Monsieur Linh and His Child

This slight novel - only 130 pages - is the third of the trilogy written by Philippe Claudel which includes Grey Souls and the inestimable Brodeck's Report.   The thread linking the three novels - though Monsier Linh is more a novella - is survival, specifically the survival of war and the associated guilt of surviving.

Written with his accustomed lack of specificity which in itself contributes so much to the narrative lifting it from a simple story to the more involved realm of ideas, it clearly however concerns the French war in Indochina - modern Vietnam - and a city, possibly Paris or Marseilles.   Monsieur Linh has lost everyone who knows him in his little bombed-out village with the exception of his grand-daughter from whom he refuses to be separated even for a minute.   With great delicacy of language and economy of prose, Claudel chronicles his bewilderment in a city where he understands not a word of the language, finds the food unpalatable and is confused by the ministrations of the impersonal though benign officials caring for refugees from the war.

He meets then on a street bench the second character of the book, a Monsieur Bark with whom he establishes an extraordinary friendship given that neither understands a word the other is saying but rather rely on tone of voice and body language.   Monsieur Bark is also bereaved - his wife has just died - and clearly finds relief in pouring out his heart to this odd refugee clutching possessively his little grand-daughter.   It is a measure of Philippe Claudel's consummate command of language that we acquire an intimate understanding of the two men in such few pages.   There is an astonishing dream sequence in which Monsieur Linh brings Monsieur Bark to his village and the contrast of the world he has lost with the bleakness of the modern city is a very powerful antiwar sequence.   Monsieur Linh's one link to his vanished world is his adored baby grand-daughter.

The book has an extraordinary twist but even if you spot it coming, it in no way detracts from this brilliant and moving story.   On the contrary, when I came to it, I immediately went back and reread the entire novella!

Man Booker International Prize

I have disagreed with Carmen Callil from time to time both in her role as an author and that of publisher but this time my sincerest congratulations to her on the stance she has taken in resigning from the judging panel because of its decision to award the Man Booker International Prize to Philip Roth.  

Granted that the shortlist for the prize was not earth-shaking with people like Philip Pullman,  Marilynne Robinson, Anne Tyler figuring but Roth!!   As Callil said, 'he goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book.   Its as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe'.   Beautiful!   Well done Carmen!

Round-Up

A quick round-up for any of you that didn't do the weekly grind through the papers!  

Phillippe Claudel, author of the amazing Brodeck's Report, has a new novel out in translation, Monsieur Linh and His Child.   According to the reviewers it is written with his customary lack of specificity that intrigues me and it is the second part of the haunting trilogy that concluded with Brodeck and started with Grey Souls.  Anne Enright gets massive coverage for her new novel, Forgotten Waltz.   This promises to be less dark than The Gathering but with plenty of her caustic wit, this one using the Celtic Tiger economy as her backdrop.
 
The Guardian persists with its genuflections to the gods of English writing with a panegyric of Christopher Hitchens by Martin Amis last week.   One would almost be forgiven for thinking the Hitch had passed on and this was his eulogy.   Or maybe Amis just wants the 'great man' to know what a sound fellow he, Amis, is.   Amis quotes, at length, various examples of what he considers great witticisms by Hitchens, the 'rebel', as he calls him.   It is a grave error to confuse witticism with plain rudeness.   Far cleverer ripostes can be heard in any Dublin pub!

I cannot pass over the brief dismissal of Damon Galgut and his book, In a Strange Room, by Alfred Hickling.   This was one of the titles nominated for the Booker and is Galgut at his best.   It is a departure from his normal stamping ground of post apartheid South Africa, being set worldwide from Greece to India and finally Africa. The narrator always referred to as ‘he’, in the third person but who not surprisingly is called Damon - a device popular also with Paul Auster -  is an inveterate traveller who on each trip either meets or is joined by different characters. The very act of travelling has a curious meaning for him. He says at one point that ‘everything at times of transition takes on a symbolic weight and power. But this too is why he travels. The world you’re moving through flows into another one inside…’ So the reality of travel becomes fiction and memory. Borders are lines on a map but also drawn inside himself somewhere. Memory is a key factor in his writing and he refers to ‘him’, the traveller, as buried under his skin. He frequently claims he cannot remember some details, that there is a memory gap as if he were a travel writer not telling a story.

The book is divided into three sections titled the The Follower, The Lover and The Guardian. If one could have any quarrel with Galgut is that these sections might well, with editing, have worked almost better as three novellas. Tightened up to that format, they would almost have a ring of Zweig. However, in their present format what obviously links them is our narrator. True to his propensity for travel caused by restlessness when too long at home, he is further uncomfortable in any relationship that might tie him in any way. This can lead to a vacillation that at times makes one want to shake him but it is a state of mind that Galgut is very at ease writing about.  At times, one almost feels one is back with the Good Doctor – also shortlisted for

the Booker - so maybe Galgut puts more of himself into his main characters either consciously or unconsciously.

The characters Damon meets and links up with on his travels are distinct and remarkable. It is a tribute to his skill that they stay in one’s mind long after the book is finished almost like old friends. Though in Damon’s case, none of them are destined ever to be old friends and his depiction of their foibles and idiosyncracies is

masterly. Galgut’s writing has justly been described as both powerful and hypnotic and I would defy anyone to read him and not feel a personal attachment to some of his thoughts.

Crusade for Modernism

I  continue my crusade in support of Josipovici though now it seems it means taking on a mighty opponent - the literary pages of the Guardian!

The English continue their love affair with their perceived giants - Amis, McEwan et al.    Nicholas Lezard's choice of the week was The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis on whom he lavishes praise commenting on the 'dazzling artistry of his style'.   While Amis writes with a certain cleverness and wit, there is little challenge, depth or innovation in his novels.   The characters do not surprise any more than the plots.   Lezard maintains that this novel is 'much more than a novel about the passing of time, or missed opportunities, or wasted talent.   Although it is all those things too'.   Well, what is the 'much more' please Nicholas!

In the same paper, Ian McEwan maintains that he has become over the years 'consciously, expressively aware of the traditions of the English novel, the treasures that are laid up for us by the great 19th century expositors of character and psychology' on which he draws for his work.  And who does he specifically cite?   Austen and Agatha Christie.   In rebuttal can I mention Joyce, Beckett and Flann O'Brien - the Father, Son and Holy Ghost of modern literature [as they were recently referred to].  

IMPAC 2011

In case any of you missed the papers or the news yesterday, the short list for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award was published.   While, the judges have to be congratulated on working through 162 books in the last five months, I am saddened to see no work of translation included.   We have lost Brodeck's Report [Claudel], Red April [Roncagliolo] and Your Face Tomorrow [Marias], all superior literary works, all demonstrative of the extraordinary literary talent and challenging work being produced in the non-English speaking world.

For  better or worse, the ten titles in the short list are:  Galore [Michael Crummey], The Lacuna [Barbara Kingsolver], The Vagrants [Yiyun Li], Ransom [David Malouf], Let the Great World Spin [Colum McCann], Little Bird of Heaven [Joyce Carol Oates], Jasper  Jones [Craig Silvey], Brooklyn [Colm Toibin], Love and Summer [William Trevor] and After the Fire, a Still Small Voice [Evie Wyld].

It might make a useful reading list for the coming weeks though I think you can all safely skip Joyce Carol Oates!

Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel

This has to be one of the most unsettling books I have read.  Written by Philippe Claudel, Professor of Literature at the University of Nancy and based on a translation by John Cullen, it raises many questions and will keep you thinking and puzzling long after you have finished it.

The first line of the book – ‘My name is Brodeck and I had nothing to do with it’ – sets the tone immediately.   This is a man writing a report about some event of which he is aware but was ‘outside’ the horrendous occurrence, not part of it. Within three pages we know the ‘event’ involves the murder of an outsider to the village.   The village is deliberately unnamed as indeed is the area though it becomes apparent that it is set in an isolated village somewhere in the mountainous region of Alsace where the language is a German dialect.

Brodeck himself is different from the local inhabitants.   He came to the village having been rescued as a war orphan by an old woman, Fedorine, with whom he still lives.  Having achieved well in the local school he was sent to Germany to university where he fell in love with Emelia who returned to the village with him as the Second World War loomed.   The subsequent invasion of the village by the Germans and the horrors associated with it involve Brodeck deeply and become memories that the village want to expunge.   But those memories are something that Brodeck cannot obliterate.   As one of the few survivors he feels ‘disappointment and disquiet ferment within us.   I think we have become and will remain until the day we die, a reminder of humanity destroyed.   We are wounds that will never heal’.

He is then uniquely qualified to write a report as requested by the village leaders on the events surrounding the murder of the ‘outsider’.   The outsider who is never named is known simply as the anderer or ‘other’ and this concept above all is gripping.   Fear of the Other has always been a foundational element of society.   Man originally formed bonds and alliances for purely simple and selfish reasons – for personal survival in the face of the Other.  And our history is one of convulsion and war with the ‘Other’ – an unidentified and unidentifiable entity, an unknown unknown [to misquote everyone’s favourite American!].  Throughout history and even more in recent times, freedom is  strangled by the fear of losing it to the Other.  Brodeck broods over the very idea of History as he compiles his report and wonders ‘why do some people retain in their memory what others have forgotten or never seen?   Which is right:  he who cannot reconcile himself to leaving the past in obscurity, or he who hurls into obscurity everything that does not suit him?   To live, or to go on living – can that be a matter of deciding that the real is not entirely so?’   Claudel faces us in this narrative with some deep philosophical issues.

To quote Rosalind Sykes of the Financial Times, ‘there are dark shades of Kafka, Camus and Primo Levi but Claudel’s lyricism evokes the deliciousness of life even as he plumbs the depths of intolerance and evil’.

The narrative is powerful and the characterisations brilliant if disturbing from the sly manipulations of the town mayor, Orschwir, to the underhand dealings of Gobbler, the town busybody and the beautiful ethereal nature of Emelia who has herself suffered horribly.   Claudel has the ability to create almost a fairy tale wonder while at the same time describing a virtual cesspool of humanity.   The translation is deft and expert.   This  book is awe-inspiring.

What not to read!

Sometimes I am totally at a loss as to why a particular book wins a major prize but never more so than the winner of the  2010 Costa First Novel Award, Witness the Night by Kishwar Desai.   With so much worth reading out there, dare I give you a bit of advice about it - don't bother!  

Desai clearly has a cause to champion and a worthy one too, namely, female infanticide and, increasingly, female foeticide, specifically in the Punjab.   No one would argue about the horrors associated with these practices.   However, if they are to be incorporated as the pivotal element of a piece of fiction, then the author needs  a good narrative.   That is sadly lacking.   The book is badly written, badly edited and barely hangs together.   Irritatingly it is littered with Hindi words which are unexplained by the author, nor is any glossary provided and, to tell you the truth, one can't be bothered to look them up.


Her protagonist, the narrator, is according to herself a hard-bitten forty five year old social worker, an Indian working in Britain but back in the Punjab for the purposes of this novel, a smoker and a copious drinker - which  she  tells us every few pages.   Nevertheless, this 'hard-bitten' social worker [embarrassingly] goes weak at the knees falling into the 'mesmerising green eyes' of a character  who is clearly the villain of the piece.

The scariest element of this whole book is provided in the blurb where we are told that Desai's debut novel 'introduces' the feisty protagonist - are they warning us there are more  to come?

The final touch is that this horror story  is published by an outfit called 'Beautiful Books'!!