The Sleeping Beauty

Elizabeth Taylor’s sixth novel, published in 1953, in contrast to A Game of Hide and Seek (and much of her previous work), tells the story of a love that one might fairly describe as fulfilled, though not, of course, straightforward. The sleeping beauty of the title is Emily, who has withdrawn from life after an accident which changed her appearance and led to her fiancé leaving her. She now spends her time caring for her sister, Rose’s, disabled daughter Philly. Rose, who is widowed, runs a guesthouse in an unnamed seaside town, and it there that the novel’s protagonist, Vinny, meets Emily and falls in love.

Vinny is there in the first place to console his friend, Isabella, following the death of her husband. Vinny, we are told, is a romantic:

“Nearing fifty, Vinny felt more than ever the sweet disappointments only a romantic knows, whose very desires invite frustration; who loves twilight rather than midday, the echo more than the voice, the moon more than the sun, and women better than men…”

Indeed, on his first glimpse of Emily (with Philly), from a distance, he reflects, “They made a most beautiful picture… mysterious, romantic.” He learns from Isabella that:

“Her face was ruined, you see. I mean the face she had. She came from hospital looking quite different – very beautiful in a way, but not in the way she had been beautiful before.”

And so it proves when Vinny first meets her in the guesthouse: “Her beauty had not gone: it was, in fact, the staggering perfection he had first thought it.” Vinny’s love for Emily, though idealistic, is presented as sincere. However, at the same time that Vinny sets his eye on Emily, Isabella wonders whether he intends to propose to her (as does her son, Laurence, who is home from the army) – enhancing the shock of the throwaway sentence in the second chapter which tells us that Vinny is writing postcards “to his mother, and to his wife.” No one, it seems, is aware of Vinny’s marriage, including his domineering mother, who will be brought to the seaside guesthouse for a holiday, and to provide an excuse for Vinny to spend time with Emily.

Emily is at the psychological heart of the novel, her mind affected as much as her body by the accident and the broken engagement. She has not only shut herself away physically, but also emotionally:

“She felt locked away in herself but ignorant of her identity, and often she woke suddenly in the night without any idea of who she was…”

Rose, too, has her reasons for keeping Emily by her side as her husband, an alcoholic, was responsible for the accident that injured her, losing his life at the same time. By ‘looking after’ Emily (as, for example, Isabella sees it) she is free of the guilt she might otherwise feel. She also carries a childish resentment of Emily as “the gay, the party-going one” and is quick to put her done when she offers to help with the guesthouse while at the same time complaining she has too much work. Throughout the novel, superficially kind acts are often seen to hide a secret malice.

This is the case when Isabella discovers Vinny’s wife, following him when he leaves her at an auction of furniture from the house she is selling in London, as she decides she cannot bear to watch it sold. She spots him with a woman she at first thinks must be a prostitute, only later discovering that they are married. The situation is complicated by the fact that, by this time, Vinny has asked Emily to marry him (after an excruciating scene where he is seeking to tell Isabella this and she thinks he is going to propose). She tells her friend, Evalie, swearing that she will keep the secret (having just shared it).

Vinny’s confession to Isabella that he has asked Emily to marry him is not the only excruciating scene in the novel, something Taylor excels at. Later, Isabella will invite the couple, along with her son Laurence and his girlfriend, Betty, for dinner, using the occasion to put Laurence down:

“ ‘Five pounds a week is the summit of Laurence’s ambition’… her glance took in everyone but Betty, at whim the words were aimed.”

Despite this, The Sleeping Beauty remains one of Tayor’s most hopeful novels, in keeping with its theme of rebirth. While its characters may not always be kind, they are rarely intentionally cruel. Love, it seems, may be possible after all.

Our Island Story

Guy Ware’s fifth novel, Our Island Story, borrows its title from ‘A Child’s History of England’ written by H E Marshall and first published in 1905.  Ignoring for the moment the inconvenient fact that England is not an island, Ware’s reference is undoubtedly deliberate, a nod towards the exceptionalist view that England / Britain was / is forged with a particular destiny, and perhaps best exemplified by the view that any suggestion the British Empire may not have been a ‘good thing’ is unpatriotic. (That it is also David Cameron’s favourite childhood book is merely an added extra, though entirely appropriate given that his misguided Brexit referendum allowed English nationalism a return to the centre stage of politics).

In Ware’s Our Island Story, however, the island is much smaller – perhaps best seen as a microcosm of England – but, like the UK, threatened by the sea:

“The Island was sinking. Or the sea was rising. It depended on what you believed about how it got there in the first place. Either way, it had been going on for years, bits falling into the sea, bits swallowed up.”

While (hopefully) no one yet believes that the UK is sinking into the sea, this theory is propagated by ‘Simulationists’ who believed that “the island had been artificially simulated by a secret cabal of behavioural scientists.” It is, of course, no more unbelievable than any other conspiracy theory (though I love the addition of the suspicion that “the money had dried up and the Simulators had moved on to pastures new”) and resonates with the now cliched science fiction trope that Earth is an alien experiment, but is used largely to demonstrate how conspiracy theories are used by politicians.

In fact, most of the characters in Our Island Story are politicians of one sort or another. The novel opens with Denis Klamm returning to the Island for the funeral of his father (K), an ex-Leader. His mother, Cora, still has political ambitions but has lost the most recent election, which was won by the daughter of the most recent Leader, Jessica King. Cora does not have a high opinion of her ‘idiot’ son: when Jessica compliments him on the reading of a poem at the funeral, she comments:

“He sounded like a fucking robot reciting a railway timetable.”

Jessica’s advent as Leader has come at the expense of her father, Jacob, engineered in part by Ari, previously Jacob’s righthand man, who has switched sides, in part to fulfil an island legend – “the Child could not become the Leader without challenging its father.” However, he now has to contend with the fact that Jessica is more of an idealist:

“Ari hadn’t catered for a Leader who hadn’t realised that hope was just another form of cynicism.”

In particular, Jessica wants to end the homelessness caused by the Island’s shrinking geography, whereas Ari is more concerned with pitting his enemies against one another. Denis, meanwhile, is another kind of idealist – a less practical one. Having (in his view) fallen in love with Jessica, he decides the best way to get her attention is to chain himself to a bridge. His lack of foresight is demonstrated when he is joined by Pavel (the taxi driver who took him to the bridge) and his ‘sister’ Eva. When they wish to be free again, they simply wriggle out of their chains:

“You don’t think we’d be dumb enough to wrap ourselves in chains we couldn’t escape for, do you?”

Even the love which prompted his sacrifice is transient as he finds himself increasingly attracted to Eva.

Denis’ story is an example of the comedy Ware injects into the novel, yet it also adds to the atmosphere of hopelessness – a futile effort, as futile as the debate over whether the Island is real or a simulation as, either way, no one is intending to take any action that might improve the lives of the Islanders (sound familiar?). Ware satirises contemporary Britain in numerous ways without overloading the novel as the island setting ensures each aspect of comparison is concrete, and the small cast of characters keeps its interactions credible. And so, we have a small group of people, often related, passing power around; debates and even referenda designed simply to create conflict and hinder action; and carefully a curated mythology used to make elevation to power seem inevitable.  Ware even manages to throw in an inquiry into police brutality that is constantly delayed, and a spad who is also a poet.

Our Island Story is distressingly recognisable: Ware’s comic scenario produces a mirror-image that is no laughing matter.

The Singularity

The Singularity by Balsam Karam (translated by Saskia Vogel) tells the story of two women who lose a child. In one case the child is an adult, in the other an unborn baby, but grief unites them, as does the fact that both are refugees. There, however, their paths differ as one arrived in a European country as a child (not unlike the author, a Kurdish refugee who came to Sweden when she was seven) and is now a woman expecting her own child, whereas the other is living in an alley with her mother and children, leaving each day to hunt for the ‘Missing One’, a daughter who has disappeared. They coincide in one moment, a moment which opens the novel as a prologue as the pregnant woman watches the other throw herself from the clifftop road in despair:

“When the woman lets go and slams against the rocks once then twice, it is neither quiet nor more solemn than usual – this at least you remember and this you tell the people who later wonder why you’re always circling back to the woman and the corniche.”

It is not accidental that the pregnant woman is ‘you’ placing the reader in the position of observer, though we shall later discover she has more in common with the dead mother than at first appears. She initially links herself to the mother of the missing girl by taking the bag that she leaves behind, filled with flyers and a stump of soap the missing girl used.

The novel then returns to the days before, as the mother searches for her missing daughter who worked in a restaurant on the corniche:

“She has aged, it shows – in her emaciated body nothing is held high anymore and under the headscarf her hair is ever sparser and whiter…”

Yet, this section is more than the pain of the mother; it is filled, too, with the thoughts of the grandmother and the children. It is their memories of the missing girl that bring her to life. Her brothers and sisters remember swimming in the sea with her after selling washcloths in the market; her grandmother remembers, “you couldn’t even sit still as a child.” This section, titled ‘The Missing One’, takes up around half the novel, and would be a powerful and affecting novella in its own right, but we then continue with the story of the pregnant woman before the narrative does something extraordinary.  In a few pages we learn that the baby, as yet unborn, has died; time freezes for the woman:

“For years you wander along the windowless corridor, it’s like a canal lock between the reception and the maternity ward…”

As we soon discover, however, this section is titled ‘The Singularity’ for a reason, as the two narratives impact on one another:

“…finally you ask if something is the matter / it happened that night on the corniche / I’m going to get the doctor, she says, I’ll be right back, and then walks out into the brightness of the corridor / when you catch sight of the woman she has already climbed out onto the cliffs, is leaning forward…”

The singularity is not simply the coincidence of the two women meeting in the minutes before the mother’s death; as this section progresses the story of the pregnant woman’s childhood interlinks with the time before she gives up her dead baby.  Here we also see the refugee experience and it is heavily implied that the fate of the missing daughter could well have been her fate. Not only do both stories humanise refugees, but they highlight the luck involved in survival and success.

It is also suggested throughout the novel that the loss of a child is only part of a wider loss felt by those who have to leave their homeland. At one point the woman on the corniche thinks to herself:

“If the loss without end is present – and it is, she can feel it like she can feel her fingertips on her eyelids and the dust that sometimes sweeps along the street and disappears – it has been inside her as far back as she can remember.”

When the pregnant woman goes to a counsellor, the first thing she says is, “I come from a tradition of loss.” This loss is made concrete in her child, but also in her childhood friend, Roza, who is left behind. The final section of the novel, made up of short chapters of less than a page, is titled ‘The Losses.’

There are now many novels recounting the refugee experience, the majority of them written by refugees, which tend, unsurprisingly, to be largely autobiographical, but The Singularity uses a structure which could be seen as artificial to produce an account which is not only moving but feels truer.

The Brass Age

Croatian writer Slabodon Snajder may be best known in his home country for his plays, but his novel, The Brass Age, was immediately recognised as a major work on its publication in 2015 and has been gradually appearing in various European languages until, at last, thanks to Celia Hawkesworth and Mountain Leopard Press, it can be read in English. It is an impressive volume at over six hundred pages, beginning with the departure of Georg Kempf from Germany in 1769, lured by the promise of land and a better life to settle in the “frontier lands” of Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresa, and ending with the funeral of his descendant, also George Kempf, in post-war Yugoslavia. For the most part however, the novel focuses on Kempf’s experiences during the Second World War, conscripted into the German army as Volksdeutsche and later deserting to join the Polish resistance. It is a novel which is both epic in scale and human in detail.

Snajder uses the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin throughout the novel to highlight the movement of peoples from one territory to another, which becomes ironic in an age so focused on national purity. When the original Georg Kempf is offered the opportunity to leave an impoverished Germany for new lands, one suspicious villager comments:

“We know that in Hamelin, near Hannover, a travelling charlatan promised to rid them of rats and then he lured their children away with his playing and they were never heard of again.”

Later, especially in the final reflections of his descendant and namesake, it is used to demonstrate the compulsion to follow:

“It seems that everything depends on the pied piper of Hamelin whom the young follow, for good or ill… The young follow their shepherd, the pipe of a piper in a colourful uniform, and the difference between Good and Evil is so indecently fine that anything is possible.”

Kempf himself is neither a follower nor a leader. When others with German ancestry enlist, he is “impervious to all their coaxing to join them” and when a Jewish friend is attacked he is sympathetic but helpless:

“To be simply a person had become impossible.”

Eventually he is conscripted to join the SS. Before he goes, he visits the graveyard where his ancestors are buried – graveyards will populate the novel representing, as they do, not only death but family ties to place. “I don’t know where I’m going now,” he says aloud, “or whether I’ll regret it.” He is sent to Poland and proves himself to be an adequate soldier, until he ordered to be part of a firing squad and eats raw potatoes to in order to escape the duty through sickness.

Though Kempf’s story forms the major part of the narrative, it is at times accompanied by the voice of his unborn child. This voice appears (boxed) alongside the main narrative providing a commentary (omniscient – for example, knowing that the friend Kempf is writing to is dead) and speculating on the chances of being born. Kempf’s story is also interspersed with the story of the child’s mother, Vera, who, at the time, is in a camp as a political prisoner:

“She quickly realised that the camp was merely a temporary stopping place and that all those herded into the Tower, a menacing brick building from the days of Turkish rule in Slavonia, were liquidated within twenty-four hours… As a Croat, Vera dared hope she would not be killed at once, that she might even survive…”

Though they will not meet for many months, the novel charts their path towards each other, which perhaps could be said to begin when Kempf deserts to join the Polish resistance. Unfortunately, the group he is meant to join is … in an attack and he ends up seeking refuge with Polish peasants: “You can stay,” as one puts it, “but it would be better for you to go.” Time and again he must pull down his trousers to prove he is not Jewish. When Germany retreats, he will eventually join up with the Russians. Kempf’s trajectory shows how fleeting and spurious national identity is (as well as making for an exciting story of survival) Even his name changes as he moves from group to group – Jurek to the Polish nurse who is his resistance contact; Yuri to the Russians. One story he hears in Poland symbolises how little divides the warring soldiers – the corpses of a German and a Russian frozen together:

“…we could only have parted them with axes or a saw, but even that was debatable. So we buried them together, in that embrace…”

Vera will later tell him that, had she met him when he was in the SS, she would have shot him.

The Brass Age is an astonishing novel – not only an important account of the Second World War from the point of view of central Europe, but one which encompasses a wider examination of the forces of history by prefacing its main story with 18^th century emigration and following it with the creation of Yugoslavia and the resultant political tensions between Tito and the Soviet Union. All of this is seen through the experience of one family – in fact, a few individuals – without ever seeming to limit our perspective. It is undoubtedly one of the most significant translations of the year.

Un Amor

Sara Mesa’s fiction (Un Amor, translated by Katie Whittemore, is her fourth novel to appear in English) often places its characters outside of society’s norms, and her latest novel (now published in the UK by Peirene Press) is no exception. Nat is a woman who has left her job in the city as a commercial translator, under circumstances which are not at first revealed, to stay in a small, rural village. Lest we imagine something quaint and picturesque, the village lies in “drought-ridden terrain”,

“The monotony of the field is broken up only by the mass of El Glauco, a low mountain of bush and shrub that looks like it’s been sketched in charcoal on a naked sky.”

Her only company is a nameless dog provided by her landlord, a “long-legged, greyish mutt” which her neighbour, the ‘hippy’ Piter tells her is probably “the worst” of the dogs the landlord picks up but “doesn’t train them, doesn’t vaccinate them, doesn’t take the slightest care of them.” Piter is the friendliest of her neighbours, though his desire to help can be overbearing. When he meets her as she is intending to buy gardening tools, he immediately offers to lend her whatever she needs, while at the same time telling her to “forget the idea of a garden. Nothing’s grown on her land for years.”

“Piter’s voice contains indisputable certainty, an expert’s confidence.”

He also advises her not to attempt to train the dog, which she has called Sieso, but she persists with both the garden and the training. Her relationship with the landlord is more difficult, his barely suppressed aggression evident in their short conversations, making her reluctant to complain:

“The mere risk of prolonging their encounters is so upsetting that she prefers not to bring it up.”

When she asks him to repair a dripping tap, he tells her to deal with it herself and then turns up while she is out to fix it. These interactions suggest the challenges of relationships with men, whether they intend to be helpful or unhelpful, and can perhaps be seen as introductory to the central relationship in the novel. Nat discovers another issue with the house when it rains and the roof leaks badly. Another neighbour, Andreas, known locally as ‘the German’, offers to fix it; she can’t afford to pay him so he offers to do it “if you let me inside you for a little while.” Of course, she refuses, but later she changes her mind:

“Bartering as a basic social interaction. Why not. There’s something beautiful there. Something essential and human.”

Initially she is very clear, “she must avoid misunderstandings at all costs. He must not think there will be other opportunities.” Yet, this unusual relationship develops when she goes to him one night, a decision that is presented as almost outside her control:

“From that day on the stream of her thoughts is completely redirected… Now they go wherever they want, towards other places, and she can’t reign them in.”

This, one assumes, is the ‘amor’ at the centre of the novel – and it is an uncontrollable love, at least for Nat (she has “transformed into a hungry creature”). Mesa challenges the reader with this relationship, begun on such unpropitious terms, and by doing so, forces the reader to question love itself. The nature of this challenge is complicated by the gradual, undramatic release of information regarding Nat’s past, for example, her sexual abuse at the hands of a family friend as a child – which she has ambiguous feelings about:

“He didn’t hurt her. He was a good man whom Nat’s parents were very fond of… And even though she started avoiding him, she was fond of him in her own way.”

She is a woman who speculates on why she might do something, but is never sure, leaving a space for the reader that can feel like a trap. When the affair with ‘the German’ becomes common knowledge in the village we can see she has unwittingly stepped outside society’s expectations, a situation which is exacerbated when her dog attacks a child. Readers will feel differently about Nat, but they are unlikely to feel nothing. In Un Amor, Mesa has produced another novel in which the unwritten rules of society (in this case, a small village) are tested and our preconceptions challenged. It is a novel which asks the questions without insisting on the answers, and that is what makes Mesa’s work so interesting.

A Question of Belonging

Probably the most famous definition of the Latin American literary form known as ‘cronicas’, of which Hebe Uhart’s latest collection A Question of Belonging (translated by Anna Vilner) is an example, is the that of the Mexican writer Juan Villoro:

“The chronicle is the platypus of prose; it incorporates all kinds of foreign elements.”

More useful, perhaps, is that of his compatriot Dante Medina: “The chronicle illuminates with a different light than that of fiction: it puts its faiths equally in reality and in textuality.” In other words, it is a hybrid of journalism and literature. The cronica is the form most closely associated with Argentine writer Uhart; as Mariana Enriquez explains in her introduction, Uhart “preferred writing cronicas, she used to say, because she felt that what the world had to offer was more interesting than her own experience or imagination.” Her explanation betrays a modesty which is also apparent in her writing, but a story Enriquez tells in Uhart’s own words of a revelation which occurred just before she began the traveling which would give rise to her cronicas, suggests a democratic – even political – impulse:

“…I realised there were others who made sacrifices, who supported their homes. Who hitchhiked because they couldn’t afford to take the bus. I was ashamed of my own thinking, of being so self-centred. It was then when I started to ripen.”

In fact, such an encounter is described in ‘A Trip to La Paz’ when she speaks to a fellow teacher travelling in second class who complains that her school cannot afford chairs for the pupils:

“Both of us were teachers but while she lived of her poor salary, I spent mine on travel and whatever bullshit caught my eye.”

This ability to see other people is reflected throughout her writing, and these people are often in the poorer parts of the countries she visits. In a number of the tales she encounters indigenous people and makes certain she provides a context for what she sees:

“Mass killings were carried out in the 19^th century to rid them of their land; the final one happened in 1914. Back then they didn’t know how to write and were forced to surrender their land with a mark of their finger – whoever refused was killed.”

Such information is inserted dispassionately, a background to the conversation, not dissimilar to cronica entitled ‘Inheritance’ where she describes the houses of those whose parents were Peronists, communists and so on in a demonstration that inheritance is unavoidable. She is also fascinated by different cultures, asking at one point, “How do the ethnic groups of the Amazon see the world?” One aspect of her writing is a non-academic attempt to record fading cultures – in Formosa, for example, she hears of the younger generation:

“…they say, ‘You don’t talk right’ because their parents want them to be taught Spanish.”

She often seeks out older inhabitants and is always interested in language. In Peru, for example, “I ask Roger to tell me about the most common insults.” Later she buys a “book that contained criollo sayings and refrains.” At a writer’s conference in Guadalajara she plans to:

“…wander the streets and decipher the thousands of things I’d read abut and didn’t understand, for example ‘ne madres’ which is another way of saying ‘no way’.”

Above all, it is Uhart’s endless curiosity that make the collection so captivating. It is, of course, perfect for dipping into, but it also has a wonderful tempo that rewards reading more than one cronica at a time – and some of the more moving are towards the end, such as the family who lived at a circus and the story of ‘A Suit with an Extra Pair of Pants’. As with all literature, these cronicas encourage us to see a different world, but they also suggest that we look at it differently too.