The Opportune Moment, 1855

Another novel that I particularly enjoyed last year by a writer I’d never read before was Patrik Ourednik’s Europeana (subtitled ‘a brief history of the twentieth century’). Luckily two more of his books are available from Dalkey Archive Press, including The Opportune Moment, 1855. Ourednik’s interest in history continues to be evident from the title, but here the camera focuses in on one relatively unimportant event rather than attempting to give us the panoramic sweep of Europeana. The event in question is an attempt to set up an anarchist community in Brazil in the mid-nineteenth century.

The clash between ideals and reality is evident from the novel’s structure which begins with a letter written in 1902 to an unnamed woman by the originator of the colony, a narrative that is immediately contrasted with the diary of one of those undertaking the voyage to Brazil in 1855. This contrast is evident from the disparate styles: the former is written with rhetorical flourishes; the latter is a prosaic rendering of events, including, for example, lists of passengers and equipment. The failure of the colony is also quickly established:

“However, the short-lasted duration of the settlement is not proof of the project’s unattainability – only people without imagination could think so. If the first experiment fails to produce the expected results, it must be repeated.”

Here the author blames reality rather than his own philosophy. He complains that many of those on the voyage “had not even read my articles.” Not only does the experiment’s failure give us a lens through which to view the diary which follows, the move backwards in time makes a mockery of the idea of progress.

We view the narrative of the voyage with an eye for the origins of failure. Distrust between nationalities is clearly one difficulty:

“The Germans are poorer than us Italians and most of them have hardly anything of their own. We’re worried that they might try to steal some of our things.”

Perhaps even more serious are the clashes between different ideologies:

“Gorand said that that was a typical Italian anarchist attitude, at which point Decio inserted himself into the conversation, saying that anarchy was not quite what Gorand imagined it, and that communism was always trying to tell people what to do.”

There is heated debate about whether the ship’s Negroes should be allowed to join the settlement (without ever considering whether they want to), and what sanctions should be used against those who do not turn up for assemblies. Ourednik satirises without ever resorting to caricature: we sense he sympathises with their attempt to be free while at the same time recognising those attitudes which still trap them.

The final section of the novel consists of four further diary entries all headed October 1855. They all begin in approximately the same fashion:

“October the 15th. This is our sixth month here but the truth is I don’t know where to begin. I’m not sure that today is October the 15th.”

These entries tell of the deterioration of life in the settlement after the arrival in Brazil. Their repetitive nature emphasises the way in which the impetus behind the settlement slows until it dies. Each entry is shorter than the last showing the dissipating energy of both the writer and the community. Unsurprisingly, it all ends with a drunk waving an axe.

As with Europeana, this is not a novel which looks cheerily on mankind, but it does possess the same wit and elegance in its pessimism.

Europeana

The Year of Reading Dangerously – Patrik Ourednik

Europeana was the first of Czech writer Patrik Ourednik’s novels to be translated into English, though another two have since followed (all published by the wonderful Dalkey Archive Press). It is subtitled ‘A Brief History of the Twentieth Century’, and that is exactly what it is, reaching only 122 pages in its coverage of those hundred years. Ourednik has explained the book’s origin as follows:

“Is it possible to express a period of time, a specific historical time, without using narrative means, however direct or elusive they are, such as a historical novel or an intimist narrative? To find a form that would enable the narrator – like History itself – to be terribly banal, while pretending to be original.”

We should therefore not be surprised when we begin not at the beginning but halfway through, and with the following fact:

“The Americans who fell in Normandy in 1944 were tall men measuring 173 centimetres on average, and if they were laid head to foot they would measure 38 kilometres.”

Here we see evidence immediately of both originality (not only is it not an obvious starting point, it is not a statistic that you would be likely to include in even a detailed history of the twentieth century), and banality – any suggestion that it is being used to make an emotive point relating to the number of casualties is quickly undercut by the next sentence:

“The Germans were tall too, while the tallest of all were the Senegalese fusiliers in the First World War who measured 176 centimetres…”

Ourednik sustains this flat, detached but pedantic, tone throughout, using not only an array of bald statistics, but a limited repertoire of connectives (largely ‘and’), and even repeating information: for example the fact that the Germans invented gas and the English invented tanks first mentioned on page 1, reappears as quickly as page 2. This is perhaps most effective when presenting attitudes; the lack of commentary is starkly reductive:

“The Germans said they were the natural upholders of European civilisation because they knew how to make war and carry on trade, and also to organise convivial entertainments. And they said the French were vain and the English were haughty…”

This doesn’t just work for out-dated national stereotypes, however:

“Sex became very important in Europe in the twentieth century, more important than religion and almost as important as money, and everyone wanted to have sexual intercourse in different ways and some men rubbed their sexual organ with cocaine to prolong their erection even though cocaine was banned in all circumstances.”

Here, the juxtaposition of the general with the specific creates a jarring comedy: from an accepted truth to a ridiculous example.

Ourednik focuses largely on the West, and does not attempt, as, for example Eduardo Galeano does in Mirrors, to present a balanced world history. He returns again and again to the First and Second World Wars (the First World War is last mentioned on page 120). But on the way he covers the Barbie doll, the invention of the bicycle, the hippy movement, scientology and psychoanalysis among many other topics. Never has history been so delightful.

Danger rating: a hundred years in a couple of hours can be slightly overwhelming, but Europeana is both thought-provoking and entertaining (and great for trivia).