Posts in Category: The power of literature
Everything is illuminated by Foer
Everything is illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer
I started to read ‘Everything is illuminated’ on the train on my way to uni last semester. I just realized that I haven’t read a lot of contemporary American literature, and this (in my humble opinion) is not a bad introduction. I had not heard about Foer before, and actually bought it because I thought it was a very thought-provoking title, so sure of itself. It starts like this:
My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name. Mother dubs me Alexi-stop-spleening-me!, because I am always spleening her. If you want to know why I am always spleening her, it is because I am always elsewhere with friends, and disseminating so much currency, and performing so many things that can spleen a mother.
Fantastic!! I was hooked right from the start by the lingo, and people on the train thought I was totally off the deep end. I was laughing out loud, chuckling, and I swear, at one point a tear ran down my cheek. I felt sorry for the people around me that they couldn’t join in on it. The whole book is written with a deep embedded humor playing on the border between surrealism and familiarity.
The core of the story is the town of Trachimbrod in Ukraine. From this place, and because of this place, the novel jumps in time between 1791 and present time. In present time, Alex’ father has set him the task of acting the guide to an American Jew (whom Alex dubs ‘the hero’- a.k.a. Jonathan Safran Foer) coming to Ukraine to seek out his grandfathers past in Europe and to find a town that no longer exists. With them on the journey through the Ukrainian landscape is Alex’ own grandfather and a ‘Seeing Eye bitch’. Pure candy for my fantasy setup 🙂
Alongside this story is the tale of Trachimbrod’s inhabitants (divided into two groups: the goers to the Upright Synagogue and the Slouchers) at a time when Trachimbrod still existed, narrated in a magic realism style. In 1791 a wagon drives into the lake Brod and a baby girl is found in the water. After being ‘won’ in a lottery she grows up with Yankel who loves her unconditionally and respectfully.
Yankel made every effort to prevent Brod from feeling like a stranger, from being aware of their age difference, their genders. He would leave the door open when he urinated (always sitting down, always wiping himself after), and would sometimes spill water on his pants and say, Look, it also happens to me, unaware that it was Brod who spilled water on her pants to comfort him. When Brod fell from the swing in the park, Yankel scraped his own knees against the sandpaper floor of his bathtub and said, I too have fallen. When she started to grow breasts, he pulled up his shirt to reveal his old, dropped chest and said, It’s not only you.
The mood in the novel is like this all the way, even in the sad and horrible parts.
I would suspect that the story is also permeated with Jewish culture and thought, but I am not well enough versed in this area that I would make a claim of any sorts. It reminds me a bit about home, the Faroe’s, and the mentality seems to correlate on many levels.
Either way, I am so happy it had a catchy title that caught my eye while surfing the web. His narrative style appeals to me, and I hope that he soon completes one of his stories, so I will have yet another excuse to frighten my fellow passengers with my out-of-control-laughter. Until then I might have a little cry with his ‘Extremely loud and incredibly close’, which he read a passage of when he attended the National Library’s International Author’s Stage. But that’s a whole other story which deserves its own place.
The Book Thief
Bedtime reading for this month has been The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.
The Book Thief - Mark Zusak
The narrator is Death himself, seeing color where death occurs and taking a liking to a little girl named Liesel, who lives with foster parents at Himmel (did anyone say loaded?) Street. Through Death we learn about Liesel’s life. Her constant nightmares about her dead brother leads to a bonding session with her stepfather, who helps her in her struggle to learn to read well. Her mother (the communist) who has ‘disappeared’ and the boy next door who craves a kiss from her. All is set in and around WWII, where people are acting strange, children are being punished by terrified parents for smearing themselves with charcoal in an attempt to imitate the great Jesse Owens, or displaying negative feelings about Hitler in public.
The narration as interference
The point that Death is the narrator is interesting. He is not an intrusive narrator in the classical sense as the one butting in on every sentence, knowing it all and letting the reader know his omnipotence. He knows everything and remarks it at times, but mostly he is someone who hovers over the story and gives tips and tiny remarks at selected areas. I am partial to stories that have historical footnotes, tidbits and ‘did-you-know-facts’ inserted in novels. I like the humane, not too artsy, feeling a story gets when you actually place it in context and the narration itself makes an investment in the story. One other such book I think of here is Junot DĂaz’ ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’. Here the footnotes are a big part of the story. Normally it is a mantra ‘If it is a sentence put it in the text’, but DĂaz uses footnotes as a way to interfere with a reading process that is linear, by breaking it off at places, introducing historical facts, character descriptions, cultural references and slang explanations. I am no expert, but I do see these kind of techniques more and more in modern and post-modern works and am leaning towards the attitude the reader has taken to books in modern era.
The increasing fast pace in daily activities has spread its wings out on literature as well. We read faster, more disperse, scan pages looking for buzzwords, and don’t really take time to think the story through until after we have read it and can contemplate its effect while multitasking other activities. And mostly literature allows you to do so. A lot of reading material is almost meant for quick consumption, think later. And this is where, as I see it, the literature with commentary (in lack of a more termish term!) does its best at breaking the reader into bits. Like saying ‘if you can’t concentrate on this, you will have missed something. Read me!!’, or ‘hey man, slow down, where’s the fire?’ In no way is this technique THE way of interfering with a fast reader, but it is a very ‘in-your-face’ technique. I know I have a very conservative way of thinking when it comes to books, but I can’t stand to read something just to fill the hours in a day. Excuse my french, but hell no! Books/literature can be many things, used in a number of ways and with different stances, but I just feel: if you are going to write/read a book that is just over in 2 hours, leaves no impression but an ‘hmm’ and uses valuable tree resources just to keep the book industry alive, then why bother? (but wait, will you not care when it is electronic? Well, yes and no, the book will still be crap, but no trees were harmed, and it is as simple as ‘Delete’ to wish the bad experience away, PLUS the attitude ‘wade through shit to get to the good part’ seems to be a self-maintained factor in literature.)
That special power
The Book Thief is now a quarter read. Liesel has just discovered one of her stepmother’s customers’ library and I feel kinship with her enthusiasm for the book and all it stands for. The book also introduces the incredible power a book can have when it does have something to say. The burning of books is a violent symbolic action, but also very half-thought impulsion. The thought process doesn’t go away if you burn the physical entity. Granted, it can impair the spreading of said thoughts, giving it a royal kick in the funsies. But in other areas it can be the exact royal kick in the funsies that literature needed. It is often said that great art is to be found in recession. An inclination towards the struggle and pain being positives and joy and uncomplicated life acting as negative counterparts. As long as one remembers not to revel in sorrow, but remember that the struggle is in fact to get to some kind of unity and meaning.
Hunger
A couple of weeks ago I finished Knut Hamsun’s Sult (Hunger). It has one of those epic starting lines that are so rare these days, probably because they either reek of clichĂ©’s or have already been taken.
Knut Hamsun - Sult
“It was during the time I wandered about and starved in Christiania: Christiania, this singular city, from which no man departs without carrying away the traces of his sojourn there.”
(quote from the English translation by George Eagerton).
Unfortunately, in my opinion, the translation of the last part (from which no man departs…) doesn’t really emphasize the fascinating brutality of city life. I would rather translate it “from which no man departs until it has marked him”. The emphasis here is that the city has a hold of you, it devours you, and IT decides WHEN you are good and ready to go on.
This corresponds well with the city as literary image in the late 19th century (Hamsun’s Hunger is written in 1890). The city, now well versed in fast pacing revolutions in the fields of science, literature, physics etc., is always one step ahead of the individual who struggles to fit in and keep up. Thus began a new era of social misery: the individual of the early 19th century, the aristocratic dandy (a flaneur observing the city), is replaced by a stressed out, overstimulated wretch.
In Hamsun’s Hunger the protagonist is such a character. All of his experiences are interspersed with Christiania as a city and the people who inhabit such a place. And he struggles. He struggles to survive in the city, while the ramblings of a ‘mad-man’, a hungry and homeless man without a lifeline in either direction, are being flung out at the reader. Our protagonist alternates between paranoid and hopeful within pages. The darkest pit is replaced by the bluest sky depending on the way the wind turns. His survival is dependent on money, a trade of capitalist society, and his income is dependent on his writing skills. But the hungrier he gets, the harder it is for him to keep his thoughts in order. At first his work is accepted, giving him enough money for a couple of days of lodging and some time to recuperate, but he has no sooner become hopeful than he is out on the streets again. And thus starts a new round of misery. It is truly a work of great significance, and it would do people well to read, especially in these days when you hear more and more about the abuse of homeless people on the one side, and the overbearing laissez faire-“the state will take care of them”-attitude.
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