The Reader
reviews by Keith Botsford
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David Mitchell, Black Swan Green (Sceptre, £16.99)

The perilous world of the fourteenth year of one Jason Taylor, stammerer, middle-class apprentice poet in a Worcestershire village, and guilt-ridden good kid around the time of the Falklands war, is written in such whizzy language that my first fly-leaf note in this book reads, “Either this man has total recall, or he hasn’t grown up.” By which I meant that is written so exactly in Jason’s language and catches so expertly his maggot soul, that it seemed it had to be true. And as adolescence is a plague one would rather forget about, it didn’t sound promising.

In fact, the child’s-eye trick turns out—as in the few masterpieces of the genre, Twain, Salinger, Alain Fournier—to cope well with such ‘adult’ subjects as war, love, loss, bravery and such. In short, Jason’s world is as rich as can be and the whizzy prose turns out to be inventive, rich, pliable and rewarding. What is more to Mitchell’s credit is that his style never falters or gets its tone wrong.

Ivan Margolius, Reflections of Prague: Journeys through the 20th century (John Wiley & Sons, $24.95)

Heda Kovaly (Margolius), the author’s mother, wrote Under a Cruel Star, one of the great post-war accounts of the Holocaust and of the Soviet takeover in what was then Czechoslovakia. Now her son has set out to revisit his father’s brief life, cut short at 39 by the communist authorities in Prague who executed him along with eleven others during the Slansky show trial in 1949.

Rudolf Margolius, who rose to be Deputy Minister of Trade, was an idealist, a devoted communist, a loving father and husband, and a babe in the woods. It took innocence not to see what was coming. As Jews from prominent and relatively prosperous families, and having narrowly escaped extermination in the Nazi camps, both the author’s parents suffered through one of the worst decades in European history, but where Heda was ever a skeptic, Rudolf was a true believer, of a kind I doubt we shall ever see again. No matter how trained, how artistic, refined, or compassionate, a good mind can apparently still convince itself that it should sacrifice family, friends and life itself, for a ‘cause’. Generations of Rudolfs did just that, and paid the price.

Rudolf’s son, a successful architect in England, gives us a remarkable, nuanced, straightforward account of his parents’ lives and of the Prague that adopted democracy after the 1914-1918 war freed it from Austria-Hungry, was swallowed by Hitler’s Germany (while Great Britain and the United States stood by complacently), and then was tossed at Yalta, into the Soviet sphere of influence and taken over by the communists in a coup in 1947, that sought freedom in 1968 (repressed) but didn’t get it until 1989.

No bells and whistles, no bleating accompany this book. It is clear, informative and deeply touching. Ivan Margolius is clearly a worthy son to his remarkable mother—whom I remember fondly as spirited, fluffy, intensely feminine and, the exact opposite of her husband, totally disabused of all ‘grand schemes’—and his martyred father, whose ashes were used to provide traction for a secret police car. Such harshness as there is in this book is saved for those who betrayed his father, interrogated him and condemned him, but still survive in Prague. The author also has an excellent eye for what is distinctive in Prague, its architecture, its music, its films, its intellectual life; it is his counterpoint to the disaster of its mid-century fate.

Wilhelm Genazino, The Shoe-Tester of Frankfurt, trans. Philip Boehm (New Directions, $14.95)

New Directions rightly enjoys a reputation for introducing new writers to an indifferent American public. Genazino’s ‘hero’ tests luxurious shoes; he has an attachment to wandering and observation; he flits in and out of the lives of others. The texture of this curious novel depends on a kind of horrendous exactness in perception, on perpetual self-enquiry. Nothing passes unanalyzed. The results are sometimes interesting, often bleak, and seldom profitable, either to the shoe-tester or the Reader. I fear that most readers will dismiss the shoe-tester as a creep.

We are here in the same Central Europe which gave us Kafka and Musil, Krauss and Sebald. A kind of sickly pall lies over that literature, and only great writers fully convey the complexity of a world that gave us Freud and Wittgenstein while it also proffered Sacher-Masoch. A jacket-blurb informs us that there is “hardly a subtler humorist among today’s writers than Genazino.” If so, it’s Galgenhumor, gallows humor. Where Genazino’s contemporary Elfriede Jellinek cuts to the quick, Genazino picks his way carefully among the rubble without, I’m afraid, really engaging our attention.

Erik Orsenna, Madame Bâ (Fayard/Stock, €22.00)

This wonderful, rich, spirited novel, like much of Orsenna’s work, has not been, so far as I can tell, published here. This is hardly surprising, since we lag far behind most civilized countries in translation. Yet to me it ranks alongside (kindly note the omissions) Dan Sleigh’s Islands, the African novels of Joyce Cary and the early work of David Pownall and Paul Theroux (and of course Conrad), on the summit of ‘African’ novels. It puts the ersatz of Toni Morrison and Marysa Condé to shame.

Orsenna’s novel is written from inside Africa, from inside an African mind, inside an African woman’s long-suffering and undaunted mind. What she wants is to be allowed to go to France to visit her son, and to achieve this she has to fill out a questionnaire. The odds, of course, are well stacked against her. France has more then enough blacks selling sunglasses and belts. But Madame Bâ is an unstoppable force. She knows what she comes from, who her father was, what he contributed to society (electricity, sporadic but revolutionary), how she grew up, married, loved, made children, all of which we find out in her answers, which are long, lyrical and—because they so accurately correspond to the myth-making, story-telling nature of the African mind—rich with the cultures in which she is imbedded, that of a far-away France and that of the Soninke, that of her caste in Mali, that of the Nyamakalas, and her sub-caste, the Nomus, or smiths.

‘I feel sorry for you,’ she writes General de Gaulle. ‘I know you. I saw you on the TV when you visited us, your poor presidents. I noted that you have everything, except leisure. Everything, motorcycle outriders, Mercedes, pretty hostesses, air-conditioning. All but the freedom to track the truth down through the remotest times. No sooner do you arrive somewhere than your index finger taps on your platinum Rolex and your aide-de-camp is already reminding you of your next appointments.’

Orsenna, who is himself a high-ranking official at the Quai d’Orsay, France’s Foreign Office, gets the tone exactly right. A questionnaire must fit the petitioner into a set of small boxes, and yet Madame Bâ can’t fit them. How to put a whole history in a set of boxes? How to make the official world understand individuals and their needs?

Madame Bâ is indomitable, as is the river by which she lives. And this “little Parisian in his fifties who pretends to be an African woman, a giantess” (as Orsenna describes himself) has written a sunny, tragic, wonderfully funny book literally overflowing with life.

And how many truly joyful books have you read lately?

Mia Couto, Sleepwalking Land, trans. David Brookshaw (Serpent’s Tail, $14.95)

There are well-known risks in so-called ‘magic realism’. To start with it’s pretty second-hand stuff by now; unless the writer is a master of his craft, it irritates readers, whose perceptions of what’s going on are constantly toyed with by an indistinct fabulism; its central characters have to be sufficiently developed for the reader not to be distracted by mumbo-jumbo; and the style must be compelling.

Couto’s novel, first published in 1992, falls short of all these requirements. Not that it’s without interest—Mozambique and its long civil war being exotic stuff—but the material, had it been developed not by a sleepwalker but by an author in full command of its subject, could have been far more interesting than the constant metamorphoses that here hold center stage.

Irène Némirovsky, Suite francaise (Knopf, $25.00)

You know how it is with books that are highly-praised. Since there is a lot of rubbish out there in the market-place, there is a tendency to put off reading them. Némirovsky’s Suite francaise is such a book, but this time public acclaim and the critics concord. I would like to think because it is a first-hand memoir, obviously true, and belongs very much to the time it was written. In that sense, though a novel, it is a document that has escaped history and its retrospective attitudes and judgments.

The book would be impossible to write today without taking sides, without considering the implications of Collaboration, Resistance, Jews, Nazis, Class and a dozen other factors that make it difficult to see 1941-1942 in France, from the drôle de guerre to Operation Barbarossa as it was lived by a forty-year-old French writer of Russian origin. It is possible to write historical fiction, to tell a story set in those days, but inevitably the writer knows the outcome. Irène Némirovsky, who died in the camps, did not know how her story—written at white heat and within a few months of the events she describes, did not, and the book is incomplete, two parts of a projected four.

I think it unnecessary to say much about how it is written (extremely well, and well translated by Sandra Smith) because the writing is imperceptible, while the story she tells is so vivid and so feeling that one believes every word of it—that, too, it shares with a document. The artistry is all there, but subordinate to an omniscient narrator’s tale of the (undecided) fate of the characters.

Nor is this a boo-hoo book. If our sympathies are engaged, it is not by the victim status of the writer or her characters, which cover a powerful cross-section of French life, but because they are authentic, because they live through defeat and occupation as ordinary (or in some cases distinctly extraordinary) French people did. They have families for whom they fear; they fall in love as one does. The same is true of the Germans, who do not obligatorily click their heels or spout their devotion to the Führer, for they too have families and fall in love.

The first book, ‘Storm in June,” deals with the exodus and its consequences, in which death seems inconsequential, tragic but unnecessary, written deadpan, whether heroic or simply the result of the ‘terrible kind of joy’ some, even the very young, can find in killing. The second, “Dolce,” must have been planned as a sort of interlude, a slow movement, and describes ordinary life under the Occupation, a life in which co-existence between conqueror and conquered can and does exist. It centers on a Franco-German love story of discretion and power, and in her notes for the remainder of the novel, Némirovsky notes: “… the historical, revolutionary facts, etc. must be only lightly touched upon, while daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides must be described in detail.” That is a credo, and she lived by it, and thus this novel, published sixty years after it was written, is so startlingly true.

Robert Edric, Gathering the Water (Doubleday, £14.99)

Edric is one of those good writers about whom I have a difficulty making up my mind. When I referred to him as ‘dour’, my friends at John Sandoe’s said, “Not at all, a most affable man!” The fact is, his raw material has always struck me as concerned, in one way or another, with the contest between the elemental and the human, with the balance definitely tipping on the side of human loss and disaster.

This novel, being the account of a lonely surveyor sent to supervise the flooding of a valley and the dispossession of its inhabitants, is no different. The elemental (here, water) and the human (Charles Weightman, who comes to sympathize with the locals) are in mortal combat. Progress and Big Capital (the Board) require that ordinary human beings be moved out and the valley filled, its human history, its beauty, its solitude abolished.

Weightman is a frail hero to bear the weight of such a conflict and the tale of his almost furtive relations with Mary Latimer and her sick sister form a counterpoint to the gathering of the water. Lives are to be destroyed: what can Weightman preserve from destruction? For Edric, I fear, very little. As Weightman notes: “I am a man between elements, just as this place is, a man who has long since ceased to hug the shore and who has cast himself into deeper waters.”

In many ways it is a beautifully told parable, of style sparse, of very large emotions told quietly, but it is strange and remote emotionally, deliberately distanced to give preference to the elemental forces at play. Even when destruction strikes—Weightman’s job is ended, Mary is sucked into the waters, the Board triumphs—the preacher brought in to re-inter the graveyard bodies asks Weightman if he imagined the submerged church “to have once been the spiritual center of the place?” and answers himself, “No. They are affectionate for it now only because it is the last of what they have to lose.” And Edric has the defeated Weightman ask himself, “Is there a valid distinction … between a man despising himself for what he is, what he has allowed himself to become, and another man despising himself for the excuses he makes?”

Water is true to itself. It covers all. It does not need to be forgiven. But for Weightman there might have been forgiveness had he chosen otherwise. These are valid thoughts, and I am ambivalent about Edric because I don’t really think Edric is right, that the elemental will not always triumph.

Linda Hopkins, False Self: The Life of Masud Khan (New York, Other Press, $35.00)

In the furious and controverted world of psychoanalysis, Masud Khan (1924-1989), the London-based Pakistani analyst, was an example of what writing about psychoanalysis could, in the hands of a man who was as much an ‘artist’ as an analyst, become. He also stands condemned, in the same circles, for his alleged abuse of some of his patients. That he was intensely seductive as a man and horribly self-destructive in his last years is beyond doubt, but we all owe Linda Hopkins, herself an analyst, a great debt for examining, dispassionately, thoughtfully and very literately the life of this brilliant but flawed man.

I should state up front that I met Masud in the 1970s and that Masud’s personal physician, Barrington Cooper, is among my closest friends, so that my reading of this absorbing book is illuminated by a personal sense of the man: lordly, commanding, intense, beguiling, luxurious and as seductive as any houri.

He wound up being drummed out of the highly-divided (between Kleinians, Freudians and in-betweens) British psychiatric guild, and in that expulsion, many factors came into play—none as much as the fact that Masud was utterly different, different in technique and exotic in character. It didn’t help his cause that he was rich, that he was foreign (neither white nor English), that he had the arrogance of his landowning family, that he found it difficult to separate his personal life from his clinical, that he had a refined erudition in literature and the arts, that he was a public, international figure, and that towards the end of his life he became intensely anti-semitic and published a memoir saying so, though his anti-semitism was perfectly in concord with his milieu, his class and his times.

His contributions to the profession (his books and his many articles and case studies) were both prolific and significant because, I think, he was as much a writer as an analyst, as much a lover as an observer, as much an artist as a clinician. It has always seemed to me that psychoanalytic writing—like that of those other disciplines (e.g. sociology) with pretensions to being ‘science’—suffers greatly from the language in which is expresses its ideas, much of which is heavily loaded with a ‘jargon’ of which Linda Hopkins is mercifully (though not always) free. Though Masud was as erudite in the literature of psychoanalysis as he was in literature itself (he acted as editor of the principal British journal and was Winnicott’s editor) his clinical insight, his instinct, was that of a writer.

Necessarily, this trait meant that he became involved with his patients, as painters do with their models, or as novelists confound what they have imagined with what they actually live.
It is enormously to Linda Hopkins’ credit that the breadth and thoroughness of her research presents the whole man and his milieu, which ranged from Anna Freud through Braque, Cartier-Bresson and the whole beau monde of London and Paris. Her biography goes far beyond relating Masud’s life. Her balance breathes fresh life into this Lear-like man who lost his kingdom, his wives, and his way while still staking out a claim to have shown analysis a new and much more intimate, much more loving, way to present itself.

It is also an absorbing read. Masud left behind not only his published work but also his work-books which are veritable mines of Masudian insights. And those insights, whether as to his own nature or of those about him, come off her pages as richly and vigorously as do Nietzsche’s ‘notes’. A powerful intellect was at work, but drink undid his life. He understood that as tragedy, but also sought it out. On his arrival in England in 1946 he saw King Lear twenty-seven nights in a row. That tells you something. And Linda Hopkins tells you more.

John Banville, The Sea (Vintage, $12.95)

Over the past thirty-some years, the Irish writer John Banville, now just over sixty, has proven himself one of the most gifted and varied story-tellers around: not flashy, very sure-footed, a writer’s writer, and his is the sort of fiction (literary only in the best sense) that is being driven out of the market. Enough prizes—this brief current novel won the 2005 Booker Prize—have kept him in the market-place but never gained him a mass audience.

That is too bad, for there is nothing even remotely difficult about his writing, which is simple, lucid and exquisitely cadenced. This story, which relates dispassionately the events of an August and a year’s dying, is limited to a handful of characters: the narrator, Max, recently bereaved, who returns to the seaside village of his childhood; his awkward absent daughter; a few locals, largely as temporary as resorts are; and the Grace family, whose twin children, Chloe and Myles (and their surprising companion, Rose) are the agents of the very delicate goings-on of adolescence that ultimately tie together Max’s past and present.

The prose is hyper-realist, strident with observation, but inviting in its accurate detail, each of which tells. The novel rests more on scene than on character (hence its title). Dialogue is scant. Here people watch each other and do not care to communicate, any more than sand, scrub and seaside lodgings do. As Max says, this encapsulated world, which includes death, love, bluff, envy and much else, turns out to be “a momentous nothing, just another of the great world’s shrug of indifference.”

David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany (Norton, $29.95)

This apparently matter-of-fact book, relating the various attempts to ‘conquer’ Nature from Frederick the Great right up to the present, could easily be overlooked by the general Reader. That would be a shame. The highly-documented and very fair-minded stance that Blackbourn takes between ecology and conservation and ‘manipulating’ nature—to provide power, navigation, agriculture and protection—is rich in insight and highly relevant to present concerns.

I found it most interesting when dealing with what I believe to be its real subject: the creation of the German state out of its many disparate parts and its rise as an European colossus in part responsible for three major wars and their attendant disasters. To look at this through the question of water and landscape is subtle and nuanced; and, above all, it keeps the reader from jumping to those conclusions about Germany that focus on the political and the personal.

The central metaphor of water—vital yet dangerous—brings up many unexpected aspects of cultural history. The Rhine was once confounded by its meanders; to channel it required co-operation between different states. This had unintended consequences. The Pripet marshes which form (when Poland is left out of the equation) the water-logged boundary between Germany and Russia Blackbourn sees as directly related to the Final Solution: improvement means removing the unimproved or, according to Nazi doctrine, the unimprovable. Vast public projects, such as dams or harbors for the German fleet, have to be centrally-controlled—the channeling of water is metaphorical as well as practical; the modern super-state is a direct reflection of attitudes towards dominating Nature and human behavior.

It is simply and well-written (as was Blackbourn’s earlier Marpingen, devoted to a divine apparition) as well as likely to be influential. Our own West, like Mussolini’s bonificazione or reclamation of marsh-lands, have created problems that their visionary creators could not foresee. Blackbourn’s book is an excellent guide to the Middle Ground between eco-fanaticism and blind ignorance of the facts.

Edna O’Brien, The Light of Evening (Houghton Mifflin, $25)

This novel would seem to be the twentieth book of fiction the Irish-born and London-based Edna O’Brien has published. No mean feat today for a writer of sensibility and style. But then there is still room in the wreckage of the publishing industry—more so in England than in America—for ‘established’ writers who have a reliable, if diminishing, readership.

Edna O’Brien’s themes, which are feminine, Irish and often comical, almost guarantee an audience, and a little celebrity, such as she earned with her early work (much as Jilly Cooper did), helped out. At first her books were both frothy and entertaining, ‘good reads’. They were also sharply observed, written with a real gift for language, and gave us a panoply of versions of her romantic, nostalgic self that had a good deal to tell us about the post Elizabeth Bowen-William Trevor Irish, at home and in London. They were intensely likeable books, not overwhelmed by ambition or pretension.

This new novel is one of the very best she has written. Both taut and spacious, what is striking about this mother-daughter relationship is the greater maturity of O’Brien’s writing. Both Eleanor, the daughter, and her mother (who is dying), have been alienated from their immediate surrounds, even from their own lives. The way they nonetheless cling to each other, as though there could be no real understanding outside the family, beyond motherhood and womanhood, is both moving and reflective. That in love, however disappointed, lies growth is a subject well worth exploring. O’Brien does that very well.

Frederick Crews, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (Shoemaker Hoard, $25)

I like gadflies and Mr. Crews, besides writing very clean prose, is among the best. He is utterly merciless to Sigmund Freud’s dishonesty and brutality: the case is made, is unarguably correct, and needs no elaboration from me. Equally interesting, however, is his close examination of the way in which Freud’s mistaken notions about repression and early childhood, have become omnipresent in modern America: in the horrors of families broken apart by circular arguments and accused of molestation, in our gullibility about the ‘science’ of Rorschach tests, UFOs, theosophy and other such relicts of the Freudian nightmare. No one with an open mind can fail to learn a great deal from this book. Mr. Crews will brook no objections to his insistence on empirical testing. Which also means that much that is valuable in our lives—emotion, religion, the sacred, subjective experience—is not acceptable to Mr. Crews. This I regret, while admiring the demolition.

Keith Botsford is editor of TRoL.