peter young’s listopia

7) Philippe Grimbert, Secret, 2004
An unhealthy and introverted boy in post-war Paris imagines he has a rival elder brother, as strong and statuesque as his health-obsessed parents, but he soon learns about a real brother, no longer alive, that his parents have kept secret from him. This feels like a very private memoir, firstly because it's filled with such personal and lifelong tragedy for all the characters, and secondly because the protagonist shares not only the surname of the author but also, as an adult, the same profession in psychoanalysis. These are just a couple of the crossover points that give away Secret as an 'autofiction', that identifiably French genre, and Grimbert also seems to be asking the reader if the relationship between fact and fiction is more like that of rivals, or long-lost brothers? He seems to be trying to reunite the two, and is deft at manipulating the reader to see the novel this way at the same time as telling a wrenching story, with its autobiographical tone making it insightful, compassionate and also very saddening. It was made into a film in 2007, which I will certainly be seeking out.

59) Elina Hirvonen, When I Forgot, 2005
This debut has quickly become the most internationally successful Finnish novel ever. Anna, a Helsinki journalist, sits in a café piecing together the lives of her own family, shattered in a moment of domestic violence, and that of her American partner Ian, torn apart by his estranged father's experience of the Vietnam War. Through these two central and well-drawn figures tensions radiate outwards in all directions with each character carrying their own burden of family history, particularly Anna's own psychotic brother for whom mental suffering has become a fact of life, and Ian who lost his father to post-traumatic stress disorder and feels helpless in the face of his country revisiting its enormous mistakes upon another generation. Written in a taut style that jumps back and forth from the late 1960s to 9/11 to the Iraq War protests, this is a subtle and layered novel about the far-reaching effects of both small- and large-scale kinds of violence that never leave anyone untouched. Like entering someone else's head for a day, it even has a happy ending of sorts and is well worth a re-read. Rather unique.

51) Brian Eno, Harold Pinter, John le Carré, Richard Dawkins, Michel Faber, Haifa Zangana, Not One More Death, 2006
Six highly succinct and distilled arguments against the Iraq War and the UK's involvement in it, also with a considerable amount of ire heaped on the veiled evil that is US foreign policy. The best and most beautifully presented piece is Harold Pinter's 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. I'd almost go as far as saying this brief book is required reading on the Iraq conflict except that in too many places their opinions would benefit from footnotes. All royalties go to the Stop The War Coalition.

Dennis Bock, The Ash Garden, 2001
The Ash Garden is impressive though, it's fair to say, challenging and certainly not straightforward. It explores a question often explored: what happens when a Hiroshima survivor comes face to face with one of the 'perpetrators' of the Bomb? In that respect The Ash Garden is rooted very much in reality, and takes some necessary liberties with actual events, such as the meetings on US television that first explored this idea, and which are revisited in a slightly fictionalised version for this book (a reading of John Hersey's Hiroshima will provide the starkly factual version).

There is a twist ahead, however, and one that is so fundamental and unexpected that it might not please every reader – it almost shook the story apart for me, but what held it together was the subsequent and important changes the author makes to the relationships between the three main characters. If that makes the characters sound contrived, that's because they possibly are, though Bock never loses sight of the inescapable history that drives the people he's writing about, or their fundamental essence. By the end of the story they feel real enough, though I still can't decide if the twist to their relationship is entirely justified or necessary. The reader just has to hang on and see where it ends up, though it's certainly a journey worth taking.

Edeet Ravel, Ten Thousand Lovers, 2003
A book that draws you in, conceivably because of the central story of a curiously unusual relationship between a pacifist Israeli student and an Israeli army interrogator of Palestinian detainees, therefore the divide to be crossed here is not racial but one defined by tolerance for political violence. Despite its 1970s setting this is contemporary left-wing Israeli fiction, anti-occupation of the Territories, and clearly informed by Edeet Ravel's own experiences: this could conceivably be autobiography, so naturally does the dialogue flow and the situations resonate with their surroundings. Ten Thousand Lovers is less politically defined than I expected, but none the worse for that; the political dimensions take a long time to come to the fore and are felt mostly as an undercurrent beneath the surface layers, playing a necessary second fiddle to the developing relationship of Lily and Ami. The final explanation of the book's title and also its political resonance is a shining moment, finally defining the enigmatic character of the interrogator Ami and giving the book some subtle pacifist credentials. Altogether a good read, though necessarily sentimental in parts.

Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments, 1995
Finding generally available Holocaust memoirs published outside of Yad Vashem is not always easy, and not made easier by questions about the authenticity of books such as Jerzy Kozinski's The Painted Bird and Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments. Wilkomirski's now notorious 1995 'memoir' had not been published for long in several other languages when, in 1998, questions were being asked by Swiss journalist Daniel Ganzfried about the authenticity of Wilkomirski himself. His investigations uncovered the likely perpetration of a deliberate literary fraud, and when the questions became accusations Wilkomirski's literary agent commissioned Swiss historian Stefan Maechler to deconstruct Fragments and learn the truth about Wilkomirski. The 'Wilkomirski affair' is now well documented (Wikipedia here, Institute for Historical Review here), but the potted history is that Wilkomirski was the son of a single Swiss mother who was given up for adoption at the age of two, is neither Polish nor Jewish nor had brothers (as he claims), had never set foot in a concentration camp, was brought up with the name Bruno Dössekker by a middle-class Zurich couple, and eventually worked as a classical musician. The best, ultimately, that can be said for Fragments is that it appears to be a misguided and unfortunate (perhaps even cynical) blurring of the line between metaphor and truth; at worst it may have undermined the reputations of several historians, educationalists and therapists who still believe it has proper contextual relevance and meaning, it provided fuel to Holocaust revisionists, and fooled a considerable number of people.

The book itself is a series of disjointed 'recovered memories', a shaky enough foundation on which to base a Holocaust memoir. The premise of the book is that Wilkomirski's true parents were murdered by Nazis in Riga, Poland, and he continued to survive alone as a child in Majdanek and Birkenau before being smuggled out to Switzerland at the end of the war. His adoptive parents claimed his concentration camp memories were just bad dreams that he must forget, but with help he was able to establish that these memories were 'real'. Fragments was therefore driven by the need to fill a large hole in his past, which his adoptive parents refused to share with him. Why would Dössekker perpetrate such a fraud, when there appears to be no motive other than the attention-seeking behaviour of someone claiming victimhood? It is this that shouts loudest in Fragments, written with the tone of a scared child throughout, a persona which Wilkomirski/Dössekker carried through convincingly in his public appearances as the awards rolled in. In retrospect, with some self-imposed editing and revision it could have made a legitimate (if rather strained and brutal) work of children's fiction, and Dössekker could have kept his credibility intact instead of being forced into hiding.

So knowing it was a fraud, why would I want to read a book such as this? Mostly to view the tone with which it was written, to see if I could smell the rat myself and maybe see where Wilkomirski trips himself up. To my mind these 'recovered memories' are far too detailed to be authentic. The style is one in which almost every paragraph, filled with "shards of memory with...knife-sharp edges", craves sympathy for yet another hardship, yet another injustice or indignity, calculated to bleed you dry of emotion. Comparisons are sometimes made with Elie Wiesel's Night, recognised as a legitimate memoir but still with its own detractors, though Wilkomirski seems to want to go one better by delivering his points of impact with an overbearing intention to shock: adults are dangerous because they are best at fooling you, children stand in buckets of shit to keep their feet warm, babies die from gnawing their fingers to the bone for lack of food. At an early point in the book, presumably as a suppressed memory, Wilkomirski witnesses the murder of his father and from this point on women are mostly portrayed as stern nurturers and men as psychopathic murderers, a delineation that lacks balanced realism. This tells you it is not so much 'us vs. them' in the context of a Holocaust memoir, as 'big vs. small' or 'me vs. everyone else', with only a loose grounding in verifiable fact.

It was a technique that in terms of literary style alone perhaps should not have fooled as many as it did, yet in other places, relieved of its unfortunate accompanying baggage, it is easy to see why Fragments initially received the accolades "small masterpiece", "stunning", "unforgettable", and "morally important". But in truth it is nothing more than a catalogue of invented horrors, supposedly unquestionable because of their sacrosanct location, and as a piece of holocaust literature Fragments is now worthless even as a legitimate novel, only worth reading for the curiosity value and necessarily to be taken with massive pinch of salt.

[ cross-posted with anti_war ]
[ cross-posted with genocides ]
[ cross-posted with peace_studies ]

Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1959 (Penguin Classics, 2004)
Had Borowski not commited suicide at the age of twenty nine it is thought he would have gone on to become one of Poland's truly great writers. The defining two years of his life were spent in Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1943 and 1945, a period which undoubtedly coloured his perception of humanity for his remaining six years and which found an outlet in the short amount of Holocaust fiction which he produced, gathered here in this short, valuable collection. These are tales based on true happenings in Auschwitz but told with a storytelling licence that makes no bid for literary greatness or emotive overkill, yet it is just this act of 'telling it like it is' that gives This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen its impact.

The distinguishing thing about concentration camp life, as Borowski tells it, is that there is no clearly defined line between victims and perpetrators. Camp inmates act with frequent self-interested cruelty to each other, something that Borowski resigned himself to accepting is a trait of anyone whose back is against the wall and whose life is under threat; the Nazis, however, do reserve both the more gratuitous and 'professional' acts of inhumanity for themselves and appear to relish in them, there being little that is identifiably human about them, as we encounter them here. This short book seems to offer an 'entomologist's microcosm' of one extreme of human experience that does benefit from some occasional optimistic colouring and black humour, though amongst the almost everyday telling there are some particularly memorable and shocking sequences, delivered deadpan and with surprisingly little anger or cynicism. This collection deserves its 'classic' status.

[ cross-posted with anti_war ]
[ cross-posted with genocides ]
[ cross-posted with peace_studies ]

Nada Awar Jarrar, Somewhere, Home, 2003
The rarely mentioned centrepiece to Somewhere, Home is the long and bloody civil war that tore Beirut apart from 1975 to 1990, because this novel lies outside the peripheries of the violence and looks at the displacement and continuity of the lives of several ordinary Lebanese women and their families as they are forced to relocate away from Beirut. This was a time when there were probably more Lebanese outside the country than in, so Nada Awar Jarrar obviously has plenty of source material for these invented histories that will probably resonate fairly accurately with the real lives of many exiled Lebanese.

The three stories here, set at different times around Beirut's civil war, are about three individual women. The first is Maysa who, while expecting a child, relocates herself away from her husband to a large rambling house on the slopes of Mount Lebanon, before he eventually joins her. Then there is Aida who has long since left the country, choosing instead to live in the cultured capitals of Europe, and yet is haunted by the spirit of a murdered Palestinian refugee who finally draws her home after the war ends. Finally we have Salwa, elderly and bed-ridden in an Australian hospital, taken from her homeland when she was a young wife and mother, recalling her old life far from home as her descendants in the wider world move on with their lives with little connection to their 'home' country.

Somewhere, Home is often unashamedly sentimental and mostly family-oriented, but the stories are all sufficiently picaresque to beguile the reader into wishing to know more about the characters, context and setting than we are told. A sequel novel to these lives, whether about these particular people or others entirely, would probably also be worth reading, though the tone would probably be equally melancholy.

Via various friends, from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

Name: YOUNG, PETER
Nationality: United Kingdom
Rank: Private
Regiment: Black Watch (Royal Highlanders)
Unit Text: 1st Bn.
Age: 33
Date of Death: 29/10/1914
Service No: 7742
Additional information: Son of the late Mr. and Mrs. William Young; husband of Elizabeth H. Young, of 12, Baxter St., Dundee.
Casualty Type: Commonwealth War Dead
Grave/Memorial Reference: Panel 37
Cemetery: YPRES (MENIN GATE) MEMORIAL

Atiq Rahimi, Earth and Ashes, 2000
Set during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, Earth and Ashes is a first novel from an Afghan film-maker more accustomed to making documentaries. This is worth mentioning as the book reads as a short personal fable and packs its emotional punch by looking at the spiritual cost of a person subjected to loss as opposed to any visually distressing imagery, which this book veils behind the digressive ramblings and nightmares of an elderly man in the shock of sudden grief. Earth and Ashes opens with Dastaguir, an Afghan grandfather and the book's narrator, taking his grandson Yassin to see the boy's father Murad, who works in a Russian mine, with the purpose of explaining to him that the rest of the family has been killed after the Russian army, in a fit of obstinate pique, obliterated their entire village.

This book's tellling in the second person (a rare thing in itself) as opposed to the first or third is a clever device which removes the reader from experiencing directly the shellshock of what Dastaguir himself has experienced: he is clearly in a confused and distressed state yet still feels he must do the right thing and withdraws into frequent internal debates about his proper course of action, one of his reference points being the eleventh century Persian epic The Book of Kings which is interwoven with various well-depicted dreamlike visions. Earth and Ashes is as far removed from the political causes for the execution of a war as any book could probably be, and focuses entirely on how this simple man is now forced to deal with an impossibly complex and traumatic event; Dastaguir, as a result, is given a troubled dignity that seems far beyond the reach of the rest of us. At times it seems like almost every sentence in this book is calculated to extract the reader's sympathy, but the overall effect is rather positively overwhelming. Highly recommended.

[ cross-posted with anti_war ]
[ cross-posted with peace_studies ]