Eve's Alexandria

These are the tears of things

For a while last year it seemed like every book commentator and their dog had been reading Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes.  Honestly you couldn't open an end-of-year review without being bombarded by recommendations to read it.  My paperback copy blares out on the front cover: 'You have in your hands a masterpiece'.   Brazen perhaps, but it has the benefit of being true in this case.  Three breathless sittings - three rather than one because I made myself draw out the pleasure - and I'm ready to go out and put this book into the hands of every single person I know. 

I read de Waal's book now (rather than, say, in three years time when it finally reached the top of the interminable TBR pile) because it's the first title for the 2011/12 season of the Museum book-club that I curate.  So, I was meant to take notes while I was reading it and engage my critical centre in preparation for discussing it.  Hopeless, utterly hopeless.  You know how it is when you've been reading something extraordinary, and it could have been 10 minutes or two hours you've been so engrossed; you come out of the trance, and your leg has fallen asleep (because you tuck it up underneath you, which is very bad for your circulation), and you desperately need the loo, and your feet are numb from the cold.   It was that kind of book.  I know I'm going to have to read it again, more slowly this time, so that I have something to say on the day other than 'Gah! Brilliant! Amazing! Genius!'

The book's raison d'etre is pretty well known I imagine.  It is a history of inheritance, of the handing down of a collection of 264 netsuke.  A hoard of small, tactile, beguiling belt ornaments from 18th and 19th century Japan which first came into de Waal's maternal family in the 1870s, and have since wended their way from Belle Epoque Paris, through the Second World War and the Holocaust, via Vienna and Tokyo, to his 'Edwardian house in a pleasant London street' in the 21st century. The netsuke are small and beautiful:

They are hard to chip, hard to break: each one is made to be knocked around in the world. 'A netsuke must be devised so as not to be a nuisance to the user' says a guide.  They hold themselves inwards: a deer tucking its legs beneath its body; the barrel-maker crouching inside his half finished barrel; the rats a tumble around the hazelnut.  Or my favourite, a monk asleep over his alms bowl; one continuous line of back.

They endure, they survive and they bear witness.  In the course of their history de Waal's netsuke have been many things to four generations of his mother's family.  To his great-great-great uncle Charles Ephrussi, the art critic and collector who first bought them, they were the height of aesthetic fashion, a symptom of a taste for Japanese art that he shared with his lover Louise Cahen d'Anvers and the rest of Parisian society.  Both were members of a community of phenomenally rich Jewish emigres for whom Japonisme represented 'a new Renaissance unfolding and the chance to have the ancient and serious art of the East in your hands.  You could have it in quantity and you could have it now.'  Charles added them to his collection of other art objects - amongst which paintings by Renoir and Degas; a statue by Donatello -  and he shared them with his friends, handing around the netsuke as conversation pieces in his famous Salon.  (Proust was a regular apparently, and Charles has long been recognised as a model for Swann in Remembrance of Things Past.)

Thirty years later Charles gave the netsuke to his nephew, Viktor Ephrussi, as a wedding present.  They travelled from Paris to Austria in 1898; their new home was in Viktor's brides' dressing room in the Palais Ephrussi, the Viennese headquarters of the family's banking dynasty.  There they were demoted to toys, to be played with by Viktor's children while their mother dressed for dinner.  Later they escaped the confiscations of Jewish property during the Anschluss and travelled to Japan with de Waal's great-Uncle Ignace in 1946 where they were found a new life as cultural echos, artefacts from a country that no longer existed.  De Waal follows closely on their heels, travelling in their wake with obsessive determination from one city to another, across centuries and continents, experiencing 'the slightly clammy feeling of biography, the sense of living on the edges of other people's lives without their permission.'

It is an intense and moving story.  The netsuke's Jewish owners couldn't have been more intimately connected with the currents of European social, cultural and political life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  They were glittering; beyond comprehension.  De Waal traces them from through palatial homes, stands in the rooms where they stood, teases out titbits from the society pages of Europe's newspapers, to bring them back breathing, laughing, weeping in all their richness.  And then he follows them right into the maws of the Holocaust, and their meteoric downfall, and the stripping away of everything they ever owned.  It could so very easily have descended into 'some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss'.  De Waal recognises from the beginning the dangers inherent in telling 'this kind of story':

A few stitched together wistful anecdotes...a bit of wandering around Prague or somewhere equally photogenic, some clippings from Google on ballrooms in the Belle Epoque.  It would come out as nostalgic.  And thin.

Thinness is something not to be born in the circumstances.  By anchoring the story in the netsuke he neatly avoids it and other cliched things, like melancholy and sentimentality.  As he says early on, the netsuke are 'small, tough explosions of exactitude'; their humour, irreverance and neatness resist the vagueness of melancholy.

Focusing on them allows de Waal to ask the important questions about his fascinating, tragic ancestors.  Not what they looked like, or wore, or did for sexual satisfaction (now so often the subject of biographies, and here treated with great subtlety and respect).  Instead how it felt to walk into rooms filled with things they owned, 'to feel the volume of space, to know what pictures were on the walls, how the light fell from the windows. And to know whose hands it [the netsuke] has been in, and what they felt about it and thought about it - if they thought about it.'   He uses the netsuke as his biographical muse, and they become the lense through which he interprets everything.

The book is as much about 'things', objects, and how they 'get handled, used and handed on', as it is about people.  And what these objects tell us about people is phenomenal.  You might imagine that because the Ephrussi were rich, wealthy beyond our wildest imaginations, and could buy almost anything they wanted; could fill their walls with Old Masters, their halls with Louis XVIth tables and Faberge eggs, that things would mean less to them.  Their ubiquity would make them worthless.  What are 264 tiny Japanese toggles in a Viennese palace full of expensive stuff?  This is de Waal's question: how do we invest meaning in the world?  Can objects have meaning, poignancy, exactitude, amidst so much plenty?  What makes something valuable, and how is that value inherited, transmitted, transmuted?

His journey in search of answers is simply a revelation.  He imagines the hand of his grandmother aged 5 reaching out to pluck a netsuke - the hare with amber eyes - from a display cabinet, while her mother tries on hats and tells her fairy stories. And then imagines what it must have meant to that same woman to take up the same netsuke but 40 years later, after her mother and father were dead and everything had been lost to the Nazis.  Everything except this small, hard, tough little thing.  I can't explain any more than that why you must read it.  Please say I've convinced you.

~~Victoria~~

Science and Sensibilities

Part of the reason it has been quiet here at Alexandria this month is that I've been a guest poster over at - whisper it - another blog.

Over at the Vector editorial blog, Torque Control, I've been making my contribution to the Future Classics series with a four-part discussion about Life (2004) by Gwyneth Jones.

The Future Classics project grew out of a lively online debate last year - itself prompted by comments made by Tricia Sullivan in an interview at Geek Syndicate - regarding science fiction written by women: why the number of women sf writers published in the UK are in decline, why those books that are published get less attention than those by men, and how and why women writers of the past have been excluded from the canon. Niall of Torque Control ran a poll to determine the ten best sf books by women published during the past ten years, and the Future Classics (eleven, due to a tie) were born. Subsequently, Vector's new editor Shana Worthen invited various guest bloggers to write about each of the eleven books in turn.

I was delighted to get the chance to go back to Life, which I first read back three years ago but was never able to write about, on account of being involved in the death-match that was wrestling my PhD thesis into submissible form. The story centres on Anna Senoz, a brilliant and dedicated young biologist, and the devastating impact that her research into the Y-chromosome has upon her career and her family. My four posts are here:

• part one, on the practice and politics of science in the novel
• part two, on the major characters' relationship with feminism
• part three, on relationships and gender roles
• part four, on sex, gender, and how the central sfnal conceit may (or may not) change the world

--

While I'm here: the excellent online magazine Strange Horizons is holding its usual annual fund drive this month, so why not go there and chuck in a few dollars? Help fund another year of great fictional and non-fictional writing by people like, er, me - and you'll be entered into a prize draw at the same time! (Seriously, I want so many of those prizes...)

My most recent review for SH, on the HBO TV adaptation of George RR Martin's novel Game of Thrones, was published earlier this month. I seem to have ended up talking about sex quite a lot:

This being HBO, however, the writers much prefer the idea of combining explanation with nudity. While the sexposition, as fan circles have dubbed it, is both labored and ripe for parody, it does nonetheless show us much about how gender and power, and gendered power, work in this world. There is no such thing as simple sex; power differentials shape every aspect of life in Game of Thrones, and intimacy is ineluctably shaped and distorted by them.

Go read the rest. And comment. And donate. You know it makes sense.

~~Nic

His Ability to Imagine Us as We Are

What Du Boise had done, he had done a long time ago. Nineteen years. And Silas had learned to live with what Du Boise had done, had absorbed that moment's horror into the flow of his life, a faded moon of a memory that only occasionally intruded into his everyday consciousness. Why did it matter now, when the situation was reversed, and Silas could use the power of his own position to make the old bastard's life hell?

I found Achmat Dangor's Booker-shortlisted Bitter Fruit (2001) a deeply frustrating read. It has all the hallmarks of a difficult and important novel: raw emotion, weighty subject matter, politically and culturally charged setting, a painstaking fascination with its characters' internal lives. And yet there's something so ponderous and deliberate about its delineation of all of the above that, for all the undoubted importance of what the book seeks to do - explore the legacy of apartheid in South Africa through the experiences of a single family - I struggled to maintain my interest at anything past the level of ticking off thematic boxes.

Dangor makes painful and necessary - if not especially original or insightful - points about how oppression, even years after it has ended, warps individuals and their relationships at the most fundamental levels, destroying trust and security and the capacity for vulnerability needed for emotional and physical intimacy. I can't recall a single significant character who enjoys a remotely healthy human connection with anyone, whether romantic, familial, or political. Even the relationship between those characters who are involved in the new post-apartheid government and their largely unseen leader Mandela, while apparently clear-eyed and sharp-witted on his side (an "uncanny [...] clarity" that gives him the "ability to imagine us as we are" that I borrowed for the title of this post), has too much of hero worship and desperate hope in it to herald anything but future disappointment when the world cannot be remade quickly or completely enough.

In practice, what this means it that everyone is consumingly obsessed with everyone else's sex lives. Silas and Lydia examine their teenage son Mikey's every gesture for some clue as to where his thoughts tend; Mikey breaks into Lydia's desk drawers and reads her diary (apparently aware but unconcerned by the fact that she "had locked them as an expression of her privacy, rather than in any real hope of keeping out an intruder"), in search of fiercely hidden but still damaging secrets about his parents' past, and evidence of her present attachments; family friends Kate and Julian are introduced to us in terms of the failure of their respective partnerships, and they, in turn, speculate about the manifold ways in which Silas and Lydia are falling apart.

(Kate is a further source of irritation all her own: a bisexual woman who apparently gravitates towards partners who offer "the best of both worlds" in deeply gendered terms, and who - of course - plays out her unsatisfaction with her female partner by having a creepy affair with Mikey. Because bisexuals, as we all know, can't possibly be monogamous. I roll my eyes.)

It is thus sadly predictable that Silas should react in the way he does to an episode from his and Lydia's shared past: Lydia's rape by a policeman named Du Boise. With the balance of power changed so decisively by the end of apartheid, and in particular given Silas' role in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the sight of the older Du Boise in a supermarket appears to Silas as a chance for payback. What the precise nature of the payback will be, he is unclear on; but so convinced is he that he owns this past, that it was something done to him just as it was to her, that he cannot stop thinking about it. Nor can he imagine that Lydia may not share his eagerness to dredge it all up again, whatever the reason; and, indeed, she does not:

"Silas, I'd forgotten..."

"I'm sorry, I didn't intend to run into him."

"You chose to remember, you chose to come home and tell me. [...] All these years, we never spoke about it."

"There was no need to."

She look up at him, her eyes scornful. "No need to? What do you mean, no need to?"

"It was a time when, well, we had to learn to put up with those things."

"What did you have to put up with, Silas? He raped me, not you."

"It hurt me, too."

"So that's it. Your hurt. You remembered your hurt."

For Lydia, being forced to recall her rape is lacerating, both emotionally and - in the event - physically, since in the course of the argument that follows she breaks a beer bottle and does a kind of helpless, agonised dance on the shards of glass. It makes for raw, upsetting reading. Unfortunately, for neither the first nor the last time, Dangor can't let his characters' actions - or even their thoughts - speak for themselves:

"Lydia's had an accident, we need to get her to the hospital, the fucken ambulance is taking forever!"

In his mind, the circumstances of Lydia's injuries were already being mitigated. Her wounds were not self-inflicted, not provoked by his obsession with remembering the past, it had been a freak accident, it had happened because she wanted to drink beer and hated the taste, and he had criticized her for drinking flat beer. Ja, a small, trivial thing like that, and the glass went flying, fell, flung, who knows? You know how she is, bra, how they all are, the Oliphant women, with their anger, slow in coming but fucken volcanic when it's there, broer. Shit, you know what an Oliphant temper is like!

There is a world of insight into Silas here without any need for editorialising narration; instead, though, that extraneous first line of the second paragraph strikes a note of insecurity, as if the author cannot quite believe we would reach that conclusion on our own (still less that other conclusions are possible, or acceptable...). I believe that Silas would rationalise his wife's upset as being about her temper rather than his blunder; I don't believe, though, that he would be consciously aware that that is what he is doing, that that first sentence belongs to him rather than to narrative fiat. Elsewhere, the explanations are still more laboured:

Lydia offered a muttered protest, in spite of her pain, Silas the merest smile. Both knew immediately that Mikey's offhand humour was an attempt to resist being drawn into any display of emotion, he had never been a 'hugger and kisser', even as a child. He had done what was expected of him when he arrived along with Jackson and Mam Agnes, he had embraced his mother and squeezed his father's shoulder. Now he stood up against the wall, so very obviously apart from the rest.

This over-explanation of character motivation is sometimes insightful, but more frequently it doesn't really feel earned; such glosses feel like ideas about who the characters are, rather than observations that can be tracked against their actions and their words. Dangor's characters have very active interior lives, but they tend to understand themselves in ways that sound very novelistic.

In any case, Silas' annexation of Lydia's experience to himself is misguided but, under the circumstances and given who he is, certainly believable. A thread running through the book is, perhaps inevitably, how the abused becomed the abusers, or more precisely of men exorcising the feelings of impotence with which oppression leaves them by exercising tighter control over their families, seeking to regain status lost to socially and politically more-powerful men by lording it over those who are less powerful still: women and children. When, later, Silas confesses to Lydia that not only has he not let his mania over Du Boise go, but that the case of her rape is to be dragged before the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, and then responds to her shock and upset by groping her, it is a measure of Silas' emotional illiteracy but also of the impossibility of any sort of untainted relationship between them; that Lydia responds with first repulsion and then resignation ("you are my husband... you have every right"). All this is difficult to read, and made me want to hit Silas on more than one occasion; but it feels right.

Where the book started to lose me was with the equally unsurprising and believeable development that Mikey, too, starts to feel that he has the right to take revenge for what happened to Lydia. I began to flag, wondering why all of this complex story has to revolve around a woman's rape, while the woman concerned is treated as a sideshow in her own story. (Men's power and men's pain, written on women's bodies. Again.)

And when we do hear from Lydia - and when she is not obsessing over Mikey's oh-so-pretty body (yes, really; Mikey is like catnip to women, regardless of whether they're his mother, his aunt, in a relationship with a woman, or have a history of sexual abuse) - she, too, is made to spell out the author's meaning for us. This, for example, is a promising expression of her alienation:

Yes, the smooth and devious one, handsome in his own way, he is my husband. You should have left Du Boise alone when you saw him, Silas, you should not have brought my rapist home. I can't rest peacefully with both of you around, your bodies, your smells, even your sounds have become all mixed up.

But Dangor can't quite resist adding:

It's like he raped me on your behalf, so that one day I would live with him through you. When you are inside me, and around me, it feels like Du Boise. He made you his instrument.

Murky and interesting, in parts; but overall the taste I was left with was not bitter fruit, but disappointment.

~~Nic

Loot

 

Book Loot 3 from Victoria on Vimeo.

 

The books I did talk about:

Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her family feuds by Lyndall Gordon

Dreamers of a A New Day: Women who invented the Twentieth Century by Sheila Rowbotham 

The Thirties: An Intimate History by Juliet Gardiner

Seasons on Harris: A Year in Scotland's Outer Hebrides by David Yeadon

How Fiction Works by James Wood

The Contemporary British Novel by Philip Tew

Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier

The Tin-Kin by Eleanor Thom

Mr Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt

And that bookshop in Pocklington has a website if you fancy a gander.

~Victoria~

 

 

Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear

"But they don't ask who's handing over the money," said Sofia Petrovna timidly. "They only ask who it's for."

Kipisarova took her by the hand and led her away from the crowd of people.

"They don't need to ask," she whispered. "They know everything."

Her eyes were huge, brown, and sleepless.

I'm delighted to have found Sofia Petrovna (1967; translated by Aline Werth) by Lydia Chukovskaya (1907-1996). I've read a number of novels by men about the experience of living under Soviet totalitarianism, but never one by a woman, and never one that gives such an intimate insight into what life was like for those who had to carry on in the aftermath: those who, when the regime abruptly swooped down and disappeared their loved ones, had to endure the slow death of hope that was waiting for news of their fate.

Chukovskaya notes in a foreword that she wrote the novel in 1939-40. It was impossible to publish, but she felt compelled to hide it in a drawer even so, protecting it for twenty-five years as "a piece of evidence". It is, she says, "the tale of a witness" - she means, I think, both her protagonist, Sofia Petrovna, and herself - "striving conscientiously, against the powerful forces of falsehood, to discern and record the events which occurred before [her] eyes". Chukovskaya's emphasis on both seeing (discern) and remembering (record) is key: in many ways, Sofia Petrovna's central struggle is not to find her voice and be heard, but rather to understand and accept what is happening to her.

Sofia Petrovna, you see, is a true believer. She is introduced as a devoted mother who pours all her energy into raising her beloved son, Kolya, after the premature death of her husband: the opening paragraph of the novel explains that she immediately took a typing course, so that she could afford for him to go to university rather than begin work young, since "Fyodor Ivanovich would never have allowed his son to go without a higher education". Once established in a job, though, it is not all about Kolya; Sofia derives a real sense of achievement from doing her job well:

"I would like to say that the work of the typing office, under the supervision of Comrade Lipatova, has already attained an exceptionally high standard."

Sofia Petrovna blushed and it was a long time before she dared to raise her eyes again. When she at last decided to look around, she thought everyone seemed extraordinarily kind and attractive, and she found the statistics unexpectedly interesting.

But we also see the quality that will eventually tear her apart. Sofia is content, even happy, with the way authoritarianism orders her world and shows her her place in it. She embraces the hierarchy within her workplace with the fervour of someone who has finally come home; singled out for overtime by her young boss, she is left all a-glow with "a feeling of pride in his authority". (She also goes in for some seriously kitschy seasonal decoration: "Sofia Petrovna glued the curly head of the child Lenin in the center of a big, red, five-pointed star, and Natasha put it up on the very top of the tree - and everything was ready").

Her habits of obedience are reinforced by Kolya, who joins the party and tends to come home spouting establishment lines. When a wave of arrests takes in a friend of Sofia's, he explains that "it was necessary to rid Leningrad of unreliable elements" - Sofia's friend being one such element, "not a real Soviet person" because "she didn't recognize Mayakovsky as a poet". Sofia is dazzled by her son's education and the certainty of his pronouncements, although in an early sign of trouble she has to cajole herself into seeing the sense in one man's arrest, because he's "such an esteemed doctor". One type of authority being gobbled up by another is distressing to her; both doctor and state must be respected, and yet they cannot both be right.

Nevertheless, Sofia keeps telling herself that everything is all right; when her faith occasionally falters, as when her boss is arrested, there's always someone around to talk her back around:

"What do we know?" retorted Natasha hotly. "We know he was director of our publishing house, but we don't actually know anything more than that. Do we really know about his personal life? Can you really vouch for him?"

The self-cannibalising logic of the system becomes inescapably clear, and simply inescapable, when Kolya is arrested. Sofia Petrovna, who has consoled herself time and again that only guilty people are arrested, and that anyone who has nothing to hide has nothing to fear from the state, is sent into meltdown. At first she floats in a sea of denial: "She must rush off somewhere at once and clear up this monstrous misunderstanding", is her first response. Queuing up day after dreary, fruitless, soul-destroying day at the relevant government office in an effort to find out where Kolya is being held, and why, she tells herself over and over again that she has nothing in common with the equally desperate women around her:

"No point waiting for him to return! Those who wind up here never return."

Sofia Petrovna wanted to interrupt, but decided not to get involved. In our country innocent people aren't held. Particularly not Soviet patriots like Kolya. They'll clear the matter up and let him go.

After all, she reads about confessions from enemies of the people in the newspapers every day: the people who are arrested, the people who are executed, really do harbour evil in their hearts towards their fellow citizens. The regime does not make mistakes (except in Kolya's case); "She was sorry for them, of course, as human beings, sorry especially for the children; but still an honest person had to remember that all these women were the wives and mothers of poisoners, spies and murderers." There is no smoke without fire, right? People certainly don't get arrested because they happen to be related to someone else who was arrested, or because one of their former co-workers named them under torture, or completely arbitrarily.

The second half of the novel is essentially a portrayal of Sofia Petrovna slowly breaking under the contradiction: the impossibility of believing in both her son's innocence and the Soviet system's infallibility. The true believer finds herself lost in a familiar world ("She felt as if she were not in Leningrad at all, but in some unknown city"), living among the marginalised and the hunted while the ground shifts endlessly beneath her feet. Disturbing.

~~Nic