Book 162, Poland: "Collected Poems: 1956-1998" by Zbigniew Herbert

One of my favourite poets in the whole wide world is Polish!

I discovered the works of Nobel Lit Prize Winner Wisława Szymborska as a secondary school kid, back in the nineties – loved them so much; huge influence on me, etc. Unfortunately, her output wasn’t huge, so there wasn’t an extra tome of her works I could check out for this project. And I’d already used Czesław Miłosz - Poland’s other Nobel Lit laureate – for my Lithuania book.

Fortunately, there are lots of famous Polish poets. Such as this guy:

I’d heard his name bantered about amongst my friends, so I figured, yeah, why not read something of his? (Yeah, yeah, he was born in Lwow, which is now part of Ukraine, but it was Polish while he was a kid.)

This was the library’s only volume of his works – ye compleat edition, running to 571 pages. But mirabile dictu, it’s good. So good. (I’d considered abandoning it for Adam Zagajewski’s Eternal Enemies, a convenient, skinny little codex, but when I leafed through that, I found myself longing for the lambent voice of my man Herbert.)

We’ve nine different volumes of his poetry packed into this tome:

Chord of Light (1956)

Hermes, Dog and Star (1957)

Sudy of the Object (1961)

Inscription (1969)

Mr Cogito (1974)

Report from a Besieged City (1983)

Elegy for the Departure (1990)

Rovigo (1992)

Epilogue to a Storm (1998)

So we get to follow this man from a post World War to a post-Cold War era; from youth; from the age of 32 to 78. And over the five decades we see his voice develop, shift from focus to focus, intensify and mourn himself.

And it is the same voice throughout – a melancholy, erudite voice, haunted both by the horrors of his own Communist (and pre-Communist) society and the ghosts of classical history. He invokes Hermes, Apollo, Athena, Marsyas, the Minotaur, Elektra, Claudius, Marcus Aurelius, Nefertiti – also Mary Queen of Scots, George Orwell and the Emperor Meiji, come to think of it – but not in a show-off-how-smart-I-am way, but to invoke archetypes of eternal drama to show that the tyranny and torture of his land (of all lands) have ever been thus.

Loads of specific references to his childhood and his Polish contemporaries, too, which were a little harder to get. He calls himself Mr Cogito (therefore he is?) in the latter half of his career, documenting what he sees as his loserly life. But fundamentally, he’s engaged in the same Szymborska-esque mission of mourning for the entire world, for the whole of history.

That hits me, you know? This is poetry that makes me want to write more poetry. To join in the chorus as a testament. Gah.

(Though I personally do like Szymborska better still, because she also finds joy in the senselessness of the universe. But it’s not a competition. Is it?)

Representative quote:

I probably like his prose poems best, but this piece spoke of nation in a way that resonates a lot with me.

TAIL OF A NAIL

For lack of a nail the kingdom fell

- our nannies’ wisdom teaches us – but in our kingdom

there haven’t been nails for a long time nor will there be

neither those handy little ones used for hanging pictures

on a wall nor the big ones with which coffins are sealed

but in spite of this and perhaps precisely because of it

the kingdom endures and even gains others’ admiration

how is it possible to live without nails paper and string

bricks oxygen freedom and whatever else you like

evidently it is possible because it endures and endures

people in this country live in houses and not in caves

factories smoke in the steppe trains cross the tundra

and on the cold ocean a ship blows its bleating horn

there is an army and police a seal an anthem a flag

on the surface it’s just like the rest of the world

it is only on the surface because this kingdom of ours

is not a creation of nature or a creation of humanity

seemingly enduring built on the bones of mammoths

in reality it is weak as if suspended between

the act and the thought existence and nonexistence

a leaf and a stone fall so do all things real

but ghosts live a long time stubbornly despite

sunrise and sunset revolutions of celestial bodies

on the disgraced earth tears and things fall

Next book: Uladzimir Karatkevich's "King Stakh's Wild Hunt", from Belarus? Or Vladimir Kozlov's "Number Ten: A Novella In Translation"? Not sure yet.

Book 155, Monaco: "Loser Takes All" by Graham Greene

Guess what? I decided that I *would not* let a second month go by wherein I'd only read one book for this blog. So I hitched a ride with my dad over to Jurong East Regional Library, and lo and behold, procured this:

It's a novella about Bertram, a 40 year-old London assistant manager of accounting and a bit of a loser - except that he's about to marry a sweet 20 year-old girl named Cary at a quiet church ceremony. Then, through the off-handed magnanimity of the major shareholder in his company, he ends up having the ceremony in Monte Carlo, Monaco - but when they're stranded at the hotel without the cash to pay their way any further, what can they do? Gamble their way into millions, that's what! And encounter all the ups and downs of riches while that takes place.

Now, I've only read one other Graham Greene novel, The Quiet American, which happens to have been published in 1955, the very same year this came out. And I can't help but be struck by the similarities between the two. Both feature:

1. A middle-aged, unremarkable first-person protagonist who is British and male,

2. and who also happens to be with an innocent 20 year-old (in The Quiet American, her name's Phuong) who appears bubble-headed and flighty but is in reality utterly devoted and surprisingly canny about the ways of life,

3. although there's an awful middle-aged woman involved - in The Quiet American it's Fowler's existing wife who won't grant him a divorce so he can remarry; in Loser Takes All it's Bertram's cheating sexpot of a deceased wife, plus a lady he picks up in the casino just to make Cary feel jealous.

4. Oh yes, and there's a handsome young man around who makes the protagonist jealous (the eponymous quiet American in The Quiet American; a young gambler named Philippe in Loser Takes All), but who does not deserve the girl, dammit.

5. And there's also machinations of power in the background - it's the Vietnam War in The Quiet American; it's the battles for money and power amongst the shareholders in Loser Takes All.

6. Plus, they both take place in exotic locations most Brit readers could only dream of visiting - Monaco! Vietnam! Not so much unlike an Ian Fleming novel after all. (Although it is remarkable that Loser Takes All was published a year before Grace Kelly's wedding to Prince Rainier - hence, it's set in the dowdy days of Monaco, before its great glamorisation.)

Of course, the two books are different, in substantial ways. First off, this one's just a novella, 110 pages long in fairly large print. And second, while The Quiet American is about the corruption of war and imperialism and all, Loser Takes All is about the corruption of wealth and greed - the money spoils everything, and Cary's the only one who can see that clearly.

And yes, this was a hell of a fun read. Probably useful for my writing, too. Although I do still feel bad about losing my copy of The Ruling House of Monaco. Will have to cough up some cash for that.

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Representative quote: There are so many faces in streets and bars and buses and stores that remind one of Original Sin, so few that carry permanently the sign of Original Innocence. Cary's face was like that - she would always until old age look at the world with the eyes of a child. She was never bored: every day was a new day: every grief was eternal and every joy would last for ever. 'Terrible' was her favourite adjective - it wasn't in her mouth a cliché - there was terror in her pleasures, her fears, her anxieties, her laughter - the terror of surprise, of seeing something for the first time. 

Next book: Johanna Spyri's Heidi, from Switzerland.

Book 142, Faroe Islands: "The Kingdom of the Earth" by William Heinesen

It's frankly kind of crazy that it's taken me a month to finish this book. It's really not that long - finished a third of it over breakfast today. But what with my university reading and travel and ADD and sudden Seasonal Affectivity Disorder (with attendant writers' block!) kicking in, I've had a bunch of trouble hunkering down with a book I can call my own.

But I suppose a preamble is in order, regarding why the Faroes should be regarded as a country, when it's under the Danish crown and most of us have never even heard of it before. Fact is, Wikipedia says it's a self-governing country, and it happens to have an established literary figure who's enjoying something of a comeback on Goodreads. Why not?

Initially, I was going to do one of Heinesen's better-known works - the National Library in Singapore has a copy of Laterna Magica, and the UEA Library has The Black Cauldron. But when I picked up The Kingdom of the Earth (the original title, seen above, translates to "Mother Pleiades"), it spoke in such mythic language of absolute wonderment that I decided, yes, this *must* be the book I read, because that is precisely what I'm trying to achieve in my fiction: a sense of wonder.

The story's set in a small town based on Tórshavn, which is now actually the capital of the Faroes - but we're in the 1910s, in the years leading up to and during the Great War, so it really is a minor seaside outpost still, far from anywhere, where the young passionate people can't wait to run away to America or England or Denmark. We start with the birth of a young, unnamed boy, then we draw out to see the society he's growing up in (among all the brutish Nordic fishermen, there's an Italian pastry chef called Chamisso, oddly enough), and the passionate loves of his grandfather Jacob Sif and mother Antonia and everyone else, which ultimately come to nothing amidst misunderstanding and death by disease or being lost at sea...

As he's born out of wedlock (there's a ne'er-do-well called Eggersten, amongst others, who absconds to the States), he's brought up by Trine with the Eyes, his grandfather's former housekeeper. And she's a hardline pious Baptist or Millenist or something, who tells him that his dead mother isn't in the Kingdom of Heaven at the right-hand side of God's throne, but on a bench by the door of Heaven, watching as more worthy souls pass through before her.

And she tries to exorcise all the lovely visions of Egyptian gods and vaetter and make-believe creatures who populate his imagination (not least because one of his childhood friends, Rita, the corpse-bearer's daughter, was honest-to-goodness mad and had to be locked up in an asylum).

But in the end... but I shouldn't spoil the ending, should I? The truth is, the story doesn't quite end: the boy's still a boy by the last pages, and the fate of his imaginative world is uncertain. It feels like the first part of a novel, though it's in fact a novel in four parts, with all these divergent strands woven together. And it's "an ode to the imagination", according to (once again) Wikipedia, subtitled "A Story From the Beginning of Time". Set in the mortal world, but through a child's eyes, conveying the strangeness and magic of it all: fireworks, baby seals who are really mermaids, magic lanterns, glass eyeballs found washed up on the beach: look closer and you'll see a cross in the pupil, look still closer and you'll see naked Christ on the cross, holding a candelabrum, no, a reed.

Worth it, basically. I should've brought this into class on Wednesday, when Margaret Atwood (yes, THE Margaret Atwood) was giving us a masterclass on first chapters and we were all supposed to bring in some work of contemporary fiction we liked. I was patriotic and brought in Rawa, only to realise that it may have a beautiful first chapter, but its foreword is weak, and when you confess a book is by your friend and fellow countryman, no-one's necessarily going to believe it's that good.


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Here's the opening:

Representative quote:
In the beginning heaven and earth and tangible things did not exist. There was only an immoderate yearning for warmth, nourishment, and sleep. Life was showered upon you in great torrents. Storms of tenderness filled your primeval darkness- wild floods of milk and cleansing water, uncasing fountains of good and pleasant sounds that had not yet become words. And by and by your eyes gained their first soul, and you perceived the shadowy outline of the great giver of life, the source of all things, the one who creates and upholds - the Everlasting One.

Yes, long before you knew the sun and the day, the light within you was lit - in the hour when you met the human eyes of the Everlasting One.

Next book: Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, from Norway.

Book 141, Denmark: "Anecdotes of Destiny" by Isak Dinesen

Just been to watch Disney’s Frozen. It’s good! Just awfully American.

This is relevant to our discussion, of course, since it’s based on a work by Denmark’s most famous author: a weird, kinda effed-up, mysteriously sexual and amoral little girl-quest called The Snow Queen. Read it if you haven’t already. - it’s honestly one of his less horrifying fairytales. The Little Mermaid beats The Steadfast Tin Soldier, but is in turn beat by the hair-raising Red Shoes. (Oh man, I just remembered that Death himself appears in The Nightingale. Brrr.)

I’d honestly considered doing Hans Christian Andersen’s autobiography or travel writings, but they were a little too long and uncanonical. What I wanted was something so famous that a film had been made about it, hell, maybe even a local publisher had decided to name an entire line of books after it…

I mean “Babette’s Feast”, of course. It’s just one of the five stories in this collection. Isak Dinesen (whose real name was Karen Blixen, not vice versa) is actually better known for her similarly cinematic novel Out of Africa, which takes place in Kenya.

And hell, these stories are good. Like, break-your-heart, amazeballs, despair-at-your-own-fictive-abilities good. Ohhh, I can’t give away the plot of “Babette’s Feast” – you just have to read it for yourselves – but suffice it to say that it involves a great chef who sacrifices everything for her art.

These are tales of sacrifice, really – of people deciding that the rational way of living judiciously or grasping contentment as it comes is simply not the thing to be done, and how they lead counter-intuitively satisfying lives for all that. Bizarre people. Sexy people, come to think of it. There’s a whiff of fucking or almost-fucking in pretty much all five stories.

What’s more worth emulating for me, possibly, is the way she’s so willing to give every one of her characters a back story – she divides her tales into sections, so that we can step back and examine the youth of each fallen heroine before action properly begins – and there’s a crystalline brevity to each section that makes it impossible to call even the longer stories novellas (maybe novelettes?). These aren’t quite in the short story tradition: they’re tales told round the fire, drawn from faraway lands…

Yeah, for some reason, Dinesen wasn’t into writing about Denmark much. “The Diver”’s set in Shiraz, Iran; “The Immortal Story” in Canton, China; and “Babette’s Feast” and “Tempests” happen in Norway, which happened to be a Danish colony then: the former’s in a colony on the Bervelaag Fjord, while the latter’s in the town of Christianssand.

Bu before you yell that I’ve gotta disqualify this volume, I’ll have you know there are Danish characters, dammit – the Copenhagen theatre troupe owner Herr Soerensen and the innocent 17 year-old sailor Povl Velling from Marstal – and the very last of the stories takes place in the country estate of a young Danish squire, though it doesn’t actually say which part of the country he lives in. But even that Danish tale takes place two hundred and fifty years before publication. These are Arabian nights exotica, to a degree, with events shifted to magical elsewheres all the better to help the reader swallow the oddness that is life itself…

(The melancholy and magic in these tales: are they like Andersen’s? Maybe.)

One little political note: I don’t quite understand why, with “The Immortal Story”, you should choose to set a story in China and not have it feature any Chinese people except servants. Instead we’ve got a Scroogey Englishman, a beautiful and impetuous Frenchwoman, a Jew with Asperger’s and a young, dumb Dane. But perhaps that’s what the spell of Canton was back then – a land where whites ran away to, to survive – and the same reason why Singapore is mentioned in the same story, as a place whereof the less is said, the better.

Leaving my home country at 5pm today, btw. Will be visiting a friend in Hanover, then back to school again! Looking forward and fearing at the same time, would you believe it.

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Representative quote: (from “The Immortal”)  Elishama stood and looked after him. When the big young figure was no longer in sight, he himself lifted the shell to his ear. There was a deep, low surge in it, like the distant roar of great breakers. Elishama’s face took on exactly the same expression as the sailor’s face a few moments ago. He had a strange, gentle, profund shock, from the sound of a new voice in the house, and in the story. “I have heard it before,” he thought, “long ago. Long, long ago. But where?”

Next book: William Heinesen’s Black Cauldron, from the Faroe Islands.

Book 127, United States: "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison

You know what I've missed? Honest-to-goodness classics. Rich, crazy, multi-layered texts; timeless texts; immortal texts; texts that've been chattered about by scholars and hipsters for years, but go untouched on my library shelves (yes, our house has so many books that we call the shelves a library) just because I haven't gotten my arse around to reading them.

There are a lot of Great American Novels. According to the lists, I ought to be reading The Great Gatsby, but that's a brief little thing I might actually persuade myself to read casually. I've read Moby Dick and Lolita and Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird and Beloved already... but what about this 581-page tome, that I used to get confused with HG Wells's sci fi novella of a nearly identical name?

And honestly, this was just the ticket. A real shock to the senses after Triptych - a reminder of how recently in history black Americans were oppressed beyond hope. Published in 1952, it tells the story of a young black man from the South, unnamed, but smart enough to win a scholarship to a black university, where he has dreams of becoming a respected, upstanding member of the black community - only to get thrown out under ludicrous circumstances by the college president Dr Bledsoe (also black) and being forced to seek employment in New York City.

We've got an element of the picaresque novel going on here - he gets rejected from all the white-collar jobs he applies for, he gets into an accident in a paint factory after fighting with an old-timer black employee who mixes the paint, he gets lobotomised by the company's doctors, squats a lady's house in Harlem and then ends up as a community organiser for the Communist Party.

But unlike the innocent protagonist of a picaresque, this guy's character develops - he gets disillusioned more and more deeply with every institution he turns to, including the Communist Party (which was in fact one of the few groups that advocated for equal rights for blacks and whites in the 1950s - shades of Burgher's Daughter, here). And it's the struggle of "the Brotherhood", as he calls it, that dominates the novel - this strange place where there's equality but there isn't equality, where jungle-fever-obsessed white ladies pursue him at talks on "the Woman Question" (there's a lot to say about gender relations in here) and fellow black activists have to stand against the Africanist racism of Ras the Exhorter, who wants them lynched for working with the white man. White-dominated institutions using black people to push down black people - same strategy of divide and rule that's been used and is still used by various forces throughout history.

The writing's brilliant, of course. They talk about the jazz and the Ebonics that got transcribed in this text, but there's also honest-to-goodness textual modernism, weird dream sequences and chaotic passages that turn off more wary readers during the prologue. Ellison abandoned the old-school black lit genre of naturalism for the purposes of this work: he quotes Melville and Eliot in his opening, but his tale of an outsider, who's abandoned civilisation because of his awareness of its utter hopelessness, who must resort to new ways of speaking to record his ideas, reminds me of Lu Xun's Diary of a Madman, although it's more likely that he was influenced by Nikolai Gogol's tale of the same name. (There really are a limited number of cool titles to go around, eh?)


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Representative quote:  "So I'd accept it, I'd explore it, rine and heart. I'd plunge into it with both feet and they'd gag. Oh, but wouldn't they gag. I didn't know what my grandfather had meant, but I was ready to test his advice. I'd overcome them with yeses, undermine them with grins, I'd agree them to death and destruction. Yes, and I'd let them swallow me until they vomited or burst wide open. Let them gag on what they refused to see. Let them choke on it. That was one risk they hadn't calculated. That was a risk they had never dreamt of in their philosophy. Nor did they know that they could discipline themselves to destruction, that saying "yes" could destroy them. Oh, I'd yes them, but wouldn't I yes them! I'd yes them till they puked and rolled in it. All they wanted of me was one belch of affirmation and I'd bellow it out loud. Yes! Yes! YES! That was all anyone wanted of us, that we should be heard and not seen, and then heard only in one big optimistic chorus of yassuh, yassuh, yassuh! All right, I'd yea, yea and oui, oui and si, si and see, see them too; and I'd walk around in their guts with hobnailed boots. Even those super-big shots whom I'd never seen at committee meetings. They wanted a machine? Very well, I'd become a supersensitive confirmer of their misconceptions, and just to hold their confidence I'd try to be right part of the time. Oh, I'd serve them well and I'd make invisibility felt if not seen, and they'd learn that it could be as polluting as a decaying body, or a piece of bad meat in a stew. And if I got hurt? Very well again. Besides, didn't they believe in sacrifice? They were the subtle thinkers -- would this be treachery? Did the word apply to an invisible man? Could they recognize choice in that which wasn't seen . . . ?"

Next book: Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, from Canada.

Book 123, Kiribati: "A Pattern of Islands" by Arthur Grimble

So it turns out that if I hadn't already covered Robert Louis Stevenson for the British Virgin Islands, I could've spent this past week reading his travel memoir In the South Seas. Alas! Instead I'm covering yet another British colonial administrator's jottings.

But I'm being facetious - once you get past the early bits about the Oxonian old-boy system of the colonial administration, and about cutting his teeth as an eager young 20something official on Ocean Island, we actually get to something quite remarkable: a thoroughly British man who engaged with the native lore of the Gilbertese to a degree unprecedented among those who didn't actually marry into the tribes. Even got himself ritually initiated into the Karongoa tribe through ritual tattooing without anaesthetic: a serpent going up and down his arms, a 15 year-old virgin on each side of him to scream out on his behalf while he manfully said it did not hurt.

And such stories - shark hunts, cursed stoves, roofs collapsing in on the family during hurricanes, ghost sightings (of both the dead and the not yet dead), mediums who could foresee the end of Japanese tuna trade, barehanded octopus fishing (which was particularly hard on Grimble, aka Kurimbo, as he had a phobia of octopi), fearsome feuds between Catholic and Protestant converts including an island-wide millenarian uprising which resulted in several deaths...

And as before, told with a considerable degree of respect towards the Gilbertese themselves; a condemnation of the heavy-handed missionaries who attempted to destroy their culture, dancing upon the shards of their ancestors' skulls; a trust that colonialism had improved things on the whole (they'd caused the land wars to cease, and Grimble quotes from a 94 year-old lady who is joyful that her great-granddaughters can travel the island without fear of robbery or rape), and that really, all shall be well, all shall be well.

There's also a clear message that colonial life wasn't a bed of roses - out in the islands, there was no fresh food; they had to subsist on breadfruit and tinned beetroot and the native cooks (only men were allowed to serve as cooks) were pretty awful, burning the rack of lamb the Governor brought specially, and making Grimble's wife Olivia weep. And having to build a house from scratch on Beru, when the previous Resident had made off with not only the furniture and the beds but even the verandah itself, and having the roof cave in on them and their three kids during a hurricane... There's even a wistful sonnet about the delights of the tropical sunset not being surpassed by the comforts of England, which is quite lovely.

Of course, this is all describing a fairly early stage of colonisation: during the 1910s, the Great War passing them by at a distance, rubbing shoulders with actual tribal kings and administrators that Robert Louis Stevenson met (he was a particular inspiration, and is referred to simply as RLS). Grimble went on to St Vincent, the Windward Islands and the Seychelles before going back to the UK and becoming a celebrated author and radio presenter, which was in the 1950s, when the empire was in an ineluctable stage of decline.

Given all those shifts of geography and fortune, how can we trust this text as anything genuine? But that's the point of non-fiction as literature, I suppose - the thing isn't the fact but the style, the voice, the way we use language to make things beautiful.

On another topic: one thing that isn't beautiful is my map. I miscalculated the location of my Kiribati marker (the country covers a huge swathe of ocean) so I'm criss-crossing myself, going northwards and westwards on my journey to the east.

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But no matter - next week we'll be doing a big jump across the rest of the Pacific Ocean to the Americas. Toodle-pip, Oceania! It's been a blast!

Representative quote: So Tanoata had learned an age-old spell called 'The Spoiling of the Oven'. She had been finishing the third performance when I stumbled upon her. Here is a translation of the words she muttered:

I stab them north, I stab them west,
I stab them south, I stab them east,
The ashes of the oven of Mareve,
Spirits of fire, spirits of stone,
I stab, I confuse, I overturn.
Bring stinking, bring anger.
Be sick at the stomach, you Biribo, Birbo! Be enraged!
For the food of Mareve stinks and stinks:
It is tiiki - tiki - tiki

Next book: Dr Florence Goring-Nozza's One and One Is Two: Caribbean Thriller from the Cayman Islands.

Book 96, Nepal: "Mountains Painted with Turmeric" by Lil Bahadur Chettri

Not much to say about this book, really. It's an iconic text of modern Nepali literature, mostly by virtue of having been written at a point where there was very little else in print - it actually got put on the lit curriculum of Tribhuvan University within a year of having been written!

Other interesting facts: its author was not in fact Nepali, but a son of Nepali immigrants into Assam - he'd just interviewed loads of hillside villagers when they came to his environs to trade. Also, this translation (with its rather silly title, drawn from a stray line of purple prose in the novella) was probably spurred on by the fact that the book was recently made into a rather successful movie, under its original title Basain. (The word means migration, referring to the fact that the protagonists all get the hell out of the village at the end of the story.)

 Other than that? It's hard to get excited about the book. It's got lush descriptions of village life, but it centres on characters who through little fault of their own end up screwed financially (in the case of the young impoverished farmer Dhané, who is forced off his land by bankruptcy and the landlord's buffalo destroying his crops) and literally (in the case of the virtuous young maiden Jhuma, seduced by a soldier then abandoned). Classic Marxist-influenced third world examination of how the rural economy is fundamentally unjust - shades of Ngugi's The River Between and Minfong Ho's Sing to the Dawn.

 Good translation, though. Lots of local feel, due to the fact that plenty of Nepali terms (e.g. specialised months of the year) have been left in - unobtrusive glossary at the end.

 
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Representative quote: "The Creator? Is it the Creator who writes our fate?" Today for some reason his small brain was pursuing arguments that were full of hidden revolutionary facts. "Why would fate be so biased? The laborers who wear out their bones in sweat cry out for flour, while those who gather up their bones to suck have other pleasures. Is this what fate really is? No, the Creator is not so unjust! Fate is made by human arrangement. Fate depends on the good order of society, on cooperation in society, on the chances and facilities you can get in society." Today, if he had had even the smallest opportunity, if his society had cared to understand his plight, would his labors not have borne fruit? If society had not been so ready to mock Jhuma's small misdemeanor, would she have left the house today in such desperation? Was the fault hers alone? Was it not the fault of the soldier, who had taken advantage of an innocent girl to gratify his desires? But it is the helpless girl and her family who are punished by society. This was the sum of Dhané's argument with his conscience. Today his heart was rebelling.

  Next book: Rabindranath Tagore's Selected Short Stories, from Bangladesh.

Book 53, Brazil: "The Devil to Pay in the Backlands" by João Guimarães Rosa

Yes! I’m finally done with this juggernaut of a novel!

And let me tell you, my friends, it is strange. It’s entirely written without chapters or section breaks, and is entirely narrated in first person by an aged jagunço, a turn-of-the-last-century outlaw soldier, describing his troop’s peregrinations across the state of Minas Gerais (which appears tiny on the map, but in the book appears to have the surface area of, say, the Moon): the eponymous backlands, the sertão, that appear in the Portuguese title, Grande Sertão: Veredas.

We go from stream-of-consciousness babblings about the nature of the devil to memories of guerrilla warfare with rival armed bands, finally coaelescing into a linear narrative which makes up the bulk of the book about fighting alongside his beloved companion-in-arms, Diadorim, and just in case you think there’s an implicitly homoerotic character arc going on I’ll have you know it is explicit, with moony longing for each other carnally (Diadorim is utterly fearless, with a slender body and gorgeous green eyes) while they’re waiting in deserted mansions for the armies to come, only they never actually jump into each other’s tents Brokeback-style: instead, constant craving has always been.

And then four fifths of the way into the book Riobaldo goes to the crossroads, promises his soul to the devil, and is thoroughly put out when the devil doesn’t arrive, but somehow gets into circumstances shortly thereafter which make him the leader of this pack of men’s men, with the confidence and charisma to back him up, with a sack of random homicidal (and equicidal, and canicidal) tendencies to boot.

[SPOILER ALERT!!!!!] And then ninety-nine hundredths of the way into the book, Riobaldo wins the war against Hermogenes, but Diadorim gets killed and guess what? He’s actually a woman. A gorgeous one too.


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Shades of Doña Bárbara: an androgynous female incarnation of the wild Brazilian landscape, not to be fucked with. WTFFFFF???? [SPOILERS END]

So yeah, this is one of those crazy precursors to magical realism, in the same experimental tradition that emerged with Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas through Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma and Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star. Brazilians be trippin’, man.

Gawd, I miss doing capoeira.

Representative quote: We could hear loud shouts and firing: it was Fafafa and his followers destroying the enemy's vanguard. This had begun in the same instant, but even so I had had time in which to feel ashamed of myself, and to realize that Diadorim was not indispensable to me. And that by his mere presence he was not obeying me. I know: one who loves is always a slave, but he never truly obeys.

Next book: Edmundo Paz Soldán's "The Matter of Desire", from Bolivia.

Book 44, Martinique: "Black Skin, White Masks" by Frantz Fanon

I also had to read extracts from Fanon's Wretched of the Earth in college. But I remember nothing from it, except that he was angry.

Black Skin, White Masks was his first work: in fact, it was supposed to be his doctoral thesis while he was studying psychology in Lyon, but of course it got rejected and ignored till maybe the '80s when it became an important text on racial liberation worldwide.

The title's actually misleading. Sure, some of it's about black folks trying to appear white. But really, it's about the entire caboodle of fucked-up psychology that's emerged in the world due to the interaction of black and white people after colonialism: something few psychologists cared to consider before then.


Fanon's alarmed by how the popular unconscious has ended up swallowing a particular negative image of the black person: the Negro = the genital, the Negro = everything base and deadly and evil when it appears in your dreams. He documents cases where white folks suffer from such neuroses, rape phobias/fantasies and tormenting delusions of tom-tom drums; images of cannibals and Bushmen in the Pathé documentaries; barbarians and faithful servants in comic books. Then he talks about how these images have twisted even the colonised Antillean peoples, who have no alternative mythology: they dream of themselves as white, as young people it is with a rude shock that they realise they are black and thus forever the shit of the earth.

Obvious stuff, you may think. Maybe it was original when he wrote it back in 1952, but today we know all this stuff: we've read in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink how insidiously racial types have imprinted even the most well-meaning of us, causing even black students to do worse in standardised tests if they're reminded of their race beforehand.

And yet Fanon says it with such passion, such anguish, and such poetry, in between his overloaded Freud-and-Lacan-quoting academese that it's different: it does awaken insights once again to the slippages of race that happen even today, even for me as a majority race Chinese Anglophone in a successful Asian technocracy.

Which brings me to three bizarre things:

1) According to Wikipedia, Black Skin, White Masks has been hugely influential even among Tamils and Palestinians. And yet Fanon clearly states that he wrote the book specifically with the Antillean black person in mind, and the educated, upper-class Antillean black person in particular, one with the wherewithal to actually go to France and make a fool of himself trying to fit in.

Antilleans aren't prototypical blacks, he notes: they see themselves as far whiter than, say, the fearsome Senegalese soldiers, and thus feel superior. Which is of course nonsense, but that's how colonisation's warped everyone's minds.


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2) The book is surprisingly sexy. Chapters Two and Three are all about the cultural clashes that result when black women shack up with white men, and black men shack up with white women: the desire to whiten oneself through sexual conquest and/or codependency. But of course, the delusions work the other way, too: Fanon reports the case of a French prostitute who would experience an orgasm at the very thought of making love to a black man, until she actually started to have sex to black men, and discovered them to be pretty much the same as white men.

He ultimately concludes that the archetypal equation of the black race with sexuality means that all white women who fear black men ( as well as all white men who hate black men) secretly want to snog them. He doesn't approve of homosexuality much, by the way. Product of his times.

3) The book is surprisingly literary. As evidence for his described neuroses, Fanon quotes at length not just from psychiatrists but also from Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas and Jean-Paul Sartre's L'Orphée Noir and even autobiographies by hack writers.

Is this good science? Maybe not. But it's also through the literary language of spiritual liberation that he voices the courage necessary for the black man to discover selfhood and dignity in the closing chapters. Really beautiful stuff: maybe I should've reread Césaire's Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal for this country segment after all.

Representative quote: I, the man of color, want only this:

That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be.

The Negro is not. Any more than the white man.

Next book: Derek Walcott's Omeros, from St Lucia.

Book 26, Mexico: "El laberinto de la soledad" by Octavio Paz

Gracias a Dios! After half a month, I’ve finally finished this damned book – Paz’s essay El laberinto de la soledad, his postscript including the beautiful Crítica de la pirámide, and his interview with Calude Fell, Vuelta a “El laberinto de la soledad”. (I spared myself the lengthy intro and the essays on Mexico and the United States that had been added on, though. Not quite part of the same set of documents.)

I’ve read Paz’s poems before – didn’t find them too memorable – but I chose him because I feel like I’ve read a number of canonical Mexican texts and authors already: Sor Juana, Carlos Fuentes, Laura Esquivel and Carmen Boullosa – plus I had this volume lying around in my library, bought during my student days when I was sure I was going to carry on with Latin American studies in a private capacity.


(As you can see, my copy has suffered under my care.)

But really, this is an odd book. It was tough going for me, with my rusty Spanish: Paz psychoanalyses the whole of Mexican culture and history, pre-Colombian, colonial and revolutionary, specifically outlining why he feels the intelligentsia has been inadequate, why the ideology of positivism was oppressive and the Zapatista movement was revolutionary by dint of its return to the roots of pre-Hispanic culture, and why there needs to be more international cooperation between the countries of the third world.

Jésucristo. And all I’d heard about the text before was its identification of La Malinche (Cortés’s translator-cum-lover) as La Chingada, the “fucked” or “raped” one, as well as the affirmation of Mexican identity as based in Euro-indigenous syncretism.

Y’know, it starts out very comprehensibly, and with a whole lotta poetry: a contrast between Mexicans (including Mexican-Americans) with white North Americans, settling on the image of the brutish pachuco as their iconic representative; then a dwelling on the nature of the unending festivals of the land and the notion of the ever-present Mexican mask (who knew that Mexicans were inscrutable?). A little heavy-handed with its constant reiterations of the condition of solitude, and kinda Mexicentric (seriously, women all over the world are oppressed by the virgin-whore binary, not just mexicanas), but still very beautifully written.

It’s when Paz starts tackling the subject formally through a chronological survey that things get wearisome. Still, it’s fascinating the little insights and stories you get even here: his clear respect for the Baroque writing of the 17th century nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the last of the Spanish Golden Age writers, superior even to the poet Luís de Góngora because she plainly found it joyous to seek for knowledge. Also his concern for the naming of Mexico after the capital of the Aztec empire, México-Tenochtitlán – for the Aztecs were cruel and oppressive towards all the other indigenous cultures; they didn’t even represent Mesoamerican civilization at its peak (that was the 10th century theocracies, e.g. the Maya) – yet they’re now venerated as victims and evidence of the glory of pre-European Mexico. And also his insight that each of the dictators of Mexican history seem to be incarnations of the triumphant conqueror Tezcatlipoca, from Cortés to Porfirio Diáz…

It occurs to me that this will mean nothing to the vast majority of my readers, since they’re mostly from Singapore. Beg pardon. Still, I recommend this book: just read it in your own mother tongue, so you’ll have an easier time than I did. Paz calls it an “exercise of the critical imagination” rather than a philosophical essay, noting that criticism is a compromise for him between poetry and activism. Pretty trenchant thought there.

And then there’s the universality of it: the intellectuals of all the developing world are usually lost in a similar labyrinth of solitude, searching for communion. From what I understand, the remedy is either a revolution or a street festival. Singapore government, please take note: we need more parties.


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Representative quote: El mexicano se esconde bajo muchas máscaras, que luego arroja un día de fiesta o de duelo, del mismo modo que la nación ha desgarrado todas las formas que la asfixiaban. Pero no hemos encontrado aún esa que reconcilie nuestra libertad con el orden, la palabra con el acto y ambos con una evidencia que ya no será sobrenatural, sino humana: la de nuestros mismos.

Next book: Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana! Yep, I'm finally venturing forth into the Caribbean!