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Neuland–Eshkol Nevo (2011) English translation by Sondra Silverston, 2014

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I didn’t know until after I’d finished Eshkol Nevo’s engrossing and frustrating novel Neuland that Nevo (b. 1971—the older I get the more I want to know writers’ ages) is the grandson of Israel’s third Prime Minister. I can imagine readers for whom this biographical fact accounts for certain qualities of the book, what we might call its status as a “condition of Israel” novel. But what matters for me about this information is the light it sheds on my position as a reader of this book, namely, one of ignorance.

Consider the title. I knew, going in, that it references a book I haven’t read, Theodor Herzl’s utopian novel and founding text of Zionism Altneuland (1902), Old New Land, or, in the words of its first Hebrew translator, the Zionist leader Nahum Sokolow, Tel Aviv. (One of my fascinations with Israel is the way a literary and intellectual tradition has so clearly and powerfully incorporated itself into the political and material fabric of the emerging state: so, for example, its self-created metropolis takes its name from a novel.) I knew, in other words, what I didn’t know, and I can only wonder what it would be like to read Nevo’s book knowing Herzl’s.

Nor did I know anything about Nevo himself. Cursory online research tells me he’s an important Israeli writer, translated into many languages, a mentor to many younger writers, the recipient of various prestigious prizes. Where he fits in relation to other Israeli writers, or the Israeli literary scene as a whole, however, is a mystery to me. (Does anyone have ideas about that, or suggestions for what Israeli literature I should read next, beyond Appelfeld, Oz, Grossman & Yehoshua, with whom I have at least glancing familiarity? Names of women writers would be especially welcome.)

But even though I read this book somewhat in the dark, I took a lot from it. Neuland is a mixed bag, to be sure: it attempts too much, its various strands don’t work equally well, hidden inside it is a different, maybe more interesting book, it’s at once too long and too short. But it’s well worth reading: ambitious, thought-provoking, engaging.

 

In 2006, in the weeks before and during the Second Lebanon War, Dori Peleg travels to South America to search for his father, Manny, who has disappeared after leaving increasingly erratic and enigmatic email messages to his children. Manny, a hero of the Yom Kippur war and successful management consultant, has taken this unusual journey—he is known, to his family, his colleagues, and indeed to all of Israel, where he is a public personality, as a master of controlled rationality—following the death of his wife.

Dori, escaping difficulties of his own (a wife he feels disrespected by and whom he no longer understands, a small child about whose developmental peculiarities he is overly protective), hires an Ecuadoran who specializes in tracking down Westerners (usually young adults) who have gone off the rails, in one way or another, in Central and South America.

Don Alfonso is one of the book’s missteps, more a way to comment on the foibles of Israelis than a fully developed character, and the back-story introduced late in the text to explain his particular interest in Dori’s search is unconvincing, just as his sexism, fatalism, and scorn for Western rectitude are uncomfortably clichéd.

A much stronger character is Inbar Benbenisti, an Israeli who has fled to South America after an unsuccessful visit to her mother, Hana, who, to Inbar’s dismay, even fury, lives in Berlin with a German. At the airport awaiting her flight back to Israel, Inbar impulsively changes her ticket to the next available flight, to Peru. The sudden flight to the Andes has its roots in traumas both professional (a caller to the therapy talk radio show she produces is shot by her son after the on-air psychologist has urged her to cut ties with the boy) and personal (her younger brother killed himself in murky circumstances during his Army service). Inbar lives with Eitan, a loving soul who designs lighting fixtures. (It says something about the novel’s preference for the irrational over the rational that the man who sheds light for a living should have such a small role.) Dori and Inbar meet cute in Peru; she joins him in his search, and the two enter into a protracted (and smoldering) not-quite-relationship.

The novel’s narrative form fuels our desire that they get together, even as it keeps us sympathetic to the partners and families they’ve left behind, by switching perspective amongst these and the other characters in separate sections. The same event is focalized, for example, first through Dori, then Inbar, and then Alfonso. A separate narrative strand is centered on Inbar’s grandmother, Lily, an early Zionist who arrives by boat in Palestine in 1939 just as the Germans overrun her native Poland.

Lily’s sections, sensitively and vividly written (a whole book could have been made of them, a good book, though maybe a less visionary one, almost certainly the book an Anglo-American writer would have written these days, with the current mania for historical fiction) provide the historical context for the idea of homeland that is Nevo’s real subject, one he both extols and chafes against. That is, even as Nevo seems to think that what has become of the Zionist experiment is problematic and flawed, he never repudiates the experiment itself, he neither devalues the experience of the early pioneers nor upholds them as heroes.

The journey to Palestine and the creation of a new Zion is the historical road taken (yes, the characters discuss Frost’s poem—subtlety isn’t really Nevo’s thing) to the one not taken, at least by the characters in this book, the road proposed by the nineteenth-century philanthropist Baron Maurice von Hirsch who founded the Jewish Colonization Association in 1891 to enable mass emigration of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe, by creating agricultural cooperatives in the Americas, particularly Argentina. (At one point, 200,000 Jews lived on such cooperatives in Argentina alone.) Nevo reminds us, but wisely does not recreate, the famous meeting between Herzl and Hirsch in 1895, when the former attempted to convince the latter that the Jewish question required a political solution, that is, a Jewish homeland; Hirsch dismissed him out of hand.

Manny, overwhelmed by his wartime traumas in the absence of his wife’s soothing presence, decides to fuse the two men’s dreams after himself having a hallucinatory-induced vision. On the place where Hirsch’s emigrants first made a life for themselves, he will found a new community that will soothe the psychic wounds of Herzl’s descendents. This is the Neuland of the title, at which Dori and Inbar arrive after a journey that owes much to Heart of Darkness, with Manny as Kurtz. Manny’s utopian community is at once the most interesting and most disappointing part of the book. It takes us many hundreds of pages to reach Neuland’s gates (which are inscribed in Hebrew, Spanish, and English with the words “Man, You are my brother.”) But then we spend only a short time there; we’re never sure what the place is all about. Manny defines it as “a communal therapeutic space based on the principles of Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl” and the idea that there is a psychic dimension to the Zionist experience that its ‘actual,” that is, socio-political unfolding has repeatedly neglected is compelling and timely. (A more sophisticated version of this claim can be found in the work of Jacqueline Rose.)

Too bad Nevo doesn’t develop the workings and contradictions of the utopian community. (Reading Neuland I was seized by a strong desire to reread Norman Rush’s Mating, the best novel about utopias that I know, one of the best novels period.) Is Manny a charlatan? The business guru in him hasn’t been entirely displaced by the spiritual one: he’s capitalizing on the so-called Hummus Trail, the journeys made by young Israelis after their army service all over the world, especially South America. For Manny, these young people, who are the primary settlers/inhabitants of Neuland, are damaged in a way that a trek in the Andes cannot repair. He argues that for the “source land” (the name Neulanders use to refer to Israel) to be remade, for Zion to be psychologically healed, the work of redefining how to live in community must happen in an entirely different place.

The novel, then, is a dialogue about the differences between Zionism and diasporism as ways of thinking about Jewish identity. This is of course a discussion, even dispute with a long history: to take only the most recent, disappointing instance, consider the recent accusations made by the Israeli writer A. B. Yehoshua to the Jewish American writer Nicole Krauss that there can be no authentic Jewish life in the diaspora, an affront that matched a comment made that very same week to me by our Israeli tour guide. It’s interesting that Nevo’s novel doesn’t seem to countenance the possibility of the diaspora. Herzl still trumps Hirsch in that the project of Neuland is a project that renovates rather than dismantles Zionism. You might even get a sense from the novel that Hirsch’s plan was a failure. His cooperatives no longer exist, to be sure, but Jewish life remains robust in Argentina (though admittedly less so since the years of the junta in the 1970s and 80s.) I’ve no idea what Nevo’s personal ideas on Jewish life in the diaspora might be, and I can’t imagine he’d be hectoring and bullying the way Yehoshua was, but the absence of diasporic life in the novel is only the more strongly felt by the presence of a particularly weak and confusing plot strand, about the idea of the Wandering Jew (the subject of Inbar’s mother’s dissertation) who is momentarily incarnated in one of the young people at Neuland.

The point of Neuland is neither to give up on Zionism nor to export it elsewhere nor to imagine other alternatives to it. The point is to create a para-Zionism to revitalize the existing one. That’s Manny’s dream, at any rate. I can’t quite tell if it’s Nevo’s. Manny is appealing but also faintly ridiculous. Dori, for one, is clear in his response: his father has gone off the deep end and abandoned him, even though that abandonment paradoxically takes the form of recognition in a way it never did in Dori’s childhood. Dori is disgusted when, with the outbreak of the Second Lebanon War, Manny refuses to leave the children of Neuland for his children in Israel. The novel seems to share that disgust—it never returns to Neuland, nor do Dori and Inbar comment or reflect on it in the novel’s brief denouement, back in Israel. They are too preoccupied with whether they will leave their families for each other.

I can’t decide how much of the cursoriness of the novel’s treatment of Neuland is a flaw of the novel’s construction or a critique of the place itself, and perhaps Israel, too. We learn, for example, that some Lebanese have arrived at Neuland, and the community has yet to decide whether to allow them to stay. (Neither has it ruled yet on the request by some of its religious members that the dining hall be koshered.) These dilemmas of course reflect tensions in the existing state of Israel as it struggles to reconcile its multi-ethnic aspects with its desire to be a Jewish homeland. Nevo might be criticizing Israel for failing to resolve these tensions. But in practice it feels more like something he just doesn’t want to get into.

What does he want to get into? The story of Inbar and Dori’s relationship, I think. But of course that is a political story, too. Inbar’s grandmother, Lily, the Zionist, had a lover on the ship to Palestine. Her lover, a klezmer musician named Pima, turns out to be Manny’s father and Dori’s grandfather (though the characters haven’t figured that out yet). Inbar and Dori could have been siblings. Instead they seem fated to take the road their grandparents never did and become a couple. It makes no sense, in the world of this book especially, to separate the personal from the political. But sometimes I think Neuland is seduced not by the idea of political utopias, but by the idea of personal ones: the idea that people can start all over again, and that Israeli people, in particular, can relate to others without the burdensome, even damaging vicissitudes their history has submitted them to.

 

Neuland has given me a lot to think about. In a way, it’s followed me about. I bought it in the gift shop at Yad Vashem. Then, a day after we’d stumbled across the balcony of the hotel in Basel where the famous photo of a brooding and bearded Herzl was taken at the Fifth International Zioist Congress in 1901, a photo displayed prominently at Independence Hall in Tel Aviv, I opened up a Swiss newspaper to find this perceptive review. The reviewer criticizes the novel’s tone, its inability to clearly reconcile fantastical elements with realistic ones. (I haven’t even mentioned Nessia, a character created by Inbar in her diary but who intervenes in the world of the novel.) I agree with the criticism, but I think the difficulty is more instructive than it is a sign of inability. Perhaps the failure to integrate fantasy and reality, dream and actuality, without simply subordinating the first to the second, is the tragedy of Israel.

 

Farley Mowat and Me

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As has been widely reported in Canada (here, for example) and even in the US (NY Times obituary here), the author and conservationist Farley Mowat has died at the age of 92.

I admit I hadn’t realized he was still alive. But the news made me sad. I’ve had many literary heroes in my lifetime, many of them much more important to the person I am today than Mowat. But he was the first, the first writer I loved more as a presence (and, in his case, a conscience) thank as a mere name attached to whatever book I happened to be reading.

I believe it was my mother’s friend Thea, a kind of surrogate mother to me in my early childhood, who first gave me one of his books, Never Cry Wolf (1963) the story of Mowat’s time in the “barren lands” of Northern Manitoba in 1948-9, where he was charged by a governmental agency to investigate the unexplained disappearance of the caribou population.

As a child I loved wolves, all animals really, but wolves especially. I’m not sure if that love predated my reading the book, and that’s why she gave it to me, or if it was reading this book that made me love them. At any rate, I read it many times, and what sticks with me most is what sticks with most people about it: Mowat eating mice to see what they were like, since they made up the bulk of the wolves diets. This fact puzzled Mowat—how could such large creatures live off of such tiny ones?—but more than mere curiosity was at stake. If wolves lived almost entirely off mice, they weren’t the ones responsible for the decline of the caribou. Mowat’s conclusion that wolves were not to be feared and exterminated was a minority opinion at the time, though it is accepted wisdom among scientists today.

Wolves were good animals for me to love. They were underdogs, a position that has always appealed to me. They were beautiful and smart. And they were remote from my daily life; even growing up in Western Canada, where wildlife was a part of life, I never saw a wolf in the wild. Wolves were something to think or dream about, not something to have to reckon with.

That suited me because my interest in animals—which lasted a long time; for many years I wanted nothing more than to be a zookeeper when I grew up—had one particularly strange aspect. I did not actually like animals very much. My father forbade animals in our house, and it wasn’t until my sister and I were teenagers that she circumvented (by which I mean simply ignored) his interdiction by bringing a cat home one day. (It seems fitting that it was father who gave me, a little later in my childhood, a book that would prove even more important to me than Mowat’s, Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, which was as much about people as about animals.) You might think that the absence of any real animals in my life would make me all the more eager for contact with them. But I don’t think so. Instead, that absence allowed me to love animals in the abstract. I was never one of those children who mucked about in woods or fields or swamps with specimen jars. I did not ride horses and volunteer at a wildlife sanctuary (not that children volunteered in those days; we didn’t have to do nearly as much as children do today, thank God).

Truth be told, animals kind of freaked me out. (In retrospect this seems quite a reasonable response to the otherness of animals—a sentiment Mowat would certainly not have shared, since his lonely childhood was spent largely in their company, and he thought of them as friends.) I liked my animals in the zoo, or seen from the car in the mountains where my family spent most of our weekends. The detachment of the zoo-going experience—me watching them through the glass or bars, or, increasingly, as this was the 70s and ideas about zoos were changing, over a moat—suited me just fine.

There was something hopeless and false about my passion for animals, which was, it seems to me now, really a blind for a more genuine passion, one that still drives me today, to know about things, to achieve mastery through knowledge. If I am honest, I think it was mostly a way for me to accumulate books about animals. Accumulating books on whatever subject matter rules my current fancy has been my greatest life-long passion.

At any rate, I liked Never Cry Wolf a lot. I can still picture my edition, the cheap white Seal paperback with the photo of the wolf on the cover. Many years later, when I taught my first self-designed course in graduate school—a course on foundlings and feral children—I called the course “Never Cry Wolf” in private homage to Mowat, even though his book or its ideas had almost nothing to do with the course.

I was a very serious and dutiful little boy, as you can imagine, and so I read most of Mowat’s other books about what we would today call environmental topics, including the controversial People of the Deer (1952), a study of the Ihalmiut people of the border between Manitoba and what is now Nunavut, and their starvation and suffering as the caribou population dwindled. I remember getting its sort-of sequel, The Desperate People, as a birthday present when I was probably about eight or nine. My best friend David Wilson, brash, a bit of a wag, looked at the picture on the cover of Inuit people in a stark northern landscape and said, “Of course they were desperate, they didn’t have any bathrooms!” Part of me thought that was hilarious and part of me thought it was disrespectful. These were serious books about serious matters. I didn’t know that the books had been controversial, had been derided at by some at the time of publication (Mowat was called “Hardly Know-It” by Northern Hands). Nor could I have known they would be savagely debunked in the 1990s by an investigative journalist who argued that Mowat didn’t know what he was talking about, hadn’t seen most of the things he described, had seriously overstated his experiences.

Mowat defended himself by distinguishing stentoriously between facts and truth. That seems to me both tendentious and appropriate, but what mattered to me at the time, and even perhaps now, was the sense I first got, as a young liberal in training, of a cause that one could feel sentimentally and self-righteously exercised over. (In this regard, these seem to me very Canadian books.)

No matter how badly I felt about the Inuit and the caribou and the natural world in general—I once wrote a letter to the Premier of Alberta protesting a planned hydro-electric plant that threatened the nesting grounds of whooping cranes, a letter that got a patronizing reply devastatingly, to my insecure self, addressed to Miss Stuber—I read these books of Mowat’s more from duty than from love. And in my defense, if one is needed, they were hard books for an eight year old. But Mowat wrote lots of other books, for children or at least about children, and those were the ones I loved and read over and over. The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, The Boat that Wouldn’t Float (strange, the intransigent refusals of these titles), A Family of Owls, The Black Joke: I enjoyed them all.

But there were two books that I returned to again and again until they became a part of me. These were Lost in the Barrens (1956) and, most importantly, because I actually owned it, its sequel, the deliciously named The Curse of the Viking Grave (1966). These were adventure stories, again set in that Northern Manitoba tundra landscape so formative in Mowat’s life. They featured three boys, an orphaned white (Jamie McNair, who lives with his uncle Angus, a trapper—ah those Scots names!), a Cree Indian (Awasin) and an Eskimo (Peetyuk). (We called them Eskimo back then.) I learned a lot from those books: how easy it is to tire yourself out walking through the snow (always go single file, so the second person can follow in the first one’s tracks, and be sure to trade places regularly); how dangerous it is to walk through snow all day on a sunny day (you’ll get snow blindness, the description of which I remember to this day, like fine sand ground into the eyes, although you can try to avoid by making glasses from strips of birch bark with slits cut into them). Without making a big deal of it, these books, I now observe, were strikingly inter- or multi-cultural. Mostly they were exciting as all hell and I never tired of them

Thinking about these books today, so many years later, I see that they helped me, a child of immigrant parents, solidify my identity as a first-generation Canadian. In a sense, Canadian identity was born in the 1970s by various initiatives of the Trudeau government; part of that developing identity lay in acknowledging and generating a profound, if problematic because sentimental, interest in the North. (Previously it has been either ignored as meaningless or valued only as an empty space from which to extract resources—a view lamentably still prevalent, with deadly consequences for the people and creatures that live there.)

I didn’t think about any of this at the time. Nor did I read only books by Farley Mowat. I read pretty voraciously, and loved all kinds of books. I had many deep readerly loves, like Gerald Durrell, L. M. Montgomery, Arthur Ransom, and, a bit later, P. G. Wodehouse. But Mowat was the first, and so meant a lot to me, even though he would probably have despaired of me.

 

For a long time I would get up very early on Saturday mornings and read in bed while the house was quiet. (Now that I have a small child, I think what a wonderful gift I gave to my parents. I can hardly wait until my daughter can entertain herself that way.) I remember shaking off my sleepiness, plunging into my book, having long unadulterated stretches of time entirely to myself with no other purpose than to create myself. However fraught or wrongheaded or sketchy Mowat’s ideas and practices—but if he’s remembered at all, it will be as a prescient figure, as one who saw early on that human beings cannot be understood apart from the environment that surrounds them and of which they are a part, and not the most important—I will always remember fondly both him and the gifts he unknowingly gave that slight, reserved boy alone in his bedroom.

I wonder who will be my daughter’s Mowat, that first role model she’ll stumble across who will have nothing to do with me.

Rue Ordener, Rue Labat–Sarah Kofman (1994, 1996 English Translation by Ann Smock)

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I think the French have a word for the genre of Sarah Kofman’s next-to-last book: the récit, an account. Perhaps that implies more of a narrative through-line than this book offers. It could be called a memoir, though it is too fragmentary to be one. It is autobiographical without being an autobiography. Maybe sketch is the best term? There’s always that useful term the French like to use: the text.

Rue Ordener, Rue Labat asks us to think about what to call it because it is always pushing against the very idea of form, as if it were a pure manifestation of the unconscious, of its author’s deepest recesses.

I first read this intriguing little work when it came out in English translation in the late 1990s. I returned to it yesterday as part of my efforts to create the syllabus (or at least the reading list) for a new course I’m teaching in the fall, Literature after Auschwitz. Lately I’ve dipped into lots of books, looking for ones that will fit the story I want the course to tell and that will be effective pedagogically. All the while I know that I won’t really know what I want from the course until I’ve taught it at least once.

My first thought was that Rue Orderer, Rue Labat probably won’t serve my purposes. But I’ve found myself returning to it over and over again in the twenty-four hours since finishing it. So maybe there is something in it I need to listen to.

In eighty pages and twenty-three chapters Kofman tells us about some of the things that happened to her as a child in and around Paris during the war and its aftermath.

Her father was arrested in the infamous roundups of July 16th, 1942, when the French police brought 13,000 Jews to a velodrome on the outskirts of Paris before deporting them, via the transit camp at Drancy, to Auschwitz.

The book begins with that day, the last time Kofman ever saw her father. More precisely, it begins with a description of his fountain pen, which Kofman kept with her throughout her life. The pen, she suggests, was the impetus for all her subsequent work, not least these pages.

I’ve been dipping into Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist lately and I thought about “the squat pen” in “Digging.” That pen, though, is so much more ambivalent, so much more a weapon (however ambivalently wielded) than Kofman’s father’s. Her book is full of ambiguity, but none of that attaches to her father, an Orthodox, unassimilated rabbi who had arrived in France in 1929 and who Kofman clearly adored. He appears in the book only through his traces—that pen, a photo, a single postcard written from Drancy asking for cigarettes and sending love to the baby, presumably the one Kofman’s mother pretended to be pregnant with in a futile attempt to save her husband from deportation, though perhaps Kofman herself—and his daughter’s memories. She remembers his inveterate smoking: because he kept Shabbat he couldn’t smoke until sundown on the Sabbath and so, towards the end of the day, he would soothe his cravings by humming melodies with the family. Kofman later recognizes one in Mahler symphony.

The father is gentle, wise, capable. The mother is another story. Most of the book is about her, and her substitute. From that day n July when so many were disappeared, life got harder for the remaining Jews of Paris. Kofman describes wearing the star, suffering abuse at school, living in increasing fear. Her mother tries to save her six children. (Interestingly, Kofman tells us almost nothing about her siblings.) Each is given another, Gentile name. Together they are sent to the countryside. But Kofman makes trouble. She loves her new school—her love for her teachers before and after the war is a repeated theme in the book—but hates everything else. She won’t eat pork, she cries for her mother. Her eldest sister writes home to say that Kofman can’t stay, she’ll give them all away. Her mother tries to hide her in other places, both outside and inside Paris. Kofman always cries, and her mother always has to take her back. One day in February mother and daughter receive word that they must leave their apartment immediately; the police will be coming that night. Desperate, Kofman’s mother visits “the lady on Rue Labat,” a former neighbour with whom she had become friendly, largely over the woman’s affection for Kofman and her siblings.

Rue Labat is two metro stops from Rue Ordener. Kofman vomits repeatedly on the way there. In fact, she vomits over and over again in these memories. The restrictions on eating in Leviticus, the laws of kashrut, symbolize Kofman’s refusal to incorporate otherness, to accommodate to situations beyond that of the family. This bodily instability is a sign of Kofman’s resistance, a refusal to compromise her identity. It is also dangerous, the result of an intransigence and recklessness to herself and to others, even or especially those who want to help her, who are in fact risking their lives for her. And of course it is also, perhaps primarily a sign of her conflict with her mother, which intensifies over time.

As a child Kofman had been so attached to her mother that she could hardly bear to part from her for even a short time. Now, hidden in the apartment in Rue Labat, devouring the books she finds there, eventually eating the foods the lady is convinced she needs for her health, Kofman repudiates her mother and becomes attached to this other maternal figure, who she calls “Mémé.” Mémé saves Kofman from deportation, but that doesn’t mean she particularly likes Jews. She disparages Kofman’s Jewish nose, for example. Under her care, Kofman forgets her Yiddish (the language she spoke with her mother).

The liberation comes. Unlike many wartime memoirs, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat doesn’t end here. One of the things I like about the book is that the war is really the least of it, here. Which isn’t to say that the events depicted here are simply universal psychological dramas. Here is a Holocaust memoir in which the Holocaust as we usually consider it barely figures. Without the heavy-handed language of “second generation” or “postmemory” created at around the same time by critics like Marianne Hirsch, Kofman tells a story of the psychological ambivalences of assimilation in which the war is necessary but not sufficient.

Kofman’s mother takes her back to live with her. Kofman doesn’t want to, she wants to be with Mémé. She runs away to her repeatedly. Hard to imagine Kofman’s mother’s frustration and despair; Kofman doesn’t try to. Instead she lists the mother’s responses: beating the child, negotiating desperately with her: she can have one hour a day with Mémé. Nothing works, the child always wants the surrogate. Eventually the mother takes the other woman to court. But the court sides with Mémé. The mother hires two strong men who lay in wait for the child and steal her back. But some time later, the mother must go to the country for an extended time to collect her other children. Remarkably, she entrusts Kofman to Mémé. The back and forth between the women continues for some time. In a brief moment of theoretical reflection, Kofman refers to Melanie Klein to explain the situation, using Klein’s distinction between the good and bad breast to speak of her experience of these two mothers. (The breasts are just a metonymy: the “good” one is bounteous, plentiful, always ready whenever the child needs anything; the “bad” one is unavailing, desiccated, not there when the child wants it. The child—an infant—has no sense yet that the mother is an independent person. Some people never learn this, to their peril.) But in the Kleinian narrative of development, the child must learn that the good breast and the bad breast, the good mother and the bad mother, are the same; in other words, the child must learn how to handle ambivalence. (The one you love can—and will—be the one you hate.) It’s unclear whether Kofman does, though she eventually exits the orbit of both women, once again through books and education, the things that had most sustained her during the war.

We sense, more than see, because the end of the book is particularly fragmentary, that Kofman comes to dislike both women. The enigmatic, almost perfunctory last lines are:

I was unable to attend her funeral. But I know that at her grave the priest recalled how she had saved a little girl during the war.

How ironically should we understand this? Does it matter that Kofman killed herself the year after writing them?

 

In her otherwise admirable introduction, Ann Smock says something you would never expect from a translator. Contrasting this autobiographical writing with Kofman’s other, philosophical works she says: “That splendid mask of feminine brilliance is not apparent at all in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, which, I would say, does without literary qualities,” adding that “It is simple, but it does not have a simple style or any style.” Surely Smock of all people—trained in the French intellectual tradition of Barthes & Blanchot—doesn’t imagine that there could be such a thing as writing without style. The style is unadorned, definitely, and the book is not obviously patterned. But its qualities are certainly literary. The sense that there is so much more at work here than its author can understand is one of its chief attractions.

The more I think about Rue Ordener, Rue Labat the more I think it would pair interestingly with Sebald’s Austerlitz. Maybe I will teach it after all.

Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland–Sarah Moss (2012)

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Sometimes you come across a book that seems as tailor-made for you as the gate is for the man from the country in Kafka’s little marvel “Before the Law.” Such is the case for me with Sarah Moss’s travel memoir Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland (2012). (For this analogy to really work, though, you couldn’t know beforehand that it’s made for you; you’d have to think it was for everyone and wonder why no one else ever came along.) Moss is a British novelist whose had more success in the UK than here (though she does have a US publisher); her new novel is just out over there and her publisher, at least, thinks it will be her break out. When I learned that she had written a book about the year she spent in Iceland, I immediately reserved it at the library. (Central Arkansas Library System, I sing your praises now and forever!)

I think most of us have dreamed of returning to live in a place we’ve only visited. The appeal of those dreams, for me at least, is the belief that everything that’s difficult or tedious about my current life would vanish in the move. There’s the thrill, too, of starting over again, learning how another place works, imagining ourselves as insiders in the place where as tourists we are outsiders. These dreams, at least for me, are as frightening as they are enticing. Starting over again, learning how another place works—what could be more daunting? And how could this new place not bring its own difficulties and tediousness? Even the same difficulties and tediousness. After all, I’d still be me, even in a different place.

Of all the places I’ve visited, Iceland is where I’ve most indulged these dreams. Something about that place gets me thinking long and hard about picking up everything. So when I first heard about Moss’s book, I felt intrigued and envious in equal measures. Moss, a professor of creative writing, left her job at the University of Kent to take up a visiting teaching position in Iceland. As a professor of literature—that is, as someone the world in its current formation has decided it really does not need—I spend a lot of psychic energy bemoaning how rooted, even stuck, I am in the position I know I am lucky to hold. My professional life is governed above all by the idea (so far borne out in reality) that I am not portable. So how could this person, I asked myself indignantly, simply up and move to the place I want to move to, without having to give anything up? One answer is: she is more famous than me. Another answer is: of course she had to give things up. One of the things her excellent book is about is what one gives up and what one gains in moving to a foreign country.

I can’t quite remember how my wife and I got so obsessed about Iceland. I think it started when we lived in Berlin and M read the first Arnaldur Indridason crime novels in German translation. (You know about Indridason, right? You have to read him. The Erlendur series in particular is amazing. Each outing is different, none a standard procedural. He’s a cut above almost every other Scandinavian crime writer.) We first visited Iceland in May 2009 and returned for a shorter but even more memorable trip this February. And we will definitely be back. The climate (those endless days in summer, the long dark of winter), the geology (you really feel the earth to be a changeable, tangible, almost living thing in Iceland, with all the bubbling and steaming and flowing of ice and ash and lava), the location (at the edge of Europe but at the center of a North Atlantic realm stretching from Newfoundland, even Nova Scotia all the way to Finland)—all these things fascinated us. People buy more books in Iceland than almost anywhere else. They sit in hot pools as much as possible. How could we not be smitten?

Above all, we’re fascinated by the North, as much by the idea as the reality. That’s where Moss starts, too, before describing her first trip to Iceland, as a nineteen-year-old university student in the summer of 1995, when she and a girlfriend travelled the ring road (the highway that encircles the island and is pretty much the only one in the country), camping rough and scraping by on the most meager of budgets.

Like most travelogues Names for the Sea is structured roughly chronologically, describing the year Moss and her family (husband and two small boys, Max, 7, and Tobias, 3) spent in Iceland and then, in an important coda, a three-week visit in the summer of the following year. Along the way, Moss touches on some of things you might expect if you know anything about Iceland: the role of the “hidden people” (elves, trolls, and other spirits who have an active role in Icelandic life; famously roads are constructed with their living places in mind, explaining some of their particularly tortuous and otherwise nonsensical bends); the dramatic change in lifestyle and life expectancy from the middle of the twentieth century onward, changes primarily related to Iceland’s role as a military base (first British then American) in WWII and beyond; the relation of climate and geology to everyday life; and, especially, the political, economic, and psychological effects of the kreppa, the economic collapse of 2008 brought on by the unregulated banking and financial excesses of the early 2000s.

The book held my interest from the start, though I was initially underwhelmed by the prose, which seemed undistinguished if never actually awkward or bad. But as I continued to read I was more and more caught up in the book, to the point that I stayed up until two in the morning reading the second half in one glorious session.

The kreppa is Moss’s great subject. In her discussion it’s at least as much psychological as economic. Icelanders keep telling her that the national psyche, going back to the time of the Vikings, values aggression and risk taking. The economies of fishing and farming, for centuries the only industries at all, are so fickle, so dependent on outside forces that Icelanders have developed a remarkably stoic, even dangerously casual attitude to the idea of risk, change, and sudden reversals of fortune. Moss speculates these attitudes explain the lack of apocalyptic rhetoric in Iceland, whether about the kreppa or the volcanic ash that shut down European air space for weeks in 2010.

Moss helped me understand something that had puzzled us back in the summer of 2009, nearly the worst moment of the crisis: if you didn’t know the economy had just collapsed you would never have guessed it. There were a few empty storefronts, but no homeless people on the streets, no panhandlers, no signs of desperation overt enough for preoccupied tourists to note, at any rate. There weren’t any political protests, either (that had happened a few months earlier, the so called pots and pan revolutions that chased out the government so closely tied to the bankers). Moss discovers in many aspects of Icelandic daily life a peculiar relation between effacement and aggrandizement, shame and pride.

This dynamic plays out in the most unlikely ways, such as the almost complete absence of a secondary market for consumer goods. (All the more remarkable in a country where almost everything is imported.) Moss, who arrives with only a handful of suitcases, can’t find second-hand furniture or clothes or bicycles or even cars. Colleagues help her out by borrowing things from family members or friends. Passing on goods from one family member to another is (barely) permissible. But buying something from a stranger (itself a strange concept in a country of 300,000, where everyone really does know everyone) is not. Moss is startled when an acquaintance describes how she destroyed an old sideboard before taking it to the dump, because she wanted her decision to be rid of the item really to be her own, that is, to be final.

This background informs the best, most fraught chapter in the book, in which Moss, reluctantly playing investigative reporter, visits a surreptitious charity in Reykjavik that runs a weekly food bank. At first, the organization wants nothing to do with her; she gets access only when a friend of a friend speaks to the director. The director tells the staff they should speak freely to Moss, but they are reluctant to do so, though not as reluctant as the recipients of the charity. In many ways, the latter’s responses (or lack thereof) are perfectly understandable. But the open hostility Moss is met with surprises her, and shocks Einar, the Icelandic friend she has brought along to translate. His reaction is the most powerful thing in the book: he is shocked to the core of his being by the very existence of the food bank, which contrasts with his most fundamental belief in Icelandic exceptionalism: here everyone is equal and no one goes without. Moss is at her most nuanced in describing her reaction to his reaction:

I’m shocked by his shock, struggling to understand why Iceland should imagine itself exempt from the economic inequality that characterizes every other capitalist society. We all knew, I thought, we all accepted a deal, that there is poverty for some and wealth for others.

‘Not in Iceland,’ says Einar…. ‘Not in my country. I had never imagined it, it had never crossed my mind, that there were hungry families in Iceland. Not people needing help from strangers.’

…

Young Icelanders keep telling me that there’s no class system in Iceland, that inequality is a foreign phenomenon, but the fact of many students’ alienation from poverty seems to prove Icelandic social inequality. I remember a colleague in Sociology telling e that not only is there a difference between the middle class and the poor, but the difference is so great that the existence of the poor is news to some of the middle class. Einar starts his car. ‘I did not know,’ he says. ‘That is the worst thing. I did not know’

Maybe, I think. Or maybe the worst thing is that I’ve known about poverty all my life and I’m not shocked.

Einar’s response helped me think about my own decision to become an American citizen. Canada isn’t Iceland, but it’s also a country filled with a remarkable degree of certainty about its own righteousness. (Moss says the idea of being unpatriotic is entirely foreign to Icelanders. Interestingly, overt displays of patriotism have become much more prevalent in Canada during my life time.) There’s something not just naïve about being shocked that one’s homeland isn’t as good as one had been led to believe, but also, worse, clumsy and dangerous. (Even as Moss is quite right to observe the complacency that can arise from the surety that one isn’t good.)

We learn plenty of other fascinating things in Names for the Sea (the title is from a lovely poem by Auden, who visited in the 1930s, that Moss reads intelligently). We learn a lot about food (how hard it is to get in Iceland, where it comes from, what it says about a person who despairs because she can’t get all the spices and produce she wants, cheaply, whenever she wants them). We learn lots about knitting and its role in shaping how Icelanders think about themselves, especially their ideas of time. We learn lots about driving and car culture and the ambivalent relation to nature felt by anyone that lives in an extreme climate. We learn lots about Icelandic ideas of family and childcare, especially an alarming but popular theory of child education that separates boys from girls in daycare so that the boys’ innate aggression won’t harm the girls’ delicacy.

All this detail means that other things get left out. Most of those things concern Moss and her personal and professional life. We only get a glimpse of Moss’s teaching, for example. Most readers probably won’t be as disappointed in that as I was, but they might share my surprise at the elusiveness of Moss’s family in this story. I can understand why she’d not want to make them the focus, but her effacement of her husband, in particular, is surprising, even weird. He seems to have been at home all the time, surely difficult, though we don’t know enough about him to tell whether he was stuck there. Only occasionally can we see his frustration; we don’t get a sense of what he’s like, or what the two of them are like together. (The boys are much more vividly presented.)

We know more about Moss herself, but less than you’d expect in a travel memoir. I wish she’d told us more about the anxieties that drive much of her experience of the world: profound shyness, even diffidence, fear of opening herself up to the scrutiny of others that she always seems to assume will involve ridicule. Moss has a lot to say about the idea of foreignness, both as she experienced it and as Icelanders seem to conceive of it. I can’t decide whether her reticence to show us more of herself and her family is a failure to take up that concept of foreignness or a brilliant performance of it. (For she certainly remains foreign to us.) At any rate, she avoids the most unseemly tendencies of professional travelers, the tendency towards self-aggrandizement or ingratiation in their self-presentation to readers.

Moss’s discussion of foreignness is something that even readers who don’t love Iceland the way I do will enjoy. That abiding interest in the foreign is something Moss shares with someone otherwise remote from her English Romantic sensibilities, I mean that master of estrangement and defamiliarization with which I began this review, a person who didn’t need to leave home to tell us about what it means to be foreign, Franz Kafka. Surprised that no one else has ever arrived at the gate that has held his avid attention for decades, Kafka’s man from the country asks why no one else has ever shared his preoccupation. He is told that the gate has been made only for him, and that now it will be shut. I want you to read Names for the Sea, but some part of me thinks it has really been written only for me.

The Books I Bought in Montreal

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The Pegnitz Junction—Mavis Gallant (hometown gal)

A Fairly Good Time—Mavis Gallant (her only novel, I think, in a nice hardcover)

Romola—George Eliot (one of the old orange spine Penguins)

Zuleika Dobson—Max Beerbohm (delightful Penguin pocket book)

Gaudy Night—Dorothy L. Sayers (last person on the planet yet to read this)

Natural Causes—James Oswald (UK crime, worth a flutter)

In Pursuit of the English—Doris Lessing (wonderful opening sentence, been meaning to read this for years)

The Crime at Black Dudley—Margery Allingham (curious: haven’t read Allingham before)

Pretty good haul, considering I had seven dozen bagels to bring home, too.

Miscellany

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Some thoughts on recent reading, mostly crime fiction related:

Some Die Eloquent—Catherine Aird (1979)

Discovered Aird thanks to Steve at Stevereads (how does he read all those books?). Some Die Eloquent must come midway through the Sloan & Crosby series, but I don’t think it matters much where you start. Aird is clearly a genius in her way and I wonder why she’s not better known. Wonderful dialogue (witty but not snappy: dry), very funny, keen eye for the way institutions work (here medicine, especially hospitals). And a decent plot in less than 200 pages. Take that, bloated 400-pp crime novels! More Aird is definitely in my future.

 

Several books by Karin Fossum (translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson, Charlotte Barslun, and others)

I read Fossum’s Inspector Sejer books when they first started appearing in English translation, about ten years ago. I liked them well enough, but suddenly there were more and more and they just didn’t grab my attention enough to continue. I returned to her this year thanks to the English-language publication of the first in the series. (Eva’s Eye in the US, In the Darkness in the UK—both quintessentially lame crime fiction titles.) Despite what I just said above about length—the book is 400 pp—I thought this an auspicious start to the series.

Ruth Rendell claims to like these books, and it’s easy to see why. Like Rendell, Fossum is primarily interested in motivation—most of her books aren’t that suspenseful. Rather, the suspense comes from seeing how the perpetrator’s actions come undone. Fossum is better than most crime writers at characterization: her best feat comes in The Indian Bride, where she manages to make plausible and sympathetic an aging Norwegian bachelor who goes to India to meet a woman after falling in love with a picture in a National Geographic book. Eva’s Eye is good in this regard, too, giving us a desperate, haughty, and clueless artist.

What I particularly like about the first book is its balance between criminal and detective. Sejer is a bit in the sensitive mold I’ve decried before, but his triumphs are more muted and thus more palatable. In later books, Fossum seems unable to decide what she wants to do with Sejer. Sometimes he’s important, sometimes barely present. It’s as if she’s experimenting with crime novels that would have no detective or inspector, and only accidental perpetrators. I guess I like my procedurals more conventional. Still, I read four of these in a row, and have now read almost everything that’s in English, and I’ll likely pick up the latest translation when it’s out this summer.

 

Red Road—Denise Mina (2013)

Mina’s a superior crime writer, one of the few I’ll drop everything for. Her previous books have come in trilogies; I was glad to see that Red Road is the fourth in the Alex Morrow series. Morrow is a great character: smart, a bit stroppy, unable to let things go. Halfway through the book a body is found in an apartment high rise that’s being demolished. Morrow’s unwilling trip to the scene of the crime is a brilliant, frightening set piece. I don’t think Red Road is as good as either the second or third in the series, but it’s totally worth your time.

 

Life After Life—Kate Atkinson (2013)

Some of the people whose reading taste I respect most really love this book. I liked it, too, even quite a lot at times. But I didn’t fall under its spell the way they did. Strange, that: the book ought to be right up my alley, being set in the historical periods (Edwardian England through WII Germany) I’m most invested in.

Ursula Todd, the protagonist, lives many lives in the book, eventually learning to avoid the causes of death and unhappiness (influenza, rape, sexual abuse) that befall her in some versions of the story. At some point, Todd, struggling through a series of vividly depicted second world wars (though I prefer Sarah Waters, or, you know, Henry Green, on the Blitz), both in London and Berlin, decides she must assassinate Hitler to stop the bad things of the twentieth century happening. This view of history is less juvenile than Quentin Tarantino’s, say, but still pretty naïve.

Atkinson, never much of a stylist, does better with England than Germany (despite the irritating, anachronistic “parade of historical ideas” quality, evident, for example, when Todd is sent to a Harley Street psychoanalyst quite unlikely to have present in the early 1920s of historical London). Atkinson did a lot of research for the book, and it shows, mostly in the laboured scenes set in Germany. There’s a whole dull little biography of Eva Braun waiting to be excised from this book.

The book’s merits are two-fold. The first is in its play with our attachment to Ursula. We do get attached to her, despite or perhaps because she keeps dying on us. Each death comes as a bit of a shock, a disturbance anyway, even though we know she will begin life again on the next page. Atkinson makes us care about Ursula and her family a lot. I think the book’s structure is key to that feeling, but I’m not sure how exactly. Anyone have any ideas?

The second is its steadfast refusal of romantic love for Ursula. She has a few relationships, even in one life a (disastrous) marriage, but none of them are ever important. As the lives pile up and she starts to “learn” from earlier ones, she avoids sexual and romantic intimacy more and more. One reason for that is a traumatic early experience, important in a book that believes events have resonances not just over the course of a life but across many lives. Another, more interesting, reason is that there are already lots of intense relationships in the book—they just happen to be between siblings. Interestingly, the Todd children aren’t orphans, in the way they might have been in the Edwardian children’s book that lurks in the unspoken background to Life after Life. What this means is that the book doesn’t feel the need to undo the parent-child relationship altogether to present the one between siblings as the most meaningful one a person can have.

Still, I wanted the book to do more with these things. I wanted it to be smarter. But I can understand why many smart readers are excited about it. For a particularly compelling view, read Derek Jenkins’s Goodreads review—it is better than the book itself, and, at moments seems to be a brilliant riposte to, for example, Adam Mars-Jones’s surprisingly brittle and hostile review in the LRB: “When someone complains about the slack internal logic of Todd’s eternal recurrence, they aren’t exactly missing the point, but they are evidently missing some of the pleasure.” Wonderful!

 

Several books by Benjamin Black

When it first came out I eagerly read Christine Falls, the Irish novelist John Banville’s pseudonymous effort at crime fiction, set in 1950s Dublin and starring a pathologist named Quirke. In the meantime, Black has published a number of sequels, which have accumulated on my shelves on the hopeful assumption that I would like the others as much as I did the first. I’ve read the next three now, and they’re entirely satisfying, although sometimes a bit workmanlike. Black is better on atmosphere—he sure gets the fug of provincial cities right—than on plotting, and the general trajectory of the books (Quirke stumbles upon wrong-doing at the highest echelons of the young Republic’s oligarchy and is unable to do much about it) gets repetitive. But he’s a good writer, and he comes by his genre interest legitimately: as a reviewer of his recent Marlowe novel put it, the best part of Banville’s work already involved secrets and investigations of one sort or another.

He can do you a fancy, (almost) overripe sentence:

Strange, how for him all the uncertainty and doubt, all that feeling of adolescent fumbling, how it was all gone, rid of in an instant, replaced by something deeper, darker, of far more weight, as if that kiss had been the culmination of a ceremony he had not been aware of as it unfolded, and that had ended by their sealing, there by the cold hearth, a solemn pact of dependence and fraught collaboration, and it was not the nearness of the fireplace, he knew, that was giving to his mouth a bitter taste of ashes. (A Death in Summer, 2011

And he can do you a marvelously efficient one:

All institutional buildings made Quirke, the orphan, shudder. (The Silver Swan, 2008)

That’s how you do exposition!

My Struggle: Volume 1 (A Death in the Family)–Karl Ove Knausgaard (2009, 2012 English translation by Don Bartlett)

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Say what you will about air travel these days, but it has for me one great virtue: it’s great for reading. In fact, planes are some of the only places I ever see anyone reading anymore. I should say, though, that since moving to Arkansas I hardly ever spend any time in public space anymore. If I lived somewhere else, somewhere where I wasn’t in the car all the time, I might find that reading hasn’t quite shriveled away entirely.

Distractions are fewer in the quasi-public space of the plane. And by “distractions” I mean phone and email. That’s all changing, alas, but for now I relish the sustained reading time I sometimes get on a long plane ride.

That deeply immersive reading experience gives me some of the same satisfactions of a long run, that same mile-eating, page-turning lope. Of course, immersive reading can happen at other times and in other places. And our life situations have everything to do with whether it does. Children sure make it hard. (Everything I’ve said about reading on planes refers to flying without children.) But when immersive reading happens, it’s quite memorable. I remember a particularly snowy January in Halifax, my Sophomore year of college, reading Absalom, Absalom! and S/Z in long bouts on my futon on the floor. (Every time I looked up it seemed to be snowing some more.) I remember reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost late, late into the night in our tiny bedroom in our tiny dormer apartment in Haverford, PA. (I love to read when everyone else is asleep). And I suspect I’ll long remember reading the last two-thirds of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Death in the Family on the plane back from a vacation in Iceland last month.

If I were Knausgaard, I’d tell you everything possible about that reading experience: the glimmer of seatback screens all around me, the increasingly drunk and loud elderly Icelanders in the rows just ahead of me, the delicious and laughably expensive Icelandic beer I’d just finished myself, as accompaniment to the delicious and even more laughably expensive mango curried chicken I’d purchased for dinner. I’d need to lull you into a pleasant stupor that is almost boredom, to send you into a readerly slipstream in which sentences and pages follow one another easily. Then I’d segue from this mass of material detail—often banal, often about consumption—into more abstract meditations, always based on autobiographical experience, meditations on grander concepts, the grandest in fact, the most provocative, the most important, the most open to bombast and bluster: sex, money, work, family, and death, death especially. Some of these conclusions would be a bit superficial, betraying what Knausgaard, at least the Knausgaard who narrates this text, would be the first to say is a haphazard reading of the European philosophical and literary tradition. But most of these meditations would in fact turn out to be shrewd and thought provoking, even beautiful. And you would keep turning the pages, you would completely under my spell, and you wouldn’t care about whether what I had to say was original or subtle or intellectually formidable. You would just want more.

We could compare my imagined Knausgaardian description of a place ride with the one that actually appears in his book. He gives plenty of detail, including a long paragraph, more than half a page, describing just the events of boarding the plane, walking down the jet bridge and finding his seat. But the narrator’s plane ride is different from most, different certainly from the one I took home from Iceland. It’s taken neither for pleasure nor for business. It’s taken because of death, the death in the family referred to in the book’s title, the death of the narrator’s father.

The narrator spends much of the flight weeping openly—to his shame but also, interestingly, to his delight. The lengthy descriptions of his emotional state and its discomfiting effect on his fellow passengers lead to a meditation on an unusual and fruitful topic: the things the people we know well don’t do, the activities they avoid, the predilections they express negatively. The narrator’s father never went to the barber; he cut his own hair. He never traveled by bus. He never shopped at local shops where he might have to talk to someone. He never attended any of the narrator’s soccer games—except once, and then, the narrator heartbreakingly relates, only to berate his son for missing a scoring chance, knowing neither the final score of the game nor that the narrator scored two goals, including the winner. The zig-zags of this section—from the description of minutiae to an abstraction born of them and back to the personal anecdote—are typical of the book.

 

A Death in the Family is the first volume of a six-volume autobiographical series—published to acclaim in Norway and throughout Europe, and now making its way into English translation—a series provocatively named Min Kamp. The echo of Hitler’s autobiographical screed Mein Kampf is surely deliberate, but I’m not sure to what end. Maybe that will become clearer in later volumes. Be that as it may, it is already clear that the title allows for considerable irony. Knausgaard ironizes the very of idea of comparing his comfortable bourgeois social-democratic life to Hitler and the project of National Socialism. He ironizes the very idea of being daring enough to do so, as if he were aging enfant terrible. He also ironizes Hitler, specifically his megalomania in making himself exemplary, of making (overstated) autobiographical struggles the basis for a (distorted) political world-view.

We might say that Knausgaard wants to take the idea of struggle back from Hitler. Yes, he seems to be saying, there is something embarrassing and false about calling a middle-class comfortable life a struggle, but there is something true about it too. And in reminding us that the struggle of life ends in death, Knausgaard offers us a politics based entirely in reality, and thus miles away from Hitler’s.

Here I am writing about Hitler—hardly what I’d intended. But in making this digression perhaps I’m more like Knausgaard than I’d dared hope. For the structure of his writing, at least in this volume—apparently he wrote two novels before the series; they seem, rather drearily, to be about angels and metaphysics—can seem wayward and formless. Not disorganized, but also not organized. This of course is an illusion, one that Knausgaard points to, both overtly, in his repeated fascination with what art means for contemporary artists, and obliquely, in the practicing of his craft, that is, in his struggle with form.

The result is a book that has plenty of shape despite seeming rather shapeless. I’m not entirely sure how that works, but my sense is that it has to do with the tropes I keep turning to in writing about him: immersion, hypnosis, submergence. This book casts a spell. It seems appropriate that these are all ambivalent terms, states we are drawn to but suspicious and even frightened of. I’m not sure I’d call Knausgaard a nice writer.

Just as the hypnotist needs some time to murmur soothing words to us before we go under (you are getting sleepy, very sleepy), so too does Knausgaard need time to cast his particular spell. And time, in reading, is connected to length. Page numbers translate into minutes, hours, weeks, even years of our lives. Immersion takes time, and takes time away. Something I hope to figure out as I read the rest of these volumes (the second and third are now in English with the rest to follow) is whether Knausgaard’s use of scale—of time-consuming length—is different from other writers’. After all, the premise of My Struggle is hardly original. A six volume, nearly 3000 page autobiographical novel that tells the story of how a sensitive boy became the writer of the text at hand: sound familiar? In case it doesn’t Knausgaard lards the opening volume with references to Proust. A long meditation on the persistence of things, even or especially things we’ve lost, could with only a few changes come straight from the Recherche:

The smell of short, freshly watered grass when you are sitting on a soccer field one summer afternoon after training, the long shadows of motionless trees, the screams and laughter of children swimming in the lake on the other side of the road, the sharp yet sweet taste of the energy drink XL-1. … You could still buy Slazenger tennis rackets, Tretorn balls, and Rossignol skis, Tyrolia bindings and Koflach boots. The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child’s reality and an adult’s was that they were no longer laden with meaning. A pair of Le Coq soccer boots was just a pair of soccer boots. If I felt anything when I held a pair in my hands now it was only a hangover from my childhood, nothing else, nothing in itself. … The world was the same, yet it wasn’t, for its meaning had been displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness.

There is surely a socio-political dimension to this passage that regrettably I don’t know enough about to comment on usefully. (What I know about Norway comes from crime novels. Possibly not entirely reliable sources.) It does strike me, though, that the notion of permanence presented here must have something to do with Norway’s social and economic stability and prosperity. (Not everyone’s childhood memories will be so connected to sporting equipment; not every place has all its houses still standing).

But there is also a literary-historical component to the passage that I do know something about, specifically in its relation to Proust. Knausgaard is working over similar topics, especially about the relation of the past to the present. But the sentiments aren’t quite the same. Proust would agree that the adult world is no longer meaningful in the same way as the child’s. But he would emphasize the connections between the two worlds. Proust’s famous “involuntary memory”—the experience buried in things, waiting to be ambush us in chance moments of sudden recovery—isn’t Knausgaard’s interest here. Rather he is concerned, as in the passage’s final turn, with the idea of loss, disenchantment, even meaninglessness. Given later events in the book, specifically the death of the father and the meditations on mortality it provokes, I think meaninglessness here means something like the primordial inertia Freud imagines in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. But Knausgaard shares Proust’s emphasis on the experiencing subject. Proust makes clear that as long as the experiencing subject is present, the world remains meaningful. And Knausgaard implicitly agrees, since that’s what the book is—hundreds of pages of the narrator’s subject experiencing… well, the stuff of experience.

One last comparison to Proust: Knausgaard is less coy than Proust about the identity of his narrator. The shadowy Marcel (mostly he is known only as “I”) of the Recherche is replaced here with the undisguised Karl Ove. Although first person narrators—even ones that have the same name and biography as their authors—are never the same as their authors, Knausgaard makes no attempt to confuse the issue. (No dizzying Philip Roth games here.) The book could be a memoir, I suppose, but it’s clearly not, it’s clearly fictional, even though it doesn’t seem concerned to be so. I’m not sure why this is, and if anyone has any ideas I’d like to hear them.

Like Knausgaard, Karl Ove is born in the late 60s, and grows up in southwestern Norway in the 70s and 80s. His father is a teacher, his mother a nurse. Like the mother in Proust, she is the boy’s nurturing parent. The father is stern, rigid, a little frightening, abusive in an undramatic but effective way. Karl Ove is a little afraid of him but at the same time wants desperately to be recognized by him. His mother is often away for work. For a time Karl Ove lives almost by himself in his grandparents’ house. Eventually the parents divorce, the father remarries, seems transformed, open, warm, generous, but it’s all too much, his newfound conviviality is really only a function of drink. What is first confined to boozy weekends begins, in the way of all addictions, to motivate everything in the father’s life, and it’s not long before he’s a full-fledged alcoholic who, after leaving the second wife, moves into his mother’s house and steadily, sordidly drinks himself to death.

The father’s demise happens later in Karl Ove’s life, he’s already a teenager when his parents divorce. Before that, despite whatever is unusual in the family situation, Karl Ove has an ordinary middle-class Norwegian childhood: school, sports, books, girls. He has an older brother, Yngve, who won’t have much to do with Karl Ove at first and is then away at school later on, returning only to bring Karl Ove word of new music and movies, inspiring Karl Ove to take up music (there’s a funny and painful scene describing the band’s only gig, at the opening of a shopping mall, where what could only with great charity be called their DIY punk aesthetic is an ignominious failure). Later, though, Karl Ove and Yngve become much closer, especially when Karl Ove follows his older brother to university in Bergen.

The first half of the book is episodic, skipping over many things, but giving us certain scenes from Karl Ove’s childhood in detail, such as his dogged determination to buy some beer to take to a New Year’s party that he trudges miles through the snow to reach, mostly because there’s a girl there he likes, a girl who, predictably, barely knows who he is. So far, so conventional, and the least likeable parts of the book, for me, were these laddish ones, always teetering on the verge of the misogynistic.

But the book’s narrative structure makes things interesting. It doesn’t just give us the conventional Bildungsroman trajectory of sensitive soul trying to find his way in the world (will a girl love him, will he be able to create art of any kind that’s any good?). Instead it takes us always back to the scene of the writing of the book, the older Karl Ove’s daily life with wife and three small children, and the never-ending, thoroughly banal but all-encompassing and (at least to its participants) engrossing contortions of daily life in a family with working parents and small children. Knausgaard is great on the sticky overlap of love and resentment that makes up parenting. He also gives us a brief overview of the dramatic story behind this marriage—out of nowhere one day Karl Ove decides to leave his first, Norwegian wife, moves to Stockholm, and, before long, falls in love with the Swedish woman he is married to in the novel’s present. Unfortunately, neither of these women is presented in any depth. Surely there will be much more of them in the later volumes.

The first half is fine, occasionally much better than fine. The set piece with the New Year’s party is pretty great, for example, and Knausgaard is good on relentless northern winters and the miracle of their ending. But the second half is extraordinary. Karl Ove, only recently married to his first wife, has had his first novel accepted for publication. One day, when he is avoiding working on the revisions, his brother calls to say that their father has died. The brothers travel to their grandmother’s home to make arrangements for the funeral, which is where they discover the full extent of the father’s depravity in his final years. It turns out that he and his mother—their grandmother, a fleeting but appealing character in the first part of the book, a resonant and pitiable one in the second—have been living in a spiraling descent of mutual alcoholism. The last third or so of the book tells the detailed story of how the brothers, together with an uncle, prepare for the funeral—mostly by tackling the accumulated filth in the old house.

There’s so much to take in in this book, some of it a bit banal, even risible, but much of it remarkable. And actually, thinking about it now, what I find really remarkable is how the remarkable is the twin of the banal. It’s hard to quote just little bits of Knausgaard. Here’s an example from that last third or so. The narrator and his brother tackle the rooms of the grandmother’s house in turn, each grimmer than the last. Shit, vomit, piss, mold, dust, grime, decay, rust: the house is a ruin that two desperate people have drifted through for years, like sullen, separate castaways in a flimsy boat. The narrator’s task is to clean the stairway:

I filled the bucket with water, took a bottle of Klorin, a bottle of green soap and a bottle of Jif scouring cream and started on the banisters, which could not have been washed for a good five years. There were all sorts of filth between the stair-rods, disintegrated leaves, pebbles, dried-up insects, old spiderwebs. The banisters themselves were dark, in some places almost completely black, here and there, sticky. I sprayed Jif, wrung the cloth and scrubbed every centimeter thoroughly. Once a section was clean and had regained something of its old, dark golden color, I dunked another cloth in Klorin and kept scrubbing. The smell of Klorin and the sight of the blue bottle took me back to the 1970s, to be more precise, to the cupboard under the kitchen sink where the detergents were kept. Jif didn’t exist then. Ajax washing powder did though, in a cardboard container: red, white, and blue. It was a green soap. Klorin did too; the design of the blue plastic bottle with the fluted, childproof top had not changed since then. There was also a brand called OMO. And there was a packet of washing powder with a picture of a child holding the identical packet, and on that, of course, there was a picture of the same boy holding the same packet, and so on, and so on. Was it called Blenda? Whatever it was called, I often racked my brains over mise en abyme, which in principle of course was endless and also existed elsewhere, such as in the bathroom mirror by holding a mirror behind your head so that images of the mirrors were projected to and fro while going farther and farther back and becoming smaller and smaller as far as the eye could see. But what happened behind what the eye could see? Did the images carry on getting smaller and smaller?

Do you see what I mean about how a fascinating but also numbing accretion of banal details (every kind of cleaning supply, everything he does with them) becomes a more abstract meditation (here on the idea of recursion, an important idea in this book which, like Proust’s always reminds us of the process of its being made)?

It is true that I have an inordinate fondness for at least the idea of cleaning, of decay being overturned. (As a child, I thrilled to the section in Dr. Doolittle where the animals are taken to a lovingly scrubbed farm.) Maybe this sort of thing isn’t for everyone. Knausgaard tells us about every trip to the corner store for cigarettes and coke, every little detail that a more conventional narrative would skip unless it saw them as symbolic, or put them in service of some dramatic plot point. For whatever reason, though, I find this recitation riveting, maybe because Knausgaard convinces me that there is an important connection between prosaic materiality and abstract reflection.

One payoff of all this detail is that we really feel the labour of cleaning the house. (What is more boring and exhausting and time-consuming than cleaning, especially when we know things are just going to get dirty again?) Taking a break on the deck one morning, Karl Ove has a vision of the house’s rebirth, symbolized by a glamorous and joyful wake they will hold there after the funeral. He becomes obsessed with the idea, and we thrill to it, even as we also know it’s an impossible fantasy. After all, when this house is scrubbed and made inhabitable again, it is still shabby at best.

But I guess what I enjoyed most about this book was the feeling that Knausgaard ends up earning his poetic, resonant conclusions, his little arias of analysis, not least in the passage that concludes the first volume, when Karl Ove returns to the chapel where the body of his father awaits burial:

Now I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what had once been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.

That last line, especially, reminds me of the “Time Passes” section in To the Lighthouse, where Virginia Woolf supplants the death of her human characters with the decay of inanimate objects. Not having the book at hand, I can’t check to see if she includes a leaky pipe, but I know she mentions ominous branches and clothes that slip off their hooks. I’m reminded, too, by the most aphoristic line here—the one that begins “For humans are merely one form among many…”—of W. G. Sebald’s invocation in The Emigrants of the dead and how they are ever returning to us.

These allusions—intended or not—suggest that My Struggle isn’t unlike anything you’ve read before. But it has a unique power nonetheless, in the way relentless description of minutiae (Knausgaard gives us not just the table but also the floor, the wall-socket, the cable, and the lamp, too) abuts abstract, high-flown (not yet sententious) commentary.

 

I can’t wait to see what Knausgaard does in the rest of the series. The next volume, I see, is about love. Where does love fit into the philosophy of evanescence expressed here? The book’s on my nightstand, ready for my next flight.

 

 

On Converting to Judaism

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If you’ve come for books, you might want to give this post a miss. It’s nothing to do with them, or hardly anything, anyway. More about books soon, I promise.

What follows is a little essay I wrote for Rabbi Barry Block of Temple B’nai Israel in Little Rock, my congregation. He’s leading me through my formal conversion to Judaism, a process I’ve almost concluded. One of the requirements was to write an essay to the prompt “Why I Want to Convert to Judaism at this Time.” Writing it proved really useful to me, and I post it here in case it’s of interest to others. I’ve revised it only slightly.

Why I Want to Convert to Judaism at this Time

There are many remarkable things about having a child. One of them—a bit joyous, a bit painful—is seeing one’s self reflected in her, not just in face or body-type but also in behaviour or character. Our daughter is cautious, scared of change, uncertain in new situations. But once she’s comfortable or sure of her surroundings, she opens up, embraces the situation, chatters away nonstop. In these ways, at least, I see myself in her. (She’s also brave, and funny, and smart, and capable of great love. These things might come from me, but they certainly come from her mother. And I haven’t even mentioned the things that are hers alone.)

I begin this self-reflection with my soon-to-be three-year-old daughter because time has become palpable and visible through her. And for me the most pressing part of the prompt for this essay is its final phrase. Why now? For I’ve been saying I want to convert to Judaism for quite a long time, more than three years in fact, since before T was born.

Judaism has been a significant part of my life for a long time. As my therapist says (see, I even have a therapist!), I’m a philo-semite.  My first girlfriend was Israeli. My study of Holocaust Literature, which continues to be an important part of my professional life, began already in college. But it wasn’t until I met M in graduate school that Judaism and Jewishness really became central to my life. At the beginning of our relationship Judaism was a vague presence, something meaningful to M of course, and something I was supportive of and even, in a mild way, interested in, but not, I thought, something to do with me. I accompanied her to High Holyday services, because I loved her and wanted to be a good boyfriend. But as I met her family, and as our relationship grew more serious, as I celebrated my first Passover and Hanukkah, as I accompanied her to her home synagogue, Judaism became more and more part of my life too. When we moved to Pennsylvania we had more Jewish friends than ever before. But it wasn’t until we moved to what might seem the Unpromised Land of Arkansas that I really began to think of Judaism as an identity that I wanted for myself. It helped that Judaism became central to my wife’s professional life. It also helped that Judaism offered excellent protection from Bible Belt Christianity. But mostly it was because Judaism became our way of making a new home for ourselves in a strange place. The Jewish community of Arkansas, particularly but not only at Temple B’nai Israel, welcomed us with open arms. That was a wonderful feeling.

In the beginning—as is still true at this time—my attachment to Judaism was intellectual. Art Spiegelman’s claim that for him Judaism is the skeptical intellectual tradition of Freud and Kafka has always resonated for me. How could I not thrill to the idea of the “people of the book”? What better description could I offer of myself than a person of the book (and books)? What is d’var Torah other than the kind of close exegesis that is at the very heart of my professional work and personal avocation? How could my secular humanist upbringing not agree with the principles of tikkun olam? Being able to share these experiences and values with M only made me love Judaism more.

Remember the Seinfeld episode about the guy who converts for the jokes? That’s me, too—because the jokes testify to Judaism’s love of and respect for words. So you could say that I came for the jokes (a.k.a. the Kafka) and stayed for community. I began to think of myself as Jewish. Many people, even Jews, thought I was Jewish. I lived as best I could as a Jew. And yet I had not converted. Every once in a while I would receive a reminder, almost never ill intentioned, that I wasn’t Jewish. And I would feel hurt. So convert already: that’s the obvious response, isn’t it?

I had started down the path to conversion once before, after several years of unofficial, as it were, that is, self-taught experiential learning. Then T was born, and there was an exhausted year in which no one in our house slept very much, and then M hit a crisis in her career and I came up for tenure, and then there was a time of transition at the congregation: there was always something going on, something that quite reasonably meant that I could postpone finalizing and actualizing my decision. Yet these reasonable reasons don’t tell the whole story. It’s only at the level of something other than reasonableness, something closer to unreasonableness, something much more unconscious than conscious that the truth of the situation is to be found. For if I’d really, really wanted to, I could have prioritized my life differently, I could have put the conversion process at the top of my to-do list, I could by now (actually, really, officially) be Jewish. So why didn’t I?

Over the past five years I’ve learned quite a lot about myself. (Recall the therapist I referenced earlier.) Not enough to break away from the unthinking patterns of behaviour that are sometimes harmful to myself and those around me, but enough to recognize, even if after the fact, that those patterns are there. One thing I’ve learned is that it’s hard for me to ask for things. The reasons why aren’t important for my purposes here. What matters in this context is that I typically feel resentful when people don’t recognize the thing I want but have not asked for. This state of affairs is unfair to others, obviously, and hard on me, too. (It’s wonderful that T has no trouble expressing what she wants.)

So perhaps the most important reason it’s taken me so long to convert is because it’s been hard for me to ask. Asking, even more than converting, is scary. What if I’m refused? It’s funny that I can feel this way when the evidence of acceptance, by this congregation and by the religion and culture more generally, is all around me. This is a deep-seated, powerful inhibition it’s taken me a long time to acknowledge. Equally powerful is my worry that something will change—about me, about the world—when I convert. I worry that I’ll lose that quality, so valuable to me, of being neither in nor out, of being on the margin, in having a foot in two places: a Canadian who lives in America, a Gentile who lives as a Jew. I see now, however, that this fear is the old cautiousness at work again—fear that taking on the new will mean losing the old. It’s an economy of psychic scarcity that I am becoming mature enough to put aside in favour of an economy of psychic plenty. Intellectually, I’ve known for a long time that Judaism is the perfect place for someone like me, predicated as it is on a repeated recognition of—though not undue reverence for—the old, the past, the towering three-thousand year-old tradition. But now I know this emotionally and psychologically, too, and, taking the lessons offered by my Jewish daughter, I’m ready to express my desire and embrace the new, to take a deep breath, open my mouth, and ask for what I want–to belong.

[Postscript: When I met with Rabbi to talk this over, he said something perceptive and reassuring: this business of being betwixt and between ,neither here nor there: that’s the way Jews have been described, sometimes by themselves, often by others for centuries. Sometimes that description has been antisemitic: the allegations against Dreyfus, for example, were that a Jew couldn’t really, wholeheartedly be a Frenchman, so how was he to be trusted? Maybe, Rabbi suggested, we are now in a position, at least in this place at this time, to think about this neither-nor generously, as possibility rather than as absence.]

 

 

 

The Summer Before the Dark–Doris Lessing (1973)

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I first tried this book a couple of years ago (apparently on a trip to Chicago—the boarding pass was tucked after p 46). For whatever reason, it didn’t take. But I returned to it much more successfully last week because I’d an inkling it could be interestingly compared to one of my favourite novels, Marian Engel’s Bear (1976), in a way that would fit a call for papers for a session at next year’s MLA. (Here’s hoping the organizers agree.) I’ll leave the comparison itself aside for now, and instead take it on its own merits. Although I’ve only read a fraction of Lessing’s vast corpus, I rank Summer as one of my favourites, alongside The Grass is Singing (1950) and the puzzlingly underrated The Good Terrorist (1985). It gives us so much to think about that it really deserves to be better known.

I love Lessing because she is one of those writers who so easily wrong-foot me. I don’t find reading Lessing an easy or always pleasant experience. (Pleasure is a great virtue in reading, but some things are great because they refuse us pleasures we might unthinking expect.) I’m always tense, reading Lessing, because she’s always on the verge of being clumsy and obvious, but actually rarely is. (In this she is like my absolute favourite writer, D. H. Lawrence. Lessing has written about his influence on her.) (That this should make me tense is odd, isn’t it?) Lessing is often taken to be strident and humourless, a reputation based, I would say, on ill-informed ideas about feminism (ideas she rightly rejected) and plain-old misogyny. (The outspoken female writer is a harridan; the outspoken male writer is a visionary.) As I’ve written in a different context, one of the things I most admire in Lessing is her uncanny play with realist literary conventions, which she never quite abandons in the literary thought experiments that make up her work.

The experiment in Summer is to explore what happens to a person who has the chance to stop serving others, even living for them, after a lifetime of doing so. As its title suggests, the novel is set over the course of a single summer. (Like Engel’s, incidentally. And if you haven’t read that book, I suggest you do so right away.) That quasi-Aristotelian constriction only adds urgency to the events of the plot, which comprise a voyage of discovery that can only end, as the title also suggests, in obscurity.

The novel’s protagonist is Kate Brown. (Various references to her as “Mrs. Brown” remind us of Virginia Woolf’s great essay “Character in Fiction” (1924), in which Woolf imagines a character that literature has had no time for, one Mrs. Brown, based on a woman Woolf once saw on a train, a character that she urges modern novelists to pursue at all costs.) Kate is the middle-aged wife of an eminent neurologist and the mother of several almost grown children. The title thus also refers to the period in Kate’s life, with the coming darkness being old age, even late middle age, and, more pertinently, the time when women stop being meaningful to contemporary society, the time when they literally become invisible. In some justly famous scenes near the end of the book, Kate experiments with her appearance and its effects on others: when she does not fix her hair and makeup or dress a certain way, she becomes invisible. Walking past a construction site, she realizes that the workers have taken no notice of her:

The fact that they didn’t suddenly made her angry. She walked away out of sight, and there, took off her jacket…showing her fitting dark dress. [The comma after “there” brings me up short. There’s a kind of stutter in the prose, like the larger existential stutter Kate experiences in the book.] She tied her hair dramatically with a scarf. Then she strolled back in front of the workmen, hips conscious of themselves. A storm of whistles, calls, invitations. Out of sight the other way, she made her small transformation and walked back again: the men glanced at her, did not see her.

More interesting than Kate’s sociological experiment is her reaction to it: her anger. The passage I’ve quoted continues: “She was trembling with rage: it was a rage, it seemed to her, that she had been suppressing for a lifetime.”  How best to express rage is one of the central questions of the book, how hard it is to express it at all one of its central observations.

The build-up to this expression of rage begins when Kate is given an opportunity. Her husband is about to leave for several months’ work in America. The children are about to scatter across the globe on various expeditions. A friend of her husband, an American come to London to attend a conference on global food production, particularly coffee, asks her to help the conference organizers. They need simultaneous translators from Portuguese, which Kate speaks fluently; her father was an English-naturalized Portuguese. (A handful of beautifully sketched out scenes describe Kate’s year in Lorenco Marques—now Maputo, Mozambique—with her grandfather in 1948.)  Kate agrees, with some reluctance. The house is hastily shut up and let until the end of September, when the children will return from their various pilgrimages. Kate settles quickly into her new job, enjoying the anonymity, the relative ease of the work, and what she thinks of as the preposterously large salary. But the break from family life isn’t suitable to introspection. And she will soon have even less time for herself—greater responsibilities await. The organizational flair she has developed running her busy, graceful household over the years translates neatly into a larger role with Global Food. She becomes the chief factotum, seeing to, even anticipating, the needs of the ministers, secretaries and other dignitaries. She arranges hair appointments, knows where to buy the best British woolens, ensures that refreshments and supplies are always ready to hand. She is a nurse, a nanny, in short, a mother once more.

After organizing a second conference in Istanbul, Kate leaves the organization. She is afraid of how easily she has replicated her role as housewife, almost as afraid as she is of what she will do next. The novel brilliantly depicts how frightening it is to leave established patterns of behaviour, even dangerous or oppressive ones. Kate resists the introspection that freedom from responsibility will force upon her, even as she is moving in that direction. That resistance is one way to explain her sudden decision to travel to Spain with a younger American man that she becomes involved with in Istanbul.

At this point the book really gets good, becoming increasingly strange and compelling. Kate and the American, Jeffrey—pretty much an irredeemably tedious character—arrive at the Costa del Sol. His disgust at its tourist economy leads him to take Kate first up the coast and later inland. The journey is increasingly feverish, not least because Jeffrey is literally so; he is only to be stopped when he is delirious and nearly unconscious. Kate finds herself marooned in an impoverished, isolated village several hours inland from Alicante. Jeffrey is taken to a monastery, where the nuns look after him until the only doctor in the area returns from a call in another valley. Jeffrey’s illness is as much psychological as physiological. At 32 he is at a crossroads of his own, unable to decide how to live his life. He rejects the life of responsibility that awaits him in the US (he comes from a family of means) but no longer able to drift in the (post) hippie lifestyle that we glimpsed in the brief section set on the Spanish coast. But the book isn’t interested in his dilemma, only in Kate’s struggle to resist mothering him, cooing over him, offering advice and a comforting shoulder. We never find out what happens to him. Before long Kate herself falls ill. She takes the bus back to coast, then a fevered, dazed flight back to London. Jeffrey is abandoned, returning neither in the plot’s events nor Kate’s thoughts.

The return to London is another surprising and interesting choice on Lessing’s part. The book is highly attuned to global capital, and it never glamourizes non-Western or third world countries (rural Spain under Franco seems to count as both) as exotic repositories of authenticity and value.  Indeed, Kate is only too aware, based on her experiences in the Spanish village, where the peasant women look up from their incessant labour with expressions of hatred at and contempt for her leisure, how difficult and not to be idealized life is for women who aren’t white and middle class and sheltered. So the “voyage out” that Lessing sketches here (and she must also have in mind Woolf’s novel of that name, with its own fevered and feverish female protagonist) isn’t really a geographic one. Lessing is famous for saying that in order to break through (to something like psychic health) one has to break down (via something like madness). But Lessing’s psychological exploration is always a material one, too. She repudiated the Communist party already in the 1950s but certain insights of Marxism, based on her experiences growing up in a colonial society, Rhodesia, never left her.

Kate can’t go home when she returns to London because her house is still let. She checks herself into the only hotel available in the summer tourist season, a posh one where she is coddled by a series of excellent caretakers until she recovers, if that is the right word, from her own mysterious illness.  But this reversal of affairs (the mother now gets mothered) doesn’t suit the novel’s purposes, for the reversal doesn’t negate the central problem (are there any roles for women that don’t involve being a mother of some sort?). The literal, physical fever finally breaks, but the figurative, existential one persists.

We see this in a wonderful scene that left me squirming. Just before leaving the hotel, the Global Food money nearly spent, she attends a sold-out production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country. Kate finds herself talking aloud about the ridiculousness of the situation of the female characters, to the point of heckling the production. She doesn’t mean to do this, part of her doesn’t want to. Here’s how Lessing starts the scene:

A woman sat prominently in the front row of the stalls, a woman whom other people were observing. Some were looking at her as much as they did at the play. She seemed quite out of place there, an eccentric to the point of fantasy, with her pink sacklike dress tied abruptly around her by a yellow scarf, her bush of multi-hued hair, her gaunt face that was yellow, and all bones and burning angry eyes. She was muttering, ‘Oh rubbish! Russian my aunt’s fanny! Oh what nonsense!’ while she fidgeted and twisted in her seat.

The disorienting thing here is that the woman is Kate—we’ve shifted from the close “she” or “Kate” of the previous paragraph, and of most of the novel, a position closely aligned to Kate’s consciousness, to one that is distanced from her.  This split in point of view echoes the split in Kate’s self-understanding. The “eccentric” is rebuked in the best passive-aggressive English way by other audience members, every one of them a version of her former self. Kate has only contempt for their contempt:

Oh for God’s sake, though Kate—but alas, had said it, too, for a woman several seats down leaned forward to give her a contemptuous stare. The woman looked like a cat, an old pussycat that has gone fat and lazy; but enough now, stop it, she should keep her attention well away from the stage since she couldn’t behave properly—really, why was it that no one but she could see, couldn’t anyone see that what they were all watching was the behaviour of maniacs? A parody of something. Really, they all ought to be falling about, roaring with laughter, instead of feeling intelligent sympathy at these ridiculous absurd meaningless problems.

Lessing makes us feel the ambivalence of the moment: we want to side with Kate here, but it’s hard to know exactly what that means, since Kate doesn’t even side with herself, part of her is mortified by what she’s doing even as most of her could not care less. The novel is fascinated by laughter—indecorous, gut-busting, unseemly, anything-but-prissy laughter. Such laughter would be revelatory, would shake this tight-assed world with its ridiculous conventions. But this laughter is more often imagined in the book than realized. And what exactly would it achieve? The string of unpunctuated qualifiers in the passage’s last sentence makes me think the book is taking some distance from Kate. These are her thoughts, not its. To be sure, the more embarrassed and uncomfortable we feel, though, the more Lessing indicts our own bourgeois complicity, not least as readers of novels who have certain expectations of characterological decorum. But I’m unconvinced the book thinks it would be best for Kate simply to howl out her rage and disgust, and for us to follow suit. It isn’t easy to escape social life, which we could rephrase in the terms of the book by saying it isn’t easy not to be domesticated, not to be a mother. Maybe these are roles we don’t want to escape, or oughtn’t want to. The dilemma is further dramatized in the book’s last act, in which Kate takes a room in a flat owned by a young woman, Maureen, a hippie drop-out type who finds herself choosing between a series of suitors, none of whom she much likes. This is the period when Kate performs the experiment with the workingmen quoted above. She learns what it is to be an old woman, which seems to consist of a fundamental shapelessness. She visits her old street, sees her house, where she is ignored, unrecognized by her neighbours.

Like Maureen Kate sleeps a lot of the time, sometimes she wanders the streets. She resists mothering Maureen, refuses to be her confessor. We could think of this part of the book as a dramatization of Alison Bechdel’s celebrated test of a text: do two women have a conversation about anything other than a man? We could read the novel as asking: can there be a relationship, across generations no less, between women that don’t revolve around the care-giving roles established by the patriarchy? Both Kate and Maureen want to resist, but they’re scared, too, because they don’t know what would come after that resistance. What would the darkness be like, other than dark? The book never tells us. It ends at an impasse, deciding to emphasize the enormous difficulty of escaping a certain way of thinking rather than to describe a solution to that difficulty. If there is a way to live in the dark that isn’t effacement, the novel doesn’t show it. It’s significant that one of the last locales in the book is the London zoo, where the ones who are really imprisoned are the people visiting it.

I haven’t mentioned an important character, one that appears frequently but only indirectly, in Kate’s thoughts, her neighbour Mary Finchley. Kate admires her je-m’en-foutisme but cannot duplicate it. I can’t tell whether the novel thinks of that as a failure on Kate’s part. It seems to me that if Lessing wanted Mary to be the book’s ultimate heroine she would have given her a larger role. On balance it seems Lessing looks a bit askance at the almost comical absence of repression in Mary’s life. Here Lessing distances herself from any Reichian idea that we should simply ignore or liberate ourselves from oppression.

The Summer Before the Dark is mostly concerned with (middle-class) women, but the rather terrifying vicissitudes of identity that it studies will speak to anyone who is—whether through the vagaries of individual psychological makeup or, in more properly Lessing-like fashion, through the structural imbalances, especially economic, that characterize lived reality—defined by their complicated need to live for and through others. In this way it continues to be relevant, assuming that’s even something we want from books. A blurb on the cover tells me The Economist thought it her best book to date. I don’t know whether to chide myself for an evidently narrow minded sense of its values (and I say that as a subscriber) or to laugh at the fundamental misreading that could make that publication say such a thing about this book.