On Bohumil Hrabal's Dancing Lessons For The Advanced In Age

This essay appeared last weekend in The National.

One of the minor arts of the novel is the art of the title, of a word or a phrase that successfully broadcasts the sense and spirit of the whole. Novelistic prose has all the time in the world to unfurl its nature, but titles, if anything, belong to the universe of poetry, to its mode of tightly wound suggestion. No matter how distinguished it is, we carry within our minds, at best, a few sentences of any prose writer's work; good titles, however, ring on forever.

Sometimes a title can prove to be, disappointingly, the most intriguing bit of a work, a cover charge that yields no reward in the establishment to which it gives access. But on other occasions titles are not just thresholds to narrative worlds of the greatest density and distinction; they are the whole work in microcosm. Such, at any rate, are the titles of the great 20th-century Czech novelist - some would say the greatest 20th century Czech novelist, above Kundera, Hašek, and Škvorecky - Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997). Even in translation, where they surely lose some of their colloquial charge, the phrases Too Loud a Solitude, Closely Observed Trains, Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp, I Served the King of England, and Dancing Lessons for the Advanced In Age are flares that light up the teeming, gusting worlds, red with carnival and heavy with suppressed laughter, from which they emerge.

At one point in I Served the King of England, one of Hrabal's most perfectly realised works, the protagonist, a small waiter named Ditie, is seen moving from a big hotel in Prague to a small but plush establishment in the countryside called the Hotel Tichota. He arrives with his suitcase in the middle of the day, but mysteriously the hotel and its grounds are absolutely deserted, the only sound being that of the wind, "which smelled so sweet you could almost eat it with a spoon". Perplexed, Ditie turns and is about to leave, when suddenly he is stopped in his tracks by a piercing whistle: "It blew three times as if it were saying, Tut tut tut, then gave a long blast that made me turn around, and a short blast that made me feel a line or a rope was reeling me in, pulling me back to the glass doors." Even sounds in Hrabal's world are as perfectly measured and varied as the sentences that then describe or translate them, and the entire universe rains meanings upon the fevered brains of his heroes.

Hrabal's protagonists are also agents and enablers of the central force in his work, which he termed pabeni, or, loosely, shooting the breeze. He is a kind of poet of the beer garden, gathering up folk wisdom, old maid's tales, testosterone-fuelled exaggeration, and street chatter into perfectly formed monologues delivered by characters he called pabitels. A pabitel, he explains in a note to his early work The Palaverers, "is a person against whom there is always welling up an ocean of intrusive thoughts. His monologue flows constantly ... As a rule, a pabitel has read almost nothing, but on the other hand has seen and heard a great deal ... He is captivated by his own inner monologue, with which he wanders the world, like a peacock with its beautiful plumage".

Thus, although Hrabal's fantastically vivid narrations throb with incident and anecdote, they are paradoxically (except in Closely Observed Trains, his most popular but in many ways most conventional work) often plotless, taking delight in their very aimlessness and susceptibility to suggestion. The series of "little men" in his work - Ditie, the paper compactor Hanta in Too Loud a Solitude, the train dispatcher Miloš Hrma in Closely Observed Trains - achieve a gentle subversion through their very earnestness and naivete, blowing the pompousness and absurdity of the world's structures and doctrines into bubbles of the strange and the surreal. Although Hrabal worked under the aegis of a communist regime, in an age of "socialist realism" in literature, about the only doctrine sounded in his work is the exuberant conclusion of the unnamed narrator of Dancing Lessons for the Advanced In Age: "Mother of God, isn't life breathtakingly beautiful!" Taken in the context of its time and literary environment, this is not so much a declaration of aestheticism as a reproach to a world that hums with, to adapt one of Hrabal's titles, too loud a certitude.

The most important word in Hrabal's work might, however, be not so much a particular concept like pabeni or the repeated emphasis on the delights of sense life, but the humble conjunction "and". Since his narratives thrive on an effect of copious simultaneity, of a dozen balls of incident being juggled in the air at the same time, the word "and" is the well-oiled hinge through which this sense is circulated. Like Jose Saramago, Hrabal loves run-on sentences and enormously long paragraphs, though in Hrabal these things are not meant to mime a primitive "folk voice" as in Saramago, but to produce an onrushing river of richly embroidered and seemingly unstoppable incident.

This principle of composition reaches its logical conclusion in Hrabal's early and daringly experimental work from 1964, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, just published in a translation by Michael Henry Heim. The entire novel is told in a single sentence. Once we begin, we are allowed no pause for breath. In his life Hrabal worked variously as a warehouseman, a railway dispatcher, an insurance agent, and even as a waste-paper collector, in which incarnation the novelist Josef Škvorecky first met him, finding him (in a detail that might have come straight out of Hrabal's own work) "saving the proofs of a Thackeray novel from the rubbish". The unnamed narrator of Dancing Lessons is similarly diverse in his vocations, telling us about his tumultuous exploits as a cobbler, a brewer and a soldier, even as he retails to us his application to the real world of the lessons he has learnt from his favourite, if fanciful, books (one on the interpretation of dreams, another a book of wisdom on marriage).

Stories and characters come sailing out of nowhere, such as the tale told to the narrator by some truckers about a dentist they see while they are racing one another down a hill: "He'd left his umbrella in his office, and just as he was sticking his key into the door one of the [lorries] burst a spring and barrelled smack into the office and it lurched away from the key, the whole office, and he was left standing there with his key in the air." In Hrabal it is not the key that misses the door, but rather the door that escapes the key. Elsewhere we find human hands blown off by grenade explosions slapping people as they fly, and a flock of turkeys blown to bits by a careering express train coming down, part by part, at stations all the way down the line.

As everywhere in Hrabal, we see from numerous amorous exploits "how a real man trembles like a frog about to leap whenever he sees a beautiful woman", and are led through parades of comic complaint: "Why will no one see that progress may be good for making people people, but for bread and butter and beer it's the plague, they've got to slow down their damn technology." Never has the workaday world of bread and butter and beer been rendered so lyrically as in the work of this essential writer, every phrase of whose narrations both prove and demand "the world is a beautiful place, don't you think? not because it is but because I see it that way."

And some links. Some beautiful passages from Hrabal novels can be found here. And an essay on Hrabal by Adam Thirlwell, "The Pleasure Principle", is here. And last, the film critic Richard Schickel's essay on Jiri Menzel's film version of Closely Watched Trains, a classic of the Czech New Wave, is here.

On Edna O'Brien's Saints and Sinners

This essay appeared last weekend in The National.

 “Is there a place for me in some part of your life?” a married man asks a woman in “Manhattan Medley”, one of the stories in the Irish writer Edna O’Brien’s new book Saints and Sinners. By asking for a place not in someone’s life, but in a part of her life, the man suggests that he wants to approach something slowly, less dramatically than affairs usually are. By speaking of a sliver and not of the whole, he perhaps indicates too that, realistically, all that he can offer is a part of his own life, and the woman understands as much. 

“We did not have a garden, we had ploughed fields and meadows,” says a girl about her family in another story, “My Two Mothers.” “Somehow I thought that a garden would be a prelude to happiness.” Although she longs for the pleasures of a garden to call her own, the girl still seems to divine that her childish desires can be but a threshold to some ideal state, not happiness but a prelude to it. These are people who seem preternaturally aware, even when in the grip of heightened feeling, of how obdurate life is, of how something may be changed or attained only by small steps, not grand sallies. Even the children are, by observing the world of adults, already adults, and the stories they narrate in O’Brien’s work are adult stories.

Saints and Sinners is the late work of a writer – late in terms of O’Brien’s own age, a vivid eighty, but not in terms of any diminution of her sensibility – to whom we owe some of the most beautiful, limpid, and resonant English prose of the twentieth century, especially that of the great The Country Girls trilogy and the stories later collected in A Fanatic Heart. Across these stories can be found all of O’Brien’s signature characters and narratorial emphases. There are the questing, emotionally dissatisfied female protagonists of small Irish towns and villages, longing for escape from boredom or stiflement; the women who think about their love affairs and the girls who watch the love affairs or marriages of their mothers. There are, too, the hardened men who want to escape from feeling or have succeeded in deadening it through drink or desolation. 

There is the landscape of fields, mountains and marshes, described in language that brings out all their strangeness (from “Inner Cowboy”: “The bogs were more peaceful, stretching to the horizon, brown and black, with cushions of moss and spagunam and the cut turf in little stooks, igloos, with the wind whistling to them, drying them out.”) And there is the society both roused and distorted by what O’Brien has elsewhere called “the hounding nature of Irish Catholicism” (“I was full of fears, thought everything was a sin,” remembers the old man Rafferty about his youth in the book’s opening story “Shovel Kings”. “If the Holy Communion touched my teeth I thought that was a mortal sin.”)

There is O’Brien’s very precise attention to the colours and textures and emotional valency of objects, as when we are shown, in “Old Wounds”, a woman turned out of her house by her son, who wanders down the road “carrying her few belongings and her one heirloom, a brass lamp with a china shade, woebegone, like a woman in a ballad.” And there is the affection for, even adoration of, people who dream and at the same time attend conscientiously to life’s duties and try to do little things well, such as the mother who, despite being poor, applies icing on a Christmas cake with “the rapture of an artist”. 

All these things are presented through a style that knows how to be ornate without being mannered and how to be plain without being poor. O’Brien achieves an effect of naturalness through a palette of options as simple as the omission of a comma where one is expected, and as complex as a clause in a sentence that seems unrelated to anything before it, as if seeking to surprise the very sentence of which it is a part.

Consider, for instance, Miss Gilhooley, the protagonist of the story “Send My Roots Rain”, which borrows its burnished title from a poem by Gerald Manley Hopkins that Miss Gilhooley loves. Miss Gilhooley finds herself abruptly abandoned by a man with whom she has had a passionate affair, but remains possessed by him. Maddened by her pent-up yearning, she goes to see a psychic to see if there is a future for them. Encouragingly, the psychic foresees them “setting up a house together....She drew a picture of their future life together, one or the other, whoever got back first of an evening, kneeling to light a fire and praying that the chimney would not smoke, though at first it would, but in time that would clear, once the flue had its generous lining of soot.”

Though at first it would, but in time that would clear ­– the psychic seems to take her story much further out than she needs to, into a level of detail that should interest nobody, not even Miss Gilhooley. But it is only by her doing so that her story becomes real to Miss Gilhooley even as, on another plane, we comprehend how the writer’s narrative ingenuity has made the story real to us. The psychic’s crafty story also illuminates the craft of story. Miss Gilhooley is gulled by the psychic, but so are we, who are nowhere as susceptible.

In O’Brien’s stories men and women are always blazingly, defiantly, men and women before they are human beings. These are stories that everywhere ask us to think about what it is that constitutes their difference, a difference which undergirds both their mutual attraction and their ultimate incompatibility. Men and women feel differently, think differently, want differently, as a consequence of their biological and emotional differences, and this fact is not something to be evaded or simplified, but rather to be both experienced and rued. This sentiment may be accused of being essentialism, but in O’Brien’s stories it has always seemed, from the situations laid out before us, more like realism. 

“Never give all the heart outright – who said that?” asks Mildred, the rambling, slightly disordered narrator of the marvellous story “Madame Cassandra”. “I have read that men have cycles just like us women...we have cycles because of the presence of the uterus – hence we are subject from time to time to hysteria – whereas men’s cycles do not answer to the womb or the moon but to their own dastardly whims...they simply go on and off the creatures they call women.” 

The story is about Mildred’s visit all the way from a village up to Dublin to meet Madame Cassandra, some kind of psychic or healer, about an affair her husband is having. Madame Cassandra, however, refuses to see Mildred, but even in inaction she precipitates the story’s denouement. On the train back from Dublin Mildred runs, of all people, into her own husband, and finds that he “looked at me almost with wonder, as if he was seeing me in some way altered, his wife of twenty-two years leading a secret life, having a day up in Dublin, a rendezvous perhaps.” Mildred knows now, as they return home, that there is “a little agitation at the core of both our hearts”, and it does not matter if her husband’s rendezvous is real and her own is fiction, as long as her knowledge of the whole exceeds his. This is just one of many unusual closes and catharses in the work of this sensuous, rueful and sublime writer.

And some links: a long interview with O'Brien from 1984 in The Paris Review is here, and a recent one, "Edna O'Brien at 80" is here.

On Sandor Marai's Portraits Of A Marriage

“It was not my muscles she was weighing up, but my soul,” decides Peter, one of the characters in Sandor Marai’s novel Portraits of a Marriage, as he proposes marriage to his maid Judit while she stokes the fireplace, then tries to interpret the long silence that is her response – an inflammatory silence, more provoking than speech, that causes him, for the first time in his life, to lose all control of himself.

“The soul”: novelists might be divided into two camps based on what they think of this word, whether their narrators or their characters use it with irony or in faith. The camp of Marai – if we wanted to cite one contemporary adherent it might be Orhan Pamuk – believes passionately in this word as the human root and mysterious quiddity that adult conversation, and therefore novelistic narration, must never shirk from. In the work of most novelists, a thought such as Peter’s would actually seem like an instance of the writer laughing at the character, through a violent, almost bathetic juxtaposition of the corporeal with the ineffable. But here we know that it is not just the character taking himself seriously, but also the writer. 

Portraits of a Marriage, translated the Hungarian poet and critic George Szirtes, is the fifth novel, after Embers, Casanova in Bolzano, The Rebels, and Esther’s Inheritance, by Marai to appear posthumously in English in the last decade. Reading a few pages of any of these shows that they are the books of a writer who was an adept of a great variety of situations and structures in politics, society, culture and, finally, “human relationships” (another favourite phrase in Marai). Marai was born in 1900, in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, saw out two world wars in Hungary, then fled to Italy after persecution at home by the Communists in the nineteen-forties. From his books we can see why he was resented, because characters in his novels are repeatedly sceptical of the prospect of human beings making themselves new through revolutionary principles, or of violent justice ever becoming the promised peaceful justice. Marai might be considered a kind of conservative.

Marai finally ended up in America, where personal and artistic freedom seemed to him to have reached the other extreme, ending up in a mass of trivialities the very obverse of the moral seriousness attached to the word “art” in hierarchical or totalitarian regimes. (This difference, seen from the American side, is what so attracts Philip Roth to his lesser-known contemporaries in East Europe in his book of interviews Shop Talk). 

But perhaps Marai would have been disappointed anywhere, because even when set against novelists more or less of his time and from his own part of the world who shared something of his spirit – Kafka, Musil, Hermann Broch, Joseph Roth, Witold Gombrowicz – he seems unusually serious, rigorous, fervent, forever linking particulars to universals and realities to ideals. The signal quality of Marai’s work is that it is not just the writer or the narrator who is invested in formulating a theory of human nature from the particulars of the story being told. The characters are equally committed to such a project: each one of these eloquent people is a psychologist, a poet, a prophet, and a philosopher, and knows it. 

People in Marai are passionate generalisers, distillers of experience, forever funneling the “I” of their stories into the “we” of what they are convinced are inexorable human laws. They are never happier than when they are have opened out their sails in a long monologue (against these effusions, Marai’s actual dialogue always seems clipped and sparse). In a fine comic moment in Portraits of a Marriage, Judit, who has been telling her lover her life story over the course of a whole night discovers, at dawn, that he has fallen asleep. The reason why this seems a particularly good, sly joke is that the reader is certainly wide awake at the end of this novelistic night.

Marai’s novels have no need of continuous incidents, because a single dramatic event – a quarrel between two old friends in Embers, a betrayal by a lover in Esther’s Inheritance – is enough to keep his protagonists preoccupied for years, decades, the whole of their lives. The same event is seen first from the point of view of the actor and the acted upon, the betrayer and the betrayed, the man and the woman (male and female nature are always very distinct things in Marai), each time memorably cast into a new mould that brings to bear upon the incident all the important facts and themes of the speaker’s life. Marai’s protagonists are, through marriage or adultery or rivalry, thrown into bruising dyads or triads, and then return to solitude to process their experience. Some of literature’s greatest romantics are to be found in Marai, and their romantic character, it seems fair to warn the reader, is contagious.

Portraits of a Marriage, one of the most original pieces of novelistic architecture in Marai, is actually a portrait of the discontents of two marriages: those of Peter, the scion of a business family, first to the middle-class woman Ilonka and later to the servant Judit. Each of the three reflects on what happened between them, producing, it seems at times, a combined portrait not of three but of nine people. The urgency with which they speak, their love of “tiny but vital details”, and their “passion for truth”  (in Embers there is a fine line about the quest for "that other truth that lies buried beneath the roles, the costumes, the scenarios of life”) becomes, in its own way, a kind of narrative energy. Only the most confident of novelists could trust in his work in this way. Here is Peter speaking of Judit, sex, union, nature, childhood, all in the same reverie:

Jungle and half-light, strange cries in the distance – you can't tell whether it is a man screaming by a well, his throat ripped open by some predator, or nature itself screaming, nature, which is human, animal, inhuman at once – bed entails all that. This woman knew all that was there to be known. She had the secret knowledge: she knew the body. She knew self-control and the loss of self-control. Love for her was not a series of occasional meetings but a constant return to a familiar childhood base: a blend of homecoming and festival; the dark-brown light over a field at dusk, the taste of certain familiar foods, the excitement and anticipation, an under it all, the confidence that once evening came, there would be nothing to fear in the flight of the bat, just the road home at dusk. She was like a child tired of playing, making her way home because the light in the window was calling her to a hot dinner and a clean bed. That was love as far as Judit was concerned.

Under it all, the confidence that once evening came, there would be nothing to fear in the flight of the bat, just the road home at dusk – what strange and compelling words these are even for the strange and compelling paragraph in which they are embedded.

Here, as elsewhere, Marai delights in stacking the odds against his characters, throwing them into a spot from which it will take them all night to extricate themselves. Why does Judit, when she knows that she has Peter completely under her spell, suddenly disappear without a trace for two years, forsaking all that she could win from him? Why does she then return, and take it? Why does Peter suddenly play a trick at dinnertime one day on Ilonka with a friend, pretending that it is his pal who is Ilonka’s husband and not him? Why is Ilonka suddenly filled with profound respect for Judit on discovering her crime, admiring how “she wanted it all, life entire, destiny with all its dangers”? 

Marai’s characters often respond to situations in the most irrational, the most surprising fashion, and then pop up afterwards to justify their behaviour in an enormously persuasive way. They are dangerous and seductive in the way the novel was once believed by moralists to be dangerous and seductive, having the mysterious power to convince or corrupt. Page after page goes by, filled out by the writer with streaks of exquisite perception ("Being human beings is not a responsibility we can avoid, but we can, and do, tell an awful lot of lies in trying to fulfill it") and lines of throwaway brilliance (“He could listen the way others shout”; “The only people capable of being at peace are people who live in the moment”; “Six is the best age for dogs and for wine”) and majestic paradoxes . These are speakers who gather the reader up in the nets of their worldview so powerfully that one believes, with them, that this is the way life really is – until they are contradicted by those of whom they speak and from whom they seem to have learnt what they know.

Of a writer whom she meets on travels, Judit observes that he seemed motivated almost wholly by lust – but not ordinary sexual lust. Rather (the italics are mine) “it was the world that brought on his lust, the fabric of it; word and flesh, voices and stones, everything that exists [that] is tangible and, at the same time, impossible to grasp in its meaning and essence.” This seems an accurate self-portrait of Marai himself, a writer just as capable of devoting a long passage to the importance of pimiento-filled olives as the notion of joy to the meaning of culture. Portraits of a Marriage confirms Sandor Marai’s retrospective status as one of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists, and alongside Irene Nemirovsky, Roberto Bolano, and Alaa Al Aswany one of the finest writers to appear in English translation in the last decade.

And some links: Marai's flight from Hungary in the nineteen-forties is compellingly described by Zoltan Andras Ban, at the enormously useful website of the journal Hungarian Literature Online,  in "The Freedom of Silence" ("Márai had been the most successful writer of the previous period, making plenty of money, treated as a star and leading a perfectly furbished and flawlessly functioning bourgeois lifestyle. By 1945 nothing was left of this. Gone, too, was the illusion which many of the ‘bourgeois writers’ had clung to that, tolerated by the communist regime, they might be able to salvage certain vestiges of a bygone value system at least for a period of time.") Szirtes writes about some of his experiences in translating Marai here ("Márai is easy to translate. What I mean to say is that he gives himself to you and invites you to enjoy the clear rhetorical circling of his prose as he uncovers layer after layer of motivation. He is all burning curiosity tempered by patience") and here, explaining his belief that the last section of Portraits, a marvellous coda delivered by a Hungarian immigrant now settled in America, needed to be translated "not into British but American English" so as to deliver the sense of a change of register. And here is an essay by Szirtes: "Formal Wear: Notes on Rhyme, Meter, Stanza and Pattern." 

A shorter version of this essay appeared recently in The National. 

On Orhan Pamuk's The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist

This essay appeared last weekend in The National, and was written in Istanbul earlier this month in the lovely common room, overlooking the Sea of Marmara, of the Hotel Niles.

In Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence the protagonist Kemal Basmacı, finding a new unity and clarity in his experience of the world after he falls in love with a shopgirl, speaks of love as “another way of knowing”. In his new book The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, it is Pamuk’s contention that the very nature of the novel itself – in search of the revelations of both an objective standpoint and perspectivism, delighting in ambiguities and secrets, and sifting the essential from the inessential in new and surprising ways – allows us “another way of knowing”.

Pamuk’s title, one notices, emphasises the word novelist and not novel, suggesting that this is a book about the processes of literature rather than the end-product. Its six linked essays, offered up in a tone simultaneously conversational and schoolmasterly (they were originally a set of lectures that Pamuk gave at Harvard University in 2009), are preoccupied with what kinds of knowledge and expectation writers bring to the writing of novels and readers to the reading of them. Like all novelists, Pamuk loves dividing the world of novels into two, the better to illuminate the whole. Here, the principle of partition that he relies on derives from the eighteenth-century German writer Friedrich Schiller’s essay “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry”.

The word “sentimental”, at first glance and in English, appears allied with rather than opposed to “naive”, so that title needs some explanation. Briefly, naive poets are for Schiller the naturals of literature, confident in their ability to understand the world, writing as if there was no gulf between the world and language, seemingly innocent of literary technique, of the artifice that makes art seem real. The totally naive writer is both liberated and limited by his naivete: he cannot change anything about his work but must always just “receive” it as if from without.

The sentimental writer, on the other hand, is the kind of artist who is deeply reflective and self-conscious, bringing doubt and skepticism to his reading of both world and work. He knows that art is always the result of certain decisions made in the realm of style and technique. “Being a novelist,” declares Pamuk, “is the art of being both naive and reflective at the same time”.

Readers can be divided into similar categories. Some may believe that novels are transcribed directly from their author’s experience. Such readers aren’t given to introspection about how their own act of reading brings the book to life. Others of a more theoretical temperament may be acutely aware of, and take pleasure in, the moves and patterns that the writer deploys to produce the experience of the text. Reading involves a different kind of creation from writing, and it is the reflective reader who approaches his task with ambition and awareness. And so for the both-naive-and-sentimental novelist, Pamuk seems to imply, the sentimental reader is more precious than the naive one, even if the latter group is usually bigger in size.

This is quite an interesting theoretical map, illuminating, for instance, the difference between literary and genre fiction, or the relationship between art and reality. Indeed, one of the great pleasures of Pamuk’s novels is the way their narrators confidently braid theory and argument into story. One recalls the grizzled painter of miniatures in My Name Is Red explaining the divergent view of the human subject in Ottoman and Venetian art, or Kemal’s meditations on what love has done to his awareness of temporality, and on Aristotle’s theory of time.

Yet if there is a criticism to be made of Pamuk’s book, it is that it spends too long at the level of abstract argument and generalized assertion. It is not animated enough by the particularities and close reading that distinguishes the literary criticism of, for instance, Milan Kundera, another novelist who constructs grand theories about the novel. Pamuk the theoretician is, paradoxically, more compelling in his novels, where ideas might be thought of a secondary layer under the primary one of story.

The triads of nouns that are such a distinctive mark of Pamuk’s sentences, for instance, seem slacker here than in his fiction (“As our mind performs all these operations simultaneously, we congratulate ourselves on the knowledge, depth, and understanding we have attained”), and a poetics of composition and reception is articulated for long stretches without actual novels being summoned to the scene.

For instance, Pamuk offers some valuable points about how novelists actually verbalize a set of compelling images -- indeed, how they are obsessed with visuality. For Pamuk the roots of novelistic writing lie not so much in story per se as in richly imagined point of view (“The defining question of the art of the novel is not the personality or character of the protagonists, but rather how the universe within the tale appears to them”). He also observes that the novel is actually at its most political not when it works through explicitly political themes but simply when it successfully realizes the effort “to understand someone” in all their individuality and their difference.

But readers may feel that they have already been schooled in these notions by his novels, and that a certain conversational register that works in the lecture theatre becomes less satisfying when transferred to the page. Rather, it is when we come across the odd ringing assertion (Anna Karenina is “the greatest novel of all time”) or the mischievous putdown (“Zola is the sort of writer who thinks, ‘Oh, Anna is reading – so while she does that, let me describe the compartment a bit’”) that the text really hums.

Although the book is perfectly competent, and a pleasure to read, the demanding reader will feel that it is only in the last chapter, “The Center”, that Pamuk really hits his straps. This is where he advances his most interesting claim, namely that all real novels have a veiled locus. “The centre of a novel is a profound opinion or insight about life, a deeply embedded point of mystery, whether real or imagined.” Further, it is important that this center be hard to reach, because “if the center is too obvious and the light too strong, the meaning of the novel is immediately revealed and the act of reading feels repetitive,” as with genre fiction.

The center, crucially, is something that is not only searched for or perceived by the questing reader, but it is also the motor that determines the novelist’s own perception of his text as he works through successive versions of it. And although it is the center, it sometimes arrives last and not first in the process of composition, being, in Pamuk’s striking image, “maneuvered into place” as the work’s form and colours become clearer and brighter.

This is a matrix of ideas that only a novelist could plausibly express and defend. If such a thought appeared today in academic literary criticism from anyone other than, say, Harold Bloom, it would seem too fanciful, unprovable, woolly, conceived in a dream and not at the desk. But literary criticism is impoverished if it does not leave room for progress through metaphors such as this one, if it advances single-mindedly through rational argument. Many searching questions are activated when Pamuk asserts, for instance, that “the difference between The Arabian Nights...and In Search of Lost Time is that the latter has a center we are very aware of.”

It is as if Pamuk himself is roused by these ideas, for the writing in this last chapter has a higher pitch, and a continuous epigrammatic energy (“Because Anna Karenina could not read the novel she held in her hands, we read Anna Karenina the novel”). The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist would have been a more balanced book if Pamuk had placed his idea of the novelistic center itself at the center of his book. But, appearing where it does, it ensures that Pamuk exits the stage on a high.

And here are two old posts on books by novelists about the novel: VS Naipaul's A Writer's People and Javier Marias's Written Lives.

On the novels of Herta Müller

This essay appeared recently in The National.

To read the work of the Romanian novelist Herta Müller is to feel, instantly, that the lights of one's everyday world have been switched off, and that one is in a place of danger, of an amorphous dread. Müller's protagonists, powerless but mildly peeved individuals living under the yoke of a tyrannical regime, are the agents of this immersion into paranoia. Perennially watched, or suspecting they are being watched (for even the most innocent bystanders "might be doing a little spying on the side"), they are themselves ever-watchful, living, even at their most secure, in "a tousled state of fear".

The most common kinds of social interaction in Müller's world are interrogation, observation, or conspiracy -- power and the attempt to subvert power. Material life is abject, private life narrowed down to a set of desultory gestures, and small spurts of emotion or sensory stimulation take on a heightened significance in these novels, which enact, through the very texture of their bleak and enigmatic sentences, the debilitation of human personality in a world in which every person feels himself incarcerated, choiceless. "What am I taking away from this country by going to another," the narrator asks her interrogator in Müller's novel The Appointment. The answer, of course, is "yourself", for without subjects there can be no dictatorship.

The Appointment opens, familiarly, with a scene of coercion. "I was summoned," begins the narrator, a young factory worker whose name we never get to know. Desperate to leave the country, she has been caught sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy, entreating the buyer to marry her. This real "crime" has become, in turn, the foundation for fictive ones. The narrator's supervisor, an older man called Nelu who is upset with her for spurning his advances, has concocted some new notes on the same lines as her own, signed off with a spiteful touch -- "Best wishes from the dictatorship" -- and passed these over to the authorities. State power and sexual resentment spin a web around the protagonist, and she and her boyfriend are now enmired. Her summoning engulfs her totally, and is thus aptly her introduction. As we see her taking a tram on her way to her menacing appointment, she tells us that she is expecting the worst, that "today I'm carrying a small towel, a toothbrush, and some toothpaste in my handbag."

Like The Land of Green Plums, perhaps Müller's best-known novel in English translation, The Appointment proffers a series of plangent, elliptical vignettes of life under the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania's dictator between the years 1974 and 1989. In these novels Ceausescu is never mentioned by name; rather, his reign is treated almost as a fact of life, like the coming and going of the seasons or the onset of old age and decrepitude.

Unlike many novels in the 20th century's vast library of the literature of totalitarianism, Müller's books do not offer us a redemptive map of the struggle to keep hope and humanity alive under conditions of the worst physical or psychological oppression (like the Russians Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vasily Grossman), or else concoct a kind of grotesque comedy from the contradictions that they find before them (like, say, the Chinese novelists Mo Yan and Ma Jian). Their words and situations replicate, rather than contest with a vivid rhetoric of their own, the banality and the stupor of a life lived to the tune of empty slogans (in Green Plums, workers' choruses play all day long from loudspeakers attached to the walls of student dormitories) and reflexive persecution.

A network of causes and effects is not drawn out; the stoical protagonists just accept that the air is bad, and try to keep going a life that, in the words of one character, is "just the farty splutter of a lantern, not even worth the bother of putting your shoes on". These are books that, in effect, make the same demands of their readers as the life that they depict makes of their protagonists, with gradually accumulating tensions suddenly being muffled by anti-climax. Like JMG Le Clezio, the French-Mauritian novelist who won the Nobel Prize the year before her in 2008, Müller is one of those independent-minded writers who don't so much reach out to the reader as ask to be reached.

The Appointment is stretched out upon a frame of double time: the present moment, in which we see the protagonist taking the tram to her interrogation early one morning, watching the people around her and making guesses about their lives with a practised eye, and, balanced against this, the swoops and circles of memory as she lives what may be her last hours of freedom. She remembers her father, a bus driver whose affair with a vegetable seller is part of a recurring pattern in the book in which older men prey on young women; her friend Lilli, who was shot dead on the border while trying to flee with her lover, a retired army officer; her ex-husband, who nearly threw her off a bridge when he found out she wanted to leave him; and her lover Paul, whom she first met at the flea market while trying to sell her wedding ring.

In one of the novel's best moments, the narrator tries to imagine what might have gone through the mind of the young border guard whose bullet took the life of her best friend. "When he fired, he was just a man on duty, a miserable sentry under a vast heaven where the wind whistled loneliness day and night," she thinks. "Lilli's living flesh gave him shivers, and her death was heaven-sent, an unexpected gift of ten days' leave… Perhaps a woman like me was waiting, someone who, although she couldn't measure up to the dead woman, could nonetheless laugh and caress her man in the grip of love until he felt like a human being." By extinguishing the life of a human being then, the guard, under the incentive scheme of a perverted order, has his own prospects for humanity returned to him.

Müller documents the slow descent of her protagonist into paranoia ("I've been listening to the alarm clock since three in the morning ticking ten sharp, ten sharp, ten sharp"), and the small obsessive gestures and dependencies of someone in trouble ("Once the nut's been cracked, it loses its power if it opens overnight.") Sometimes this kind of work risks shrinking into mannerism. Her narrator spends almost unreasonable amounts of time thinking about things like the precise colour of apples or leaves or the surfaces of windows -- this is a world in which the life of objects almost equals that of human beings (a theme amplified in Müller's Nobel lecture, appended here to the text of the novel, in which a handkerchief laid out upon a staircase becomes Müller's office after she is thrown out of her workplace).

Indeed, at one point the protagonist finds, wrapped in a piece of paper inside her handbag, "a finger with a bluish-black nail", and cannot figure out whether this object, in its own grisly afterlife, connects to life or to death -- "whether the whole person was dead, or just his finger". It is this strange mingling of the quotidian and the macabre that one remembers when one puts down the work of this difficult but distinctive writer.

On Jose Saramago's The Elephant's Journey

A slightly different version of this piece appeared last weekend in The National.

In José Saramago's novella The Tale of the Unknown Island, the protagonist – an unnamed everyman figure – asks a king for the gift of a boat so that he may go out "in search of the unknown island". The king is sceptical: after all, isn't it well established that no more unknown islands exist? But the man stands his ground in a remark rich with metaphorical meaning, he insists that there is always another unknown island to be discovered.

Finally the man has his way. The story gives him a love interest: the humble cleaning lady of the palace, who decides that after a lifetime of swabbing the royal floors she would rather be part of a voyage. No other crew member can be found, but this does not seem to be a problem. The story takes its leave of us with an image of the two lovers painting the name of the boat on the prow. "Around midday, with the tide," the narrator finishes, "The Unknown Island finally set out to sea, in search of itself."

Of the dozens of great exponents of the novel in the 20th century, Saramago, who died in June at the age of 87, was one of the few who really made the form his own. In his books the story never arrives to us neatly organised, crafted, and finished, cleansed of narrative detritus. Rather, like the boat in Unknown Island, it is always in search of itself, trying to arrive at an understanding of itself, remarking on its own difficulties as it goes on.

At first this puzzles us. Then, when we see the possibilities inherent in the method, it delights us. The narrator is always the most powerful presence in Saramago's novels, now speeding the action along, now slowing it down, making a luminous observation one moment ("We are, more and more, our own defects and not our qualities"), then succumbing to a page or two of pure pedantry. The narrator's love of irony, sympathy for the marginalised, and undercutting of the grand narratives of history establishes a direct line between him and the author, a lifelong and outspoken communist.

Most distinctive in Saramago's work, though, is the style. His narrators revel in the role of master of ceremonies, insisting on it through the very form of their prose, which swallows up the talk of the characters into long, rolling, idiosyncratic sentences. The typical Saramago sentence can seem almost Jamesian in its love of ripples and qualifications, but it employs no other punctuation than the full-stop and the comma and creates the illusion of something spoken rather than written. In Saramago, it is as if the folktale met modernism.

This narrative method naturally risks falling into self-indulgence and corrosive doubt - the kind of arid self-reflexivity visible, for instance, in the French nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute. But Saramago vaults this chasm by virtue of the scale and the thrilling conceits of his stories, which roam widely over Portuguese and European history and are never happier than when juggling metaphysical speculations. In The History of the Siege of Lisbon, a proofreader of a historical work changes the entire shape of the Portuguese history by inserting the word "not" at a crucial moment in the text. Blindness imagines an unnamed city struck by a mass epidemic of sightlessness, thereby illustrating just how fragile and hard-won is the civic peace that a portion of humankind now takes for granted. In Death At Intervals, death (a character, named, like most of Saramago's characters, with her initial in lowercase) suddenly abandons her work of taking human beings away from this world. First there is delight at the prospect of immortality, and then consternation as the larger implications of eternal life start to emerge.

Saramago's new novel, published posthumously, is called The Elephant's Journey. (After this we can expect one more book, Cain, as yet untranslated, and perhaps some unfinished or unpublished work.) The Elephant's Journey is translated by Saramago's excellent long-time translator Margaret Jull Costa, and supplies all the familiar pleasures of his voice, seen here filling out a diverting little story about a pachyderm and its mahout who live in one strange land and travel to another.

For two years Solomon the elephant, a gift to King Dom Joao III from one of his colonies in India, has been languishing in Lisbon along with his devoted keeper Subhro. Solomon's arrival, we hear, initially caused a great stir in Lisbon life before he fell, like all fashionable new diversions, from favour with the elite.

It is the middle of the 16th century and Protestantism has recently shaken the foundations of Western Christendom. Dom Joao III wants to send a present to the Duke of Hapsburg, Maximilian, who has embraced the new faith. But the gift cannot have any Catholic associations, and so Dom Joao fixes - taking the irresolute suggestion of his flighty wife - on Solomon. The elephant must now travel on foot, by land and by sea, down rivers and over the Alps, to Vienna. And so we embark on a picaresque tale in the manner of Cervantes, to whose school Saramago certainly belongs, albeit told in slow motion, as if keeping time with the stately pace of its protagonist, who often holds up the travelling party because he wants to take a nap.

Solomon causes a great stir in towns and villages along the route, becoming, like in the old fable about the elephant and the three blind men, many things to many people – indeed, a screen on which human vanities and fears are projected. Some villagers, overhearing bits of a conversation about the elephant-headed Indian god Ganesha, come to believe that Solomon is God. One priest nearly loses his life in trying to exorcise the devil from Solomon's soul. Another tries to enlist the elephant in performing a cunningly man-made miracle, just so that the authority of the Catholic Church may be reaffirmed (many of Saramago's best jokes are those aimed at the self-importance of church and state).

But the book's pleasures are mainly rooted in the narrator's playful spirit and his rejection – repeatedly played for laughs – of most of the rules of conventional novelistic exposition. We hear a voice that is gnomic, dryly witty, rich in proverbs and zany maxims ("The same thing happens with good ideas, and, on occasions, with bad ones, as happens with democritus' atoms or with cherries in a basket, they come along linked one to the other"). It is a voice given to gusts of whimsy and anachronistic observation, fastidiously laying out all the possibilities of a situation with qualifiers ("in the unlikely but not impossible event of", "always assuming that"), and then breaking up this rhythm with sudden pistol shots: "He went plof and vanished. Onomatopoeia can be so very handy." When I came across the simple declarative sentence "The snow began to fall" at the end of one chapter, I was astonished and made a mark in the margin.

Jull Costa's English, too, has an energy and a verve that rings in the ears long after the book has been put down. Her translation, like many other translations of linguistically rich books, also expands the common vocabulary and sonic possibilities of the target language, employing words and rhythms that are beyond the range of most contemporary novelists in English.

"It must be said that history is always selective," says the narrator at one point, "and discriminatory too, selecting from life only what society deems to be historical and scorning the rest, which is precisely where we might find the true explanation of facts, of things, of wretched reality itself. In truth, I say to you, it is better to be a novelist, a fiction writer, a liar." This is as close as Saramago comes to articulating a philosophy for his fiction. In The Elephant's Journey, it is the stoical mahout Subhro whose experience - like that of other figures outside the grand narratives of the past, like Raimundo Silva in The History of the Siege of Lisbon, or Baltasar and Blimunda in the novel of that name - allows us to access what the Indian historian Ranajit Guha calls "the small voice of history". Such works should never go plof and vanish.

An interview with Margaret Jull Costa is here.

On the novels of Irène Némirovsky

This piece appears this weekend in The National.
 

The French novelist Irène Némirovsky died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, but, through one of those quirks of fate with which the history of literature is replete, her reputation only began to approach its zenith in 2004. That year saw the publication of Suite Française, an unfinished novel about the experiences of French fugitives during the German occupation of 1940. Némirovsky worked on it while she was on the run herself. It possessed, even in its incompleteness, a Tolstoyan scope and intensity.

For depth of feeling, concision of expression (the novel’s wide-angle opening sentence is only four words: “Hot, thought the Parisians”), and agility of narrative technique, Suite Française was difficult to forget. It immediately inspired an intense curiosity about Némirovsky’s earlier novels, of which there seemed to be a great number. The author was only 39 when she died but she had published roughly a novel every year in a career that lasted 16 years. How did she arrive at her extraordinary powers? What kinds of continuity existed between the earlier works and the later? Did the trademark Némirovskian narrator’s philosophical apprehension of life, which appears fully formed in the late books, come into its own piece by piece, or in one great leap?

New translations of Némirovsky’s books, delivered at the author’s own rate of one a year by her translator Sandra Smith, are slowly allowing readers in English to answer all these questions. Unlike Némirovsky’s contemporary audience we move backwards into her oeuvre, reading books that are smaller in scale and emotional range than her final works (including the majestic All Our Worldly Goods, one of a small shelf of novels in world literature that provide an extended portrait of a happy marriage). Nevertheless, these novels provide their own distinct emphases and satisfactions alongside their weaknesses. Jezebel, written mid-career in 1936, is the latest to emerge.

The very title of the novel appears to condemn its protagonist, the beautiful society lady Gladys Eysenach, whom we meet in a courtroom as she stands trial for the murder of her much younger lover. This opening scene is unusual in Némirovsky for the length of time – about 40 pages – that she holds the same frame. In most of her work she cuts from scene to scene (and often forward in time, too) as rapidly as in a film. But here we feel we are watching a play and we take our cues from the courtroom audience, who have flocked to the galleries in anticipation of a satisfyingly sordid spectacle.

The murder and its motivations are carefully reconstructed, and all the people in Gladys’s life take their turn to speak. Although the accused often flinches, she does not deny her guilt. There are the usual flashes of striking observation. When the judge asks Gladys to take off her hat, her chambermaid, sitting in the audience, moves instinctively to help her mistress before she realises where she is.

Although the trial is for murder, it is also, we see, a prosecution by men of a woman, by bourgeois society of someone who has violated its unwritten codes, and by the crowd of a scapegoat. The trial is about law, but beneath that it is about the complacency of public moralism. Némirovsky’s work, even as it attends to the thoughts of individuals in the manner natural to fiction, also often gives voice to what people think as a mass, usually in a way that exposes their biases. Here, when there suddenly appears on Gladys’s face a sly expression that was “the stock image of a murderer”, the crowd, we are told, “felt even more confident that they had the right to judge her”. When the sentence is passed, the crowd leaves, satisfied. But the narrator wants to tell us more.

The French filmmaker Jacques Becker once said: “In my work I don’t want to prove anything except that life is stronger than everything else.” He might have taken this thought from Némirovsky. In Suite Française, when the teenager Hubert Péricand breaks down in impotent rage because he has not taken up arms against the Germans, the dancer Arlette Corail consoles him: “What can we do? … first and foremost we have to live … to go on …” “First and foremost we have to live” is a thought that echoes throughout Némirovsky. From Ada Sinner in The Dogs and the Wolves to Golder in David Golder, her characters are conscious of all the beautiful things that life has to offer, of the enormous need in their own natures, and of the constant pressure of time upon existence. Life, for them, is stronger than everything else, and they will often transgress to keep the flame burning.

Gladys Eysenach represents this lust for life at its negative extreme. She is animated, but then gradually deformed, by the intensity of her desire to cheat time of its due. A great beauty, she enjoys a glittering youth, marries well, and has several love affairs after her husband passes away in middle age. She revels in her power over men, whose ardour is what gives her life its sweetness, but cannot stand anything that shows up her real age. She tries, for instance, to deny that her teenage daughter Marie-Therese is growing into a woman herself (Némirovsky appears to have drawn this detail from the conduct of her own mother, who dressed her in children’s clothing until she was well into her teens).

When Marie-Therese wants to marry early, Gladys implores her to wait a few years, just so that she may enjoy her own youth a little longer. Later, when her daughter dies in childbirth, Gladys has the baby sent away because it reminds her that she is now a grandmother. We see Gladys thinking, as a 20-year-old: “Leave me alone! I want my pleasure!” Forty years later she is still thinking the same thing. She cannot submit gracefully to the stages of adult life, and so turns herself first into a monster of egotism, later a figure of pathos.

In the novel’s most grotesque scene, we see Gladys camped one night outside the home of her Italian lover, Aldo Monti. Monti has repeatedly beseeched Gladys to marry him but she has always refused, fearing that his regard for her will disappear when he discovers her real age. Monti is out of the house, but he returns at dawn with Jeannine, the wife of one of his friends, a woman less than half Gladys’s age. Gladys is about to confront the couple when something stops her. “Jeannine could cry,” she thinks. “Jeannine wasn’t even 30. Her tears would make Monti feel tenderness towards her. But she, Gladys, couldn’t forget that tears made her make-up run down her cheeks.”

Jezebel is a slight work by Némirovsky’s standards. At times the narration has a perfunctory air, and the author might herself have conceded that the story becomes claustrophobic, hewing too closely to the protagonist’s perspective (this problem is solved in later books by a stronger narratorial voice and beautiful swoops into the lives of minor characters).

Yet the effort invested in the novel’s structure – Némirovsky loves the lash of an uncoiling plot, and the challenges of distracting the reader from perceiving the shape of things before the moment of revelation – yields rich rewards. Also on display is the trademark panache in managing narrative time, within a demanding story that covers over 40 years in the life of the protagonist. Indeed, it is a kind of beautiful paradox about Jezebel that narrative time should be managed so expertly in a story about a woman whose tragic flaw is that she can’t accept its passage at all.

Remembering Jose Saramago

The Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, one of the twentieth century's greatest writers, passed away last week. I first came across his work as a student in England in 2000, when I bought most of his novels, in beautiful paperback editions published by The Harvill Press (now Harvill Secker, and not quite the same thing), in a garage sale. They seemed to me to express a wholly original sensibility and a fruitful impatience with many fossilised novelistic conventions, and this taught me a great deal. The last Saramago novel I read, and delighted in writing about, was the wondrous Death At Intervals, in which he gave body, life and voice to that spectre that flits in the margins of our consciousness all our lives, death.

Here is an old post on one of Saramago's most charming books, "Jose Saramago's Unknown Island", and here is a link to his lovely meditation on literature delivered when he won the Nobel Prize in 1998, "How Characters Became the Masters and The Author Their Apprentice" ("Now I can clearly see those who were my life-masters, those who most intensively taught me the hard work of living, those dozens of characters from my novels and plays that right now I see marching past before my eyes, those men and women of paper and ink...").

On Vasily Grossman's Everything Flows

A slightly different version of this piece appeared last weekend in The Sunday Telegraph.

Any history of twentieth-century Russia must open by marking and comparing two groups of citizens within the former Soviet Union. There were, on the one hand, those Russians who adapted their lives successfully to the dogma and paranoia of the perennially looming, all-consuming Soviet state, and on the other, those who fell afoul of it and were made to serve in labour camps, jailed, or killed.

As Vasily Grossman’s scathing and sorrowful novel Everything Flows shows, these two groups were not independent of each other. Often a man might make a move up in his own life by writing a “denunciation” that suspected, and merely by alleging went a long way towards proving, the conspiracy or treason of another.

People thus feared not only the state, but also their own neighbours. In the “people’s state”, the most innocent words were sounded in whispers, and the simplest freedoms disabled. Everything Flows, which was still being revised by Grossman when he died in 1964, is an unforgettable examination of both the perverse machinations and the moral agony of a hollowed-out humanity.

Like Rip Van Winkle, the protagonist of Everything Flows, Ivan Grigoryevich, leaves society a young man and returns elderly, bowed, and perplexed. His exile, though, has not been one of sleep, but of thirty years in Stalin’s Gulag for a trivial offence. His life has been shredded by the state: his mother is dead, his lover long ago married someone else.

In a striking passage, he goes to Moscow to see his cousin, the prospering scientist Nikolay Andreyevich. Nikolay offers him a confused welcome, while his wife Maria Pavlovna worries that “if Ivan did use their bath, they’d never be able to get the bath properly clean again, neither with acid, nor with lye.” That last qualifying phrase about acid and lye might have been left out by a lesser writer, but it is precisely this that brilliantly brings alive Maria Pavlovna’s pinched hospitality. The detail is cleanly double-sided, managing simultaneously to be both a justification and a condemnation of Maria Pavlovna's conduct. We begin to see how fiction can really be made to work in a layered, mind-expanding way.

Grossman was a bold, unconventional writer, and the form of his book echoes its title, ingeniously employing a variety of narrative lenses as it winds in and out of the corridors of a society feeding upon itself. One chapter unforgettably describes the days of a young mother in a labour camp; another is a meditation on a thousand years of Russian history and the country’s “slave soul”; and a third supplies an intriguing study of Lenin’s personality. This is a genuinely visionary work of art, and a worthy sequel to Grossman’s magnum opus Life and Fate.

An excerpt from Everything Flows, published in the Russian-English literary journal Cardinal Points, is here. A long interview with Grossman's translator Robert Chandler, whose services to Russian literature are immense (he is also the translator of works by Pushkin, Nikolai Leskov, and Andrey Platonov) is here.

And some other essays on Russian literature: on Nikolai Gogol's "The Overcoat", "A Kiss in Chekhov", "The sweet voice and harsh words of Osip Mandelstam", "On Hamid Ismailov's The Railway", and on EE Cummings's Russian travelogue Eimi.

And two longer essays on what the work of translation means for literature in general and for Indian literature in particular are, respectively, here and here.

On Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes

In one story in Kazuo Ishiguro’s new book Nocturnes, the narrator, a small-time musician who plays in cafés, looks around at his supporting cast and explains, “Playing together every day like this, you came to think of the band as a kind of family.” Of course, it is not only among musicians that music generates feelings of intimacy, tenderness, fraternality—a kind of higher awareness of both the present moment and an overarching continuity. To an extent that the rational side of our minds can never fully explain, our moods sometimes vault dramatically when we hear a melody, the tremor in a singer’s voice makes a hundred memories or regrets come flooding back, and the shape of a tune can make the most banal phrases appear as if they are exploding with significance.

In his new book, Ishiguro, who in his youth nurtured dreams of being a singer-songwriter, conjures up a set of stories about the power of music to bind, console and heal. The word “nocturne” means “a musical composition of a dreamy character”. It struck me that the protagonists of the stories here are not just players of nocturnes; their lives are themselves nocturnes. Some of them are young musicians of modest talent who know that they will never be stars; others are middle-aged drifters whose lives are gently washed by regret. Ishiguro explores the implications of this for their self-perceptions, their friendships, and their marriages in a way that is simultaneously tender and comic.

Like a vibrating guitar string, these stories are never stable or stationary. There is a twist or turn, usually minor but slowly expanding in significance, on nearly every page, as the narrators (all the stories are told in the first person) work out, sometimes not very well, what is happening to their lives. In the story called "Nocturne", we see a middle-aged saxophonist, Steve, whose career has come to a standstill not because he is not good enough, but perhaps because he is not good-looking. Steve’s wife eventually falls for the charms of a richer and better-looking man, but both of them feel so guilty that her paramour offers, as a kind of compensation, to pay for some plastic surgery for Steve. Steve’s agent thinks this is quite a good deal given that Steve is going to lose his wife anyway. After some resistance, Steve finally succumbs and gives himself a new face in the mirror.

Recovering after his operation, Steve finds himself in the room next to the celebrity Lindy Gardner, who is one of those children of the media age who are famous despite having done nothing of significance. Seeing that he and Lindy are now in the same boat, Steve realizes “the scale of my moral descent”. But the despised Lindy turns out to be surprisingly good company, and eventually turns into a kind of confessor figure for him. Ishiguro’s deceptively light and easy touch draws the reader in right away, and much of his dialogue is of an exceptionally high order.

Another story, "Malvern Hills", offers the pleasures of a familiar Ishiguro device seen, for instance, in his novel The Remains of the Day— that of the unreliable narrator. This kind of story features a complex first-person narration where, although we have no other information than that which is being provided by the person who is telling the story, we can nevertheless tell that he is not interpreting life accurately. When carried out skillfully, this makes fiction more stimulating and rouses the reader to activity, because it is as if we are reading a story and constructing an alternative version of it at the same time. Simultaneously, we come to understand, philosophically, how our sense of the world depends so much on subjective perception.

The narrator of "Malvern Hills" is a young, self-involved, hard-up songwriter who goes to spend the summer in a hotel in the countryside run by his sister and her husband. Although he is the one who is being helped out, he quickly comes to resent the few duties thrust upon him, and feels that the artist in him is being suffocated. “It seemed clear I’d been invited here on false pretences,” he thinks, and we laugh at this and commiserate with him at the same time.

At a number of points in Nocturnes, the characters express a preference popular music— evergreen ballads, Broadway hits, the work of “those old pros [who] knew how to do it”—over more challenging and difficult forms. The idea implicit in these gestures is that we often overlook the extent to which music we think of as “easy” is itself the result of great craft and discipline. After six novels, Ishiguro is now an old pro, and as these smoothly tossed-off and beguiling stories demonstrate, he too knows just how to do it.

And here are some older posts on other short-story writers: Daniyal Mueenuddin, Nikolai Gogol, Samrat Upadhyay, Etgar Keret, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, Alaa Al Aswany, Mridula Koshy, Chekhov, Manjushree Thapa, Jahnavi Barua, and Houshang Moradi-Kermani.

On Irène Némirovsky’s All Our Worldly Goods

Extended depictions of successful marriages are very rare in fiction. This is not just because good marriages themselves are rare, or because marital discord and misunderstanding is itself a favoured subject for fictional inquiry—an opportunity to observe the workings of the self as it rubs up against that other with which it is most intimate; a way to probe the gulf between the private thought and the public word in adult life. In addition to all this, it must be said, it is difficult to bring out the richness of a fulfilling marriage in a way that is also dramatic. There is a reason why folk tales and romantic comedies end at the point of “and they lived happily ever after”—because beyond this point lies more difficult, ambiguous terrain not just for the couple but also for the form.

This is why, when, four chapters into Irène Némirovsky’s novel All Our Worldly Goods, her protagonists, Pierre Hardelot and Agnès Florent, decide to consecrate the unspoken affection they have shared since childhood, and marry in defiance of Pierre’s family, we ask: What now? We feel that Némirovsky has either played her cards too soon, or she is setting these two young people up for a fall.

But remarkably, this is not the case. Némirovsky’s novel begins in a small town in France called St.Etienne at the beginning of the 20th century, and over the next three decades everything around Pierre and Agnes will change shape and colour—crises of livelihood, the death of parents, troubles with children, the horror of two World Wars in which Pierre and then his son are, respectively, mobilized—except for what is shared between them. The tenderness and awe that Pierre feels on his wedding night as he wakes up and contemplates the sleeping figure of his beloved runs like a winding thread across place and time, all the way to the closing scene of the novel, in which, after many months of separation and of fearing the worst, Pierre and Agnes find each other still alive.

Némirovsky’s own life story is no less poignant. She was born in 1903, the daughter of Russian Jews who escaped just after the Russian Revolution and moved to France. In relative youth she wrote a string of successful novels, but she was captured by German troops in World War II and met a gory end at Auschwitz, Poland, in 1942. A notebook snatched up by her daughter as the family fled their house remained unopened for more than 50 years, when it revealed itself to be not a diary but a pair of finished novellas. This work, translated into English as Suite Française in 2006, proved an enormous success, and led to the republication and translation of Némirovsky’s earlier works, including All Our Worldly Goods. Contemporary fiction is all the richer for this belated injection of Némirovsky’s work into its bloodstream.

Némirovsky’s work is distinctive and unforgettable for many reasons. She is interested not only in individuals but also their milieu; All Our Worldly Goods also traces the fortunes of the Hardelot family and the business it owns, and repeatedly cuts away for a page or two at a time into memorable portraits of minor characters ( to my mind the way in which a realist novelist deals with such characters is often a good way of understanding the depth of her engagement with her material).

Further, Némirovsky has the courage, both in this book and in Suite Francaise, to write about the present moment as if it were already historical. She began All Our Worldly Goodsl in 1940, when France was already occupied by German troops, and some the action of the book takes place in the same year—indeed, we are given a fairly comprehensive portrait of what the war is like. The wonder of this would have been apparent to her first readers in French; reading it now, we forget that the war she is describing is the same war that took her life.

Lastly, like all the great realist novelists, Némirovsky alights upon situations we all know and makes them come alive with some marvellous perception. For instance, Guy, Pierre’s son, comes home on leave from the front, and is told by his wife, Rose, that she is pregnant. Guy cannot think of anything to say but “I’m very happy” over and over again, but he does so “without looking at her, feeling oddly shy”, and so much is contained in this paradoxical and yet truthful observation.

This moment parallels one from much earlier in the book, when Pierre comes home from the war (this is World War I) for the first time. Although he has arrived, we see Agnès standing still “in the dark hallway, pressed against the door that was about to open”—she wants to hold on to this moment of delicious anticipation, because every moment after this will be turned towards her husband leaving again. Némirovsky’s writing is full of such delicate and daring surges, beautifully rendered by Sandra Smith’s translation from the French.

The title of Némirovsky’s book (Les Biens de ce monde in French) is worth contemplating. At the most basic level it gestures at the human need for material security and the use, within families and societies, of economic power as social force. Marriages are considered good or bad on grounds of class; Pierre’s grandfather threatens to disinherit him when he decides to marry beneath his station; families are repeatedly shown gathering up their most precious possessions as they flee from war—all these are illustrations of the title.

But “goods” can also be understood in a different way, as—to take a phrase in the novel itself—“all the good things of this world”, both tangible and ineffable. The trust and faith of relationships, the memories of sweetness and darkness we carry, the simple round of actions and exchanges that see us through the day—these too are our worldly goods, and Némirovsky’s novel successfully balances both these planes of existence to open out for us a vision of "the good".

And some links: here is the website of a wonderful exhibition running in New York till March 22, 2009, called "Woman of Letters: Irène Némirovsky and Suite Francaise". Among the things worth seeing online are the manuscript of Suite Francaise, with its hand-drawn map of France made by the author (there is a good deal of cross-country movement in the book), the pages crammed from top to bottom with tiny handwriting (Némirovsky must have feared running out of paper), and the lines running on blank paper from left to right and sagging in the middle like clothes lines. Ruth Scurr has an excellent essay called "Irène Némirovsky In The Woods" which discusses, among other things, Némirovsky's love of of Katherine Mansfield and also Chekhov (of whom she wrote a biography). JM Coetzee's essay "Irène Némirovsky: The Dogs and the Wolves" is here, and Paul La Farge's "Behind The Legend" here.

Lastly, as a kind of counterpoint, John Mullan's essay "Ten of the best marital rows in literature".

[A shorter version of this piece appears today in Mint.]