“Lust, Caution" by Eileen Chanag - review (sort of)

“Lust, Caution" by Eileen Chang:

In the midst of the Japanese occupation of China and Hong Kong two people meet, for very different reasons, Wong Chia Chi, a young student active in the resistance, and Mr. Yee, a powerful political figure who works for the Japanese occupational government.

Wong Chia Chi earlier in her life fell in love with the theater, so that now, at the cost of her own life, she acts out in reality her stage role in a treacherous spy ring of wartime Shanghai. Chia Chi spends her days mixing with high-societal ladies who spend most of their time discussing jewelery and mah-jong. Occasionally she meets Mr. Yee for romantic reasons. Her real aim, her task, though is to lure Mr. Yee to a place where he can be assassinated. At the last moment she changes her mind, warns him and saves his life only to loose hers in the end.

While the prose is easy without being overly poetic I never really cared for any of the characters, no emotions were kindled nor any resonance evoked. There were far too many characters in this short novella and even while writing this review, I’m struggling to remember their names.

The plot, as an idea, is a good one but the handywork leaves much to be wished for. There is no suspense, no drive, the whole thing is quite boring to read. Suspicion about the publication sets in, all the pretty word hype accompanying the publishing of this novella seem now, after having read the book, just that: empty words meant to promote the book after the movie by Ang Lee, which is based on the story, was met with approval and success. 

I was not gripped.

I do understand, though how Ang Lee the film director, could make a good movie out of this foundation. There is much to find, fill out and explore in the concept, in the idea of the story. The novella did not exploit these possibilities and thus made only a meager construct. Luckily it was a very short novella.

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"Doktor Faustus" by Thomas Mann - review

 “Doktor Faustus” by Thomas Mann:

This is, among so many other things, a fictional biography of the composer Adrian Leverkühn, who devotes himself to the devil. It is a well-educated, wonderfully composed, profound and tragic tale.

In following all the stages of development of the old Faust saga Thomas Mann links them with the threats and problems of our (that) time, the turn of a highly and overdeveloped national spirit to archaic primitivity and cruelty, resulting in awful disaster. The time frame are the years from 1884 to 1945, roughly Thomas Mann’s period. The book is Thomas Mann’s last great novel and was first published in 1947. The original title at first publication was „Doktor Faustus - Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn“ - erzählt von einem Freunde”. (“Doktor Faustus - The Life Of The German Composer Adrian Leverkühn As Told By A Friend”). 

The work is suffused with Mann's moral despair over his country's complacent embrace of Nazism and can be read as an allegory of how it came to be and how it came into being that Germany sold its humanity and soul. 

Thomas Mann himself called his novel a book of life of almost criminal ruthlessness, a strange kind of transferred autobiography, a work that “cost me more and consumed me more than any previous one." This feeling, that this was something which really had his greatest interest, energy and sympathy, is noticeable throughout the book.

I bow my head in awe and humility to this book. It took me a long time to read it, not in actual hours but in the time to be right for me to want to read, to finally read, understand, reflect and lastly highly appreciate it. This book shows what literature is capable of, what heights can be reached and what achievements can be made, what literature as an art form should strive for. 

All is told by the third person narrator Serenus Zeitblom, the dear humanist friend and companion of the composer Adrian Leverkühn from childhood on. 

Through this friend, through reflective distance we get to know Adrian Leverkühn, a clever, aloft, proud spirit, isolated, brilliant, overreaching, someone who is too clever for almost any profession, the work of a composer included. Leverkühn is filled with the artistic urge for creating -  without any inhibitions, without any regards to tradition or history, ruthlessly. He is a radical in the utmost sense. Leverkühn, in a Faustian pact bargains, after having, almost willingly contracted syphilis, his soul and the possibility to love for achievement of 24 years of unparalleled grandiose musical accomplishment.

There could be noticed, if so wanted, an allusion to the fascist intoxication which befell the peoples on the political level of the book. Apart from the political, though, many other levels permeate this book:

There is the ostensible re-telling of an old, typical German myth. 

There is the aspect of the Künstlerroman which lets us follow the life of the artist. 

There is the aspect of a social novel, there is life, there is art, there is philosophy, theology, musicology. 

There is a very extraordinary attempt to approach and describe music, in Mann’s opinion the most typical German of all art forms, with the means of prose and poetry and expose its role in society. Throughout the book there are enlightening passages which read like theoretical essays on art. 

There is indeed so much in this book, not least very much wisdom, that I find it impossible to give name to it all. It is also Mann's profound meditation on the German genius - a genius torn between profundity and form, both on the national and individual level.

The prose is absolute magical mastery, a highly intelligent, exquisitely fine-tuned machinery of words, beauty and the German language. Mann's known mastery in sentence structure is one thing but here he sometimes drives his linguistic finesse to the point of self-parody which gives the text additional charm. More than once I had moments of benign bliss that made me proud and happy to be capable to truly appreciate German. (I hear there are good translations, nevertheless). 

Impressive, frightening the moment when the Devil first makes its appearance, even seen through the reflections of an intellectually well-educated mind formed by the 20th century. Mann plays with virtuosity the psychology, the archetypical fear, the existential inferiority, the wavering metaphysic and conveys with bravura the feeling of being at the mercy of something fatefully inescapable, of doom.

Mann had the talent to assemble grandiose themes, knowledge, education and drama and fabricate out of them a wonderfully light-footed text, always entertaining, never becoming a boring show-off of style. A great book, a timeless classic, maybe one of the last few.

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"Königsallee" by Hans Pleschinski - review

 “Königsallee“ by Hans Pleschinski:

It is the summer of 1954 and Thomas Mann, Nobel laureate, 80 years old, out from his exile in Switzerland, Zürich, pays Düsseldorf a visit, together with his wife Katia and his daughter Erika. He intends a reading of his new novel “Felix Krull“  which is developing into a bestseller. 

It is sheer chance that at the same time Klaus Heuser stays in the same hotel, together with his lover Anwar. Heuser is shortly back from his own exile in Indonesia to visit his aging parents. 

Thomas Mann met Klaus Heuser back in 1927 at a beach on Sylt in Germany where he stayed for a holiday with his family and fell in love with the young man. He invited him to stay at his house in Munich and Heuser, who then was a handsome young man and beguiled many with his sweet looks and charms, became one of the great loves of Thomas Mann and served as model for the character in Mann’s Joseph novels. 

Although they stayed in loose contact and wrote letters to each other, neither Mann nor Heuser know the other is staying at the same hotel. And the escort of Thomas Mann, namely Erika and Katia Mann, want to prevent a meeting of them at all costs for fear of unforeseen complications. Mann’s politically difficult visit in Düsseldorf and post-war Germany is already stress enough and the great magician's equilibrium shall not be disturbed further.

Out of this scenario, based on real events and research of manuscripts and journals, Pleschinski spins an atmospheric lively tale full of remarkable figures and encounters. We meet cameos of Erika Mann, the daughter, of Katia Mann, the wife, of Golo Mann, the son, of Ernst Bertram, former writer, poet, professor in the service of Nazi Germany. They all have their own agenda to follow and so do the dignitaries of the city of Düsseldorf. 

The prose mirrors the times but also the depth and profundity the German language is capable of, a language which seems to be the only one possible to really be able to transport that which is so delightfully good in the German soul and at the same time so frighteningly bad. 

It is not only a novel about an unlikely encounter between two former lovers, it is also a novel about life, about literature, about fame and abdication. It is about the responsibility of the artist and the prize one has to pay for life, for success or fame. 

It is also a novel about the 50s in Germany. A very remarkable area, not necessarily a proud and acceptable one, saturated, soaked with falsehood, prudery, and a maybe, typical German righteousness and unwillingness to admit guilt and wrongdoing.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, for its surprising plot, for its lively, often humorous rendering of famous figures and its playfully great mastery of the German language.

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"Filthy Animals" by Brandon Taylor - review

 “Filthy Animals” by Brandon Taylor:

This collection of loosely linked short stories highlights momentary dramas of loosely connected young people. 

As in Normal People by Sally Rooney, these members of the younger/youngest generation act and live, connect and disconnect with a frightening speed under rules both bafflling and eluding immediate understanding. Maybe there are no rules at all. The lives of these people unfold for a short moment in sometimes banal, sometimes harsh and unforgiving, unsentimental or frightening ways and show them at their most vulnerable.

Underlying all these stories and glimpses of lives is a melancholy that stretches far beyond the normal lost feeling of coming-of-age. It is a melancholy that comes from being lonely. All these people are lonely, even in closest contact to each other or being in company. There is sadness and much suffering in this book, more mental than physical. Sometimes it seems that your worst enemy is the one that you love the most. Everyone seems under attack or is forced to be prepared to defend himself against attacks that will undoubtedly come. Throughout the book there is loneliness, alienation or hurtful, unsparing introspection. Many of the people we meet are queer or caught in a moment where they have to decide if the line between straight and gay should be crossed. 

These emotionally rich stories often concern the body, predominantly male but not always, and many pair vulnerability with brutality. What we learn from them is that vulnerability is part of life and only through it we might come to learn to connect and accept. 

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