“how to be both“ by Ali Smith - review

“How To Be Both” by Ali Smith:

What is first? What you see or how you see?

In this novel two narratives are set against each other – one of a troubled teenager, the other of a 15th century Italian fresco painter. At the beginning the reader is given the choice where to start reading, first the story about the girl following the story of the painter or vice versa. 

There is George, a bristly, highly intelligent teenage girl, whose mother has just died and who is left struggling to make sense of this death, together with her younger brother and her emotionally absent father, all still under shock.

And then there is Francesco del Cossa, an Italian renaissance artist, a real-life figure who painted a series of striking allegorical frescoes of the seasons in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, the palace to "escape from boredom" in Italy. Francesco also suffered from the far too early death of his beloved mother. 

I started with the painter’s narrative first and can only imagine now what my reading experience would have been like had I done differently. A futile thought, never to be resolved. 

What is relevant, though is that both narratives form, one way or other, a connection and resonate across time. 

At its heart How to Be Both challenges the binary notions which form the basic understanding of our world. Why should we expect a book to run from A to B, why should characters, traits, actions, be easily pigeonholed into male or female?

George has a boy’s name but is a girl on the onset of puberty and troubled by all the sweet insecurities that go with that age. Francesco, the Italian painter, when taken to a brothel for the first time by his childhood best friend, declines to sleep with the girls and rather draws them and not much later we learn that he is binding his chest with linen. Finally his best friend discovers his/her secret but they stay friends. Many of the figures in his paintings could be either male or female. Why not be both? It does not matter. 

Francesco, through the tricks writing is able to perform, as some sort of spirit, sees George for the first time in a gallery and takes her for a boy. Not by chance are the paintings exhibited there from the time period he comes from and not by chance does the boy/girl studies intensely his painting which is hanging there, too. 

“To be both“. The titular ambivalence or duality is the core of the book. Both intellectually challenging and emotionally moving, simultaneously mournful and full of positive energy, linguistically playful and deadly serious and furthermore, despite its innovative structural setting, the book is a joy to read. The duality does not stop in front of Death. In recalling a trip with her mother to see the frescoes of Francesco in Ferrara, Italy, George brings her back to life and through Francesco’s paintings he himself is resurrected, breathes and lives. George’s mother, a "renaissance woman" with degrees in art history and women's studies, draws her attention to the sexual symbolism and "constant gender ambiguities running through the whole work."

In an interesting twist the reader in the end is faced with the possibility that the narrative of Francesco might just be the imaginative fruit of George’s and her friend’s mind. They had been assigned an art/school project with the task to explore the dichotomy of Sympathy / Empathy. 

I personally preferred Francesco’s narrative for its seductive ability to bring to life a time and place quite different from my own. I liked it because I could easily identify with the artist and most of all I liked the voice, the beautiful poetic prose that conveys touchingly convincing how beauty can be found in almost anything. Only the eye and mind of an artist is needed. 

George’s narrative is, very appropriately and cleverly so, that of an adolescent contemporary schoolgirl, which is charming in itself and very often hilariously eye-opening. 

I liked this truly inventive, mesmerizing novel, dazzling in its scope and I was, as always, delighted by Smith’s penchant for puns. It has been a lovely experience. 

#robertfaeth, #painterinBerlin, #painting, #art, #bookblog, #bookreviews, #literaturelover, #poem, #poetry

“Summer“ by Ali Smith - review

“Summer” by Ali Smith:

Summer is the last in Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, all independent novels which nevertheless work together as a collage or symphony of overarching complex connections of voices and narratives that reflect our contemporary life.

In October 2016 Autumn was released, the first installment of this Seasonal Quartet. With it the shocking, inhumane events of the past four years had begun. There was Brexit, there was Donald Trump, there was migration, refugees and injustice, social upheaval and climate change. There was the pandemic and the lockdown. The latter two blend seamlessly in with Smith’s concern with isolation, community, migrants, refugees and the many ways of depriving people of their freedom. Against this political background Smith explores the personal experiences of many of her interesting, vivid, endearing characters. The Quartet’s concern is not primarily political but individual, personal, too. It is both public and private. It is about relationships and friendships, it is about grief, injustice, human warmth and cruelty but also about the healing powers of love, art, and decency. The last installment of the Quartet was released in August 2020 with Summer. 

Smith believes in art and its ability to deepen or highlight our understanding of the world and in every seasonal novel a piece of art or literature sets the tune or highlights a mood. Every volume in the Quartet provides meditations on the season for which it is named. In every volume there is imagery that underlines the specific character or essence of the season. 

Autumn catches the national shift of mood after the Brexit vote and tells of an impossible love and friendship across the generations between the worldly former songwriter of 101-years, Daniel Gluck, befriending the young, miserable girl Elizabeth. Art in this novel was represented by 60s pop artist Pauline Boty, colorful, playful and fleeting. 

In Winter, two estranged sisters who personify the rift in society between remainders and leavers, are changed by the appearance of the radiant girl Lux who helps thaw their icy Christmas gathering. Art here is represented by sculptor Barbara Hepworth, something solid to hold on to in difficult, shifting times. 

Spring focuses on the global migrant crisis and the abhorrent treatment of refugees. An artwork by Tacita Dean serves as a strong symbol of the avalanche, set off by the impact of Brexit and climate change. It is the seven metre-wide chalk-on-blackboard drawing The Montafon Letter, a “picture of a mountain so huge that the wall became mountain and the mountain became a kind of wall”. 

Summer throws us right into the pandemic and the lockdown. And as in the previous installments with their cyclical titles, Summer cannot other than be concerned with time itself. Time is one of the central themes here. It is no coincidence that Einstein’s writings feature prominently in this final installment, with his theory of movement in time and relativity. 

Questions:

What is the essence of time?

How are we attached to it?

What is our personal time?

Why can’t we remove ourselves from our time?

How do we come to understand what time is?

What do we do with time and what does it do with us?

Is death the end of a life?

What is the definition of a life?

It comes as no surprise to learn that our imagination is conceived, defined, confined and dependent on the Zeitgeist of our time. 

The artworks used in Summer to represent or indicate the tune are moving pictures, specifically the films of Italian director Lorenza Mazzetti whose life and work were marked by the Nazis' massacre of her family in 1944 and Charlie Chaplin’s films The Great Dictator and The Immigrant. Films are a good medium to record time but can be also used to conjure with time, to play tricks with it. The imagery evoked in the prose is often of meadows, grass, butterflies and trees that throw long English shadows on sloping hillsides, but there is nothing saccharine or kitschy about it. “Summer is like walking down a road towards light and darkness“, there is happyness but also tragedy, one cannot be had without the other.

We meet the two siblings, Sacha, 16 and Robert, 13, both brilliant and linguistically playful adolescents. Sacha is a typical woke child of her time and thinks the world is in big trouble. Her brother Robert, full of mischief, gets himself in trouble with his uncompromising, often racist, destructive behavior. His is an intelligent spirit in search for answers but at the same time a victim of bullying injustice at his school. He is a big fan of Einstein. When, in a prank Robert on Brighton beach, superglues an egg timer to Sacha’s hand (giving her “time on her hands ha ha”;  she responds in thanking him for this “bonding experience“), she is rescued by Art and Charlotte, the estranged couple whom we met in Winter, and this propels the characters, together with the mother of the siblings, off on a road trip to meet another character out of Autumn, 104-year-old Daniel Gluck, the neighbour girl Elizabeth and Art’s formidable Aunt Iris.

We also meet the sibling’s mother, Grace, a former liberal-minded actress turned Brexiteer with her store of memories that reach back to the late 80s. Now she lives alone with her two children, blaming the Brexit for the leaving of her husband who lives next door with a younger woman, even though he left her two years before the vote.

As with each of the previous novels, the present-day stories are juxtaposed with a period of history that resonates with the contemporary world. This time it’s the 1940s, when wartime Britain rounded up “enemy aliens” and detained them in the same facilities that later became the Immigration Removal Centres in Spring. We find Daniel Gluck, the 101-year-old whose deteriorating memories, dreams and transient realities we inhabited in Autumn, incarcerated as a young man with his father and many other Germans or men of German descendancy on the Isle of Man, at the Hutchinson Camp.

Of Daniel we learn that he once had a sister, Hannah, whom he lost to the war. They spoke of themselves as the summer brother and the autumn sister. In a strange reversal of roles, age and gender switched, David and Hannah resonate in Sacha and Robert and in a remarkable moment Robert, the 13-year-old walks into the room of the old man and is perceived by him as his lost sister.

This, as the volumes before it, has been a great joy to read. As always full of stories galore, radiant with wit and humour, thought-provoking puns and wordplay, lively dialogues, spirited and enlightened prose. It is a praise of memory, love, forgiveness, humour and hope. The pressure of finishing the last installment satisfactorily Smith has absolutely mastered with bravado. This Quartet is truly a significant literary achievement! 

#robertfaeth, #painterinBerlin, #painting, #art, #bookblog, #bookreviews, #literaturelover, #poem, #poetry

“Spring“ by Ali Smith - review

 “Spring” by Ali Smith:

After Autumn and Winter, Spring is the third installment of this Seasonal Quartet, all stand-alone, separate but interconnected novels. Like in the previous novels, in a symphony of voices and references Spring is also permeated by contemporary politics. 

In Autumn, a wonderful inspiring novel with a manyfold of little stories about the absurdities of live, about friendship, art, life and death, the referendum for the Brexit was brought on its way.

Then in Winter, also sparkling with wit, insight and little stories galore, a rift between remainders and leavers went through society. Now, in Spring the world is in upheaval, conflict and climate change force people to leave their home and migrants are on their way across continents, countries and borders, and seek life elsewhere. As always Smith delights with wit, insight, playfulness and her sheer joy in creating narratives.

Smith often uses a piece of art or literature to get us into a specific state of mind, to set a tune or highlight a mood:

While Autumn caught the national shift of mood after the Brexit vote, it was also a story of impossible love and friendship across the generations between the worldly former songwriter of 101-years, Daniel Gluck, befriending the young, miserable girl Elizabeth. Art in this novel was represented by 60s pop artist Pauline Boty, colorful, playful and fleeting. 

In Winter, two estranged sisters who personify the rift in society between remainders and leavers, are changed by the appearance of the radiant girl Lux who helps thaw their icy Christmas gathering. Art here is represented by sculptor Barbara Hepworth, something solid to hold on to in difficult, shifting times. 

Now here, in Spring, with its main focus on the global migrant crisis and the abhorrent treatment of refugees, an artwork by Tacita Dean serves as a strong symbol of the avalanche which is coming towards us, set off by the impact of Brexit and climate change. It is the seven metre-wide chalk-on-blackboard drawing The Montafon Letter, a “picture of a mountain so huge that the wall became mountain and the mountain became a kind of wall”. 

Autumn explored age-old questions about the nature of time in a symphony of memories, dreams and transient realities: What is time, how do we subjectively and objectively experience it, how are we caught in our personal time bubble? And then in Winter this feeling of isolation turned almost insularly claustrophobic, telling a story of family dysfunction under one roof. But now Spring leaves this isolation and sets out on a tale of redemption and hope, brought on by a child outsider of magical, almost Jesus-like dimension. 

There are three main characters in Spring, who gradually understand their capacity to reinvent themselves and to escape their situation:

Richard Lease, a television director who last enjoyed popular success in the ’70s. He is grieving the recent death of his closest friend and work-collaborator Paddy, a clever, wise, witty, independent woman. Richard half-heartedly works on a new TV script, a cheap, sexed-up fictionalization about the writers Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke who apparently had been in the same locality in Switzerland once but personally never met. Then he meets Florence. Then he embarks on a newfound course towards healing and helping. 

Brittany Hall, a twenty-something woman who works as a Detainee Custody Officer in an Immigration Removal Centre just outside London. She feels dead and her life reduced by the racial violence at her work that is keeping refugees in detention. She is tired and run down by the complicity in everyday violence but then too self-involved, resigned and lazy to really do something about it. She is aware that “something terrible was happening“ but “as if beyond perspex“ it feels “quite far away“. Then she meets Florence. Then she embarks on a newfound course towards healing and helping.

And there is mysterious, precocious Florence, a 12-year-old schoolgirl who one day walks into the detention centre, bypassing guards like a ghost. In her refreshing, intelligent, straightforward youthfulness she takes both, Richard and Brittany, outside of their own lives and makes them grow. She meets Brittany on a train station platform in London and persuades her on the spot to ride a train with her to Scotland. Here they intercept the suicidal attempt of Richard who wants to throw himself in front of the train. Florence writes stories in a notebook which sometimes pop up in Spring. Like the girl Lux in Winter she is a purifying light for almost anyone she meets. She “humanizes the machine”, makes individuals remember their humanity which they forgot or lost in their daily-life’s struggles. “She makes people behave like they should, or like they live in a different better world. “

In a voice that really gets under the skin the prose of Spring is blunter, more explicit, more polemically embittered in its use of foul language, than that of its predecessors. The spirited writing is still light in style, much as in Autumn and Winter, but has become more stinging, reflecting news speech, social media troll hate speech and fake news talk. The tune is not as subtle anymore as in Autumn or Winter and serves in Spring as a weapon to open up cracks in our consciousness gone cold and frozen in a post-Brexit, fake news world. It shocks, hurts and then it redeems. It “humanizes the machine” and makes us at least think about the possibility to avoid further inurement to division, injustice and indifference. 

Despite the injustice and cruelty of which we are made painfully aware in this novel, this is a tale which, true to the spirit of Spring, the great connector, the bringer of new life, is an offering of hope.

#robertfaeth, #painterinBerlin, #painting, #art, #bookblog, #bookreviews, #literaturelover, #poem, #poetry

“The Great Passion“ by James Runcie - review

 “The Great Passion” by James Runcie:

This book proved to be the right choice to read during Easter. I have always been a great admirer and connoisseur of the work of Johann Sebastian Bach. One could say that his idea on variations even triggered some ideas which led into some of my series in painting and video. So, yes, I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

It is historical fiction and at that it is very good. It provides a specific, expansive and convincing evocation of Leipzig in the 1720s, how it felt to live, breathe and die there, how daily life and death took their course, what society’s rules, value systems and believes consisted of. At times it felt a bit romanticized, but this might just be my own Sehnsucht, my nostalgic longing for a time long ago.

On the whole the novel is a great account of grief, loss, love and art. It is also a fictional journey that lets us witness the creation of one of the great masterpieces ever written for the celebration of Easter, “The St Matthew Passion“. With heart, soul and imagination Runcie evokes the design, the struggle, the overall mood and the total commitment to God, that poured into this piece. It is a piece designed to make the death of Jesus feel immediate, not as something that happened in a far away Palestine thousands of years ago in a different society, but as a tale of immediate relevance, straight out of the present. Listeners were meant to come to understand how it would be if Christ would be crucified every day.

It is 1726, Leipzig, Saxony, and young boy Stefan Silbermann, son of the famous organ maker Silbermann, after the tragic death of his mother, is sent by his father to Leipzig to there study music and train as a singer in the St. Thomas Church choir. The grief-stricken, still mourning boy is bullied relentlessly by the other students, for his appearance (he has very red hair), for no other reason as simply being new, and especially for his beautiful voice which they see as a threat to their own status.

His vocal talents are not lost on the attention of Johann Sebastian Bach, the school’s cantor. He takes the boy under his wings and provides shelter, emotional support and education in his own, very numerous and diverse family.

Through Stefan Liebermann’s voice we not only take part in the everyday life of the Bach family but also in the creation of one of the composer’s best-known vocal pieces.

It is a book that captures well the spirit of that time that was imbued with absolute and unwavering faith and trust in God's power and grace for all of His creation. It is not a religious book, though, it is just very good in conveying this all-permeating belief that culminated into one of mankind’s truly great pieces of art.

#robertfaeth, #painterinBerlin, #painting, #art, #bookblog, #bookreviews, #literaturelover, #poem, #poetry

“Poertrait of an Unknown Lady“ by María Gainza - a very brief impression

 “Portrait of an Unknown Lady” by María Gainza:

Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead, this is a novel about a high society con artist in 1960s Argentina. It is a narrative told through layered impressionistic vignettes by the narrator, an auction house employee in Buenos Aires, specializing in the verification of authenticity of art works, who is attracted to the sadness and strangeness of others.

The book tries to create a feeling for the life of a woman who seemed gifted to forge paintings and make a living off them. What are her motives, her motivation, what was her life, what is her link to the community of artists who gathered in bars in Buenos Aires or in a run-down hotel?

Despite sometimes interesting, philosophical musings on art, forgery or authenticity the book left me strangely untouched, nothing really resonated within me. That might be my shortcomings not that of the writer, but still, no lasting impression was gained.

#robertfaeth, #painterinBerlin, #painting, #art, #bookblog, #bookreviews, #literaturelover, #poem, #poetry

“The Family Chao“ by Lan Samantha Chang - review

 “The Family Chao” by Lan Samantha Chang:

In this thoroughly entertaining book, an immigrant family’s dreams are paid for in blood. The novel hovers between disturbing, profound family drama and surprising, unpredictable mystery. Despite the morbid plot that drives the story it is an entertaining, often humorous novel that pays homage to a Russian classic.

It is loosely based on but not a strict retelling of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, it is more of a reboot of the family drama with similar elements but different initials, transposed to a Chinese-American family. There are parallels such as the three brothers with their distinct personalities and their difficult, contentious, competitive and toxic relationships, the tyrannical and overbearing father, the passive mother and a mysterious outsider who plays a crucial role later in the play. And there is a courtroom trial. The pivotal event is the mysterious death of the family patriarch Leo Chao. The novel is full of memorable, complex characters, there is suspense, surprises, twists, family dynamics and human psychology.

Leo Chao, together with his wife Winnie, both Chinese immigrants, succeed in establishing a family restaurant in the small town of Haven, Wisconsin. The first half of the novel sets up the motivations for murder by establishing how obnoxious and tyrannical patriarch Leo Chao is, a very unpleasant person, whom no one likes.

He has three sons: 

Dagou, the oldest, handsome and the most reckless.

Ming, the middle one, accomplished and financially successful in New York.

James, the youngest, naive but the good and loving son, a natural peacemaker, studying medicine. 

Dagou unsuccessfully tried to make a living as a musician in New York but now, since his return to Haven six years ago, works as head chef in the family restaurant. Ming has left for Manhattan and is the one who the most broke free of family ties and the community of Haven which treated him, based on racist motivation, cruelly during his childhood. Ming and James are on their way to reunite in Haven for the annual Christmas party. 

James, on his way from university, is asked for directions by an older Chinese man at a Chicago train station, the old man falls down a set of stairs and dies leaving a bag with his life-savings in James’ possession, an event that forever will alter the lives of the Chao family. 

Their mother has left home, the family dog and her tyrannical husband to seek spiritual enlightenment in a Buddhist retreat for nuns. 

Dagou, to impress his father, the family and the community, is planning an extravagant Christmas party at the Fine Chao restaurant. Until up to the half of the book everything builds up towards this party. After the party Leo is found dead in the restaurant’s freezer room the following day and Dagou is charged with murder. 

While the first half of the novel focuses on the Chao family and Haven’s small Chinese population, the second half shows what happens when that community becomes the subject of scrutiny by neighbors and news of them spread to the wider world. As in Dostoyevsky’s novel, we follow the proceedings that  take place in the courtroom, complete with revelations of family secrets and betrayals. Questions of race and identity, community, assimilation and prejudice are discussed as the case against Dagou is heavily tinged with anti-Asian bias and stereotypes. But also fun is poked at some animal rights activists. When the Chao family dog disappears, wild rumors fly around town (it is hinted the Chaos have turned the dog into a dish) and a large section of people in the courtroom show more concern for the lost pet than the death of Leo, a former pillar of the community.

The novel gives insight into the precarious path that children of immigrants have to tread between fulfilling their parents’ dreams and accomplishing their own, between honoring the culture of their parents and becoming too American and thus unrecognizable to them.

And then there is the question what became of the bag of money and a mysteriously lost engagement ring.

The name Chao, which in the plural would make Chaos, seems to be well chosen for the state this family is in. Chaos in physics is a state that balances between order and randomness. It describes a system that may seem random or disordered, but is in fact deterministic and responds with sensitivity to conditions set at their initial start. The universe is not random or neatly ordered, but chaotic. Like life, like family.

I loved this book. For its story, for its humour, for its insights, for its psychology and sketching of family dynamics, for its suspense and twists and its palpable sheer joy in writing.

#robertfaeth, #painterinBerlin, #painting, #art, #bookblog, #bookreviews, #literaturelover, #poem, #poetry

”The Glass Hotel” by Emily St. John Mandel - review

 “The Glass Hotel” by Emily St. John Mandel:

“Sweep me up“! This words are scrawled with acid marker on a window pane by Vincent, one of the main protagonists of this extraordinary tale, by then a thirteen-year-old school girl who likes to shoot 5-minute-videos. Sweep me up, out of my life, take over control, give my life a direction, take me out of my present situation: a plea for change and the admittance of weakness in will. 

How would your life have been if this and that had happened differently, if you’d chosen this path instead of the other one? Alternate realities, permutations of events, what-ifs. These are, among others, themes in The Glass Hotel.

And we are being swept up by this tale. Swept up and into a long arc of narrative that begins in the titular Glass Hotel, a sparkling place on a remote Vancouver Island for the rich and wealthy who wish to flee civilization for a while and still stay among themselves. It is owned by Jonathan Alkaitis, a New York self-made entrepreneur in finance who, in his hubris lives in the firm assumption that no serious harm will come to him, that he’ll get by with his criminal Ponzi scheme, roughly based on the scheme of Bernard L. Madoff who in 2008 caused one of the biggest financial crisis of the century. The book is as much an exploration of the machinery of late neoliberalism leading into financial crisis as a journey into the mind and consciousness of ordinary people who became corrupted and took part in a crime, who simultaneously ”knew and not knew“ what was going on and what they were involved in.

Jonathan Alkaitis strikes up a relationship with the bartender Vincent, the teenager of years ago, now a young woman who, apart from shooting videos has not achieved much in life, has no sense of purpose but a strong sense for opportunities and is a sort of social chameleon. He leads her away from her job into the ”Kingdom of Money” and she spends the next three years with him until the day his scheme implodes, brings downfall and disaster to everyone and he gets arrested.

Where in the post-apocalyptic Station Eleven it was a pestilence, a virus, which got out of control, here it is a post-modern man-made criminal construct, a Ponzi scheme, which leads to devastation for many. Mandel introduces us to several characters involved criminally active in the crime itself or at its periphery like innocents, victims, by-standers, friends or relatives of the accused. In doing so she lends a realism to an abstract crime and shows how easily ordinary people can fall victim to corruption.

As in Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility different time zones appear, disappear, mingle, intercept. We are taken back in flashes to the past and projected forward to the future. We learn that Jonathan, decades later, dies in prison, that Vincent, too, dies thirteen years later in a storm on a ship. We learn of her artist brother Paul who made the beginning of his career with her stolen videos, we learn of the older brother of Jonathan who used to be a painter and died of heroin addiction. We meet Olivia, another painter who later became victim of Jonathan’s scheme. And of course we get close insights into the minds of Vincent and Jonathan. 

Ends and beginnings begin to overlap, possible and improbable outcomes of lives, alternate lifelines and life narratives are presented. Alkaitis, after years and years in his prison cell, conjures an alternity, a ”counterlife“, a luxurious dreamscape in which he meets ghosts of his deceased victims. 

It is a breathtaking narrative arc that goes forward and backward in time and geographically from the foggy wilderness of a Canadian island to the glass and steel high-rises of Manhattan to a South Carolina prison. From lives lived in abundance and wealth to lives on the brink of extinction this tale circles back to its beginning in a beautifully if hauntingly resolved end. It is a dramatic and ingenious tale of how weak, fragile, fleeting, precarious and easily changeable everything is.

#robertfaeth, #painterinBerlin, #painting, #art, #bookblog, #bookreviews, #literaturelover, #poem, #poetry

”Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John Mandel - review

 “Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John Mandel:

I really liked this novel. I did like her first one, Station Eleven, too. But with this one she convinced me and won me over.

Maybe after two wartime novels and a rather bleak depiction of a corrupt Indian society, still in the afterglow of a pandemic and the start of the horrible war in the Ukraine I needed a respite from the news and get my mind off things for a while, flee reality, go to some place (admittedly still dystopian in flavour), away from harsh reality and loose myself in a nice adventure story and philosophical ponderings on issues like time and time travel, the meaning and quality of life or the concept of life lived in a simulation.

It is speculative fiction but it is good at it. All starts as a common detective story and by half-way through the book we find ourselves entangled in a tale of alternate, strangely intercepting and mutually repercussing time periods and live experiences which all in the end fit together and turn back on their beginning. A very clever tale, beautifully rendered and satisfyingly resolved in the end.

On the front it is a Science Fiction tale, in total it is much more. The author uses time travel and other sci-fi themes to ask age-old questions about how we create meaning and attach it to life.

As in her previous novel Station Eleven different time zones are generated which connect, intercept and affect each other in unforeseen ways. The past isn’t just prologue, it’s the present and future, too. There are notes and quotes which repeat across time, much like musical notes in a fugue.

Sea of Tranquility follows four separate storylines and opens on a young British man, Edwin St. John St. Andrew who seeks himself in a faraway land, but does not succeed. In 1912 he travels to Canada and there, on a small island in a dark forest he experiences a strange suite of sensory, inexplicable events, the anomaly as we later learn, and meets a man named Gaspery Roberts. 

Gaspary Roberts himself comes from the far future and is a time traveler from the year 2401. He’s investigating a cosmic anomaly, a space-time rupture or, as his physicist sister Zoey explains it, a “file corruption,” which may provide evidence that the universe is a simulation. 

On his course to unravel this anomaly he meets various people in different time zones, a teenager video-artist named Vincent, an aging violinist who performs in an airship terminal and a novelist who writes about pandemics. They all are connected unknowingly by and to that anomaly.

The novel is a pleasure to read. The characters are lively and memorable. The prose is eloquent, the pace fast, the narrative captivating and surprising. This is a book which uses sci-fi themes but is more interested in the psychology of its characters than in building or depicting strange future worlds. 

 At the end of the book, one character says, pondering the question what a life lived in a simulation would be: ”If definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what? A life lived in simulation is still a life.” Famous American poet Wallace Stevens once said that reality is ”things as they are”. This seems to be the main theme: That artifice not necessarily shuts out meaning. 

One of the most resonating sentences with me in that book was its last one: 

”I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.“

It brings to mind another great poet, T. S. Eliot, and the beginning of his long passage in The Four Quartets:

… “At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, …

… Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

                                   But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know. .... "

A truly enjoyable book. Hugely satisfying both as an adventure tale and an intellectual play on time, life and metaphysics.

#robertfaeth, #painterinBerlin, #painting, #art, #bookblog, #bookreviews, #literaturelover, #poem, #poetry

”The White Tiger" by Aravind Adiga - a brief impression

 “The White Tiger” by Aravind Adiga:

The White Tiger won the 2008 Man Booker Prize, and there must have been some reason for the judges’ choice. Maybe they thought it avant-garde, new, fresh, socio-political relevant or eye-opening. 

I’m not condemning the novel. It is a light, especially in the beginning, often amusing and entertaining read with a fresh, cheeky voice. And for a debut novel quite an achievement. It is a satirical bildungsroman, a vicious critique of contemporary India under global capitalism. I recognize it for what it is meant to be, a parable, a satire and mirror of Indian society in change. But it left me only with the reinforced feeling that I would never want to live in India.

It is the story of Balram Halwai, now an Bangalore entrepreneur and part time philosopher, then a poor boy in a village in the north of India. His family is too poor to afford letting him finish his education and he has to work in a tea shop and wipe tables until one day he manages to be hired by a rich man as a chauffeur and goes to Delhi. 

There he immediately becomes aware of the immense wealth and opportunity all around him, while knowing that he will never be able to gain access to that world. The India portrayed is one of bribery, corruption and huge social injustices. 

So he makes the decision to murder his master and start a business of his own from the money robbed. With apparently great success. 

That is the newness of the novel, the voice of someone who is amoral, cynical and unrepentant. And getting the reader’s endearment and sympathy in spite of that. 

Still, it left me with nothing more than a little smirk in my face, soon to be forgotten. 

#robertfaeth, #painterinBerlin, #painting, #art, #bookblog, #bookreviews, #literaturelover, #poem, #poetry

”The Undertaking" by Audrey Magee - review

 “The Undertaking“ by Audrey Magee:

Another novel by Audrey Magee, her first, after I’ve read her second, The Colony.

I admit that I enjoyed The Colony much more. Not because it is a better book or better written or better in storytelling or better in any which way. The Undertaking is a good book, a very good one. It is in contrast to The Colony just so sad, so awfully, hurtfully honest, relentlessly sad in the way it shows what miserable, egotistic creatures we humans are, so easy in forgetting and throwing overboard former believes and goals, so easily ready to leave behind our sense of moral for the promise of security, wealth, power and personal well-being.

This is the second book in a row I have read now that deals with themes related to warfare and survival. It’s not that I don’t see the necessity to remind people that once there had been different times. Books like this are necessary. They must hurt. They must drive home at least a little of the sorrow and hurt and devastating loss people experienced at those times. We live in comparatively secure, peaceful times here in Germany, now. Although the war in the Ukraine is going on for almost 5 weeks now and the images which are dealt to us via the news are in no way any softer or less hurtful than the tales in this book. Maybe that is why this novel has had an additional strong impact on me and left me, temporarily, with a sense of hopelessness. Shall we ever learn?

It is shortly after the beginning of Second World war, Germany. Peter Faber, out on the eastern front, is married to Katherina Spinell in a ceremony carried out by an army chaplain, a photo of Katherina serves as proxy while she attends a similar ceremony in Berlin with a photo of Peter. They marry both for very different reasons. They have never met before but he wants leave from the front and she wants a widow’s pension in case he dies. 

When they, on his leave, do meet, they are both surprised that they instantly like each other and fall in love. Peter, after an extended leave, has to go back to the front with her promise that she’ll wait for him and she stays behind in the apartment she shares with her parents, in Berlin, awaiting the birth of their child and his return.

But then the war goes on, not at all as planned and we follow Peter’s arduous struggle through Russia, the fighting, the killing, the siege of Stalingrad in the terrible Russian winter and all the inhuman acts, all the atrocities which were committed on both sides and which come with war. In stark contrast to that we follow Katharina on her well-pampered way in Berlin, protected at first by the Nazi friends of her father and her husband. We learn of the everyday cruelty, not felt as such by her, towards Jews. We learn of how easily and unthinkingly people in favour of the Nazis could take over the lives, the apartments, the belongings of Jews who had been deported.

Then times change for the worse in Berlin, too. The war is drawing to an end, Katharina’s by then 2-year-old son whom his father never saw, dies of meningitis and she is raped by the Russians after Berlin had been taken. Peter, after almost 9 years away in Russian captivity, returns home to a wife who still waits for him in the old apartment. But although both are delighted to see each other everything has changed. She meanwhile has an 8-year-old son as a result of the rape and Peter is unable to adapt to the new circumstances and leaves her and Germany.

The narration is often told in a disconcertingly deadpan tone, exposing and condemning in its simplicity and more brutal in its impact for that. It highlights the moral blankness of both, Peter and Katherina, but it also, mercyfully puts their victims at some remove. 

The novel does not plead for understanding or sympathy for it’s characters. The characters' inner lives are not what matter. We only come to understand how they came to walk the paths they did. Mostly what Peter and Katharina experience is irritation that thlngs aren’t developing as good as they imagined them to be. We find it hard to feel sympathy for them. The only solace the reader might get is that both, Peter and Katharina, in the end seem to understand that after what they did, which believes they followed and what they supported, there really cannot be hope of forgiveness. 

This novel serves as a poignant, relentless reminder of the struggles, the ruthlessness and the atrocities of Second World War and its aftermath. It is also a timely reminder, sadly proven by the Ukrainian war, that atrocities, torture and floods of refugees are not a thing of the past.

It is not a friendly view nor a friendly book. But it is a good one.

#robertfaeth, #painterinBerlin, #painting, #art, #bookblog, #bookreviews, #literaturelover, #poem, #poetry