July 2024 In Books: What I'm Reading

Thanks to anaemia, a traffic accident, and a broken glass bottle, I've been (in roughly equal measures) sulking and reading at home.

An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence
Zeinab Badawi

Cover of Zeinab Badawi:
An African History of Africa
Penguin Books

It's been energetically praised in the British press, and I am also charmed by this book, which I found at a bookshop near the Free University here in Berlin.

BBC World anchor Zeinab Badawi sets aside many of the piles of colonialist histories of (in the earlier chapters of her book) northern African countries, to expose the reading public to snippets of neglected knowledge about former kingdoms, leaders, and citizenries. She draws from modern experts and personal travel in nations like Egypt, Sudan, and Eritrea as much as she can, rather than relying on archives only.

It is also an 'alive' field of study: while ancient Egypt's dynasties are well charted, ancient sites of the kingdom of Kush in Sudan, and Adulis and Qohaito in Eritrea, are only partly excavated. There is much left to reveal itself.

Cover of Francisco Coloane: Feuerland
Unionsverlag

Feuerland (Tierra del Fuego (1956))
Francisco Coloane (tr. into German by Giò Waeckerlin Induni)

Like Jorge Luis Borges historical stories/essays, Coloane's collection of tales puts the reader back into the morally ambiguous, colonialist era – this time, in southernmost Chile.

Die untergehende Sonne ließ ebenfalls große Goldnuggets am Rand der Horizontpfanne zurück, goldene Kumuluswolken, mit denen die feuerländische Abenddämmerung ihre unablässig wechselnden Phantasmagorien entzündet.

('The setting sun left behind huge gold nuggets at the rim of the horizon's pan, golden cumulus clouds with which the Fuegian dusk was kindling its unceasingly changeful phantasmagorias.') 

The first tale touches on Romanian gold magnate Julius Popper, his mercenary army, and genocide of Ona Indigenous peoples; and the multifarious journeys of Europeans to South America. In inhabiting a men's world, it is rather like Hemingway. But perhaps it is more philosophical.

It's impossible not to picture the landscapes, birds, and animals that Coloane portrays in so much detail, in my mind's eye – no matter how ignorant I was of Patagonia going in.

Coloane experienced popularity abroad in the 1990s, and the Unionsverlag hardcover copy of Feuerland that I am reading was printed during that time.

"Patagonian landscape with single tree before night sky" (1832)
Eduard von Buchan (1800-1876)
Wikimedia Commons

The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century
Thant Myint-U

A descendant of a United Nations Secretary-General, raised in the United States but drawn into Burma/Myanmar at various epochs in the 1990s through to the present, Thant Myint-U has written not just a scholarly examination of the country's history.

Cover of Thant Myint-U: The Hidden History of Burma
W. W. Norton

He also gives a journalist's insights into life stories of Burmese people who have fallen prey to external and internal social, political, and economic developments; as well as a diplomat's insights into international and national machinations.

It would be too crude to state without qualification that the path to hell is paved with good intentions: the intentions of a few Burmese governments, of Aung San Suu Kyi, of the U.S. government, of the United Nations, ... But, with more nuance, this phenomenon is at least one leading thread in Burma/Myanmar's recent history.

I'm listening to the audiobook recording.

***

Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, Vol. II (1830)
Thomas Moore, ed.

Inspired by a seminar I'm in about the Greek Revolution of 1821, which had led the English poet to travel to the mainland north of the Peloponnese, I looked up Lord Byron in Google Books. There I found a very "warts and all" compendium of letters, journal extracts, book passages by Byron's partner Teresa Guiccioli, and commentary from Thomas Moore (who had been Byron's friend), published 6 years after Byron died of fever.

"The Reception of Lord Byron at Missolonghi" (1861)
Theodoros Vryzakis (1814-1878)
Wikimedia Commons

...This is more of a rant than a review. I will start by apologizing to the above authors for inadvertently grouping together their works with Byron's. Secondly, because people often feel injured by what they consider 'cancel culture,' I'll emphasize that I don't judge the many readers who appreciate Byron's poems on their own merits.

So:

First of all, this is not news, but: he was not a considerate romantic or sexual partner. He chatters incessantly about his 'conquests' to his male friends in his letters, underlining how little respect he has for these women. In 21st-century terminology: toxic masculinity leaks from every page.

Secondly, Byron keeps lying to himself and others about his intentions:

To give one example, he got rid of his illegitimate daughter Allegra in a convent school.

It was supposedly a good school. But she became 'peculiarly quiet' according to visitors who'd known her before, and she died from a fever there at the age of 5. Claire Clairmont, her mother, was inconsolable.

He had made a big deal in letters to friends about how noble he was, nobler than that atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley (who'd by all accounts been kind to Allegra), for wanting his daughter to grow up religiously and 'purely' ... Not that he'd ever put his money where his mouth is, and tried to be properly 'religious' or 'pure' himself.

Thirdly, he's hugely catty about Leigh Hunt, John William Polidori, and others. Part of it can be explained, I suppose, by his being bisexual but not wholly self-accepting.

But the worst passage so far is a letter to Sir Walter Scott, in January 1822:

I need not say how grateful I am for your letter, but I must own my ingratitude in not having written to you again long ago. […] I can only account for it on the same principle of tremulous anxiety with which one sometimes makes love to a beautiful woman of our own degree, with whom one is enamoured in good earnest; whereas, we attack a fresh-coloured housemaid without (I speak, of course, of earlier times) any sentimental remorse or mitigation of our virtuous purpose.

I think a few years of imprisonment might have helped, and I certainly hope no one will excuse him on the grounds of being 'misunderstood.'

***

Also reading:

Auf der Reise im Dazwischen (Austria, poetry) by Omar Kir Alanam
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (United States, nonfiction) by Michelle Alexander

June 2024 in Books: What I'm Reading... by Chekhov

Progress has been made in a 1970s Penguin Classics paperback of Chekhov's Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories: I read "The House with an Attic (An Artist's Story)," translated by David Magarshack, today.

I. I. Shishkin and A. V. Gine in the Studio on the Valaam Island (1860)
by Ivan Shishkin (1831–1898). Wikimedia Commons.

One day [...] I found myself by sheer chance on an estate I had never been to before. The sun was already low on the horizon and the evening shadows lay over the flowering rye. Two rows of very tall, solidly planted old fir trees stood like solid walls, forming a beautiful dark avenue.

***

Chekhov's short story recounts an episode in the life of a cynical artist. The artist, the narrator of the tale and not in an omniscient sense, is renting a house in the countryside. There he gets to know a family of three women: the mother Yekaterina Pavlova, the elder daughter Lydia, and the younger daughter Zhenya.

Lydia is occupied with charitable works: teaching, providing medical care, and lending books. The artist squabbles with her: according to him, she is merely greasing the wheels of a homicidal system that condemns poor Russians to overly long working hours, which permit them no time to enjoy the fruits of education, and will make them sick anyway.

In Front of the Mirror (1870)
by Ivan Shishkin. Wikimedia Commons.

I asked myself while reading if Lydia herself is attracted to the artist. Is she even more irritated that he does not fall in with her views, because her political principles force her to see an obstacle between them because of that? Is the artist also interested, but finds her 'too difficult'? I suspect it, but perhaps Chekhov didn't intend it – then either it's a subconscious subtext, or I am wrong. Perhaps the author sees Lydia's intention exactly as the artist interprets it: she thinks that she needs to punish the artist for his views, which get in the way of her labour.

At any rate, the artist falls for Zhenya. As Zhenya is only 17 years old, and portrayed as naive rather than well-informed and independent for her age, I winced while reading.

She longed for me to introduce her into the sphere of the eternal and the beautiful, into that higher world in which, as she imagined, I was quite at home

In the passage where he describes Zhenya's body as "unformed," the artist seems himself to feel a line has been crossed, albeit not in a legal or criminal sense given customs and legislation of the time. The story was published in 1896, and Chekhov died in 1904.

Corner of overgrown garden. Ground elder (1884)
by Ivan Shishkin. Wikimedia Commons.

It's the second story of Chekhov's I've read where his characters self-reflect ambiguously about what 20th century sociological theorists might call the 'male gaze.'

(In the short story Ariadne, he writes about a young Muscovite who is dismayed at the thought of treating partnerships as pairing together heterosexual couples regardless of liking or character or any other factor. Another character, who conducts an adulterous affair with the titular Ariadne, just thinks that any woman is fair game if he's attracted to her: no deep feelings, thoughts, or sentiments needed.)

APPARENTLY Chekhov's stories were often not so much 'inspired by' as directly based on his own life and people he knew. Which sounds dangerous, but as his stories appeared in magazines and Russians in his circles read and reacted to them, he seemed to be fine risking a fist to the face from a disgruntled acquaintance.

Given that garden-variety gossip arguably informed his plotting, it isn't clear to me: was he trying to make a deeper point about Lydia's character here? or can we just understand "The House with an Attic" as a straightforward narrative drawn from real-life experiences of 1. debating how to improve the Russian society of his time, and 2. finding a love that escapes?

THE PROTAGONIST'S ASSERTIONS about sociopolitics seem largely unreasonable, with veins of the reasonable. Of course everyone is prone to exaggerate due to the heat of debate, or because they lack direct illustrations and examples. Chekhov was a doctor, but/so it's hard to believe that the author agrees with every word:

Lydia asks,

But you also deny the usefulness of medicine, don't you?

The artist replies,

Yes. [...] Do away with the main cause of disease, physical labour, and and there will be no more diseases. 

*

I like the poignant ambivalence when Chekhov leaves hopeful loose threads in his stories – to be continued – for his characters, instead of plunging into an impressive but gloomy dead end.

A Forest (1890s)
by Ivan Shishkin. Wikimedia Commons.

Berlin Reads, 2023: A Short Story by Idza Luhumyo

The International Berlin Literature Festival formally begins on September 6th this year, but 'Berlin liest' is a long running prefatory tradition that my bookseller mother has also celebrated once or twice.

'Berlin reads': People and businesses read aloud a book, for no more than 30 minutes, in public. It's a kind of 'amuse bouche' for the festival itself.

***

There are few restrictions, but the organizers offered a few nudges. Why not read poetry by Dinçer Güçyeter, whose prose and poetry memoir Unser Deutschlandmärchen won the prize at the Leipzig Book Fair in April? Or Palestinian author and current New Yorker Ibtisam Azem, who wrote Das Buch vom Verschwinden as a reflection on the ongoing conflict in Israel and the Palestinian Territories? Salman Rushdie's Victory City is also on the list, in honour of the author who was notoriously attacked last year. Jeffrey Eugenides's Virgin Suicides and Middlesex are well known, Bora Chung's short stories in Der Fluch des Hasen (Cursed Bunny) imaginative works of fiction.

In the end I read the magical realist short story "Five Years Next Sunday." Idza Luhumyo won the Caine Prize for African Writing for it, in 2022. You can read it as well on the Prize's website.

It's short, but full of imagery, and the metaphors are so complex that I wasn't able to disentangle them fully. (If they are all metaphors; some things you can probably also understand literally, like acquaintances rudely pawing the protagonist's hair.) Pili, the main character, is being emotionally bled dry by the family (parents and teenaged brothers) and new friends around her. On one level she sees through their motivations, on another level she doggedly takes their purported affection at face value. At the same time, I think, Pili is scrambling for a chance to escape and to chase her own daydreams.

She keeps looking outside, reporting on the gathering of the clouds, the darkening of the day, the flight of the birds. “Rain is coming,” she whispers.

Around the World in 32 Countries: Argentina and Jorge Luis Borges

Niedertracht und Ewigkeit: Erzählungen und Essays
Jorge Luis Borges
Transl. Karl August Horst and Gisbert Haefs
Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991

"Cuesta del Obispo, Provincia de Salta (Argentina)."
Attributed to eMaringolo, 2012
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-2.0 License

***

Argentina in a Nutshell:

Surface area: 2,780,400 km2 (smaller than Brazil, larger than Mexico)

Main country immigrated from historically: “62.5% of the population has full or partial Italian ancestry” Now the country is only 2.4% Amerindian.

Recognized regional languages:

• Guaraní in Corrientes
• Quechua in Santiago del Estero
• Qom, Mocoví, and Wichí in Chaco
• Welsh in Chubut

(Yes, that Welsh)

Independence from Spain: declared 1816

Driving side: Right

Notable geography: "Aconcagua is the highest mountain outside of Asia, at 6,960.8 metres (22,837 ft), and the highest point in the Southern Hemisphere."

Sources: Argentina , List of countries and dependencies by area [Wikipedia]

***

Finding Argentine authors was difficult, but perhaps I didn't go about it the right way.

I was thrilled to learn [via Goodreads] that the classic film Blow-Up, by Michael Antonioni, is based on a short story by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. Also, because I was interested in Patagonia, my mother found the Chilean writer Francisco Coloane's book Tierra del Fuego in our bookshelves, for me to read as a supplement.

Technically there are many biographies and memoirs one could read. The Pope is Argentine. Ernesto (Che) Guevara was from Argentina and wrote his Motorcycle Diaries about travel in the country. And there are plenty of biographies of Eva Perón, wife of the 1970s president Juan Perón and symbolic heroine of the nation who inspired a film where Madonna acted the title role.

Photograph of the first meeting between the Argentine writers
Borges and Ernesto Sabato.
Published in the Revista Gente, nº 499, Feb. 13, 1975
via Wikimedia Commons, public domain in Argentina

However, our home library doesn't have many books by Argentine authors. The exception is the literary giant and polymath Jorge Luis Borges. He also happens to be a favourite author of a colleague.

We have a German translation of a collection of short stories and essays, and notes by the author, that were published from the early 1930s through to the 1960s: Niedertracht und Ewigkeit: Erzählungen und Essays 1935-1936.

***

The Universal History of Infamy — the Niedertracht part of the book, originally published as the Historia universal de la infamia in Spanish — is a series of short stories about villains who really lived, in fictionalized form.

The villains: A Chinese pirate who led a fleet of over 20,000 people and rivalled the fleet of Portugal in the early 19th century, John Murell (Lazarus Morell) who pretended that he wanted to free slaves in the southern United States and instead ensured that they were recaptured and murdered, a gang lord in New York, and Billy the Kid, amongst others. Their tales are all gripping, the details that Borges may have added in from other sources were colourful and helped set the scene as thoroughly as any set designer could in a well-financed Hollywood film. The book made me so curious that I looked up all of the real-life stories after reading his fictional versions.

I think that Borges might have considered, but didn't say, if dramatic villainy like this, perpetrated by frowning people who wield firearms and murder people with great publicity, does more harm than everyday villainy. Likely I should read Hannah Arendt's thoughts on the banality of evil before I write more. But maybe more people are killed by criminal negligence, the guns manufacturing and marketing industry, fake medicines, overwork, etc., than by the kind of first- and second-degree murderers who end up in prison.

Incidentally, I wish that the vocabulary Borges had used for African-American characters were less dehumanizing. 'Negro' and 'mulatto' were considered polite enough terms in the 1930s, I think, but when he talks of 'heaps of negroes' in stories where he no longer seems to be satirizing racist attitudes, it feels as if he genuinely did subconsciously consider Black people to be an incoherent and mindless mass.

Anyway, Borges faithfully lists his sources: Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain, The Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury, etc.

Mysterious Demises at Cornwall, with Sherlock Holmes

"High Cove Typical Cornish rocky cove, with small sandy beach"
by Mike Hancock, 1995
via geograph.org.uk at Wikimedia Commons
CC BY-SA 2.0 license

Thus it was that in the early spring of that year we found ourselves together in a small cottage near Poldhu Bay, at the further extremity of the Cornish peninsula.

It was a singular spot [...] From the windows of our little whitewashed house, which stood high upon a grassy headland, we looked down upon the whole sinister semicircle of Mounts Bay, that old death trap of sailing vessels, with its fringe of black cliffs and surge-swept reefs on which innumerable seamen have met their end. With a northerly breeze it lies placid and sheltered [...]

I realized afresh when I read this passage in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Adventure of the Devil's Foot, that one of the charms of the Sherlock Holmes tales is its perhaps semi-journalistic survey of Britishness. His stories are of their time, too, and feel at least to me very Victorian and very Edwardian. But I think that less time-specific aspects of England peep out, even if it is the description of an Atlantic-battered holiday getaway — Sherlock Holmes leaves London at the beginning of the story, so that he can recruit his health by the seaside — in western Cornwall.

Alongside a far from bashful self-advertisement of the short story — Watson claims that this adventure is a problem 'more intense, more engrossing, and infinitely more mysterious than any of those which had driven us from London' — Doyle also enumerates his set of characters with well-practiced celerity. For example, Mortimer Tregennis is introduced in this sketch: "his lodger strangely reticent, a sad-faced, introspective man, sitting with averted eyes, brooding apparently upon his own affairs."

Mortimer Tregennis and the vicar, Mr. Roundhay, are the ones who request Sherlock Holmes's professional assistance in this story. Tregennis's sister has died and his two brothers descended into madness, for no apparent reason, seated in the dining room after an evening game of cards. (What happened wasn't common knowledge. The housekeeper was the one who found the victims the next day, hours after the mysterious catastrophe had occurred.)

Watson, never one to dilute drama, writes that as he and Holmes — having accepted the request — were walking with the others to investigate the death scene, a carriage drives by to transport the maddened brothers to an institution. "As it drove by us I caught a glimpse through the closed window of a horribly contorted, grinning face glaring out at us. Those staring eyes and gnashing teeth flashed past us like a dreadful vision."

"Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Devil's Foot (1910), Illustration by Gilbert Holiday, in The Strand Magazine"
via Wikimedia Commons

That morning, Sherlock Holmes sifts the evidence at the Tregennis house. He wants to know amongst other things what might be behind the tale that a face had peeked in through the window, the previous night, at the card-players. There are no footprints near the window. Also, the night was too dark and a card-player in the room could not have seen very much. Eventually, Holmes leaves the Tregennis home again for his cottage, without pointing fingers at any culprit. But in his mind, the links have formed in a strong chain of evidence.

Ibid., here

Later, that afternoon, a neighbour of the Tregennises enters the scene, calling on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson and wishing to keep informed about their investigation. He happens to be the Edwardian equivalent of a celebrity:

The huge body, the craggy and deeply seamed face with the fierce eyes and hawk-like nose, the grizzled hair which nearly brushed our cottage ceiling, the beard--golden at the fringes and white near the lips, save for the nicotine stain from his perpetual cigar--all these were as well known in London as in Africa, and could only be associated with the tremendous personality of Dr. Leon Sterndale, the great lion-hunter and explorer.

All of the dramatis personae are introduced to the story at that point; and Holmes speedily resolves the mystery. Retelling it would require many spoilers, which I won't mention here.

*

I don't know why this gruesome tale is the first one I think to post on Valentine's Day; but in a way I think the mystery, once resolved, doesn't make it an entirely undeserving candidate for this day. Loyalty and love, although mangled and lost under the violence of fictitious and sensational tragedy, are still at the emotional centre of the story.

***

"The Adventure of the Devil's Foot" is a later Holmes story, in The Last Bow, and was published in 1910.
The quotations are from the Project Gutenberg edition, here, and this is the Wikipedia article: here.