The Brahmadells
by Jóanes Nielsen
Translated from the Faroese by Kerri A. Pierce
by Jóanes Nielsen
Translated from the Faroese by Kerri A. Pierce
Wednesday, January 30, 2019
Friday, January 25, 2019
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
Thursday, January 17, 2019
Monday, January 14, 2019
Thursday, January 10, 2019
Street of Life
In
pre-war Budapest three families who lived on Katalin street had a blissful beginning
and sought a serene continuation. But caught in the misfortune brought by WWII,
individual lives are displaced or killed, crumbling the connection and changing
it forever. The lives and space around them disintegrated such that nothing could
rekindle it back. Their relations were so strong that they couldn't be forgotten,
so feeble that they couldn't be preserved and so absurd that it was hard to
define. But at least love for each other was what connected them, and now
dispossessed from Katalin street, whose shared recollection is rather painful—the
guilt of having to lose and being alive alone devoid of former passion—has
shadowed their internal spirit, especially of the four younger members
belonging to the three families.
The novel opens in an apartment—social rehousing scheme under soviet/communist regime made them leave the house at Katalin Street—where everyday life of Elekes family continues. Their memories of the Katalin Street and the life they spent there, all those joys and mishap buried in the past keeps returning even after all these years. It's the upshot we're seeing in the lives of the Elekes family and Bálint. What follows is the backstory of these characters, and also of those who lived on Katalin Street. Members of the Elekes family have untold longing for the past, and each of them sees the others in that light. They try to maintain that nothing has changed, but time and again those same shared love and values direct their attitudes and behavior. All of them have accepted that something deeply rooted to their lives has been taken away, not merely the residence of Katalin Street but families that they felt like their own.
There came too the realization that advancing age had taken the past, which in childhood and early maturity had seemed to them so firmly rounded off and neatly parceled up, and ripped it open. Everything that had happened was still there, right up to the present, but now suddenly different. Time had shrunk to specific moments, important events to single episodes, familiar places to the mere backdrop to individual scenes, so that, in the end, they understood that of everything that had made up their lives thus far only one or two places, and a handful of moments, really mattered. Everything else was just so much wadding around their fragile existences, wood shavings stuffed into a trunk to protect the contents on the long journey to come. They had discovered too that the difference between the living and the dead is merely qualitative, that it doesn’t count for much. And they had learned that in everyone’s life there is only one person whose name can be cried out in the moment of death.
Irén (Eldest daughter of Mr. Elekes and Mrs. Elekes) and Bálint (Son of Major Biro), who were once passionate lovers and sought to get married, have developed sharp views of life, as if the former selves have been lost forever and they are not to ignore the changes they've gone through. For them the realities have blurred, and no new fascination will ever appear. They want to continue, however awkward they internally feel about each other and everything surrounding them, for the sake of one another. Bálint, once held in captivity by the regime, has trouble separating his experience and existence, and continues to live in and out of one or other of his memories. Blanka (Younger sister of Iren) now married and settled in far off Greek island, in her new life recreates and even alters the version of truth so as to be happy and safe, since all her life she has feared anything that doesn't suit her, and have resisted against them in unusual ways—the same thing that displaced her from the family. Henriette's (Daughter of Jewish family the Helds) ghost moving among them across time and space, watching them, recreates the Katalin Street again, resembling the old days and the unrealities that are real and palpable in her afterlife world. Blanka and the ghost of Henriette share a common trait of creating their own versions of past so that they could happily live with those memories.
Episodes from their childhood and while they were growing up to be become adult conveys how three families lived like one, and personal feelings and values they harbored for each other. Mr. & Mrs. Held and Major Biro are loosely drawn characters, and following their death they become even less significant figures in the story. Henriette's death caused in an unlikely episode is the key event in the lives of Balint, Iren and Blanka. They hadn't expected time will distort things around their lives that they wouldn't be able to nurture love amongst them. Irén, Bálint, Blanka and even dead Henriette relishes on living in and out of their past, keeping memories alive as if they are more important to them than the moments of the present.
Even
after many things happened and disconcerted their private life and relation, Irén
and Bálint believe they cannot separate themselves from each other, though
little has remained of previous romantic fantasies. It's also because they
share a common past, and that their moods and sentiments resemble each other. It
feels like Iréne is self-boasting in her narrative about her character,
especially in the light of her mother and sister, but the slow—chronological or
sometimes even not—unfolding fits all things together. Her outspoken story of
jealousy, envy, misapprehension, love and hate, providing personal vantage, all
concludes to become feeling of guilt and loss in this decades tracing gloomy
tragedy—an individual spectra traumatized by war.
Introversion
is one of the traits of Elekes family. Whatever Irén says in her personal
narrative, the other voice depicts her being the most sensitive and filled with
love and pity for all the people she knew. She has always kept moral ideals
above all else. She wanted to be happy and possess everything that mattered her
most: love for her sister Blanka and the intimacy of Balint. While still living
on Katalin Street members of the three families always tried to make things
momentous and took care of each other whenever required but after the death of
the Helds and Major Biro, those who survived discerned the fragility of things
and people surrounding them, nevertheless unable to forget who and what is
lost.
Katalin
Street has the backdrop of the war ridden Budapest, occupied by Nazi in 1944,
bombing and air raids in the background, social set up in threat—It's also the story
of people who are stuck in time, and consider that the happiest things are all
done, and whatever happens henceforth are mere the continuation of sense of
absence and loss. In this regard, the novel has a darker tone that conveys, some
people who have suffered loss because of war have turned into shadows living in
present while their realities are still left in time. Trivial feelings, that
cast an individual is also a character of the novel. There are many occasions
when changing moods or behavior of a member in an unlikely situation make others
feel awkward and bearing becomes more absurd thing, keeping them away from acting
natural—escaping to solitude or coming to tears.
A tragedy filled with intricacies of relation and memory in the backdrop of war is
the central theme of the novel, and it captures the sentiments of death and decay. Revisiting
the past, trying to live the safe ideal life in the cores of memory and find
solace to one's longing and comfort with almost futile attempts marks the lives
of characters of Katalin Street.
Author: Magda Szabó
Translator: Len Rix
Publisher: MacLehose Press
Page Count: 272
Publisher: MacLehose Press
Page Count: 272
Price: $17.21
Tuesday, January 8, 2019
No Full Stop
In
a town of Trois-Cents, a regular customer of the bar Credit Gone West, BrokenGlass sets out to write a book about odd characters he encounters on the bar,
and tells theirs and his own story, jotting down them in a notebook, however he
likes, and this is the story produced, a one long sentence without even a
full-stop. Stubborn Snail, the owner of the bar, wants the fame and legacy of
his bar to be written down and those who think their story is special wants
their space in the book, and apparently all those are patrons of Credit Gone
West, and all have their backstory, some confessed, other observed.
The
first part of the book traces the precarious origin of Credit Gone West, and the
puns surrounding it find its way into politics, creating jokes and satires on ordinary
people, crowd culture, and the references the author has used for humour,
crossing national and cultural boundaries, makes the description vivid and
enjoyable. The whole drama around the bar's establishment—the concoction even involving
the government, and Stubborn Snail's resistance and victory—is too great an
opening.
"… I’ve always hated
intellectuals of all kinds, because it’s always like that with intellectuals,
they talk and talk, but nothing concrete ever comes out of it, only more and
more discussions about discussions, then they quote some other intellectuals
who said this, that, or the next thing, and who saw it all coming, and then
they have a good scratch of their own navels, and they think everyone else is
stupid, and blind, as though no one could get through life without
philosophizing, and the problem is, these pseudo-intellectuals, they
philosophize without actually living, they know nothing about life, and life
goes on anyway, following its own course, countering all their second-rate
Nostradamus predictions, and they all go round congratulating each other, but
what you notice is, pseudo-intellectuals all love suits, and little round
glasses, and ties, because an intellectual without a tie is basically stark
naked, incapable of proper thought, but I’m proud of how I got here, I did
things myself, I’m a self-made man,"
One
of the odd characters is the Pampers guy, a man who was fond of visiting Rex
District (probably a Red-Light District), locked out by his wife, who ends up
in Prison and is sodomised by fellow inmates… and now a patron of Credit Gone
West, who earnestly wants to be in the book by Broken Glass, our off-beat
narrator. Description also sometimes turns to bawdy, but laughter is all that
matters. Another guy is the Printer, who claims “I’m telling you, Broken Glass,
if you don’t put me into your book, it won’t be worth the paper it’s written
on, I tell you, they could make my life into a film,”, a man who had once
settled with a white French woman, worked like a boss, had an easy going life,
whose life suddenly turned upside down upon arrival of his long unknown son,
and who was thrown into an asylum… and now brags that he's great story to tell,
because unlike others, "he's done France" and relishes on the copy of
Paris Match.
In
another episode, Stubborn Snail tries to impart some joy to Broken Glass—sixty-four
years old man—and suggests trying his luck with Robinette, also an alcoholic,
known to be the piss queen of the town, and Robinette contesting with a
newly arrived high-life bragging guy turns unexpected. The first part of the novel
is jolly, stylistic, and compilation of idiosyncratic traits and tales of all
these characters.
"…I trusted you, I told you about
my life, and you just make fun of me, you say the file’s closed, I know deep
down you’re laughing at me, give me that book, I want to read it, if you don’t
give it to me things are going to get nasty between you and me, and I want you
to rub out everything you’ve written about me, I don’t want people to know my
story”
In
the last part of the story, the similar style of narration follows, and now Broken
Glass tells us his own personal and saddening story. Once an instructor, Broken
Glass recalls his childhood days and his fond of reading books from all around
the world. And he spins the story, on how he lost his mother, lost his job,
lost his wife only to find himself broken and at the mercy of alcohol at Credit
Gone West. In these ramblings, he gives away his character, what kind of man he
is, and what doesn't he care at all and on what he sticks to always. All
through the text we find allusions or even direct mentions of writers and book
titles, that suggests Broken Glass found happiness reading literature and
wanted to be associated with it, but could never make himself a writer, but luckily
Stubborn Snail's proposition has brought back the urge, nevertheless he doesn't
want to be pedantic, neither concerns himself with willful coherence, and
enjoys the freedom writing in a stream of conscious way.
"…I must be off now, my place is
in paradise, and if some cheating angels go telling lies up there to stop me
entering by the great wide gate, well, believe me, I’ll get in anyway, through
the window”
Broken
Glass, is too self-absorbed, particularly about memories of his mother. The
tragedy befallen on many characters, including our narrator, though cannot be
so heartrending, since we doubt whether or not we can be their emotional
followers. Are we to trust these drunken ramblings? May be, but time has
changed them, and alcohol has blurred their self. But, their lives are not jinxed,
they hope to continue, but the ways are scrambled. What are we to make of all
these? The story, slyly composed, is irreverent in every manner, and African
literature with post-colonial mark or struggling identity should not be
expected of this. Unruly work of art, humour at its heart and off-beat
narration at the surface, the novel is able to satiate a reader.
Author: Alain Mabanckou
Translator: Helen Stevenson
Publisher: Softskull Press
Page Count: 162
Price: $16.95
