Review

Imre Kertèsz, Fateless (or Fatelessness)

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[WARNING: SPOILERS, of sorts]

Let’s get the first thing clear. I like holocaust literature – not because I enjoy the subject matter but because in it I find the most elemental, universal truths about humanity. Depending on the book, this literature contains various combinations of bravery and cowardice, cruelty and kindness, love and hate, self-sacrifice, self-preservation and betrayal, resilience and resignation, and  well, all those qualities that make up humanity and its converse, inhumanity. I have by no means read all that is out there but here are some that have moved me: Anne Frank’s The diary of a young girl (of course) and Anne Holm’s I am David, from my youth, and then books like Martin Amis’ Time’s arrow, Bernhard Schlink’s The reader, Marcus Zusak’s The book thief, and Ursula Hegi’s Stones from the river. There are gaps, though, in my reading, such as Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s ark (I did see the film), the works of Primo Levi, and Elie Wiesel’s Night. I have, however, just added Imre Kertèsz’s Fateless to my list of books read.

Kertèsz, 2007 (Photo by Csaba Segesvari, from Wikipedia under GNU Free Documentation License 1.2)
Kertèsz, 2007 (Photo by Csaba Segesvari, from Wikipedia under GNU Free Documentation License 1.2)

Kertèsz adds a new spin to the universal truths explored by these books – it’s what he describes (in my 1992 translation anyhow) as “stubbornness” which seems to me to mean “resilience” or a determination to survive, and even to have, if possible, little wins against the system.

Anyhow, first the plot. The novel takes place over the last year of the war and concerns Gyorgy Koves, a 14-year old Hungarian Jew, who, one day, is suddenly called off a bus, along with all other Jews on the bus and transported to Auschwitz, and then Buchenwald, Zeitz and back to Buchenwald, before returning home at war’s end. It chronicles his experiences, his thinking, and the impact on him of his experience. He begins as the archetypal naive narrator…but by the end, though his tone has changed little, he is no longer naive. This is rather beautifully achieved as we see his youthful application of logic being changed into something more cynical and survival focused.

Gyorgy speaks with a strange sense of detachment borne, to start with, of an apparent unawareness of what exactly was happening to him and a disbelief that anything untoward would happen. And so, in the beginning, as events unfold he describes them as “natural” because of course, when they got to Auschwitz, it was sensible to inspect each person to see who was physically fit and capable of working. He didn’t know then what would happen to those not found physically fit. The horror gradually builds as reality sets in and he goes about making it through each day – through his share of beatings, the reduced food rations, and all the other deprivations that make up concentration camp life. In the first part of the book he uses the term “naturally” to mean some sort of normal logic but by the end it comes to mean, as he explains to a journalist who asks him why he keeps using the word for things that aren’t natural, that these things were natural in a concentration camp.

Early on in his captivity he says that they approached their life (and work) “with the best of intentions” but they soon discover that these “best of intentions” do not bring about any kindness from their overseers, and so his attitude to getting on, to surviving starts to change. As he starts to physically weaken, become emaciated and develop infections, he observes that “my body was still there. I was thoroughly familiar with it, only somehow I myself no longer lived inside it”. Always dispassionate, always matter-of-fact, while describing the most heart-rending things.

Towards the end, he is placed in a hospital ward and there he is treated better and, even, with a certain amount of kindness. This in its way is as shocking to him as the cruel beatings he experienced at Zeitz. He can see no logic, “no reason for its being, nothing rational or familiar”. He can only understand kindness in terms of the giver receiving “some pleasure” from it or having some “personal need” satisfied. Never is there any sense that altruism might come into play. His view of “justice” is based very much on survival. He says, when he is spared, “everything happened according to the rules of justice … I was able to accept a situation more easily when it concerned someone else’s bad luck rather than my own … This was the lesson I learned”.

And so, in the end he returns home, and finds it hard to explain to people just what happened and how he now views life. He describes getting through his time as “taking one step after another”, focusing just on the moment. He implies that if he had known his fate he would have focused on time passing – a far more soul-destroying activity than concentrating on getting through each day “step by step”. This brings us to the fate/fateless bit. He says at the end that:

if there is a fate, there is no freedom … if, on the other hand, there is freedom, then there is no fate. That is … that is, we ourselves are fate.

I find this a little hard to grasp but he seems to be saying that we are free to make our own choices, even in a concentration camp – we are not fated but make our own fate. He was and is not prepared to accept any other approach to life. But life will not be easy:

I am here, and I know full well that I have to accept the prize of being allowed to live … I have to continue my uncontinuable life … There is no impossibility that cannot be overcome (survived?).

And yet, at the very end of the book, he says “and even back there [in the concentration camp], in the shadow of the chimneys, there was something resembling happiness”. Wow! This is an astonishing book – it charts horrors with a calmness that is quite shocking, and it is particularly shocking not because Gyorgy is unfeeling but because he can’t quite grasp what is happening to him. This is the fundamental irony of the book, and the fundamental truth of a naive narrator: we the reader know exactly how it is even as Gyorgy tries to make sense of it using logic and reason. I must read this book again – and preferably the newer more highly regarded 2004 translation by Tom Wilkinson.

(Translated by Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson)

Julian Barnes, The limner

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I’m probably going to show my ignorance here as I’m no expert in short stories. I do however like them and have read a fair smattering over the years. Julian Barnes’ The limner is interesting because it is historical, that is, unlike most short stories that I have read, it is set in the past rather than contemporaneously with the author’s time. I think, in fact, that I have read more futuristic short stories than I have historical ones, and yet historical fiction is an equally popular genre. Is it in fact so that there are comparatively few short stories that are historically set, or is it simply that I haven’t read them? If the former, why?

Anyhow, it is an ironic story, not the least because it is a story by a writer (of course) about a man (a limner or portraitist) for  whom language means little. The limner, you see, is deaf and mute – and, what’s more, does not feel he misses much by not being able to speak and hear. His view is that “the world’s knowledge of itself, when spoken and written down, did not amount to much”. It is, in fact, a story that looks at what lies beneath the surface, that explores that age-old theme of appearance versus reality.

I have only read two works by Julian Barnes – The history of the world in 10 1/2 chapters (fiction) and The pedant in the kitchen (non-fiction) – but these, together with this short story, reinforce my sense that I should read more. I like his way of viewing the world through whimsical and often ironic eyes. Wadsworth, the protagonist of this story, is an outsider: he is “industrious” and “of a companionable nature” but as time has gone on he has become less and less interested in painting his subjects – who are mostly adults, and mostly men. The plot turns on one particular, but apparently fairly typical, commission – the painting of a portrait of a customs collector. This customs collector, Mr Tuttle, is not interested in having his wife or children painted. The story commences, pointedly, with the statement that Tuttle had been argumentative about the fee and size of canvas, while Wadsworth, for his part, had agreed easily to his demands re pose, costume and background. As the story progresses it becomes clear that Mr Tuttle is a vain, pompous, self-important man who, while continually asking for “more dignity” to be represented in his portrait, in fact  exhibits little of that same dignity.

Without giving away the story, I will simply say that Wadsworth makes some decisions that enables him to preserve – though he doesn’t put it quite this way – his own dignity, and those of the lesser mortals in Mr Tuttle’s household. It is a neatly conceived story that makes its points lightly, humorously and, perhaps, a little predictably. While it’s not as challenging to read as some short stories – and I do like a challenge – it is also a little deceptive in its simplicity. It is well worth a read.

George Orwell, Books v. Cigarettes

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George Orwell, 1933 (Presumed Public Domain, from Wikipedia)

George Orwell, 1933 (Presumed Public Domain, from Wikipedia)

We all do it! That is, we say we haven’t got the time to do something or we can’t afford something when in fact we really could if we changed our priorities. This idea is the inspiration for George Orwell’s essay titled “Books v. Cigarettes” (written in 1946). It all started when a newspaper editor told him of some factory workers who said that they read the newspaper but not the literary section because “Why, half the time you’re talking about books that cost twelve and sixpence! Chaps like us couldn’t spend twelve and sixpence on a book”. Orwell’s response is to examine what he believes is a widespread view (in 1940s England anyhow) “that the buying, or even the reading, of books is an expensive hobby and beyond the reach of the average person”.

He does this by attempting to ascertain how much his own reading costs him.  You can read the details in the essay (it’s a short one) here. In short, he decides that he averages £25 per year on his reading habit, but £40 on smoking. And this, he says, is based on buying not borrowing books which would of course significantly reduce the cost of his reading. He then tries to establish a relationship between the “cost” of reading and the “value” you get from it, but realises how difficult it is to apply a value across the board. As he says

There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind [my emphasis] and alter one’s whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later…

How do you value these different experiences? He decides to avoid this tricky problem and just estimate what it costs to treat reading as simple entertainment, so he divides the average price of a book by the average time it takes to read one and discovers that this cost compares favourably with going to the cinema. And of course, he says, if you bought second hand books or borrowed them, the cost of reading would compare even more favourably.

Finally, he presents the rough estimate that only 3 books are bought per person per year in Britain. A woeful situation he says in a society which is nearly 100% literate. And his conclusion?

…let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.

Thanks to George Orwell, next time I go to buy that case of wine, I see that I will have to stop and think about whether I should buy a few books instead!

Elizabeth Jolley, My father’s moon

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‘No one,’ she says, ‘can write anything till they’ve had experience. Later on perhaps. You will write later on.’ (Elizabeth Jolley, My father’s moon, 1989)

Although fiction demands imagination, it must be based on  some kind of genuine experience. (Elizabeth Jolley, “Only Connect”, essay first published in Toads, 1992)

My father’s moon is the first book in Jolley’s semi-autobiographical trilogy, the others being Cabin fever and The George’s wife. It won The Age Book of the Year Award in 1989.

I am an Elizabeth Jolley fan – and, along with Helen Garner, another Jolley fan, I enjoy the way she repeats and revisits stories and characters from one book or story to another. In this book is the chapter, “Night Runner”, which was published as a short story in Meanjin in December 1983, and again in a short story anthology, Room to move, published in 1985. The narrator of the story – and of the novel – typifies Elizabeth Jolley’s alienated protagonists and their often peculiarly self-centred and self-deluded ways of coping with their loneliness. Clearly Jolley decided that this was a character she wanted to develop further. And clearly she also drew a lot from her own experience to develop this character. Like Vera, Jolley was brought up as a Quaker, her parents sheltered refugees before and during the Second World War, and she trained as a nurse. Like Vera, Jolley probably experienced loneliness and alienation. However, this is fiction and so we need to be careful about how far we take these analogies between Vera and her creator. Much as I can empathise with Vera’s predicament, I must admit that I would hate to think she is Elizabeth Jolley.

It’s an uncomfortable novel. Vera, the first person narrator, is not a highly sympathetic character but neither is she totally disagreeable either. What she is, though, is lonely. The book has a somewhat challenging structure – and I had to concentrate to keep track of where I was. It starts with Vera, a single mother, leaving her parents’ home, with her young daughter, to live and work in a boarding school. Her hopes for a lovely life there among people “who feel and think as I do” are dashed. Such people “are not here as I thought they would be … I am by my own mistakes buried in this green-leafed corruption and I am alone”. In this first chapter are flashbacks to the past, and gradually the book moves into the past, providing us with insights into her character and how she has ended up where she is. Most of this past takes place in the hospital where she trains as a nurse during the war. The book finally returns to the beginning of the novel with Vera resolving to make a step towards alleviating her loneliness. However, we are by no means convinced she will.

Moon, by atomicshark @ flickr, licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY 2.0

Moon, by atomicshark @ flickr, licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY 2.0

The book comprises titled chapters, many if not all of which could be (and some have been) published separately as short stories. This gives it a somewhat disjointed feel – but seems appropriate for the story of a person like Vera. It is full of wonderfully drawn characters, with some very funny (if often dark) scenes and dialogue. Just think nurses and hospitals! There are many references to music – something that is common in Jolley’s works. Music is usually a comforting force for her characters, offering them respite from what is often a cruel world – and this is the case here, with Vera being drawn to characters who love and play music. There is a lot of irony, some of it subtle, some of it less so as in Magda’s comment to Vera who has fantasised about an affair with her husband: ‘You are so innocent and good … Don’t ever change’. Naive perhaps, innocent no!

So, what about the title? Funnily enough(!), it refers to Vera’s relationship with her father, a major stabilising influence in her life. He tells her throughout her childhood that wherever she is she can always look at the same moon he is looking at, ‘And because of this … you must know that I am not far away. You must never feel lonely’. A lovely concept and one to which Vera regularly returns in the book.

My father’s moon is not, I think, the easiest Jolley to read, and there are some things that might become clearer on a second reading. However, its concerns are very representative of her work – loneliness and alienation, homosexuality, parenting, memory, music and religion. While Vera is deeply lonely, while she often behaves selfishly, she can also be kind. She is also no quitter. For that I rather like her.

Disgrace-ful

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Well, I finally got to see the film adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace today. Before seeing it, I was a little surprised that it only had an (Australian) M rating. From my memory of the book I was rather expecting an MA rating. I was slightly disappointed in the film: it’s not that I want to watch explicit “stuff” (in fact I often close – or half-close! – my eyes during realistic violent scenes on film) but I did feel that this adaptation somehow missed the full menace of the book. The book is hard to forget. The film, while engrossing, did not seem to have quite the same punch. I’m not quite sure why that is – it could simply be that having read the book, I was too prepared for what was to unfold for the shock value to work.

Interpretation of Disgrace, by Andre Pierre @ flickr.com, Creative Commons Licence 2.0

Interpretation of Disgrace, by Andre Pierre @ flickr.com, used under Creative Commons Licence 2.0

That said, I’m glad I saw it. But first, a brief synopsis. David Lurie, an English professor at a university in Cape Town, is forced to resign after some rather “improper” behaviour with a female student. He goes to stay with his daughter on her remote farm and while he is there they are brutally attacked. What then unfolds is how this impacts each of them – and in particular how he gradually sees the consequences of some of his own previous behaviours. Despite, though, some growth within Lurie, it is not a cheery film.

JohnMalkovich did a good job of portraying the complexity of David Lurie. Lurie is not an easy character to understand – after all, it seems he barely understands himself – but Malkovich goes a long way towards “explaining” him. Lurie is a man who, in his time, has “preyed” upon women taking advantage of the gender (and other) power imbalances between him and them, but who is forced to face (horrific) reality when he and his daughter become victims themselves of power imbalances. Ironically, rape (the ultimate expression of gender power imbalance) is used to usurp the racial power imbalance that is entrenched in South Africa.  The personal is clearly the political in this story. Newcomer Jessica Haines beautifully plays his daughter, conveying well the fragility that lies just below the surface of her strength. Her reaction to what happens to her and her decision regarding her future are hard for us to comprehend but, like her father, we do come to some understanding even if we’re not sure we’d do the same!

The cinematography is spare mirroring the spareness of the book. The landscape is beautifully rendered, but only to convey its harshness. The pace is measured – shots are unhurried, allowing the ramifications of the events to sink in slowly with us as they do with the characters. The score has a gravitas that adds force to the drama being played out. And yet, and yet … perhaps all this gives it an elegaic tone rather than the menace and despair I found in the book. Coetzee’s post-Apartheid South Africa is not a pretty place.

Early in the book – and the film – David uses the word “usurp” by which he means to intrude or encroach upon. This is the subject of the book: the fact that nations and people (black-white, male-female, teacher-student, parent-child, person-animal) usurp upon others/each other. While the film does not quite explore all of these with the richness of the book, it conveys enough for us the get the gist! I would imagine that Coetzee is not dissatisfied with the outcome.

(If you haven’t seen the film, see the trailer here.)

State of the investigative journo film

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I really want to see the new Australian film, Last Ride, and the film of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, but as State of Play is coming to the end of its run and we hadn’t yet seen it, that’s what we went to see today. Apparently, the film is an adaptation of a well-reviewed 6-hour British miniseries which aired in 2003. I didn’t see that and so don’t know what was cut out to create a 2-hour movie. We found it a perfectly entertaining political thriller but felt it really tells the same old story. Somewhat daggy newspaper journalist (played convincingly by Russell Crowe) investigates a story in which he has a relationship with a major subject. He has a young, ambitious rookie offsider. There are some love triangles (though admittedly our journalist does not bed the rookie). And, just when he and the rookie are resting on their laurels and you think the investigation is complete, he suddenly remembers something someone said that makes him rethink their resolution, resulting in, of course, a dramatic denouement (one that’s not necessarily expected but neither is it surprising).

I liked Crowe – I usually do like him in his films. The other members of the cast (Rachel McAdams, Ben Affleck, Helen Mirren, Jeff Daniels, Robin Wright Penn) were good too. All in all it’s a well-made and entertaining film, with the usual thriller twists and turns, but there was nothing that lifted it out of the ordinary. Margaret and David, of At the Movies fame, rated it 4 and 4 1/2 (out of 5) respectively. There’s clearly something wrong with me. I’d give it 3 1/2!

Haruki Murakami, What I talk about…

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Haruki Murakami (Photo by Wakarimasita, Wikipedia, under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0)

Haruki Murakami (By Wakarimasita, Wikipedia, using Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0)

What a strange little book! I guess it’s not surprising that Haruki Murakami’s notion of a memoir is not quite that of the rest of us. This is not because it has any of the, shall we call it, weirdness you find in his novels, but because in its 180 pages, What I talk about when I talk about running talks quite a bit about – yes – running.

The book was written over a period covering August 2005 to October 2006, and the chapters read largely like diary entries. In the foreword he says:

Somerset Maugham once wrote that in each shave lies a philosophy. I couldn’t agree more. No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act.

So, what does this book tell us about Murakami? He is not competitive, he is not particularly comfortable socially and in fact enjoys being alone, he is tenacious, he is highly self-motivated … and he is modest. We learn all of this through his attitude to running. Early in the book he draws some parallels between his life as a runner and as a writer, but by the end of the book his focus is almost solely on running (and triathlons). He says that running marathons and writing novels are similar in that the point is not whether you win or lose, but whether “your writing attains the standards you’ve set for yourself”. The book describes in some detail the standards he sets for himself as a runner and how he goes about (or not as the case maybe!) achieving them.

I enjoyed the book, but I must admit that I was really hoping for more insight into why he writes the sorts of books he does. Fairly early in the book he writes of his years of owning/running a jazz bar in Tokyo. He says:

Thanks to this…I met all kinds of offbeat people and had some unusual encounters. Before I began writing, I dutifully, even enthusiastically, absorbed a variety of experiences.

Aha, I thought, we are getting to the meat of things but, in fact, he doesn’t expand on this. Regarding his writing goals, he very simply says that his “duty as a novelist” is to ensure that each work is “an improvement over the last”. Regarding writing as a profession he says you need three things: talent, focus and endurance. You need these same things for long-distance running too.

While running is clearly in his bones and he plans to run long distances for as long as he can, he does say at the end “the main goal of exercising is to maintain, and improve, my physical condition in order to keep on writing novels”. Oh, and his philosophy? It seems to be this:

Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life – and for me, for writing as well.

Book coverI’m glad I read the book – Murakami seems like a decent, gentle man with some thoughtful things to say about life – but I really don’t think it gave me any real insights into his work. It really is mostly about running!

Haruki Murakami
What I talk about when I talk about running
Vintage Books, 2009

The challenge of the biopic

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I do love a biopic – essentially, a movie dramatisation of the life of a real person – but I also know that I must always keep in mind that it is a dramatisation. That is, it is not a biography but more like a biographical novel. The challenge with this is that when I know the subject well – such as Jane Austen (have I told you I’m a fan?!) – I can tell where poetic licence has been taken in order to tell a good story. But, when I don’t know the subject well, I can walk away believing that what I have just seen are the facts.

A year or so ago, I saw the film Becoming Jane. It created quite a stir among Janeites because it took great liberties with her life: it took what our sources can only confirm as an attraction (possibly an intense one, but one that was quickly nipped in the bud) and created a highly romantic story that included a near-elopement. To the purists this took too great a liberty with her life. To the feminists it was “corrupt” in its implication that it was only as a result of this “romance” that Austen was able to write the love stories that she did. To the general public though it was a lovely period piece about someone who has become one of the century’s icons. Me? I thought it was a very entertaining movie – but it was not my Jane!

Coco Avant Chanel

Coco Chanel, 1920s
Coco Chanel, 1920s (Presumed public domain)

Anyhow, this brings me to the film I saw today, Coco Avant Chanel. I know next to nothing about Coco Chanel’s life and so I could easily walk away from this film believing that I know exactly how she got to be the fashion doyenne that she was, and exactly what role was played by two men – the Frenchman Balsan and the Englishman Arthur “Boy” Capel – in the development of her early career. That would, though, be a bit naive of me. And the film itself should clue me into that through the way it clearly skirted around some parts of her story. For example, at one point it showed Balsan treating her almost as a whore (or kept woman – “my geisha”) and then suddenly accepting her into his rather wild “fold”. It showed “Boy” as her first great love but glossed over the financial arrangement between them, something which the film implies compromised Coco’s sense of independence. It teased us with a close relationship with a sister but didn’t resolve that.

However, I did enjoy the movie. I liked the transition from 10-year-old Coco (then called Gabrielle) to the young woman peering through the curtains before going on to perform in a cabaret-style bar. It neatly gave us the sense that she was an outsider, watching and waiting to join in. The “outsider” idea is certainly one of the themes of her story as told in this film. Oh, and I loved the way it showed her subversive attitude to fashion – her blending of comfort (no corsets, looser fit, androgynous look) with style and elegance. A woman after my own heart, though I must admit that comfort rather than style is what I mostly achieve!

Co-producer of Becoming Jane, Graham Broadbent, says of his film that ‘There are documented facts and we’ve joined the dots in our own Austenesque landscape.’ Should we care – does it matter – that we can’t all see the joins between the dots when we see a biopic?

J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a bad year

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Coetzee, Poland, 2006 (Photo: Mariusz Kubik, from Wikipedia)

Coetzee, Poland, 2006 (Photo: Mariusz Kubik, from Wikipedia)

J.M. Coetzee is one of those rare novelists who pushes the boundaries of what a novel is. The progression from his mid-career novel, the spare but terrifying Disgrace (1999), through Elizabeth Costello (2003) to Diary of a bad year (2007) is so dramatic that there are those who question whether these last two are even novels. It’s actually been a year or so since I read Diary of a bad year but it is currently being discussed by one of my reading groups so now seemed to be a good time to blog about it here.

One of the first things to confront the reader who picks up Diary of a bad year is how to read it. It has three (two to begin with) concurrent strands running across the top, middle and bottom of the page. Some readers try to read the three strands as concurrently as possible while others read the strands sequentially. Following this latter path, though, means you risk missing the way the strands comment on each other. The three strands are:

  • the narrator’s formal voice, basically taking the form of essays he is writing
  • the narrator’s informal voice in which he talks about his life as he is writing the essays
  • the voice of Anya, his “little typist”, and, through her, of her boyfriend, Alan

The three characters represent three modes of viewing the world: the narrator’s is primarily theoretical, while Anya’s is more pragmatic and Alan’s rational. Through these modes, Coetzee teases out the moral conundrums of the early 21st century both in terms of the political (the events confronting us) and the personal (how are we to live).

Towards the end, Coetzee refers to his love of Bach. To some degree the book is a paean to Bach: its three-part structure in which each part counterpoints the others seems to be a textual representation of Bach’s polyphony. The essays running across the top of the page, while a little uneven and dry on their own, are counterpointed by the views of the characters in the other two strands, resulting in our being presented with different ways of viewing the same world.

The characterisation is interesting: Senor C, the writer of the essays, is the logical, moral but somewhat pessimistic thinker; Anya is practical, down to earth, but with a strong moral sense; and Alan is the economic rationalist for whom money is essentially everything. The views of the two men are strongly contrasted, while Anya is caught in the middle. There is a Darwinian sense in Alan of the survival of the fittest, while Senor C spurns competition as a way of life, preferring collaboration. For all his “moral” views, though, Senor C is not presented as a paragon and we are discomforted at times by his attitude towards the beautiful Anya.

The overall theme seems to be how do we live in a world full of paradoxes and contradictions, a world that seems to be pervaded by dishonour and shame (the things Senor C explores in the essays). He talks about ordinary people and how they (we) cope with things they (we) don’t approve of. He wonders why they (we) don’t do something about it, but suggests in the end that they (we) practise “inner emigration”. He says:

The alternatives are not placid servitude on the one hand and revolt against servitude on the other. There is a third way, chosen by thousands and millions of people every day. It is the way of quietism, of willed obscurity, of inner emigration.

I like that concept though it does smack of burying one’s head in the sand. He also talks about collective guilt, and about bearing the dishonour of what’s gone on before. Through choosing a “novel” form like no other, one which blends but in no way harmonises fact and fiction, Coetzee shows in a very concrete way that difficult times need new ways of presenting ideas. He offers no neat conclusions, no easy outs;  he is quite subversive really. Late in the book he ponders the value of writing, and says:

Are these words written on paper truly what I wanted to say?

This then is another step in Coetzee’s path of trying to find the best, perfect perhaps, way of saying what he wants to say. I, for one, will be ready for his next step.

What I didn’t know about flamenco

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Until tonight, if you’d asked me what flamenco was I probably would have said a Spanish dance accompanied by percussion and I might have said there’s flamenco music too. After all, I have heard flamenco guitar! Tonight, though, we attended a performance by  Soledad Barrio and Noche Flamenca, and I learnt more about flamenco in two hours than I’d learnt in my somewhat longer lifetime.

Noche Flamenca was formed in 1993 by Martin Santangelo and his dancer wife Soledad Barrio. The performance we saw comprised two guitarists, two singers and three dancers (all male except for Soledad Barrio). The show commenced with the company on stage tapping out percussive rhythms on a table as if they were at a bar (cantina) and ended with the company doing another hand percussive piece, but this time without table. In between was a sequence of dance and singing items all performed on a stark, minimal stage and pretty well all accompanied by one or two guitars. The only props were chairs, and the lighting was simple but dramatic. I am no dance and music critic and so will not attempt an analysis of what we saw but I will say that it was a beautiful show. It wasn’t what we, naively now I realise, expected: we expected red dresses and castanets, along with stamping feet. We got the stamping feet but there wasn’t a castanet in sight. The whole show was presented as if it were a highly stylised cantina: performers appeared from the group to “show off” a dance or song and controlled but seemingly natural chat could be heard occasionally in the background. The dancing was splendid. I was particularly taken with some travelling moves by Soledad in which, if I hadn’t actually heard the feet tapping, I would have believed she was floating above the surface. Eat your heart out Michael Jackson!

Flamenco Dancer, photo by Gilles Larrain (via Wikipedia)

Flamenco Dancer, photo by Gilles Larrain (via Wikipedia)

So, what did I learn? I learnt that flamenco covers dance, music and song, and that a major feature is its complex syncopation against a strict rhythmic structure (called the compás). My most interesting discovery, though, was that while it is now defined as the music and dance of the Andalusian region of Spain, its origins are wider. During the performance, I was surprised by the singing in particular as it had, to my admittedly untrained ears, a Middle Eastern sound. A quick search of the Internet after we got home told me why – flamenco’s roots are Arabic (Moorish) and European gypsy. How nice to discover that my untrained ears are slowly being trained!

Oh, and I also learnt – rightly or wrongly – that flamenco is a very male thing, that male posturing and bravado are very much part of the tradition. At least that’s how it appeared to me as presented by this company of six men and one woman.

I came away a much wiser person. I also came away wishing I could swish and swirl my skirt the way Soledad did. First though I have to get the skirt!