booklit

One of the pitfalls of reading literature in translation is that some authors see their work, if they see it all, come to the English language in a chronology all of their own. Artificial Snow (2002) was Florian Zeller’s debut novel, but it’s the last of his four to be translated and published. Reading his book, therefore, has almost been an exercise in regression. Having started with the mature and satisfying, The Fascination Of Evil, we now find ourselves back when the author, in his early twenties, was learning his trade and was style trying veer off from Kundera to a style all his own.

Artificial Snow, like Zeller’s recent novel, Julien Parme, is a coming of age novel, although it has more in common with his second, Lovers Or Something Like It, in that it deals with young Parisians caught up in the foibles of love, relationships, and their own self-importance. The last of these is exemplified when Zeller makes the decision to include himself in the novel:

Florian was a strange guy. He was twenty-one and a bit. Quite a bit. His life had been turned upside down by one incident and he’s never been the same again. When he was ten, during one of his experiments, he’d poked a piece of wire into an electric socket while holding it in his mouth. […] It was feared he’d lose the power of speech but, after intensive care, the only after-effects were a fierce desire to write books and a weird hairstyle: his hair seemed to be permanently crystallised on his head like untidy stalagmites.

Zeller, author of the novel, opens with a section titled ‘Boring prologue’ that reflects the disaffected nature of himself, which in turn sets the mood for the book itself:

Everything seemed terribly boring: getting up in the morning, going to bed at night, pretending not to pretend, shaking hands, being polite and romantic, studying and getting good marks, everything. I even found the prologue of the novel I was trying to write after a fashion tragically boring. But, then again, deleting it was even more boring.

From here we move into the narrator’s story, which begins with him missing his train on the Metro.  It’s a fine, if obvious, metaphor that foreshadows the main plot of the novel - that of relationships being like trains, where you hop on and off as life dictates. The train the narrator has missed was to take him to a party which carries some importance to him: Lou is going to be there (”In my dreams, she called me “my darling”; in reality, she didn’t call me at all…”) and he’s quite interested in getting back together with her after a brief relationship a few years before, even if it goes against all he believes in:

We’d spent a few nights together at the time and I didn’t like the idea of doing something I’d already done before. I felt that repeating things was always proof of failure. Getting back together with a girl was like admitting you hadn’t found anything better since, it was like admitting you’d reached your sexual peak somewhere between fifteen and sixteen; that sucked.

Even if the narrator would prefer not to go back, his love for Lou snowballs into obsession, so much so that he finds himself following her, maintaining a distance, and seeing his love melt when she doesn’t notice him, kisses another lover. When it looks as if all hope of reconciliation has faded, there seems only one solution: to wreak terrible acts of violence on her, to kill her. However:

The best crime, the best revenge, was to cheat on her, cheat on her as much as possible, defile her memory with fleeting moments of pleasure.

As far as story goes in Artificial Snow, there’s little of it, with Zeller preferring to relay a few events, presumably autobiographical, given his own inclusion in the novel, and to reflect on them, preferring philosophy over plot. While some of his lines are a tad simple (”making love and fucking are two very different things”) there’s still an invigorating energy running through the prose that skips past these, like them or not, and leads straight in to the next. Also, following the narration can be a little difficult at times, what with Zeller narrating in addition to his narrator, who just so happens to have a recurrent friend called Florian Zeller? Are the two Zeller’s the same? It’s foggy, but the openness of it is a welcome ponderable.

Shakespeare provides an epigraph at the start of the book, one that recurs later in the prose, saying where goes the white when melts the snow? Zeller’s snow is that of childhood, those crisp sheets of memory that we play over in our mind but can never return to. Here, the white turns to sludge, something tricky for the narrator to pull himself out from but altogether necessary for growing up. In writing Artificial Snow it seems a vessel for Zeller to grow up in. Later books show that it worked.

Florian Zeller is an author probably best marked as ‘one for the future’, given that he is still to reach thirty, but that hasn’t stopped him in recent years putting out a number of novels and plays. Julien Parme (2006), is the fourth of his novels and provides an interesting bit of trivia in that two translations have been released this year - one in the US by Other Press, translated by William Rodarmor, and the pictured edition, in the UK, translated by Christopher Moncrieff, and published by Pushkin Press.

His previous novels, also from Pushkin Press, include Lovers Or Something Like It, a paean to a generation confounded by the abundance of choices facing them, and The Fascination Of Evil, a response to the controversy surrounding Michel Houellebecq’s Platform. Both of these demonstrated a solid style reminiscent of Milan Kundera and Houellebecq himself, the narrative veering off at tangents. So it comes as a surprise to find, with Julien Parme, a change in style.

While you were always sure that Zeller was in charge in previous novels, dripping observations across each page while recounting his characters’ adventures, Julien Parme is told completely by its title character, a fourteen year old boy who dreams of winning the Nobel Prize in Literature by the time he’s twenty. (”Julien Parme, you’ve never heard of him? The great writer? No? Really? Because I forgot to tell you I’d like to be a great writer.”)

Julien begins his account wanting  “to tell you about the incredible thing that happened last year”, before going on to say something contradictory…

That sort of person has always made me want to puke. That’s why if someone says he’s got an incredible thing to tell you, I’d be more the sort to be wary, because someone who says that, you shouldn’t give him the chance to go any further. Never.

…and then going back on that (”But in my case it’s not the same, seeing it’s me who’s doing the telling…”) Zeller captures well this meandering teenage mind as it criss-crosses itself through the story, heading off on imaginative flights, usually around Julien’s future as a famous novelist, something that, given the unoriginality of his titles (The Night Ahead of Me, a take on Celine’s Journey To The End of the Night, and the more obvious A Thousand Years of Solitude).

Julien’s imagination is no doubt the sum of a having few friends and his mother’s relationship with François (”…the latest in the long line of muppets…”). When he gets caught smoking his mother grounds him, forbidding him to attend the birthday party of Émilie, older sister of Mathilde who he harbours a fancy for, even though  he daren’t speak to her. But, teens being teens, Julien goes to the party anyway, and the weekend from there becomes a chain of events, some perhaps a bit unlikely, that lead up to the predicament described at the start of the story: looking back on the past year, having been sent off to a family friend in Saint-Dié.

What finished me off more than anything was the feeling that they wanted to get rid of me. My mother, then my uncle. Basically, no one wanted me under their feet. As far as they were concerned I was a hopeless case. Especially my mother; on the platform I definitely sensed she was telling herself: ‘Come on, just another little effort and that’ll be the end of the nightmare’. It freaked me out that she didn’t even look unhappy.

Where previous Zeller novels would have used the incidents in Julien’s life to wax  on about topics such as romance, friendship, bravado, and more, there’s little of that here in Julien Parme. While we wouldn’t expect a fourteen year old to be spitting aphorisms left, right and centre (or good ones, at any rate) there’s little sense that, in the year since, Julien has grown at all. Being even more isolated than before, you would think, would stir up a stream of reflections on where he went wrong. But the novel tends to wallow in a straightforward account that, because the conclusion is gifted from the off, holds little surprise.

In its defence, Zeller hasn’t went the way of many writers who tackle the child narrator by giving Julien that common get-out-of-jail card: making him precocious. If anything he’s a danger to himself, unsure of the world and just beginning to get interested in its wonders, such as women:

Several minutes dragged by, while in my mind thousands of words were jostling around everywhere, trying to work out what to say. Then the moment came, and I leapt in with both feet.

“The music, it’s not bad is it?”

“You think? I don’t like it much, me.”

“Yeah, that’s true mind you, it’s not brilliant this music…It’s the kind of thing they play on the radio…”

I let it go for a moment, unsure even whether to add: “You’re right frankly, it’s useless this music. I haven’t really been listening. It’s crazy.” But I thought it best to change the subject, so I wouldn’t seem like a guy who’s easily influenced.

It’s a convincing piece of ventriloquism, the way Julien’s mind wanders, and the scrapes he bumbles into set up some interestng scenes, but it really does feel like Zeller’s taken his foot off the brake with this one. The change in style is certainly interesting and I hope that Julien Parme is a halfway house between the two as, I think, a blend of his last novel and this could push him to a larger audience. Florian Zeller, you’ve never heard of him? No? Really? But I already told you, he could be a great writer.

Alain Elkann has, in the last thirty years, published over twenty books spanning essays, biography, and fiction. Envy (2006) is the first, as far as I’m aware, of his works to be translated into English and given that much of its action takes place in London, it may well have made itself a prime candidate for introducing him to an English speaking audience. That it’s central concern, as implied by the title, is a universal one probably helped too. And being published in the’ Pushkin Modern range ensures the container is as good as the content.

Envy tells the story of Giacomo Longhi, an Italian writer, who, having heard much about him, wishes to interview the great English artist, Julian Sax. It’s not that easy, though, as Sax isn’t the sort who likes granting interviews and there’s a wall of people - friends, relatives, other artists - who all know him, promise to ask him about the interview, invariably coming back with apologies.

Julien Sax (”a seductive man with a disturbing gaze”) is seen as the world’s greatest living artist and details about him emerge from all manner of associated people. He is “the grandson of Ludwig Sax, the most important scientist of the last century!” and, as one person notes:

“He has an ambiguous relationship with money and with women. He is very reserved and arrogant too, in a certain sense. But he is undoubtedly an extraordinary artist.”

When people get on to the subject of Sax, they linger long on the details of his life:

His turbulent past, moments of great debauchery, his vast brood of illegitimate children, his rebellious side, and his arrogance, were all subjects that triggered endless anecdotes.

These aren’t merely details, but clues, for Elkann is describing, in all but name, Lucien Freud. But the novel is not so much about Sax as it is about Longhi’s perception of the man and it’s this that produces the more interesting sections of self-analysis as he tries to understand why he envies the artist:

I am interested only in Sax because I realise I envy him, I envy the security of a talent confirmed by critics, collectors and market prices all over the world. The great, recognised artist is perhaps the only man who does what he wants, lives as he wants, while his life becomes a legend. Perhaps I haven’t really admitted this even to myself, but I’d like my life to be a legend too.

Throughout the novel Longhi has, on discovering where he dines, plenty of opportunities to introduce himself to Sax but is too hesitant. In his eyes, the artist is “a part of an extinct race, that of the great personalities” and this may go some way to explaining his timidity. At one point he spies a woman interviewing him and resolves only to sit at the next table and listen in.

In discussing how he’s unable to get Sax out of his head, a friend suggests that he write a novel about him. And in a piece of dialogue, Elkann uses this opportunity to show the reader why his novel uses thinly veiled characters rather than explicitly name them:

“Are you sure that this obsession of yours doesn’t hide a desire to write a book about him?”
“No, as long as he’s alive that’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because I would have to tell the whole truth.”
“But people write novels because they are imaginary stories, you can tell the truth in them.”

Thus Envy becomes the planning of a story - a crime novel, with Sax as victim. Essentially it’s a retaliation against the fear that, like many women before her, his wife will submit to the artist, become his lover, only to be discarded.

Through his work, he can dominate any woman: the most sophisticated, the most cultured, or the coarsest, who on seeing herself portrayed reacts with either love or hate, but in both cases feels mastered and flattered. Literature today no longer has that power.

Surely autobiographical in nature, Envy is an interesting treatment of its subject matter and provides a strong grounding for many of its ideas. While there’s the sense that more could have been said, especially on the subject of art and of being an artist, the conclusion is satisfying - to Longhi’s novel, and to Elkann’s. Literature’s power may be waning, but it’s still a force to be reckoned with.

With Christmas in mind I fancied reading something festive to try and get me out of the humbug spirit and, while the obvious choice would have been Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I thought it more interesting to try Adalbert Stifter’s Rock Crystal (1845). It’s a novella, with the subtitle A Christmas Tale and, given how blank and frosty the cover is, I went in with little idea as to how the story would go, knowing only that it concerned village life and two children lost in an icy landscape. And, having read Tarjei Vesaas’ The Ice Palace earlier this year, the prospect of lost children and icy landscapes is always a welcome one.

Rock Crystal takes some time before its main narrative gains control to look at the tradition of Christmas (”…when nights are long and days are short, when the sun slants toward earth obliquely and snow mantles the fields…”) in rural Bohemia which Stifter presents with warmth, bringing the touch of a fairy tale to the snowy mountains and valleys:

In most places, midnight as the very hour of Christ’s birth is solemnized by ritual of great splendour, to which bells wring out their heartsome invitation through the still darkness of the wintry air; then with their lanterns, along dim familiar paths, from snow-clad mountains, past forest-boughs encrusted with frost, through crackling orchards, folk flock to the church from which solemn strains are pouring - the church rising from the heart of the village, enshrouded in ice-laden trees, its stately windows aglow.

The story tightens its scope from exploring village life at this time of the year to the marriage of the beautiful daughter of the dyer of Millsdorf to the shoemaker of Gschaid (and she hasn’t done too bad for herself since shoemakers are “indispensible the world over where human beings are no longer in the primitive stage”) and this one just happens to be the only one in the whole valley. But despite their marriage, the dyer’s daughter is still considered a stranger to the people of Gschaid, where, like all villages, customs hold dear to a place. Even the children soon borne of the marriage are considered strangers.

It’s not long before the children are older and the eldest, Conrad, is allowed to escort his younger sister, Sanna, across the mountains to Millsdorf in order visit their grandmother. This Christmas, returning with presents and pockets stuffed with bread, they find themselves lost on the mountains when the weather takes a turn for the worse and they find the blizzard of snow is filling in their recent footprints so that they are “going on with the dogged endurance that children and animals have, not knowing what is ahead or when their reserves may give out”:

…on every side was nothing but a blinding whiteness, white everywhere that none the less drew its ever narrowing circle about them, paling beyond into fog that came down in waves, devouring and shrouding everything till there was nothing but the voracious snow.

Stifter does well to present the icy landscape in Rock Crystal, dominated as it is by the snowy mountain with its “dazzling horn-shaped peaks” and rock-faces “coated with a white velvet map of hoar-froast and glaze with ice-tissue” making it “the inspiration of many a tale”. The alpine meadows sparkle white, too; and the trees that speckle the mountainside are “drooping with the weight of snow”. Reading around the novella, it seems that Stifter is renowned for his depictions of landscapes and the knack he obviously had for them is demonstrated here with depth, variety, and genuine appreciation.

While the children’s adventure in the story brings them close to death, their will to survive drives them on further into the night, into the ice. And meanwhile, the people of Gschaid come together to bring the children to safety, their selfless hunting a significant act that shows that these people considered strangers are not so after all and that the mother can enjoy “the same familiarity and warm intimacy that existed between the people that belonged to the valley.”

The finest moment of Rock Crystal is certainly the descriptive passages, especially over the typical 19th Century exposition where you get the whole family history before the story is allowed to happen, as they bring an immediacy to the prose, a sense of actually being present in the valley (and on the mountain) as snow falls. My inner sadist was hoping for a different conclusion, but the charm of Stifter’s novella is that it ties faith in with the spirit of Christmas. Not so much faith in the religious sense, but the unquestionable duty to other people for which we should hope to depend on when needs must. And for a Christmas tale, it was good to put my faith in Stifter.

Florian Zeller, from what I can gather, is the latest darling of the French literary scene. At twenty-six, he is a novelist, a playwright, and a lecturer. And, for one so young, he has received a number of literary awards. His third novel, The Fascination Of Evil, was recently published by Pushkin Press, a publisher well known for producing quality books from international authors, new and old. And, as novels go, it’s a mature work with hints of Kundera, dealing with the decline of morals in both Islamic nations and the West.

The story begins with the unnamed narrator preparing for a flight to Egypt for a literary conference. He is due to meet and travel with Swiss novelist, Martin Millet, of whom he is aware but not acquainted in person or in work. And while the narrator, with his girlfriend at home, is looking for a quiet life, Millet is more interested in kicking up a fuss within Egyptian society, spouting his opinions on Islam, and, for most of the novel, finding local women who will have sex with him. This latter desire is inspired by letters Flaubert wrote about his time in Egypt. And, as Millet’s obsession grows, the narrator finds himself dragged further into the author’s world. Then, without warning, Millet vanishes. The narrator, of course, can do nothing but fear the worst for his companion.

The Fascination Of Evil concerns itself, at a deeper level, with the diminishing power of words. It looks at the suras of the Koran, at their hold over the devout, but then, as Millet learns during a meal, there are those who claim to hold true to the tenets of Islam yet, the minute they head to a more liberal nation, the words that dictate their faith are soon forgotten:

“They’re not Egyptian women. They are often Lebanese or Moroccan, but they are not Egyptian. And they only sleep with Saudis, I believe. In any event, for Egyptians, there is no prostitution and no sexual freedom.”

“What do they do?” lamented Martin.

“They bugger each other.”

Apart from that, the food was excellent.

Zeller, however, is not like Millet and is not out to upset Islam. Indeed, aside from pointing out the hypocrisy inherent with some Muslims, he also takes a swipe at Europe. The continent has allowed freedom to send it into decline. Political correctness has reared its ugly head and when religious groups (say, Muslims) protest at novels (Rushdie gets an honourable mention), we seek to remove the offence rather than staunchly support it. By seeking to be inoffensive we are watering down our own culture. Such subtexts lend the novel an impressive depth and you can’t help but agree with Zeller’s observations.

The book’s title, as it would be giving nothing away, relates to the feeling of fearing the worst. The narrator comes to feel the fascination of evil when Millet vanishes after a night out hunting women. But the true fascination, as implied by the denouement, is the fear of what is happening to the west. There are many facets in which our continent, the narrator believes, is falling apart, one such example being letter-writing:

It’s the telephone, and in particular the mobile, that has killed off the art of letter-writing once and for all. I often think of those women who lived in hope, with the pledge of one single love letter, when the other person, for example, went off to war. Back then, words had a formidable strength, since they decided lives. People waited, and trusted, even without news of the other person, for infinite lengths of time. Today, you start panicking the moment you can’t get that other person on your mobile. What’s he doing? Why isn’t she answering? Who’s he with? Anxiety has gained ground. We have entered a period of no return that signals the end of waiting, that is, of trust and silence.

Zeller’s prose style is not florid – to an extent it’s simplistic, realist. Each sentence serves to make a point or an observation and does so without decoration. If I were to have a criticism it would be the sheer volume of exclamation marks used where they were wholly unnecessary, although that may be a quirk of a translator who had a quota to use up, especially when they would appear in the narrative rather than within speech.

Although The Fascination Of Evil, at times, reminded me of Kundera because of the sporadic digressions the narrator would make, the ending was more reminiscent of Houellebecq (from whom Millet is no doubt inspired) that the narrator goes beyond the original narrative and aims to provide a conclusion to all that has gone before, something, I admit, for which I’m not a convert. But, overall, Zeller succeeds at producing a great tale that offers up some interesting points that merit consideration.

And, while he’s still young, The Fascination Of Evil showcases the wisdom of an fantastic talent who must surely be deserving of a great future in literature. And, since I’ve already been looking into his previous novels, it certainly looks like this novel could just be the beginning to my fascination of Zeller.

This nice little book from Pushkin Press, about A5 in size with quality paper, contains two shorts from Austrian author Stefan Zweig, whom I’d no knowledge of prior to spotting this on the shelf. Both stories, named The Invisible Collection and Buchmendel, are linked by the theme of obsession and describe the lives of two different men for whom life was solely about art and literature respectively.

The Invisible Collection begins on a train where the narrator meets an elderly art collector who proceeds to tell him about a recent experience that he believes is the strangest of his career. The story follows the man’s trip to a far outpost of Saxony where an old customer lived – this is in the time of the German depression following World War I – in the hope that he may sell up past purchases cheaply in the desperate financial climate. When he arrives, he meets with Franz Kronfeld, an octogenarian and veteran of the 1870s war. He notices that something is amiss with Kronfeld: he is blind. After lunch, Kronfeld’s daughter asks that their visitor understands the situation regarding Kronfeld’s collection, which he spends time with daily, and, in respect, deceives him so that he never knows the truth about its value, a worth he sees as the saviour of his family through these hard times.

Buchmendel is the longer of the two stories and a more popular tale from the Zweig canon. Another narrator recounts the story of a man called Jacob Mendel, a Russian Jew living in Vienna, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of books. For over thirty years he has sat from dawn to dusk in a coffee shop studying books and taking payment for advice on myriad esoteric subjects. His bibliomania is such that he notices little around him: the advent of electricity, the onset of war. Then, years later, the narrator remembering the character of Mendel returns to the café to find the old man no longer there and only one person, Frau Sporschil, who remembers him. With much sadness she recounts the story of his last few years, and how, emotionally wrecked from his mania and financially ruined from the depression, he was left with nothing and died on the steps of the café in which he had spent the greatest part of his life.

Zweig’s couplet of existential tales is emotionally wrought, and study a wider canvas than implied by their setting. Both display what I’ve found is a familiar trope of the author’s work; namely the decline of Europe and its increasing level of corruption – a belief that led to his suicide in 1942. There is a strange authorial decision in The Invisible Collection that, in my opinion, eliminates the need for the opening paragraph, as, to paraphrase, it states that the narrator met a man on the train and the following is what he said. Overall, though, the stories work well together, but a larger collection of Zweig’s work would have made a better introduction to his catalogue as it’s hard to understand the scope of his writing and ideas when both pieces are thematically linked.