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.

There are a number of novels out there that people are expected to have read at some point in their youth. Not to have done so is, in a word, shameful. This is the position that I’ve found myself in with J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye (1951), a copy of which I bought many years ago, perhaps even twelve, when I was the same age as its infamous narrator, Holden Caulfield. That copy has sat unread on my shelves all that time, its pages yellowing.

Part of the reason I’ve not read it is that I thought I knew it already.  What with its famous opening, the defiant nature of Holden Caulfiend, and a slim understanding that the novel concerned, to some degree, Caulfield’s younger sister, what more was there to know? Loads, apparently, especially on realising the book wasn’t about baseball. What forced me to finally take the book off the shelves is that it’s a universal reference point for so much fiction employing a youthful narrator shaking his fist at the world.

Having mentioned the opening to the novel, it seems only fair to show it, acknowledging the immediate strength and attitude to Caulfield’s voice:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

Although novels had long moved from the verbiage of the serial novel, Salinger is quick to show that this is no payment-by-the-word affair, but that of a person with their own ideas of what the story should be. Salinger maintains the consistency of the voice through almost two hundred pages, but what’s most interesting is who Caulfield is addressing. At first it appears he is speaking to us, the reader, but as the opening paragraph rolls on there are references that suggest this isn’t just any old tête à tête between book and reader. References to his brother visiting him once a week in “this crumby place” and and going home, but not for a while yet, hint at what’s going on, but as the novel progresses the truth becomes clear.

The Catcher In The Rye sees Caulfield reflecting on an event that happened to him the year before. He begins at Pencey, his preparatory school, in the lead up to Christmas. He won’t be coming back after the holiday, having flunked all his subjects save English, and a letter has been dispatched to his parents back home in New York. After a few altercations with fellow students, a plan forms in his head:

I’d decided what I’d really do, I’d get the hell out of Pencey - right that same night and all. I mean not wait till Wednesday or anything. I just didn’t want to hang around any more. It made me sad and lonesome. So what I’d decided to do, I decided I’d take a room in a hotel in New York - some very inexpensive hotel and all - and just take it easy till Wednesday. Then, on Wednesday, I’d go home all rested up and feeling swell…I sort of needed a little vacation. My nerves were shot. They really were.

Even though Caulfield is a year older, and seems more calm and collected than the younger self he describes, there is a sense that he’s never being fully honest with us. It’s to be expected from someone who says he’s “the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life.” At one point, early in the story, he discusses the way he acts, and although the lies he tells us about telling to others at times sound absurd, the down to earth believability of this are deliberately ambiguous. Truth or not, the sad thing is that while he thinks he’s deceiving others, he’s deceiving himself about why he does it: for attention.

I was sixteen then, and I’m seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I’m about thirteen. It’s really ironical, because I’m six foot two and a half and I have gray hair. I really do. The one side of my head - the right side - is full of millions of gray hairs. I’ve had them ever since I was a kid. And yet I still act sometimes like I was only about twelve. Everybody says that, especially my father. It’s partly true, too, but it isn’t all true. People always think something’s all true. I don’t give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am - I really do - but people never notice it. People never notice anything.

In my misconceptions of The Catcher In The Rye being about baseball (although a baseball glove does feature), I’d assumed that the title referred, in some way, to playing baseball in a field of rye. Simple, I know. I was surprised, however, to see, as the story makes clear, that it’s another classic American novel, like Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men, taking its title from a Robert Burns poem, in this case Comin’ Thro’ The Rye, a poem that calls for self responsibility without busybodies interfering. It’s a reference to an image Caulfield has of children playing in a field of rye near a cliff where he is there to catch them as they fall, something he misinterprets as to do with the preservation of his sister Phoebe’s childhood, a misunderstanding that leads to epiphany.

That The Catcher In The Rye is often seen as a novel best read in one’s youth is perhaps true in part. The wise words of a teacher, coupled with Caulfield’s realisation showing he is on the path to adulthood, is geared for that age group. The masterly control Salinger shows in his anti-hero’s voice, a casual, limited vernacular, capable of expressing (and suppressing) a great deal of content and experience. Growing up is painful, and Caulfield’s as good a guide as any. But as an adult, the enjoyment of the book is not in its lessons but its allusions, tone, and its character, all satisfying, and nary a whiff of didacticism making the novel feel like a life lived than one taught. In talking about books, Holden says it best:

What I like best is a book that’s at least funny once in a while. I read a lot of classical books like The Return of the Native and all, and I like them, and I read a lot of war books and mysteries and all, but they don’t knock me out too much. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.

Ah, Salinger: he doesn’t write, he doesn’t call. Perhaps that’s why.

As the opening to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina makes clear, unhappy families are unhappy in their own way, and in dealing only with its own families it leaves a wealth of stories about unhappy families to be told. 1933 Was A Bad Year (1985), a posthumously published novel by John Fante, concerns one such unhappy family: the Molises, a three generation family with its roots in Italy and branches in the United States.

It should be noted that Fante himself was the son of an Italian immigrant and his fiction bears a  semi-autobiographical signature. The hardships of life in the Depression and his Catholic upbringing are readily present in his fiction, and in a life that stretched over seventy years he produced a paltry amount of it: not because he took his time, but that times were hard and he drifted into movies, penning scripts, like him, long forgotten, because the money was better. Indeed, it was only once Bukowski declared him “his God” that he was ‘remembered’ again.

As the title of the book makes clear, the action is set in 1933. At that time our narrator, Dominic Molise, is a seventeen year old with dreams of becoming an American sporting legend, a southpaw pitching for the Chicago Cubs. His poverty stricken situation doesn’t deter his dreams - after all, some of the most successful names he can rhyme off were once like him.

I could feel my future making waves around me, the promise of days to come, the exciting years that lay ahead. It was always this way with great men, a stirring in their bones, a mysterious energy that set them apart from the rest of mankind. They knew! They were different. Edison was deaf. Steinmetz was a hunchback. Babe Ruth was an orphan, Ty Cobb a poor Georgia boy. Giannini started with nothing. People thought Henry Ford was crazy. Carnegie was a runt like myself. Tony Canzoneri came out of the slums. Poor young men, touched with magic, lucky in America.

Molise’s left arm is his ticket to the big time, so much so that it’s a character of its own, which he refers to as Arm throughout ( “Oh, Arm! Strong and faithful arm, talk sweetly to me now.”). While he would use it for baseball, for “fame and fortune and victory”, his father has other ideas - like training him up in the family trade, bricklaying, so that they can be father and son, working together, paying debts and, with their savings, some day going into the lumber business.

So, there it was. The whole book. The Tragic Life of Dominic Molise, written by his father. Part One: The Thrills of Bricklaying. Part Two: Fun in a Lumber Yard. Part Three: How To Let Your Father Ruin Your Life. Part Four: Here Lies Dominic Molise, Obedient Son.

Molise has had a stint working for his father before, a summer job, and what he recalls most is that “the Arm resented it and was sore all the time”. To his mind, it wouldn’t make sense to toil away with bricks chasing a dream of lumber yards when, observing his father, he notes:

He himself was a very good bricklayer, laying them as expertly as he shot pool, fast and neat and with a rhythm, but he stayed poor just the same, no matter how hard he worked, until it was plain that being poor was not his fault but the fault of his trade.

Why put your back out when other dreams are less intensive? Molise, with his friend, Ken Parrish, a richer kid from the other side of town, contrive a plan to earn the cash to travel east from Colorado. The only problem is that in raising the cash, the effect on the family could be catastrophic, especially such a tightknit family living in a single house, all dependent on the income of an ailing business.

The focus on family, another of Fante’s staples, is drawn well in 1933 Was A Bad Year. Molise’s siblings come and go, more than can be said of his father. The tensions brought about by debts (”‘the rent, the lights, the gas, the butcher, the doctor, the bank, the lumber yard’”) threaten to implode the family. And, always at home, never making things any easier, are Grandma Bettina (”She had not wanted to come to America, but my grandfather had given her no other choice.”), and Molise’s mother, too rapt in religion to truly care for what’s going on around her:

Prayer! What good was it? What had it done for her? My father beside her in bed every night, listening to the clicking of her rosary, finding her on her knees, shivering in the cold, what the hell are you doing down there, come to bed for Christ’s sake before you freeze to death, her prayers a snapping whip at his ass, reminding him of his worthlessness, his wife like a child writing letters to Santa Claus, collapsing from life into the arms of God, of St Teresa, of the Virgin Mary….God’s victim, my father’s victim, her children’s victim, she walked about with the wounds of Christ in her hands and feet, a crown of thorns about her head…I longed for the day of revolt when she would break a wine jug over my father’s head, smack Bettina in the mouth and beat us children with a stick. But she punished us instead with Our Fathers and Hail Marys, she strangled us with a string of rosary beads.

Reading Fante is always a joy, his prose punchy, breezy, and warm with humour. That he can, seemingly without effort, make a light work of a time in history where life was downright miserable brings to mind Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, although the two could hardly be any further from each other in style. Like Fante’s Wait Until Spring, Bandini, this novel is also a coming-of-age novel - bricklayers, poverty, Depression - but then, as I noted before, unhappy famililes are different in their own way, and, even though both books follow Fante’s themes, the Bandinis and the Molises are unhappy in their own way.

Part of the joy in reading books for a second, third, umpteenth time is that you can come away with an improved understanding. One book I read a few years ago was Patrick Süskind’s The Story Of Mr Sommer (1991). Back then, I remember being underwhelmed by its relatively simple story and, to be honest, none of it really added up. It was the title, presumably, that hampered my experience of the novella as I went in expecting, as suggested, a story about the eponymous Mr Sommer. In doing so I now realise that I missed the point, a point which I feel a reread has sorted out.

Told many years hence, the novella deals with the narrator’s ” old tree climbing days”, those spent growing up in the village of Unternsee, one of many villages running along a lakeside. While the book spans a number of years, the main events are brought to mind by the enigmatic Mr Sommer, resident in the next village, who everyone knew although no one had ever bothered to speak with him.

What makes Mr Sommer memorable, and a vibrant hook for the narrator’s memories, is his penchant for walking:

He would often leave home before daybreak, as the fishermen out on the lake at four in the morning would confirm, and often not get home till late at night, when the moon was already high in the sky. In that time he would cover astonishing distances. To walk right the way round the lake, a distance of some twenty-five miles, in the course of a day was nothing out of the ordinary for Mr Sommer. To make two or three trips into town a day, six miles each way - no problem for Mr Sommer! When we trotted off to school at half past seven in the morning, still rubbing sleep from our eyes, we would encounter a fresh and alert-looking Mr Sommer who had already been walking for hours; coming home tired and hungry at lunchtime, we would be overtaken by Mr Sommer, eating up the ground with enormous strides; and on the evening of the same day, when I took a last peep out of the window before going to bed, I might see the tall, lanky figure of Mr Sommer hurrying shadowly by on the lake road.

While the reasons for Mr Sommer’s perambulatory feats are discussed (claustrophobia? a nervous twitch?) the answers are little more than hearsay and speculation. All around him there’s a sense of loneliness, and in this questions of how we treat others arise. That no one makes the effort to say hello or enquire after his wellbeing leaves Mr Sommer merely trudging on in life, with nothing to experience or stop for, other than necessary distractions like eating and sleeping. It’s the sort of life that can only end in tragic circumstances.

Of the narrator’s life, or where he begins anyway, childhood seems a fun time, one where each day is taken up by the fun of climbing trees and the pretence of flying (”…if I’d just unbuttoned my coat then and held my coat tails in both hands and spread them like wings, why, then the wind would have picked me up altogether, and I would have soared off School Hill with the greatest of ease…”). Soon, though, as with any coming of age story, the coming of age part has to happen.

The Story Of Mr Sommer features a short string of remembered scenes that come together to show the foibles of growing up. Here we have the first stirrings of love with a classmate (”I could have gone on looking at that face for ever, and I did look at it whenever I could, in lessons or during break. But I was careful to do it discreetly, so that no one saw me looking, not evenCarolina herself, because I was terribly shy.”) and, thanks to a gross scene with his piano teacher, a lesson how mean people can be.

That’s life, however, and Süskind cleverly spins all this into a thread about bicycles that runs through the story. When starting out, the narrator has trouble believing such a thing could never support him when it can’t support itself freestanding, but repeated attempts - be it on the bike or in life - soon lead to  confidence:

I don’t remember how long it took me to master the dark art of riding a bicycle. All I remember is that I learned it by myself, with a mixture of unwillingness and grim resolve, on my mother’s bicycle, on a slightly sloping forest track where no one could see me…And one time, after many failed attempts, surprisingly suddenly really, I cracked it. I could move - in spite of all my theoretical doubts and my powerful scepticism - freely on two wheels: a mystifying and proud sensation.

While the narrator got nostalgic, I couldn’t help feeling similar, thanks to the sprinkling of watercolours interspersed with the text, thanks to French artist Sempé. It recalled for me a childhood spent reading the books of Roald Dahl - The Twits, say, or Matilda - all illustrated by Quentin Blake. The Story Of Mr Sommer, however, no matter how lightly the prose makes it seem, is for an older age group, because of darker themes that appear towards the end.

And what of Mr Sommer and his story? Well, this reread showed that the story I was looking for was never there, that it was a mystery, and that’s how it was intended. As a reader you want to understand the character, to ask him why he walks so relentlessly. But when the ending looms and you want to reach out, it’s already too late. There’s been so many chances before and each one not taken.

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.

Here begins my Roth odyssey. And where better to start than the beginning? So, with that obvious logic in mind, the first in an oeuvre spanning twenty-eight books (a mix of fiction and non-ficton; of standalone and series novels) is Goodbye, Columbus (1959), a novella of around one hundred pages that won the National Book Award in 1960. Bundled with it are five more short stories, each complementing the greater work in theme and style. One may assume by its length that this was Roth stepping up, stretching those muscles in search of a novel.

In reading around the book it’s interesting to note that it caused controversy in its day for the unflattering portrayal of some Jewish characters. But with Roth himself coming from a Jewish background, and the stories showing hints of autobiography, it would seem he was at least in a position to be critical about the Jewish lifestyle. Of particular delight, is that in almost fifty years it has lost none of its bite.

In Goodbye, Columbus there’s a young Negro who comes regularly to the library where Neil Klugman works and sits each time with a book of Paul Gaugin’s exotic paintings, dreaming of Tahiti (”That ain’t no place you could go, is it?”). It’s a fitting metaphor for the novella’s main focus, the summer relationship between Neil, a poor boy from Newark, and Brenda Patimkin, a spoiled girl whose father, having laboured at his business, has moved the family on up from Newark to an affluent suburb.

Neil gets invited to the local country club twice: first by his cousin, where he meets Brenda; then by Brenda herself, after asking her out. Despite their social differences, they come together - Brenda doesn’t ask many questions - and find their fondness for each other growing:

We came back to the chairs now and then and sang hesitant, clever, nervous, gentle dithyrambs about how we were beginning to feel towards one another. Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them - at least I didn’t; to phrase them was to invent them and own them. We whipped our strangeness and newness into a froth that resembled love, and we dared not play too long with it, talk too much of it, or it would flatten and fizzle away.

That the froth only resembled love is no doubt fitting for this coming of age story. Given the frequency with which they engage in sex in her parent’s house, it’s clear that lust is more appropriate. Regardless, it fills a summer. But all good things come to an end and the ultimate breaker in the relationship is perhaps dated for readers of a more promiscuous age, eliciting more shoulder shrug than shock. Nevertheless, one can’t forget the novella is of its own time and, riding a wave of strong writing and excellent dialogue, it does it well.

The coming of age theme is reflected by way of Brenda’s athletic brother, Ron, introduced in said pool “like a crew-cut Proteus rising from the sea.” Ron’s at that stage in life where marriage is on the mind, but he’s nostaligic, looking back to past glories. Aside from music, his favourite record is a recording of his last day at school (”‘Big Ron’s last game, and it’ll be some time before Buckeye fans forget him’”) in which a voice offers a rallying cry to the university, reflecting on growing up:

“For many this will be their last glimpse of the campus, of Columbus, for many many years. Life calls us, and anxiously if not nervously we walk out into the world and away from the pleasures of these ivied walls. But not from its memories. They will be the concomitant, if not the fundament, of our lives. We shall choose husbands and wives, we shall choose jobs and homes, we shall sire children and grandchildren, but we will not forget you, Ohio State. “

Walking out into the world echoes the other major thread running through Goodbye, Columbus: assimilation. The Patimkin’s are a Jewish family and while they try hard to maintain their traditions, they find themselves, at the same time, trying to hide their heritage. The father thinks nothing of paying thousands to have the bend in his childrens’ noses fixed. Ultimately, Neil, a lapsed Jew, can’t assimilate into this family and, like Ron’s class of ‘57, it’s time to leave. “No sense carrying dreams of Tahiti in your head, if you can’t afford the fare.”

Of the other stories, each tackles contemporary issues of post-war Jewish life, mirroring Goodbye, Columbus’ notion of assimilation. The Conversion Of The Jews, about a young boy who questions Jewish teaching, is an obvious standout for its controversial conclusion, but it’s Defender Of The Faith, about a Jewish sergeant trying to help other Jewish soldiers under his command with their army life, that feels more complete. The others are lesser players, the final, Eli, The Fanatic, proving itself predictable and an unsatisfactory ending to the whole package. But while it’s Goodbye, Columbus, it’s hello to me, this new explorer on the sea of Roth.

On my regular visits to book shops there has been one book that I’ve picked up on each visit, pondered it awhile, and returned to the shelves. Not because it didn’t interest me, but because other books I picked up interested me more. However, having seen a positive review elsewhere, I decided that the next time I picked it up I wouldn’t put it down until I’d read it. So, it came to be that I read Secret (2004), by Philippe Grimbert, winner of notable French literary prizes. And besides, it’s always fun to be part of a secret.

Grimbert is by trade a psychoanalyst and it appears that for his second novel he has decided to sit himself on the couch and delve into his own family history, providing a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in post-war France. Fiction and reality are almost inseparable here as the narrator is Grimbert himself and the events are real. Secret, then, is an attempt by the author to flesh out his family history prior to his own birth, in which an unearthed secret is hidden:

Of athletic parents, Grimbert is a child of “thinness and sickly pallor”, and begins by talking of how he invented an imaginary brother, someone older and stronger, someone he’d never become, a brother “who would burden [him] with the full force of his weight”, to fill the hole in his world:

I always felt envious when I went to stay with a friend and a similar-looking boy walked in. The same dishevelled hair and lopsided grin would be introduced with two words: ‘My brother’. An enigma, this intruder with whom everything must be shared, even love. A real brother. Someone in whose face you discovered like features: a persistently straying lock of hair, a pointy tooth… A room-mate of whom you knew the most intimate things: moods, tastes, weaknesses, smell. Exotic for me who reigned alone over the empire of my family’s four room flat.

What follows then is the realisation that buried deep in his mind, the imaginary brother has his roots in a half-brother who died before Philippe was born. The novel proceeds to tell a version of Grimbert’s family history, imagined from the bones of what he knows:

For a long time I was a young boy who dreamed of having a perfect family. I used the rare glimpses they gave me to build a picture of how my parents had met. A few incidental words about their childhood, snippets of information about their youth, their love… I pounced on these fragments to create my unlikely tale. In my own way I unwound the tangle of their lives and, much as I had invented myself a brother, created from scratch the meeting of the two bodies from which I was born, as if I were writing a novel.

By doing this he learns how his father’s first marriage spawned the half-brother, despite having always had eyes for the woman who became Grimbert’s mother. But it goes deeper than that, for after his fifteenth birthday Philippe learns “what [he] had always known”: that his past is Jewish. His father, by deed poll, had changed their name from Grinberg to Grimbert, thus allowing him to “plant roots deep in French soil.” Confronted on the truth he replies that “we’ve always had that name”. And so the true nature of the Grimbert history comes to light as the author imagines what it would have been like to live in occupied France, as a Jew:

The yellow stain distinguished them to others but also allowed them to recognise each other, binding together a community that, because it was hiding itself, had sometimes not realised its own existence.

So it continues that Grimbert pieces together his family history during and after the war, taking what is known and supposing the rest, finding in his fictions reasons for why events happened as they did. And as the author works through the memory of his characters, the great secret that lies at the heart of the family is aired and the burden they represent cast aside, leading to final tragic circumstances.

Grimbert’s prose is terse, mildy poetic at times, and, along with its notion of imagining one’s family’s past, is reminiscent of Anne Enright’s The Gathering, only more optimistic, interesting, and enjoyable. At no point does the author brood on the past, each short section being a delicate meditation or revelation, culminating in the harrowing aftermath of one family’s life during wartime that is ultimately poignant in the telling. In sharing the secret of his brother Grimbert no longer needs to invent, for with the secret aired he is no longer alone.

Secret is published as Memory in the US.

There’s a common misconception that Eskimos have an inflated number of words for snow. Probably because there’s various Eskimo tribes, all speaking their own languages. I have no idea how many words there are in Norwegian - or Nynorsk, to be more precise - but I reckon there’s a good number of them, otherwise Tarjei Vesaas’ The Ice Palace (1963) would be a repetitive novel.

And how, then, without being repetitive, would it translate to English, if we only have one word for snow? That word being, well, snow. Thankfully, the English language has a large enough vocabulary to describe frozen water in all manner of ways - ice, icicle, frost, slush, etc. - all equally evocative, and its a mercy indeed for without them The Ice Palace would not be the evocative beauty it is.

Siss and Unn are two very different young girls. The former is popular in their rural school; the latter, recently arrived in the area, is very much alone. But something attracts them to one another, and one winter evening Siss heads over to Unn’s and their getting to know other - secrets shared, and promised to never tell, aside - is an awkward affair. So awkward, in fact, that Unn skips school the following day to visit the ice palace, a structure built from the errant streams and spray of a waterfall, and is never heard from again.

And as the search for Unn begins amongst the villagers the snow begins to fall. In fact, the snow falls all winter, each successive layer covering up the earth and any tracks Unn may have left. But it’s not quite so simple as that, for the snow is both physical and metaphorical, a representation of the way in which Siss becomes snowed in, emotionally isolated in her need to preserve the memory of her friend:

They’re not thinking about Unn any more.”

“Who isn’t?”

“Nobody is!” said Siss, even though she had not meant to. It had gone dark, and then she had said it.

Her mother answered calmly: “How do you know, my girl?”

Siss said nothing.

“And then nobody knew Unn. It’s unreasonable, but it makes it seem different. People have a lot to think about, you see.” Mother looked at Siss and added: “You’re the person who can think about Unn all the time.”

As if Siss had been given a great gift.

This “gift” leads Siss to embody Unn, to become the loner at school. To keep the air of mystery alive - for that reason she’ll never tell another soul Unn’s secret. But as the winter leads into spring, Siss learns to accept that Unn is never coming back and in such situations one can be relieved of a promise’s obligation. And so, with the new season warming the land, Siss is able to take one step closer to adulthood and all the inner turmoil she has been suffering melts away, the metaphorical ice palace going the same way as the physical one:

It was just as alarmingly tall and strange from whichever angle you looked at it. Polished and sparkling, free of snow, and with a ring of cold around it in the middle ofthe mild March air in which it stood. The river, black and deep, moved out from under the ice, gathering speed on its way downward and taking with it everything that could be torn way.

Aside from the rather amazing story of The Ice Palace, with its layers of symbols and possible interpretations, what really captures the imagination is the prose: chilly, sad, and haunting; yet not without colour. It’s poetry, and what makes it even more special is that it’s a translation. Just how beautiful must the original be?

The Ice Palace really deserves more widespread attention. It’s a subtle gem, extremely unassuming, and, while it will no doubt mean different things to different people, they will all agree that it means something to them. Frankly, it’s nothing short of a work of art and I’ll be looking forward to reading more of Vesaas in the near future. As an introduction to his work, what a way to break the ice!

Were it not for my rather unnatural obsession as regards collecting all of the Penguin Classics, I may never have heard of The God Boy by New Zealand journalist, Ian Cross. Written in the late fifties, this debut novel falls somewhere between Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye (which I am yet to read) and Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. I believe it is hailed as a classic in his home land - in much the same way Grassic Gibbons’ Sunset Song is in Scotland – and forms (or at least once formed) part of the school curriculum – but don’t quote me on that.

The story is told by thirteen year old Jimmy Sullivan who is recounting the events in his life two years previous when his world changed forever. His world back then was the coastal town of Raggleton where he lived with his parents and went to Catholic school. His elder sister, Molly, lived in Wellington. Jimmy’s day to day activities include going to school, hanging around with his friends, and talking with an elderly Raggleton resident (called Bloody Jack) down by the harbour. When not embroiled in such pursuits he turns his attention to the question of God.

Jimmy has a problem with God. While the sisters at school feed him all the usual nonsense, his interpretation is that God is a literal being. And, when he is told that God frowns upon bad behaviour by punishing those that sin, Jimmy believes that he is being reprimanded from up on high when the family life around him begins to disintegrate. His father’s a drunk, his mother has a secret abortion, and their disdain for each other grows throughout the novel. Jimmy, always thinking he is to blame, attributes their arguments to the new bike he begged for and received and even offers to give it back if that will stop the trouble.

Aside from such innocence, Jimmy has some methods for dealing with the strife in his household. He calls them his ‘protection tricks’ and whenever his parents devolve into quarrel he finds solace in singing songs and plunging his hands into scalding hot water. His confusion around Catholic ritual is typically shown here in that, while he doesn’t care for all that religious stuff, his songs sometimes include the Hail Mary.

All through The God Boy, Jimmy’s anger grows until one day he lashes out at God and finds a new mean streak (swearing at an old lady, throwing stones at a friend, smashing a window) which, when the novel’s end comes around, Jimmy believes is what he is being punished for until he realises that he is not to blame – he’s made all the effort and God hasn’t even lifted a finger.

Like Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, the narration by a child makes for interesting reading as you are forced to interpret what you are being told. Jimmy, of course, doesn’t know what an abortion is but by reading the clues as he describes the scene (early in the novel) you get the gist of what is happening. His monologue is punctuated with local phrases that emphasise the setting and the inclusion of a few American phrases hint that Raggleton – at its remotest – is not safe from outside influence.

Overall, The God Boy is an enjoyable portrait of a family falling apart through a young boy’s eyes and for all his protests about how he doesn’t care there is emotion within that allow you to see past his objections. I don’t think it’s as engaging as Doyle’s Booker winner but its nevertheless a good enough quick read.