booklit

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.

My previous experience of Nadine Gordimer was with last year’s Booker longlisted Get A Life. That book, to me, was so full of stunted sentences, lacked narrative focus, and was excruciatingly boring that it’s a wonder I would want to read another. But, sometimes, to get the measure of a difficult author (and being a Nobel laureate is usually a good marker of being one) you have to go back to previous works when the style was not so prevalent. With July’s People I don’t think I went far enough back as there were still many of the stylistic tics I hadn’t enjoyed in Get A Life, but this novel was a better and more coherent read.

July’s People is set after the Soweto Uprising in a South Africa where the situation has become anarchic, with white people being forced from their homes, sometimes killed. The Smales family, Bam, Maureen, and their three children believe themselves “lucky to be alive” when they escape to rural South Africa and stay in a mud hut as guest of their servant, July.

It is here, away from the city, that the Smales come to realise the difference between the white and black people of South Africa, for where they are all about the money, the poor have different needs:

She saw how when she or Bam, who were completely dependent on these people, had nothing but bits of paper to give them, not even clothes - so prized by the poor - to spare, they secreted the paper money in tied rags and strange crumpled pouches about their persons. They were able to make the connection between the abstract and the concrete.

July’s People shows the descent of the Smales family as they try to make what they can of their life amongst the poor black community. While July remains servile to them, the gulf between white and black people is slowly dissolved to the point where it is the white family who is found to be helpless while the black people are resourceful to the last. In a life where everyday necessities such as toilet paper, sanitary towels, and groceries become luxuries, the Smales make an effort to understand their new environment but ultimately remain trapped, never quite knowing how to get out.

Mercifully, the prose in this novel is much easier to read than Get A Life (and, I presume, later Gordimers). And while the dialogue can still throw you sideways for a moment, it’s quite easy to regain the thread. Stylistically, rather than use quotes, Gordimer has opted for dashes opening and closing speech. During periods of extended interaction between characters it can be a tad unwieldy, but is ultimately readable. There is also the occasional fragmented sentence but nothing untoward that really hampers the text.

In fact, July’s People has much enjoyable writing. When Maureen, our window on the world, isn’t philosophising, there come a series of descriptions that evoke the difficulty of trying to live a normal life in a world outside your comfort zone, and of how natural that world is:

They made love, wrestling together with deep resonance coming to each through the other’s body, in the presence of their children breathing close around them and the nightly intimacy of cockroaches, crickets and mice feeling-out the darkness of the hut; of the sleeping settlement; of the bush.

Gordimer also takes time in the novel to find stylistic flourishes, such as the initial car journey when the Smales flee their lives - a piece of writing that wonderfully captures the bumpy journey off road and the angst of the ordeal as a whole:

People in delirium rise and sink, rise and sink, in and out of lucidity. The swaying, shuddering, thudding, flinging stops, and the furniture of life falls into place. The vehicle was the fever. Chattering metal and raving dance of loose bolts in the smell of the childrens’ car-sick. She rose from it for gradually longer and longer intervals. At first what fell into place was what was vanished, the past.

My reading of July’s People was very much like that car journey. There were moments where I found my mind drifting as I read it, not taking much in, but, as I warmed to the prose style, I found myself finding more and more of it followable. Those lapses, however, may have lost the novel’s full effect for me but it’s certainly piqued my interest for some more of Gordimer’s work, for it’s a great mix of gritty reality and symbol all wrapped up in a style of her own making.

Originally published as a serial in a Colombian newspaper back in 1955, The Story Of A Shipwrecked Sailor, to my surprise given other Márquez titles, is a piece of non-fiction. It was only attributed to Gabriel García Márquez in 1970 and tells the story of Colombian sailor, Luis Alejandro Velasco, as told to Márquez. While the full title pretty much covers the bulk of the story (The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor Who Drifted on a Liferaft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made Rich Through Publicity, and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time) there’s a great deal of action here despite being pretty much restricted to a raft.

Leaving Alabama after eight months of repair work, the Colombian destroyer, Caldas, is heading home. Only a couple of hours from ending their journey a number of sailors are knocked overboard, their ship sailing on innocent of their loss. In the subsequent scramble the narrator Velasco recalls seeing his friends in the water with him as he fought his way to a raft. And then, one by one, they disappeared until he was alone at sea.

The next ten days are Velasco’s account of his time as his hopes of rescue abandon him, as starvation, thirst, and the sun take their toll on his mind and body, leading him to hallucinations. And that’s not all - he hunts for fish and gulls, fights against the sharks that punctually arrive each day, and saves himself when the raft overturns. Twice! It’s amazing how much action you can fit into ten days in such a confined space. But eventually, as the lengthy title states, it all comes to an end when he ends up ashore in the place he least expects: his own Colombia.

As Márquez’s first real work, there’s little of the style that he would become famous for - and, indeed, take the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature - and his journalistic tendencies see him reporting the account from Velasco’s perspective, adding colour where necessary, and bringing life to the page. And, despite it’s basis in fact, there’s something of the myth to it, given perhaps the solitary nature of one man’s fight for survival amidst the unforgiving sea.

The Story Of A Shipwrecked Sailor is a relatively quick read covering the stubborn will to live of one man with a positive outcome. Sprinkled amongst its pages there’s some interesting tidbits of survival and enough action to maintain such a narrative account. There’s also an emotional connection as we wonder what it’s like to be feared dead, what our families and friends must think. And given the current climate of people becoming celebrities for absolutely anything, this book shows that, no matter where these people are in the world, it’s not such a recent phenomenon after all.