The latest addition to my website is Tomás González‘s La luz difícil (Difficult Light). It is narrated by David, a Colombian painter. While he and his family, were living in New York, his son, Jacobo had a terrible car accident, leaving him in permanent and agonising pain. Jacobo decides that he cannot go on living and, with the support of his family, he plans to die. Much of the book is David, now aged 78, widowed, going blind and back in Colombia, writing about Jacobo and the events leading to his planned death, including a car journey from New York to Portland, Oregon. However, we also see the world through David’s painterly eye and it is the combination of the Jacobo plot and David’s view of the world that makes this a masterful novel.
The latest addition to my website is Clara Usón‘s Corazón de napalm [Heart of Napalm]. There are two stories going in. The first concerns Fede, an overweight thirteen year old boy, whose parents spend their life partying and doing drugs. When it all goes wrong, the parents split up and Fede and his father move to Santander, where his father has a new wife. Fede and his stepmother hate each other and Fede decides to run away to find his mother. It does not work out well. Meanwhile, Marta is painting for the famous artist, Maristany. He has a tremor so he has the ideas and she carries them out. The clients are none the wiser. However, she is fired by Maristany’s new wife, Solange. Sometime later she meets Juan, a judge specialising in juvenile crime. They start an affair, which has its ups and downs, while she struggles to make a living, till Solange phones her after Maristany’s death, to carry on her work. Though various things go wrong in both stories, the two do converge and in a surprising way. It is a very clever book with interesting ideas on art and juvenile crime but sadly not available in English.
During our recent travels in Ireland, we visited Birr Castle, a beautiful castle in wonderful grounds and well worth the visit. The castle is owned and still partially occupied by Lord and Lady Rosse. The Earl of Rosse is the brother of the Earl of Snowdon who was, for eighteen years married to Princess Margaret. In the bookshop, I found a copy of a book called Room for Books – Paintings of Irish Libraries by Alison Rosse. Alison Rosse is the Countess of Rosse. It is, as it says, a selection of paintings of various Irish libraries, both private and public, beautifully done. The paintings reminded me of the painting of Coole Park Library done by Yeats. which I had just seen, shown in my post of yesterday (scroll down).
I am no art critic but I did find these paintings well done, somewhat but certainly not too much impressionistic and all giving the flavour of the library in question, all of which have their similarities – high shelves with books in them – but all of which have their own distinct appearance. Each painting is accompanied by a useful description/history written by William Laffan, an Irish art historian. My only regret is that I have not visited any of them and, as many of them are private, probably never will; however this is definitely an excellent way of seeing and appreciating fine libraries you will probably never see. The one shown above, by the way, is the library at Birr Castle.
The best way to get the book is to visit Birr Castle. If that is not possible, it is available online from the publishers, the Irish Georgian Society and from Offaly History for the very reasonable price of €10.00.
The latest addition to my website is Sabahattin Ali‘s Kürk Mantolu Madonna (Madonna in a Fur Coat). Our narrator, who has lost his job, gets a job where he has to work with a German translator called Raif. Raif is treated badly at work and badly at home (by his in-laws) and is often ill. When Raif seems to be dying the narrator is given a notebook which contains Raif’s story. He had gone to Germany as a young man and drifted around, till he went to a modern art exhibition. He did not like the art till be saw the final painting, a self-portrait by a woman called Maria Puder, which he christens Madonna in a Fur Coat. He is determined to find her and eventually does. The rest of the book is about their up-and-down relationship and, given what we know from the early part of the book, it is not going to end well. Ali tells an excellent love story as well as the story of a man whose life was defined by one meeting and has been failure both before and since.
I recently attended an exhibition at Tate Britain called Aftermath, exploring the impact of World War One on British, German and French art. I have long been fascinated by this period for two reasons.
The exhibition did, of course, include some interesting French artists, such as Picasso, André Derain, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and André Masson and German artists such as Max Ernst, Otto Dix and Georg Grosz.
My grandmother who died in the Spanish flu epidemic, with my uncles
My other interest in this period is because World War I changed so much. There were the obvious changes such as the fact that 10 million died and 20 million were injured, large parts of France and Belgium were destroyed, the economies of many European countries were destroyed, it led directly to the Great Depression and the rise of Fascism, various revolutions/civil wars happened (Russia, Ireland, Malta, Hungary, Germany, Egypt, Finland and others) and various countries died/significantly changed their frontiers and/or came into being after the war. Less obvious but still fairly well-known were the Spanish flu epidemic immediately after the war, which took millions of lives, the fact that after the War, the US surpassed Britain and Germany in economic and political power and the fact that after the War, Britain (and other countries, too) moved from being primarily a rural country to being primarily an urban country. In the UK, we have recently celebrated one hundred years of votes for women though, as many pointed out, it was at the same time that all adult men also received the vote. There is no question that the role of women changed after the war, not least because women had to work at men when the men were away fighting and dying.
Many novels and poems were written (and are still being written) about World War I, probably as many if not more than those set in World War II and the American Civil War. I have a long but far from complete list on my main site. Obviously many of those concern the actual conflict as well as life at home. Many of the World War I novels are critical of the conduct of the war. We can read about the terrors of the war, the inefficiency, incompetence and, at times, venality of the powers that be and of the officer class. Some novels show gentlemen declining to be officers and enlisting as other ranks.
The Tate divided its exhibition into eight categories. These are:
Remembrance: Battlefield and Ruins
Remembrance: War Memorials and Society
Traces of War: Wounded Soldiers
Traces of War: Dada and Surrealism
The Print Portfolio (prints, primarily in France and Germany, widely distributed)
Return to Order
Imagining Post-War Society: Post-War People
Imagining Post-War Society: The New City
While this division is not necessarily terribly helpful in looking at the novel, it does have some relevance. The war-wounded, example, certainly appear in various novels as do ruined battlefields and the idea of a return to order. However, I shall focus on a few novels that are on my website that do look at some of the after-effects of the war. There are, of course, many other novels dealing with this topic that are not on my website. Also, some of these novels will also deal with the war itself before moving on to the after-war period.
It could be argued that many of the great novels of the post-WWI period would not have existed without World War I. Would we have had, for example, Kafka, Joyce, Woolf,Faulkner and many other fine novelists without World War I. The answer is, of course, maybe but they may have been different and we may well have had others who would have revered even more. I shall not, therefore, be looking at those writers and others as regards their writing style and experimentation (Surrealism, Dadaism, etc. probably influenced the novel but were not, on the whole as key as they were in art.)
I shall start with my favourite post-war novel and that is Ford Madox Ford‘s Parade’s End tetralogy. Much of the series – and probably the better part – is set during the war but it is also is very much concerned with what we call world-weariness though other languages have better terms. While researching this issue, this clearly came up as a general issue. Some of it, of course, was post-traumatic stress disorder (then called shell-shock) but a lot of it was a general malaise that affected a lot of people, combatants and others, and Ford deals with it.
One other great English post-World War I novel and one far less known is Henry Williamson‘s The Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight series. This covers a long period – from the late 1890s to the 1950s. It covers World War I, of course and also the aftermath. The Williamson character and hero of the book, Phillip Maddison, does what Williamson actually did (and what D H Lawrence and others did) – retreat from the world, an aspect of world-weariness. Maddison also remarks on the disappearance of the rural around London.
Virginia Woolf‘s Mrs Dalloway is not the only novel to have a shell-shocked soldier in it but Septimus Smith is memorable, not least because he appears in a first-class novel, but also because he is so well portrayed by Woolf, as he retreats into his own world from which he will never return. Sadly, there were many men like him.
Two key themes for US writers were The Lost Generation and the Depression. The obvious Lost Generation work is Ernest Hemingway‘s The Sun Also Rises (UK: Fiesta) with its epigraph You are all a lost generation. Jake Barnes, the hero/narrator, has been wounded and left impotent and joins the list of literary characters, wounded physically and mentally during the war. William Faulkner‘s Soldier’s Pay is not an obvious Lost Generation novel, not least because it is set in the US and not Paris but it does show the effect of the war on those who do not go to Paris.
Many of the French novels of the period are concerned entirely with the grimness of the war, which is not surprising as much of the war was fought in France. Louis-Ferdinand Céline‘s Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night) may be the most miserable book about the post-war period. Ferdinand Bardamu is a deserter and spends much of the book wandering around in a state of misery and encountering the miseries of other people. If you have any doubts as to whether people really were miserable after the war, this book should cure you.
Of the relevant German books I have read, I would mention Ludwig Renn‘s Nachkrieg (After War). His previous book was set during the war while this one deals with the period after the war, with the German Revolution and Kapp Putsch.
The war was not just about the Western front. Events took place elsewhere and World War I influenced them. I mentioned various revolutions and civil wars. The best-known book in English about the Russian Revolution is, of course, Доктор Живаго (Doctor Zhivago). If you have not read the book, you may well have seen one of he films. Nabokov hated it. It does show the horrors of the Revolution which, of course, came about because of the war.
There are quite a few books about the Easter Rising and the Troubles afterwards. The Irish Times has a list. Liam O’Flaherty‘s Insurrection is an obvious Easter Rising novel and Elizabeth Bowen‘s The Last September an obvious one about The Troubles. However, I hope my Irish friends and relatives will not find it amiss if I mention an English writer, J G Farrell‘s Troubles, which mocks the English (though is not too flattering towards the Irish), as their Empire crumbles beneath them and, in this case, above them.
There were other places involved. I would mention Macedonia, not an obvious one. Petre M. Andreevski‘s Пиреј (Pirey) is about the aftermath of the war in Macedonia with the hated Bulgarians being replaced by the hated Serbs.
Only the first volume of Cezar Petrescu‘s Întunecare (Gathering Clouds) has been translated into English and that deals with the war. However, the second and third volumes deal with the post-war period in Romania. They have been translated into French and German and I hope to get round to them sometime.
I would mention two excellent more modern novels that deal with the aftermath of the war. Sebastian Faulks‘s Birdsong does take place, in part, during the war but also some of it is set in modern times (i.e. late 1970s) and is about the modern memory of the war. This has been quite common recently with the hundredth anniversary but was less so when Faulks wrote his book. There have been several other novels doing this as well.
Robert Edric‘s Desolate Heaven is less well-known but deals with a group of people shortly after the war who are suffering in various ways. It is a first-class novel which should be better-known.
There are many, many other worthwhile novels on this topic but I hope this will give you a flavour to supplement the Tate exhibition. The exhibition continues till 28 September 2018, so do try and see it if you are in London.
Our weekend in Porto introduced me to José de Almada Negreiros, a Portuguese writer and artist, of whom, I admit, I had never heard before. The Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis is a museum named after António Soares dos Reis, the Portuguese sculptor who left many of his works to the museum, after committing suicide when only forty-one. Though the museum certainly has a section devoted to his works, it also has a collection of nineteenth and twentieth century Portuguese painting and a collection of decorative arts from earlier periods. More particularly, it currently has a special exhibition devoted to José de Almada Negreiros (link in Portuguese).
José de Almada Negreiros was born in 1893 in São Tomé and Príncipe. His father was a Portuguese cavalry lieutenant based in São Tomé and Príncipe while his mother was born on the island but died when her son was only three. His father was later posted to Paris but José and his brother were sent to boarding school in Lisbon. He graduated from the International School in Lisbon and, by now, was drawing and sketching, particularly satirical works. An exhibition of his work was held at the International School and it was there that he met Fernando Pessoa. As well as producing sketches, he was also writing poetry and other works for Orpheu, a progressive literary journal. He also designed a ballet. He published his first novel, A Engomadeira (it means a woman who starches and irons clothes) in 1915. (I have a copy which I hope to read some time in the not too distant future.)
He was also responsible for the famous Anti-Dantas Manifesto (link in Portuguese). Dantas was Júlio Dantas, a Portuguese playwright, who was fairly conventional. The Manifesto, supported by other prominent modernist Portuguese writers, including Fernando Pessoa, was a pro-modernist, anti-traditional manifesto. It caused quite a stir as Almada Negreiros did not hold back in his views. The text in Portuguese is here.
He spent time in both Paris and Madrid and became involved in a wide variety of artistic activities. In writing, he wrote novels, stories, poetry, plays and screenplays. He worked for a while as a dancer. He acted in films. He painted, he sketched, he designed. He married the artist Sarah Afonso (link in Portuguese). He died in 1970.
There is a wonderful description of his acting career in the exhibition:
I played the part of a very wicked aristocrat who gets killed right at the beginning. So, I was overjoyed. I got murdered in one of the first scenes, for kidnapping a girl. There was actually an incident sort of disastrous there. The girl was Maria Sampiao, and at some point, she fell from the horse we were riding, damn it! But I fell down with her… It was a very bad movie, a big mess, a beastly thing. I had to do a jump, a twenty-feet jump, from the top of a wall. Of course, I would lay (sic) down on my belly with outstretched arms, lower myself as much as possible on the wall and flip my legs over it. I could always pull it off just fine. Well, I used to be a gymnast […] I simply remember that it took them sixty-seven takes to kill me. And it was very hard for me to die, because I had to fall to the ground. Stabbed to death!
[Note that the English text is the translation used in the exhibition and not mine. The original Portuguese is not as badly written.]
Section of storyboard designed by Almada Negreiros for a film
As you can see, Almada Negreiros had a very varied career. Here is what he said about that:
I draw, I write, I sculpt, I do stained glass, I dance, I do theatre, I do cinema, and, if my art doesn’t speak through any of these voices, what can we do then? Just pretend that I am already dead – and that I left behind these posthumous works.
Many of his works can be seen at the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. If any of them are available in the UK or US, I am not aware of them. Not surprisingly, none of his written work has appeared in English, the fate of most Portuguese writers, though one or two are available in French and Spanish. I hope to get to get round or one or two of them in the not too remote future. It seems to be stating the obvious when I say that he should be better known in the English-speaking world and undoubtedly would be, were he to be French or German. By the way, this exhibition sadly finishes on 18 March.
Sheffield, a small town in Northern Tasmania, has since December 1986, become the town of murals. All over the town, you will see murals on walls and boards, most of them highly imaginative and colourful. Every year, the town holds a a mural festival.
My favourite was the one you can see in my not very good photo above to the left, Yesterday & Tomorrow , painted by Aileen Gough and Karen Armstrong . You can see more about their paintings and many other murals here.
Last year we spent an enjoyable few days in Provence, so we headed back this year. This was more of an artistic trip than a literary one. Before going, we watched one of my favourite actors, Richard E Grant, giving an interesting introduction to the various artists who lived and worked on the Côte d’Azur. Our first stop was to the fairly ordinary town of Cagnes-sur-Mer. However, just outside the town is the Renoir Museum, which was Renoir’s last home. As you can see from the photo above left, it is not a very imposing house and it was not helped by being a cloudy day but we were able to see Renoir’s studio, several of his paintings, lots of photos of him and his family and ceramics made by him and his sons. All of his three sons went on to careers in the arts, Pierre as an actor, Claude as a ceramic artist (some of his ceramics were on display) and Jean as one of the great film directors. I have seen around twenty of his films and all are superb, still very much worth watching.
Matisse Chapel
Vence was another town which did not impress us much but, just outside it, is Matisse’s chapel. Matisse built it on a plot of land he purchased and fully decorated it, as thanks to the Dominican nun who had looked after him while he was sick. He designed everything himself, even though he was in his late seventies at the time. He said it was his masterpiece and it would be difficult to argue with him on that point. The stain glass windows are stunning, as is the simplicity of the design of the chapel. Those who live in the UK may well be aware of an important exhibition of Matisse cut-outs at the Tate. Tate director Nicholas Serota, who curated the exhibition, was inspired by his visit to the chapel.
Van Gogh’s bed
Of course, another famous artist associated with Provence is Van Gogh. We did visit Arles where Van Gogh lived for a time but his famous yellow house was destroyed in World War II and there is not much else to see associated with him. However, we also visited Saint-Rémy, where Van Gogh spent a year in the Saint Paul Asylum which is still very much extant and located just next to the Roman site of Glanum. You can still see such much of the scenes that Van Gogh painted, including the lily beds (sadly it was past lily season), the olive trees, the garden and various parts of the hospital which, apparently, have changed little since Van Gogh’s day.
Actes Sud bookshop
Though there was not much to see in Arles related to Van Gogh, as well as the various Roman remains, there was also my favorite publisher in the whole world, Actes Sud. I have some seventy Actes Sud books in my library (and acquired a few more, as they have an excellent bookshop in Arles, as you can see in the photo to the right). What makes Actes Sud special, apart from their unusual location, is that they publish not only innovative French works but also translations from many languages, including many fine works that it would be impossible to read, unless one spoke far more languages than most people could ever hope to master. I spent far too much time in the bookshop and, probably, far too much money but it was a good way to end a most enjoyable visit.
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