Filed under: Book Reviews, Literary Fiction | Tags: albania, book reviews, books, gjirokastër, ismail kadare, lit, literature, reading, WWII
Ismail Kadare’s Chronicle in Stone follows a southern Albanian city, Gjirokastër, through the occupations of the Second World War. Kadare, who grew up in Gjirokastër, offers as narrator a boy slightly older than Kadare himself at the time of the events he writes about. Although the narrator offers little real understanding of the war or the occupations, or of what these things mean for his town and for Albania, in its place he gives a certain personhood to the city itself. Chronicle in Stone is divided into chapters, featuring the boy’s first-person narration, and of pages between those chapters composed of either anecdotes from the boy or selections of the local papers. These selections from the papers at times offer the reader a way of better understanding and placing the events the boy writes about, but even without them the novel would be one notable for the ways Kadare views history as almost a part of the landscape, and that landscape as having a selfhood all its own.
Time and again Kadare writes of the life the city holds. Although it would be hard to think of the Albanian mountains as offering any tenderness, over the novel’s course the city begins to take on a sympathetic cast, appearing not so much harsher than the people living in its confines, despite Kadare’s early description of the city and its people.
Everything in the city was old and made of stone, from the streets and fountains to the roofs of the sprawling age-old houses covered with grey slates like gigantic scales. It was hard to believe that, under this powerful carapace, the tender flesh of life survived and reproduced.
Kadare’s prose manages to be both solemn and lighthearted, shifting easily from these moments of almost ecstatic description to jokes and off-color observations. Although the novel has been translated twice – from Albanian to French, from French to English – the translator, David Bellos, has done an admirable job keeping intact the text’s unique style and description. See the continuing description of Gjirokastër:
It was a slanted city, set at a sharper angle than perhaps any other city on earth, and it defied the laws of architecture and city planning. The top of one house might graze the foundation of another, and it was surely the only place in the world where if you slipped and fell in the street, you might well land on the roof of a house – a peculiarity known most intimately to drunks.
Yes, a very strange city indeed. In some places you could walk down the street, stretch out your arm, and hang your hat on a minaret.
Gjirokastër during the Second World War is marked both by its occupations – with Italian, Greek, and German soldiers changing places so often and quickly that residents sometimes wake to find a new occupying force has moved into place – and by the growing forces of Communism. Enver Hoxha, the man who would make himself as Albania’s dictator for forty years (entirely shutting the country off from the outside world, so that the only televisions and cars were owned by the State), came from Gjirokastër, and he and his partisan forces receive some attention near novel’s end as the city’s young men and women join the partisans in the mountains.
The narrator’s version of these events, again, are curiously limited. This is a boy who never ventures out of the city, who early on questions, “What were the villages like? Where were they and why didn’t we ever see them? To tell the truth I didn’t really believe the villages existed.” The world he describes in Chronicle in Stone seems formed as much by his reading of Macbeth as by the war; the city, and all the inanimate objects in and around it, take on their own personalities and reasoned actions in our narrator’s eyes. When the occupying forces build an air field outside of the city, the boy writes lovingly of one of the planes:
Only the big plane was free of all suspicion. Even if all the other planes were evil, my plane couldn’t be. I still loved it just as much. My heart swelled with pride when I saw it lift off the runway, filling the valley with its impressive din. I especially loved it when it came back exhausted from the south, where there was fighting.
Even memories and sentences take on a physicality, suggesting some sense of being:
Bits of memory, fragments of sentences or words, splinters of trivial events swarmed about, shoving and catching one another by the ear or nose with a brusqueness sharpened by the speed of my steps.
This sentence echoes an earlier one, when the boy is still reading a borrowed copy of Macbeth. It’s the sense of the action contained within the book’s covers that in time seems to spill out into the boy’s world, rendering everything in it worthy of note and suspicion, down to the neighbor who regularly carries cabbages (reimagined as human heads) past the boy’s house. The boy views the book with an absolute wonder that in time encompasses everything in his world.
I couldn’t get to sleep. The book lay nearby. Silent. A thin object on the divan. It was so strange … Between two cardboard covers were noises, doors, howls, horses, people. All side by side, pressed tightly against one another. Decomposed into little black marks. Hair, eyes, legs and hands, voices, nails, beards, knocks on doors, walls, blood, the sound of horseshoes, shouts. All docile, blindly obedient to the little black marks. The letters run in mad haste, now here, now there. The h’s, r’s, o’s, t’s gallop over the page. They gallop together to create a horse or a hailstorm. Then gallop away again. Now they create a dagger, a night, a ghost. Then streets, slamming doors, silence. Running and running. Never stopping. Without end.
That is the same sense that emerges from the novel as a whole. Not of a story without end, but of a place without end. As the occupying forces move in and out, as the partisans become a part of daily conversation, the city sustains itself, carries on without end. There is a tremendous, indescribable beauty to the life Kadare has given his city in this novel, to the way even a war can seem a bit player next to the city’s life. Kadare doesn’t just offer beauty, of course; his description can veer sharply, shockingly, in the other direction, as when one character is shot while eating and “[m]orsels of half-chewed meat mingled with blobs of Azem’s brain as they rained down together onto the low dining table.”
Chronicle in Stone is a gorgeously imagined and written novel. The strength of the narrator and the ways he considers his world will stay with you long after you return the book to your shelf, as will Kadare’s Gjirokastër, improbably holding strong to its mountainside perch, guarding its inhabitants but with little care of the world surrounding it.
Gjirokastër
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Filed under: Wednesday Longread | Tags: albania, blood feuds, kanun, longreads, scott anderson, shkoder, the curse of blood and vengeance, theth
Check back every on occasional Wednesdays for a link to a new longread. Your thoughts on this week’s read, and suggestions for future articles and essays, are always welcome!
Theth, Albania
I’ve been holding off on posting about Scott Anderson’s “The Curse of Blood and Vengeance” for a few months now, because of the risk of reasserting or reaffirming some of the stereotypes about Albania. This is, to say it early and just one time, a beautiful country – one not without its problems, but home to some of the most welcoming people I’ve ever met. Anderson’s article about Albanian blood feuds, published about thirteen years ago, gives a glimpse of northern Albania, and of traditional blood feuds, that makes for compelling reading. It is also a picture of Albania that is far different from the Albania of today. While the country has its problems – with building infrastructure, with education, with corruption – I doubt anyone would now describe Albania as “an economic ruin, its government is largely theoretical,” as Anderson does in his article.
Anderson considers not only the question of blood feuds in Albania, but the question of what causes violence in the Balkans.
What is it about the Balkans that so defeats all efforts to calm them? In searching for an answer, observers have naturally focused their greatest attention on the succession of conflicts that have torn apart the former Yugoslavia. And in so doing, they have tended to conclude that the Balkans are singularly riven by centuries-old ethnic and religious hatreds — that these are people, or better, groups of people, who simply can’t live together.
Rather than labeling Balkan violence the inevitable result of religious schisms, Anderson considers the issue from the city-village divide. He relies heavily on the idea of the kanun as the guiding force behind the blood feuds; as he writes:
…many Albanians [...] once again openly embrace the traditional laws and loyalties of the village. These are spelled out in the kanun (pronounced ka-NOON), a book of rules and oaths. By the dictates of the kanun — there are actually several versions, most of which came into being centuries ago — one’s primary allegiance is to clan and community, not to the state. In accordance with this allegiance, taking revenge in order to defend the honor of one’s family is not only permissible but also a sacred duty. Of course, unlike medieval times, now that duty can be carried out with modern weaponry like assault rifles.
A lock-in tower, as used to be used in blood feuds
Anderson may rely too much on the idea of the kanun – as James Pettifer and Miranda Vickers write in The Albanian Question: Reshaping the Balkans (I know, I know, I am dangerously far into “things none of my readers care about” territory) the kanun has essentially become an oversimplified lens Westerners can use when viewing Albania. The kanun may not be as wholly responsible for guidance of village life as Anderson writes, because during Enver Hoxha’s Communist rule strong local power structures developed and were able to reemerge following the collapse of Albania’s post-Communist government.
Anyway, back to the article! Anderson considers these questions of Balkan violence and what governs these northern Albanian towns and villages by writing about a blood feud in which a man was gunned down in one of northern Albania’s larger towns, Shkodër. Anderson speaks with the families on both sides of the blood feud, and in doing so highlights some of the difficulties with these feuds – that they can go back and forth for years, as neither family is willing to abandon a “blood” after a member of their family has been killed. Anderson’s visit to an Albanian man who negotiates ends to blood feuds is a telling moment, too, as the man describes having to bring the entirety of both feuding families together for a ceremony, to avoid the possibility that one absent family member will claim he is not tied to the peace settlement.
Anderson does an admirable job of reviewing Albanian history, from Hoxha’s rule to the fall of Communism to the pyramid schemes that collapsed in 1997. This is an engrossing read whether or not you’re familiar with Albanian history, and raises necessary questions both about the “Balkan mentality” and about the ties Albanians – that all of us, really – hold to family and community.
Read Scott Anderson’s “The Curse of Blood and Vengeance”
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Filed under: Book Reviews, Nonfiction | Tags: book reviews, lit, mary roach, NASA, nonfiction, packing for mars, reading
Reading Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars is like seeing the journalist version of my twelve-year-old self: Roach is endlessly curious, prone to digressions, and drawn to potty humor. This makes her a fantastic if sometimes frustrating guide through NASA’s history, and training and testing processes. She alternates between making seemingly unconnected ideas and stories “click” into satisfying place, and leaving her readers with a mass of information on something connected to NASA in only the most generous of terms. Her habit of preceding some throw-off fact with “I read somewhere…” smacks of occasional laziness (just tell us where you read it!), but Roach always recovers herself through the sheer enthusiasm with which she attacks such topics as how to use a space toilet, and whether a Russian porn film was really filmed in zero gravity.
Still, there isn’t anyone I would rather follow on a tour through NASA. Roach has an eye for the absurd and the uncomfortable, and appears to take some pleasure in noting how frequently her questions (about toilet use, sex in space, and so much more) are evaded. She provides a view of the astronaut’s life that is sometimes startling for its divergence from the grade school dream. Astronauts, it turns out, spend most of their time not being in space – a disappointing discovery for someone like me, who maybe hasn’t held close the dream of journeying to outer space, but who nonetheless never paused to think about how unromantic the astronaut’s life is.
Roach’s greatest discovery here, though, may be in finding the NASA employees who are as willing as she is to joke about the odder elements of life in space. She also has a special talent for finding the few worthwhile, gut-busting lines from transcripts that run for hundreds of pages, as when the Apollo 10 crew members find themselves plagued by some “floaters.” (Seriously: shit, in space, does not always stay in the toilet or bag where it’s been deposited.)
CERNAN: …You know once you get out of lunar orbit, you can do a lot of things. You can power down…And what’s happening is –
STAFFORD: Oh – who did it?
YOUNG: Who did what?
CERNAN: What?
STAFFORD: Who did it? [laughter]
CERNAN: Where did that come from?
STAFFORD: Give me a napkin quick. There’s a turd floating through the air.
YOUNG: I didn’t do it. It ain’t one of mine.
CERNAN: I don’t think it’s one of mine.
STAFFORD: Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away.
YOUNG: God almighty.[And again eight minutes later, while discussing the timing of a waste-water dump.]
YOUNG: Did they say we could do it anytime?
CERNAN: They said on 135. They told us that – Here’s another goddam turd. What’s the matter with you guys? Here, give me a –
YOUNG/STAFFORD: [laughter]…
STAFFORD: It was just floating around?
CERNAN: Yes.
STAFFORD: [laughter] Mine was stickier than that.
YOUNG: Mine was too. It hit that bag –
CERNAN: [laughter] I don’t know whose that is. I can neither claim it nor disclaim it. [laughter]
YOUNG: What the hell is going on here?
Look, this space turd segment is, without a doubt, one of the greatest moments of Packing for Mars – I could not resist the temptation to quote it in full – and it highlights what makes Mary Roach such a fun writer. She knows no shame or boundaries, and she answers the questions we didn’t even know we had. She mixes these (frankly hilarious) moments into more serious examination of all the things we don’t know about space: what would happen to a baby conceived in space, how to keep the human body from deteriorating in zero G, how to handle multinational crews dealing with their fellow astronauts’ cultural quirks, whether it is worth putting a half billion dollars into a mission to Mars that in all odds won’t have any tangible results. Oddly enough, given the way Roach strips away many of our childhood images and myths of NASA, she imbues the organization with slightly more wonder than she pulls away. NASA is a bureaucratic engine, and one that perhaps takes itself too seriously; but even in this it offers us something new, as with the biblical instructions regarding sandwiches that can go into space:
The contraband Wolfie’s sandwich [explanation {mine}: one of the astronauts brought an outside sandwich into space] violated no less than sixteen of the formal manufacturing requirements for “Beef Sandwiches, Dehydrated (Bite Sized).” The requirements cover six pages and are set forth in the ominous phrasing of biblical commandments. (“There shall be no…damp or soggy areas.” “The coating shall not chip or flake.”)
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Filed under: Book Reviews, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction | Tags: book reviews, books, david mitchell, historical fiction, japan, lit, literature, reading, the thousand autumns of jacob de zoet
David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is such a detailed and well-crafted novel that it’s hard, at times, not to feel you’re watching a movie. Mitchell follows the titular character, Jacob de Zoet, as he moves to a Japanese factory town as a clerk for a Dutch shipping company. De Zoet has landed this job in an attempt to better himself and his prospects, so that at the end of five years he can return home and marry his sweetheart, Anna. Whether Anna feels Jacob needs to better himself or not, her father does. Jacob’s work has, from the start, an air of the prison sentence to it – at least as far as his dealings with coworkers go.
Mitchell doesn’t just follow Jacob, though, and it’s his ability to move between characters and worlds that makes this novel such a remarkable one. Mitchell follows Jacob’s travails as the hated assistant to a man who vows to clean up the Dutch company’s work on Dejima (a factory town on an island off of Nagasaki) and get rid of employees seeking unfair profits; a Japanese midwife as she is forced to move to a shrine run by the Lord Enomoto, a fearsomely powerful man; and the attempts of a British naval captain, John Penhaligon, to rescue his career by taking over the Japanese trade controlled by the Dutch. Mitchell uses each of these characters, in turn, to look at types of power and how it is wielded. Penhaligon, for instance, hopes to both assert his own power over his crew and to declare himself a worthy captain when he arrives home. The longer Jacob is in Dejima, the more he realizes that his “power” is fleeting and dependent on a fickle superior. And the midwife, Orito Aibagawa, early appears to have an extraordinary amount of power and self-possession, though even this proves of slight value against Enomoto’s wishes and her own desire to do right for those she lives with in the shrine.
As Greg at The New Dork Review of Books pointed out in his review of The Thousand Autumns, Mitchell exhibits some stylistic quirks that can impede the flow of the reading. The interruptions – characters talking over one another, characters’ thoughts cutting into conversation, details of the world inserting themselves midway through a conversation – at times run on until it is hard to keep track of the original conversation. One meeting is broken up by numerous times:
‘But what Yoshida-san proposes,’ objects Dr Maeno, ‘would require…’
A radical new government, thinks Uzaemon, and a radical new Japan.
A chemist unknown to Uzaemon suggests, ‘A trade mission to Batavia?’
Yoshida shakes his head. ‘Batavia is a ditch, and whatever the Dutch tell us, Holland is a pawn. […]‘
Mitchell’s style does sometimes prove a distraction, but at other times it affords a tremendous energy to the novel. These characters seem to live and breath, in their inability to censor either their thoughts or words. At other times, the sort of rapid-fire description to which Mitchell is prone provides a gorgeous backdrop for the characters. When de Zoet walks around Dejima, early on, it is almost as though he moves before an (very active) movie set:
In the garden, the cream roses and red lilies are past their best.
Bread is being delivered by provedores at the Land-Gate.
In Flag Square, Peter Fischer sits on the Watchtower’s steps. ‘Lose an hour in the morning, Clerk de Zoet,’ the Prussian calls down, ‘and you search for it all day.’
In van Cleef’s upper window, the Deputy’s latest ‘wife’ combs her hair.
She smiles at Jacob; Melchior van Cleef, his chest hairy as a bear’s, appears.
‘“Thou Shalt Not”,’ he quotes, ‘“Dip thy Nib in Another Man’s Inkwell.”’
The Deputy Chief slides shut the shoji window before Jacob can protest his innocence.
Outside the Interpreters’ Guild, palanquin bearers squat in the shadows. Their eyes follow the red-haired foreigner as he passes.
Through scenes like this Mitchell gives us a view of the workings of the whole island, not just Jacob’s small part of that world. It’s these details, provided rapid fire, that make the story such an engrossing one. Whether or not you are interested in Jacob’s early concerns with the trade mission, these descriptive sentences, sprinkled liberally throughout, offer a view of Dejima that is hard to resist.
As the novel progresses, Jacob becomes less a moving figure in front of the backdrop of Dejima, and more a part of that backdrop itself. He becomes involved, too, in the lives of Dejima’s Japanese residents. Mitchell does this so carefully, so gradually, that you don’t realize how fully Jacob has become a part of the island’s life until long after he is.
Mitchell has so many parts of this story moving at once that some elements are left to the side after a brief moment as seemingly central elements to the plot. Even this seems carefully orchestrated; Mitchell may move away from certain storylines, most notably that of Orito and the shrine, but this has the feel, again, of real life. Some characters on missions we would expect to be vital elements of the plot are lost, killed, forgotten; but their missions and lives have ways of quietly reasserting themselves, later on, through different characters and at unexpected moments.
While it may seem at odds to say that The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet reads like a movie, and that it reads very much like life, this is the only way I can think of it. In shifting between the vision of Dejima as a moving backdrop to the dull life of a shipping company clerk, and a vision of that same clerk as an integral part of life on Dejima, Mitchell makes clear the distinction between living somewhere and being a part of life somewhere. Mitchell has written a book that is at the same moment overflowing with intrigue (holy moly, is there a lot of that; and this review can’t pass without a mention of Enomoto, perhaps best described as “dastardly” – one of the most fully and irredeemably evil characters I’ve ever read) and with the attempt to answer questions of how and where and why we choose to make our lives.
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Filed under: Wednesday Longread | Tags: assassin of secrets, lizzie widdicombe, longreads, plagiarism, q.r. markham, quentin rowan, reading, spy novels, writing
Check back every on occasional Wednesdays for a link to a new longread. Your thoughts on this week’s read, and suggestions for future articles and essays, are always welcome!
One odd side effect of reading Lizzie Widdicombe’s “The Plagiarist’s Tale” may be a degree of empathy with the profiled plagiarist, Quentin Rowan, and an intense desire to read his novel. (Though I should be calling it a “mashup.”) Rowan’s spy novel, Assassin of Secrets, was set for a November 2011 publication and seemed destined to be a success…until readers began to notice that sections of the novel were lifted wholesale from dozens of other works. Rowan’s efforts to publish his novel, which was in essence a cobbling together of other writers’ work, aided by standard tropes of the spy novel, are shocking; didn’t he expect to be caught? But up to that point, Rowan’s works (apparently all plagiarized, save his first published poem) had been published in venues as respected as The Paris Review, and no one had noticed.
Rowan’s case isn’t one of your standard-issue plagiarism, pulling select lines from other novels and inserting them into otherwise original writing. With Assassin of Secrets he was doing with literature what Girl Talk does to music; the key difference being that Rowan attempted to pass the work off as his own. As Widdicombe notes, writers and plagiarists start out in the same way, and Rowan’s success as the latter can be attributed to some skill – if not as a writer, then certainly as a reader and editor.
The making of a plagiarist can be hard to distinguish from the making of a writer. Joan Didion has described learning to write by typing Hemingway’s fiction; Hunter S. Thompson did the same with “The Great Gatsby.” Rowan reversed the process: he was a writer before he was a plagiarist.
Widicombe goes into Rowan’s backstory, including early efforts at writing, and his slide into plagiarism. She also considers how his novel might have been perceived, if Rowan had stated before publication that he hadn’t so much written the book as edited it. It’s hard, undeniably wrong though Rowan’s “writing” methods were, not to admire his work a bit, and to have some curiosity about it. As anyone who’s struggled to seamlessly insert a(n attributed) quote into an essay knows, there’s a skill to integrating others’ work with your own. That Rowan was able to do so with over thirty sources, to form an entire book by picking and choosing selections of other novels, and to do it so well that no one noticed the plagiarism until after publication, is at the least notable.
Rowan’s method, though—constructing his work almost entirely from other people’s sentences and paragraphs—makes his book a singular literary artifact, a “literary mashup,” as one commenter put it, or spy fiction’s Piltdown Man. Thomas Mallon, the author of “Stolen Words,” a book about plagiarism, described “Assassin of Secrets” as “an off-the-charts case” both in the extent of the plagiarism and in the variety of Rowan’s sources. “It almost seems to be a kind of wikinovel, with so many other writers unwittingly forced to be contributors,” he noted.
In an age when we will crowdsource pretty much anything, when we admire bands whose work is the sampling of other bands, a novel made up of other novels sounds like a sure hit. Where Rowan tripped up is in his desire to be an author, rather than an editor. Witticombe manages to paint a humanizing portrait of Rowan, while addressing these larger questions of what we call literature, and how we like it to be made. It’s hard not to wish that Rowan had sought publication for his work as the mashup it was, rather than as an original novel.
Read Lizzie Widdicombe’s “The Plagiarist’s Tale”
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