“All I want, I said, is to understand what’s going on. Not the war,  I hurried to add when I saw Marko’s raised eyebrows, not the war, I will never be able to understand that, I gave up trying long ago, but the thing on the Danube, the reality and absurdity of the slap, the meaning of the circle around the triangle, the song I heard in the courtyard on Zmaj Jovina Street. Marko sat there, silent.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (APR 29, 2011)

Marko’s silence is understandable. His best friend, the unnamed narrator of the novel, is about to embark on a narrative of 309 pages, all in a single paragraph, navigating from trivia to arcana and back again, as he tries to make sense of the apparent senselessness around him. Besides, most of the time they are together they smoke pot, entering a state not known for coherent objectivity, though the protagonist’s pot-smoking declines as the situation around him becomes more fantastic; when life itself supplies enough conspiracies for the most rabid paranoiac, who needs hashish? The run-on writing style is actually appropriate, and once picked up, the book is difficult to put down. The narrator is a professional newspaper columnist with an engaging voice. And the absence of any visual breaks in the text makes any decision to stop reading entirely arbitrary: why stop here when you could go on for another page, for twenty, to the rainbow’s end?

David Albahari, a Serbian writer now living in Canada, used the unbroken-paragraph technique to wonderful effect in his short novel Götz and Meyer, a meticulous study of two petty functionaries of the Final Solution and one of the best Holocaust books I have ever read. This time, his target is less clearly defined and his scope is bigger.

The setting is Belgrade in 1998, following almost a decade of war in the former Yugoslavia, but prior to the NATO bombing of the city during the Kosovo crisis. Ethnic tensions abound, but Albahari’s focus is on the anti-semitism arising as a perverted offshoot of nationalist sentiment. His protagonist, a Gentile, catches sight of a man slapping a woman on the banks of the Danube, an act that, despite its violence, seems to have a ritual quality, almost as though staged. He begins to see curious symbols chalked on sidewalks: triangles within circles enclosing more circles. He responds to an ad in the paper saying “Sometimes a slap can change the entire cosmos.” A few days later, he comes into possession of a Jewish manuscript that seems to change its contents every time he opens it. He looks up old Jewish friends and meets new ones. He becomes involved in the study of the Kabbalah and its enumerations of the Divine Presence or Sephirot. He meets a woman who combines mystic knowledge with sexual allure. He visits her apartment for a conversation lasting the entire night: “What did she talk about? About the Kabbalah, the system of the Sephirot, the emanation of divine substance, about the system of everything in existence, the notion of good and evil, the migration of souls, the harmony of the spheres, the influence of the planets, prayer, and silence.”

The specific area where the narrator lives is Zemun, on the opposite side of the River Seva from Belgrade, and the historical settlement of Jews expelled from the city in the early 18th century. (One of their permitted occupations was gathering leeches, hence the book’s oblique title.) The unique properties of this nine-block area are explained by the narrator’s manuscript, a translation of “a Kabbalistic text written some two hundred fifty years ago at the crossroads between two empires, the Habsburg and the Ottoman, and between two worlds, this world here and the one beyond.” He begins to believe that he is hosting the translocated soul of an 18th-century mystic named Eleazar, and may personally stand on the bridge between the two worlds. Meanwhile on the practical level, he publishes articles on anti-semitism and witnesses the scourge at first hand, in vile attacks on the community and against his own person. Strange though this all may seem, I found myself increasingly drawn into the novel as events accelerated, let down only slightly by an ending that fell unaccountably flat.

Kabbalistic mysticism has made several appearances in novels of late, such as Myla Goldberg‘s Bee Season and Dara Horn’s The World To Come. It parallels, I suppose, the trend in Christian writing exemplified by Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose and carried to the point of absurdity by Dan Brown. Albahari’s aim is serious, I am sure — this is far from a mass-market book — but he uses his erudition (including several excursions into higher mathematics) to mystify rather than explain. Indeed, there is a nightmare air to the whole book, recalling the alternative reality of Kazuo Ishiguro‘s Eastern Europe in The Unconsoled. But I have to remind myself that the reality faced by Albahari is not alternative at all, but bitter fact: strife and persecution in his home country that would cause his emigration a year later. If he cannot yet find a clear focus, it is only because the wounds are too fresh. As reactions to political dislocation, pot-smoking and paranoia have a dazed authenticity. And if Albahari has to resort to mysticism and fables to address it, he is doing much the same thing as his fellow countrywoman Téa Obreht was in her equally recent but more normal novel, The Tiger’s Wife.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (April 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	David Albahari
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Götz and Meyer The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht

Translated Bibliography:

• Words are Something Else: Stories (1996)
• Tsing (1997)
• Götz and Meyer (1998 in Serbia; December 2005 in US)
• Bait (Writings from and Unbound Europe) (2001)
• Snow Man (2005)
• Leeches (April 2011)

“We’re all entitled to our superstitions.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (MAR 10, 2011)

This spectacular debut novel by the talented Téa Obreht, is narrated mostly through the voice of young Natalia Stefanovi. Shortly after the novel opens, we learn that Natalia has followed in her grandfather’s footsteps and studied medicine. Just recently done with medical school, she has taken on a volunteer assignment to inoculate children in an orphanage in a small seaside village called Brejevina. The book is set in a war-ravaged country in the Balkans, quite possibly Obreht’s native Croatia. Brejevina, Natalia explains, “is forty kilometers east of the new border.”

En route to her volunteer assignment, Natalia finds out about her grandfather’s death in Zdrevkov, a distant town away from home. Nobody in the family can tell why Grandpa would travel so far away from home and die in a strange place. The rest of the family members were not even privy to the one piece of information that Natalia did know: her grandfather was dying from cancer.

Just like the book’s author, Téa Obreht, Natalia too is convinced that place has a lot to do with the shaping of a man’s character. So it is that she sets off to travel to the places visited by her grandfather for some clues about the man she thought she knew, but didn’t quite. “The village of Galina, where my grandfather grew up, does not appear on a map,” she says. “My grandfather never took me there, rarely mentioned it, never expressed longing or curiosity, or a desire to return. My mother could tell me nothing about it; my grandma had never been there. When I finally sought it out, after the inoculations at Brejevina, long after my grandfather’s burial, I went by myself, without telling anyone where I was going.”

The novel’s narrative flows back and forth between two and sometimes even three threads. One part details Obreht’s current journey to the orphanage in Brejevina, her experiences with local superstitions there and eventually her journey to the small town where her grandfather died. Another narrative moves to the past—first to the immediate past shared between Natalia and her grandfather, and then way back further, when the grandfather was a little boy in the tiny village of Galina.

It is in this past that the narrative of the “tiger’s wife” unfolds—the story is a hypnotic mix of old-fashioned folklore compounded by local superstitions and gossip. The tiger that stalks the novel might just be one that Natalia remembers visiting as a child with her grandpa or one which haunted the hills of Galina years ago.

Rudyard Kipling’s famous Jungle Book is an essential element of Obreht’s novel and one can see where the anthropomorphic qualities of Kipling’s classic tales have made their way into Obreht’s prose as well. She does an outstanding job of mixing doses of these qualities with good old folklore and classic storytelling. There’s a very “Once upon a Time” quality to her writing that’s instantly arresting. As the novel progresses, Obreht describes many a colorful character in the town—the apothecary, the town butcher and other assorted characters. Each of these has his or her own special place in the overall story.

Obreht’s favorite novelist, she has said, is Gabriel Garcia Marquez. One can recognize his influence especially in one story that stands out in the novel—that of Gavran Gaile, the “deathless man.” For various reasons, Natalia comes to believe that her grandfather, just before he died, was on a quest to meet this “deathless man” and she tries to understand why.

The Tiger’s Wife is also a quietly damning indictment about war and Obreht catalogs its ill effects through the ways it affects the grandfather. “In my grandfather’s life, the rituals that followed the war were rituals of renegotiation. All his life, he had been part of the whole—not just part of it, but made up of it. He had been born here, educated there. His name spoke of one place, his accent of another,” Natalia says speaking of the emotional displacement that the war brought about, and which never ever healed.

Above all, Obreht’s greatest strength is her spectacular evocation of place. In an interview with The Atlantic, Obreht has said that she is “very interested in place, and the influences of place on characters.”

“What inspires me most to write is the act of traveling…I like to explore the interactions of people with place and how place influences characters’ decisions, and their conflicts with one another, and also with the place itself.” It is this inspiration that really fuels The Tiger’s Wife. It’s one of the most evocative novels I have read in a long time. Every tiny village in the Balkan country comes alive within its pages.

At 25, Obreht is the youngest on the New Yorker’s famous “20 Under 40” list. The Tiger’s Wife is an extremely auspicious start from a writer to watch. Even if the somewhat disparate threads in the book fall slightly short of tying into a seamless whole, this debut novel is easily one of the year’s best.

Obreht tackles large and complex issues here: war, loss, the sense of place and how it forms who we are. Obreht also shows how strongly superstition ties into that very sense of place. “When confounded by the extremes of life—whether good or bad—people would turn first to superstition to find meaning, to stitch together unconnected events in order to understand what was happening,” she writes. While this is universally true, it is especially relevant in the war-torn isolated landscapes that Obreht writes of so evocatively in the book.

Even Grandpa, Natalia finds, couldn’t resist the pull of place and story. Trying to make sense of his fractured country, of his own body that was wasting away, it stands to reason that Grandpa would give in to superstition and try and have his fortune read by the deathless man. After all, as one of the characters in The Tiger’s Wife says, we are all entitled to our superstitions. Even a man of science needs an occasional crutch.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 172 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (March 8, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Téa Obreht
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	One Hundred Years of Solitudeby Gabriel Garcia Marquez Another recent novel set in the Balkans: Solo by Rana Dasgupta

Bibliography:

• The Tiger’s Wife (March 2011)

“Thinking back, he is surprised at the quantity of time he spent in daydreams. His private fictions have sustained him from one day to the next, even as the world itself has become nonsense. It never occurred to him to consider that the greatest portion of his spirit might have been poured into this creation. But it is not a despairing conclusion. His daydreams were a life’s endeavor of sorts, and now, when everything else is cast off, they are still at hand.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (Mar 6, 2011)

How do you write about failure?

Early in this book, its protagonist, Ulrich, a young Bulgarian man studying chemistry in Berlin, is walking down a corridor after Albert Einstein, who drops a sheaf of papers. When he picks them up and runs after the great man, Einstein thanks him by saying “I would be nothing without you.” Much later in life, after his own career has been a failure by all outward measures, and life has almost been crushed out of him by Soviet austerity, Ulrich comes to learn more about Einstein and his callousness to some of those closest to him, and realizes that genius feeds off the failure of others. “The people close to him were blocked up and cut off. Their lives were subdued, and they were prevented from doing what they hoped to do. […] How many stopped-up men and women does it take to produce one Einstein?” Ulrich realizes that when Einstein spoke those words, “it was not success he saw written in my face. He saw, rather, that I would never accomplish anything at all.”

I suspect that this insight might have been the genesis of this daring novel. How might it have been for a non-Einstein, a scientist forced to abandon his studies, a musician without a violin, a human being neutered by a grey regime? What might he have had to offer the world other than dreams? Seeing that Dasgupta gives his novel a musical title, and calls its two parts “movements,” I also suspect that his musical inspiration might have been Bela Bartok’s “Two Portraits for Violin and Orchestra” of 1908. This is a two-movement composition reworking the same material in two contrasted ways, the first elegiac and slow, and the second frenetic and distorted. This is exactly the structure of Dasgupta’s novel: a first part about a life lived in shades of grey, followed by a second dream-life in strident color.

The concept is daring because it deals with mediocrity and failure in a strikingly bipolar way. But Dasgupta’s ideas require him to generate enough momentum to keep one reading through the Slavic gloom of Ulrich’s deterioration in the first part and present the second as a convincing and relevant reworking of the material. Unfortunately, in order to emphasize the contrast between the two “movements,” the author shoots himself in the foot. The second part, despite a certain flashy vulgarity, is not uninteresting, but you have to get through the first part in order to reach it — 160 pages devoid of music, poetry, or inner beauty. For instance, we first see Ulrich as a young boy fascinated with music. His mother buys him a violin, but when his father returns from a business trip some months later, he throws the instrument into the fire. This happens on page 18, and from then on there is virtually no music in the first part of the book — not even in the writing, which is dry and declarative almost throughout: this happened; then that happened; then something else.

Ulrich transfers his interests to chemistry. He gets to study in Berlin, but has to abandon his degree when his parents lose their money. Back in Sofia, he works as a clerk, then as the manager of a chemical factory charged with impossible goals in each successive Five Year Plan. His romantic life fizzles out in failure. Now retired, blind, poor, and nearing 100, all he has are the daydreams which form his legacy. Or so we are told. The first part ends with the quotation I offer above, but this is the first we hear of any daydreams at all. By depriving Ulrich of any inner life in the first part, Dasgupta sets up his contrast all right, but he deprives the reader also.

Ulrich’s daydreams make up the second movement, and they restore at least some of the music that had vanished so completely earlier. But it is a savage music, a grotesque scherzo. It begins almost as a series of short stories: a near-feral boy playing on an old fiddle in an abandoned factory, the beautiful but impoverished daughter of a former princess who marries a Georgian gangster and takes on much of his ruthlessness, and an American record producer credited with the invention of world music as a popular genre. Eventually, these strands interweave. Dasgupta has gifts as a storyteller, and there is a color, an energy, a wild poetry here that the first part lacks. But he is a self-conscious writer who now seems determined to bring in all the hues he had previously denied. His moments of ecstasy go over the top, and there is too much reliance on drugs, alcohol, and sex. None of these characters is entirely likeable, and this second part also reflects the wanton hardness, squandering of resources, and disregard for humanity that made the first part so distasteful. Yet at least this preserves an element of truth in the fun-house mirror, in a way a more sentimental ending might not.

Nonetheless, this novel about a mediocrity is by no means mediocre itself. It is an original concept that might work for other readers. So let’s end with Ulrich passing his legacy to Boris, the dream alter-ego whose violin playing has rocketed him to stardom: “I have a lot of failure to give away. Look at my music: a fantastic failure. A triumphant failure. That’s the legacy I leave behind. If I could make an Einstein with my failed science, think what will come of my music!”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 25 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rana Dasgupta
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More music melded with literature: An Unfinished Score by Elise Blackwell

Bibliography:

• Tokyo Cancelled (2005)
• Solo (2009; February 2011 in US)  Commonwealth Prize