the book of blam (aleksandar tišma tr michael henry heim)

The Book of Blam was Tisma’s first novel in a trilogy. In some ways, having already read Kapo, it feels as though the author must have been building up towards the extremes of the later novel. The Book of Blam, set in Novi Sad, is a circuitous read, stitching together diverse fragments taken from the life of the book’s protagonist, Blam, tracing his ancestry, his lost love life, his failures, his escape from the pogrom, but also the fate of his family and friends, almost all of whom died during the war. As stated, this feels like a less traumatic entry point into Tišma’s writing, which, given the cruelties the book relates, seems astonishing. Tišma’s even handedness in describing events in Novi Sad during the war is extraordinary. 

kapo (alexander tisma, tr, richard williams)

As David Rieff notes in his afterword, there has been a sentimentalisation of the holocaust. The need to make it a palatable experience for a film-going public has lead to an event of unimaginable horror being the backdrop for imaginable stories of love or valour. Aleksandar Tisma’s novel is a severe corrective to this trend. It is a book which I did not enjoy reading. This seems entirely in keeping with how the process of reading about the holocaust should be. It’s not meant to be entertaining or fun. It’s meant to be unpleasant. Kapo, tells the story of a Croatian kapo, Lamian, who survives Auschwitz in large part because of his own immorality and cruelty. Tisma presents the character in old age, as his day-to-day life and memories merge. Lamian escaped but on the other hand he can never escape. He wants forgiveness, but he is too imprisoned in the gaol of his mind, deservedly so, to ever be able to seek it. Tisma, I learn, translated Kertész's Fatelessness into Serbian. He is writing within a discourse about the holocaust. (And the asides in his novel about Israel are fascinating.) In short, although the novel is shocking, cruel, to the point of being transgressive, even Sadeian, he is not writing in order to shock the reader. He is writing in order to inform, that history, the real history, might not be forgotten.  

the bridge on the drina (ivo andric)

First things first. Ivo Andric’s novel is completely radical in so far as its central character is not a human or even an animal. It’s a bridge. Which is in theory an inanimate object, but the novel traces the way in which this inanimate object touches the lives of those who live on either side of it, over the course of hundreds of years. This isn’t a typical approach. Shape shifting, generation busting novels come along every now and again, (eg Orlando), but even these rarely span 600 years. The effect is oddly hypnotic. Characters recur, particularly towards the end, and at times the novelist notes something that happened to an ancestor in another era of the bridge which we have already seen, but the emphasis remains, more than anything else, on the bridge.

And what the bridge represents. Reading about the novel and knowing something of the history of Bosnia (where the novel is set), something my generation became aware of back in the dog days of the post-Yugoslav wars, one notes there has been criticism of Andric for being too pro-Serb, and anti-Moslem. I have to say that this did not strike me during the reading of the novel. This might have to do with my ignorance in terms of reading the codes, but it felt to this reader as though the novel was a constant celebration of ethnic and religious integration. Generation after generation is marked by a harmony where the greatest threat is the possibility of the river flooding. The only time this harmony is disturbed is when politics rears its ugly head, and suddenly the differences between the townsfolk become an issue, where for decades or more the mix of Serb, Moslem and Jew has allowed each to value the differences of the other.

As such, it feels as though the bridge itself is more than something that links two sides of a river. It is also the bridge between cultures. Whenever the bridge is threatened, the community as a whole, consisting of these different peoples and their stories, is also threatened. The affection that permeates the novel for people from every walk of life feels tangible. The Bridge on the Drina doesn’t read, to an ignorant stranger’s mind, like a novel setting out to promote discord, but one seeking to bridge difference. 

the other side of everything (d. mila turajlic)

Mila Turajlic’s documentary is at once a potted history of modern Serbia and a sensitive but deeply honest portrait of the filmmaker’s mother. It also goes to show what can be achieved with little more than a camera and a good story. The hook around which the narrative is constructed is that there is a door in the apartment where Turajlic’s family have lived for generations, in central Belgrade, which has remained shut for sixty years. When Yugoslavia was still Yugoslavia, when the war had just ended, and the communists were redistributing living space, two rooms from their apartment were annexed. A family moved in next door. The two sides of the door never met. However this is just the hook, upon which is framed the portrayal of the mother, a fearless mathematician who campaigned vociferously against Milosevic, and is now, as Serbia veers back towards right-wing politician extremism, accused of being a traitor for her part in Milosevic’s downfall. The film shows her relating her past and details her ongoing struggle today. whilst gently probing the mother-daughter relationship, as Turajlic tries to live up to her mother’s example. This film is, of course, her way of pursuing and honouring her mother’s struggle. 

a tomb for boris davidovich [danilo kis]

I was first introduced to the joys of what is probably termed “world” literature within the UK when I used to go into the bookshop at Winchester as a teenage schoolboy. I had an account there, for some reason, and I was able, if I did so responsibly, to spend my grandfather’s money on books. The books which caught my attention, which got me really reading, were the Picadors. With their perfect spines. Calvino, Brautigan, Pynchon, Marquez. Picador were, at that time, the publisher which opened the doorway to an international library. I still have many of those books, stashed away in boxes at my parents’ home. One day they will come out and strut their stuff again, perhaps.

I thought about Picador, reading Kis’ fractured novel/ short story collection. The more you read, the more you start to wonder about the editorial choices of publishing houses. This is not necessarily a criticism of Picador who did and still do a good job, but Kis is one of those authors whose work seems to have been crying out to be published and be better known, not just now but thirty years ago. This book was originally published in 1976. Solzhenitsyn garnered the prizes, justifiably so, for his immense works about the Soviet empire. But Kis’ book offers a drier, more measured corrective. Here he presents seven characters, from varied backgrounds, all of whom will founder on the rock of Stalinism. The seven characters all have their flaws as well as their virtues. All are stout adherents to the political philosophy which will ultimately destroy them. This fact lends an instant level of pathos to their stories. Furthermore, it means that Kis surgically unmasks the realities of Stalinism, something which in his native Serbia, like much of the rest of the world, was a truth people were still reluctant to face.

The absence of rancour in Kis’ prose and the obvious pleasure he takes in writing, ensure that this never feels like a judgmental book. It is a scalpel, rather than a hammer (or a sickle), making sly incisions in its subject’s flesh. Coming from a Communist state himself, the clarity of his thought would seem to suggest, (as perhaps in the early work of another Yugoslav, Kustirica), that Communism is a system which should not be entirely damned, if it can produce minds like this. The elegance of the links which hold the book together, the stories criss-crossing, implying a novel which is barely there, matches the beauty of the writing. It feels worthwhile quoting from the titular story, as this passage both sums up the premise of Kis’ book and also shows off his remarkable talent:

“The ancient Greeks had an admirable custom: for anyone who perished by fire, was swallowed by a volcano, buried by lava, torn to bits by beasts, devoured by sharks, or whose corpse was scattered by vultures in the desert, they built so-called cenotaphs, or empty tombs, in their homelands; for the body is only fire, water or earth, whereas the soul is the Alpha and Omega, to which a shrine should be erected.”

It is a mystery to me why this writer is not more widely known. Perhaps there is something ephemeral about his work. He lacks the great lumpen-novel to which greatness is so frequenly ascribed. But Kis demonstrates a subtlety and a rigour which denotes him as one of the finest chroniclers of that historical footnote, Eastern European Communism, as well as belonging to a vanguard, alongside the likes of Cortazar, for a new literature which is both more personal and more oblique. One where the voice of the author bristles, but whose stories resist the grand narrative arcs so frequently demanded by the Western literary tradition. 

the lute and the scars [daniel kis]

So then. A Serbian writer whose father died in Auschwitz, who lived in exile in Paris, who namechecks Calvino, Cortazar and Koestler among a host of other little known Central European writers, who is an admirer of Borges and who, to this reader’s mind, is the missing link between the Argentine and Bolano.

Bolano again. He recurs with nagging regularity. Bolano’s short stories, the ones that helped garner him attention, blend the cotidian, the personal, the everyday, with the global. They are also obliquely autobiographical. Lo and behold, here is the avowed Serbian Borghesian who, somewhat before Bolano’s time, is writing in exactly the same vein. With the same off-the-cuff, anecdotal brilliance. Converting the world and his life into a compendium of stories, with all the rag-tag connections of history interwoven.

There are only seven stories in this collection. But that’s enough. Two at least are minor masterpieces. The title-piece effortlessly manages to encompass fifty years of Soviet tragedy in a few, seemingly throwaway pages. Jurij Golec is a more Borghesian meditation on death, framed within a Bolano-esque context. The Stateless One tells the life of Von Horvarth in 26 brief chapters. The other brief tales conjure the life of post-War Europe, the frontiers collapsing and retrenching, Russia, Serbia and France all over-lapping. Kis’ genius lies in his capacity to make something transcendental out of a seeming nothing, to turn water into wine.

The joy of reading is to stumble across a voice which comes out of nowhere and somehow speaks across time and geography. There’s no time for theory in the world anymore, at least not the kind of theory that makes any sense, but if there were I’d try and pin down the secret donation of late 20^th C literature: as the scale of the global seemed to become evermore immense, all-encompassing, overwhelming, the writers realised that it was only by using the micro of their own experiences as a prism that the world of the macro (the death camps, the wars, the torture chambers) could begin to be discussed. That these subjects might be removed from the discursive terrain of political rhetoric and re-positioned within a context where their real effects could begin to be grasped. Real being defined as something that can be phenomenologically experienced, as opposed to being intellectually contemplated. This, more than Borges, is what binds Kis with Bolano, and their fellows. In essence, they are writers who seek to reclaim history through the existence of the everyday, which is after all, all that history is. Reclaiming it from the preachers and the politicians and the theoreticians who have annexed language in a bid to sever the common Brechtian from his or her own experiences.

There’s no time for theory. Which might be just as well. On an overcast Montevidean morning. There is time for that failsafe of modernity, a google search (Kis Bolano) which reveals that I am not the only one to have made the association. Three others, in fact, including Vila-Matas, who lists Kis alongside his friend Bolano, Koetzee, Pynchon, Antunes and Perec in order to refute Vargas Llosa’s argument that literature has become too “leve, ligera, fácil”. Which puts Daniel Kis in some fine company and also suggests that there is indeed a possibility that the Chilean Borghesian was aware of the work of the Serbian Borghesian.