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 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.

when father was away on business (d emir kusturica, w abdulah sidran)

Kusturica's second film is not well known in the UK, although most people I've met here seem to have seen it. I'd never heard of it. The director's reputation might be on the wane, but there was a point at the end of the 20th century when he felt like the freshest, most important new voice in cinema. A trio of films, Black Cat, White Cat; Time of the Gypsies and Underground were feted for their irreverence and flair. When Father Was Away on Business was his second film, using many of the same actors who appear in the later films and is a bravura piece of work which stands up beside the director's more celebrated offerings.

The film belongs to a strong Eastern European satirical tradition (going back to Schweyk, Brecht etc). Tito's Communist rule is pervasive and one misplaced remark can lead to exile. This is what happens to Malik's father Mehmet after his lover denounces him to his brother-in-law. Mehmet "goes away on business" and later the family will follow him. The satire is gentle but affecting, most of all because it presents events through the eyes of the child, for whom football and girls are just as important as politics. 

However, above and beyond its politics, this is a great film in so far as it captures a complete social environment. As well as being a satire, it's also like a work of 19th C realism. Here is Communist Sarajevo captured with all of its energy, beauty and flaws. The film runs at 2 hours and 15 minutes, with an array of storylines and twists in the plot, but it never feels over-elaborated or rambling. The director's hand is firmly on the tiller, guiding the screenplay through its various episodes, whilst revelling in this world which has gone and will never return. The frequent use of significant football matches, usually against the Russians, provides a framework based in history, a history which must seem all the more distant now in Bosnia, when the nation participating in the football matches no longer exists. In addition, the affectionate relations shared across the religious divide seem remarkable given the imminence of what was to come at the time this small masterpiece was made.