http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/ This area is for the discussion and review of particular works of European literature. en Wed, 19 Jun 2013 21:19:49 GMT vBulletin 60 http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/images/misc/rss.png http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/ http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/showthread.php/60580-Matt-Haig-The-Humans?goto=newpost Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:20:00 GMT My review of Matt Haig's The Humans from Indy on Sunday:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...g-8622205.html ]]> European Literature leyla http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/showthread.php/60580-Matt-Haig-The-Humans http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/showthread.php/60578-Marcel-Theroux-Strange-Bodies?goto=newpost Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:09:37 GMT Here's my review of Marcel Theroux's new novel Strange Bodies from today's Independent:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...9-8662423.html ]]> European Literature leyla http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/showthread.php/60578-Marcel-Theroux-Strange-Bodies http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/showthread.php/60361-Nikolai-Leskov-The-Enchanted-Wanderer?goto=newpost Mon, 10 Jun 2013 09:32:34 GMT http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/...cle1269138.ece


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Enchanted-Wa.../dp/0099577356



Nicolai Leskov, Russia's forgotten Writer, a new collection of stories published by Vantage and the his association with Tolstoy/Dostoy in attached article. ]]> European Literature Hamlet http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/showthread.php/60361-Nikolai-Leskov-The-Enchanted-Wanderer http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/showthread.php/60305-Wojciech-%C5%BBukrowski-Stone-Tablets?goto=newpost Fri, 07 Jun 2013 05:33:17 GMT Stone Tablets (1966) is considered a classic of 20th-century Polish literature. It is now available in a new translation by Stephanie Kraft. A 650-pp leviathan of a book, it tells the story of Istvan Terey, who is a Hungarian diplomat sent to India ca. 1956.

"Istvan Terey serves as Hungarian cultural attaché in Delhi just a few months before his country is torn apart by the Hungarian Uprising. Though he is popular with Indians and Europeans, communists and capitalists, Terey's outspoken criticism of corruption in the Hungarian government and the embassy threatens to undermine his career.

His religious convictions trouble, and ultimately destroy, his relationship with his Australian lover. A sweeping Cold War romance, a critique of Soviet Communism, and an exposé of tensions within the Warsaw Pact, Stone Tablets is based on the author's own experience as a Polish diplomat in India in the late 1950s, and is Wojciech Zukrowski's most famous novel."

]]> European Literature Liam http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/showthread.php/60305-Wojciech-%C5%BBukrowski-Stone-Tablets http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/showthread.php/60290-Georges-Bataille-Blue-of-Noon?goto=newpost Thu, 06 Jun 2013 16:02:23 GMT Written in 1935, forgotten until its publication by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, in 1957, Le Bleu du Ciel (Blue of Noon) is perhaps Georges Bataille’s most overtly political work. An introduction to the story begins in latter-1930s, London: ‘in a... Written in 1935, forgotten until its publication by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, in 1957, Le Bleu du Ciel (Blue of Noon) is perhaps Georges Bataille’s most overtly political work.

An introduction to the story begins in latter-1930s, London: ‘in a cellar, in a neighbourhood dive – the most squalid of unlikely places’. The protagonist, Henri Troppmann, and his accomplice, Dirty, are bleeding and bandaged, delirious, in a place ‘crowded with men […] their eyes […] getting ominous’, surreally recalling the tips of ‘spent cigars’.

The post-orgiastic squalor is only vaguely, symbolically countermanded by Dirty’s ‘sumptuous evening gown’, and Troppmann’s own assertion that: ‘The scene that preceded this nauseous carnival […] was in every way worthy of Dostoevsky’.

The reader is then flung into the remembrance of a scene at London’s opulent, bourgeois Savoy Hotel. Herein, Dirty and Troppmann encounter an ‘ugly’ elevator attendant and a ‘rather pretty maid’ who – ‘trembling, nauseated’ – has to wash Dirty between bouts of vomit, urination, and ‘dissonant’, maniacal laughter.

Will Self, in his excellent introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics’ edition, calls Dirty an ‘aristocratic scapgrace’. Indeed her wealth and transgressive frivolity here manifest as she asks ‘to be given her purse’ only to find a ‘stack of banknotes’ and to toss it on the floor for the maid and her attendants to ‘go shares’.

If, as Self argues, Dirty is an emblem, or allegory, of the Ancien Regime, Troppmann himself may be seen as ‘the personification of the Third Republic; listless, divided, unmotivated’, though it appears he is infinitely more difficult to categorize than his female consorts.

On page 13, Troppmann asks:

‘My desire? Whatever worst things can happen to a man who will scoff at them.
The bank head in which “I” am has become so frightened and greedy that only my death could satisfy it’.

On this token, it appears he is merely the voice of a thing-moving, without direction, an emblem of a peculiar, wired sort of debauchery, a transgressive avatar, distinctly ‘lacking in cause’ (Self).

The oneiric sequence of Part One (after the introduction) introduces us to character of the Commendatore, an oppressive, virile harbinger of death, and particularly of hell (the reference to the reaper-like father of one of Don Juan’s victims withstanding).

As Troppmann insists the meeting is ‘not in any nightmare, but in fact’, the Commendatore is nonetheless symbolic, insofar as he is one minute alive (the apparent culprit of a malevolent and vile act of necrophilia), and the next minute dead, ‘as [Troppmann] was passing his grave’.

The would-be strata of Bataille’s realital plains, i.e. material, figurative, dream-like, are often confounded by a proclivity of the authors for this type of symbolic ambiguity. The section is written in italics, implicit of a new type of narratorial delivery – to be considered different (if not an entirely separate psychical strata), and boasts metafictional lines such as: ‘I came to a city that looked like the setting for a tragedy’.

Laying next to a person he calls ‘the second victim’, Troppmann notes how the woman’s lips resemble ‘a certain dead woman[s]’. He notes that: ‘From them dribbled something more dreadful than blood’, and resolves that, ‘This time it wouldn’t be me who exited, but the old man’s corpse’. Whilst the insinuation of the Commendatore’s semen suffices to explain this ‘repugnance’ (as Troppmann describes it), the omission (or euphemistic ambiguity) remains, and leaves one wondering whether Troppmann himself may not epitomise the relentlessness of Bataillean transgression (for, indeed, would such a mind find semen on a dead woman’s lip “repugnant”?).

A quick look at Self’s explanation of the scene, then:

‘… [its] content is comprised of anti-clericalism, necrophilia and the occasional self-tormenting eruption from the denouement of Don Giovanni (the haunting of Troppmann by the Commendatore recasts the snuff scene that is the climax of The Story of the Eye)’.

Put simply (perhaps reductively), the scene evinces both the grappling of Troppmann with death, sexuality, and perversity, as well as the proto-postmodernistic intertext of Bataille and his earlier novel. It seems to me this grappling with the boundary of necrophilia represents an interesting point of departure for discussion on the author’s commitment to true, vital, transgression (though I won’t bore you with it here!)…

Part Two introduces us to Lazare, a Jewish revolutionary Marxist (and Troppmann’s 2^nd female confidante). Whilst Troppmann refers to her as the ‘Bird of ill omen’, he also describes her as ‘ugly and conspicuously filthy’….

her hair (short, stiff, unkempt, hatless) [which] stuck out like crow’s wings on either side of her face. Between these wings, her nose – that of a skinny, sallow-fleshed Jewess’

… a remark that may seem anti-Semitic, were it not for the quotidian nature of the general vitriol espoused by the speaker. Indeed, having said goodbye to Dirty (for the time being), Troppmann claims that ‘[Lazare] was the one human being who could rescue [him] from dejection’.

Soon after (in the 2^nd part of the chapter named “Motherly Feet”) we are introduced to Troppmann’s final love interest, Xenie (emblem of the naïve, crumbling ‘edible bourgeoisie’, in Self’s words). In a restaurant called Chez Francois, the protagonist – having noticed an ‘avant-garde magazine’ in front of her plate, in which a ‘country priest retrieves a heart with a pitchfork from a pile of manure’ – oddly seduces the girl by digging the ‘tines of [a] fork hard into her thigh’.

The scene is almost vampiric:

‘One of the tines, sharper than the others, had pierced the skin. Blood was flowing, but it was a trifling wound. I didn’t waste a second; she had no time to prevent my pressing two lips to her thigh and swallowing the few drops of blood I had just drawn’.

This section of the novella in fact brilliantly attests to the demi monde of the continental interbellum; the hedonistic pangs of the crumbling French character prior to the inception of the Vichy government (post-WWII).

Troppmann can be seen hereafter sporadically frequenting various Parisian bars and nightclubs (as is the bulk of the novel).

Whilst Self claims that ‘we know Troppmann is well-to-do, but we have no evidence to support this other than his idleness’, I would argue that the very mobility displayed here – his frivolous economic expenditure in bars and restaurants – provides precisely this evidence. He may also later be seen travelling to Barcelona, Vienna, Frankfurt (though, admittedly, the final journey is made with his likely patron, Dirty).

Back in the nightclub scenes then, an interesting (perhaps allegorical) incident occurs:

‘For some reason one of my friends had taken of his belt and was holding it in his hand. I asked him for it. I folded it double and amused myself by shaking it at women as though I were about to strike them. […] Then two girls came along, and one of the, confronted with the threat of the raised belt, turned on me She insulted me and spat her contempt in my face. She was really pretty – blonde, with strong patrician features. She turned her back on me in disgust and crossed the threshold of Fred Payne’s’.

Unlike the more sensitive protagonists of Ma Mere (My Mother), or l’histoire de l’oeil (Story of the Eye), Troppmann here appears entirely oblivious to the oppressive, patriarchal connotations of his “game”: ‘Holding out the belt, I said to her: “why are you angry with me”?’.

The girl is angry (for, he says, ‘she [is] surely German’), and is – according to Troppmann – ‘Full of impudence’. She proceeds then to fashion a female figurine out of wax (the ‘suppleness and coolness of flesh’), and dances maniacally with Troppmann in the club, before feeding him a cut-off ‘slice of [its] pink calf’. The imagery is exquisitely resonant with the fork in Xenie’s thigh, and provides not only the allegorical material for ideas about domination and submission, but also the figurative remove from either real consumption or violence (the wax doll and the belt, respectively). It is as if Bataille is prompting our consideration as to the ephemeral nature of the moral coding of these (conventionally sinful) acts, and as always exhibits the complex figuration of a transgressive symbolic interplay in conceiving thus.

Perhaps the most interesting section of the novel is still to come. For after Lazare’s approach (that is, the approach also of the spectral communist revolutionary) Troppmann says:

‘For a moment I wondered if she weren’t the most humane being I’d ever seen. What was approaching me also was a monstrous rat. Not running away was what was necessary and easy’.

The ambuiguity, of course, is that there is either a real rat coming towards him at the same time as Lazare, or perhaps a figurative rat in the form of Lazare. Since he is tired, he declines a meeting with her (with Marxism, Judaism), returns to his hotel room, to fall asleep.

The passage is worth quoting at length:

I dreamed I was in Russia; I was visiting one of the two capitals as a tourist, most likely Leningrad. […] a huge iron-and-glass edifice […] like the old Galerie des Machines. […] dirty light filtering through the dusty panes. Above the dirt floor the empty space was more vast and solemn than a cathedral. I was depressed and utterly alone. Through a side aisle I reached a series of little rooms where mementos of the revolution were kept. The rooms did not constitute a museum, but in them the decisive episodes of the revolution had taken place. […] created for the life […] of the Czar. […] had entrusted a French painter with the task of depicting on the walls a “biography” of France. In the austere, rhetorical style of Lebrun, he had narrated historical scenes from the life of Louis XIV. […] France was rising into the air with the ponderous floorlamp in one hand. […] emerging from a cloud or pile of wreckage, but she had, already, almost disappeared: the artist’s work, casually sketched in places, had been interrupted by the uprising. […] The adjoining room was the most oppressive. Its walls bore no trace of the old regime […] the revolution recorded in numerous charcoal inscriptions […] by sailors or workers […] set down in crude language and cruder images the event that had overturned the universal scheme of things. […] tears came to my eyes, revolutionary fervour slowly filled my head, sometime expressed in the word “lightning-bolt”, sometimes in the word “terror”. […] the Soviet authorities had decided to raze it [the building/museum][…] and I feared for my life. I was alone […] managed to worm my way outside […] a desolate landscape of factories […] empty lots […] I went towards a bridge. It was then that a cop started chasing me together with a gang of ragged children. The cop […] responsible for clearing people from the area of the explosion […] we reached the bridge together […] we looked at the building – it was visibly exploding (but we heard no sound: the explosion released dark smoke, which did not expand in swirls but rose straight towards the clouds like crewcut hair, without the slightest shimmer; everything was irremediably dark and dusty…). There was a stifling chaos, neither glorious nor grand, which dissipated aimlessly as the winter night came on’.

The “dream-sequence” itself visibly partakes in the symbolic displacement and magical dissonance of random-seeming events, and thus sets the Bataillean tone for a discussion of history (or historical depictions) in a kind of pictorial deferral. The building itself is an interesting thing to explore (for both us and for Troppmann), for if it is an allegory of the revolution (the architecture, or the structure, of revolutionary propaganda), it is decidedly bleak and labyrinthine, depictions of the personified female, France, “herself” rendered in the peculiar, “austere” stylings of a 17^th Century French painter

(* Lebrun was declared by Louis XIV to be the “greatest French artists of all time”).

As such, the “museum” is host to the metafictional reworkings of historical “Fact” (with a capital “F”); for whilst the oppressive forces of either Russian or French patriarch are visibly, tangibly evident, Troppmann’s own understanding of the world and the revolution is anything but concrete. The dankness, the explosion, the silence of the “crewcut” smoke, the ecstatic fleeing to find a “bridge” (of understanding, perhaps) poetically evinces a veritable maelstrom of the human psyche. It is precisely Bataille’s point here that there is no “real”, solid fact; that, instead, there is merely “stifling chaos, neither glorious nor grand” – both the bourgeois Enlightenment, as well as the idea of a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, simply the man-made, deifying constructs of war and societal oppressions!

There are so many (more) things to be said of this novel, not least of all of its grave and transgressive dénouement. I wonder if anybody remembers it??? ]]> European Literature Engleberton Crabferry http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/showthread.php/60290-Georges-Bataille-Blue-of-Noon