Category: novel

Jew or Viennese or Both?

Eva Menasse: Vienna ISBN 978-3-442-73253-1 (translated into English under the same title) ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Vienna from the beginning of the 20th century through two World Wars until today – what a marvelous setting! The story of a Jewish family – how promising! Those were my thoughts when I read about Eva Menasse’s novel “Vienna”. The Austrian writer apparently draws on autobiographical material, and narrating the fate of a Vienna based Jewish family throughout the 20th century could have been the occasion to draw a critical portrait of Vienna’s society, its latent anti-Semitism and xenophobism, to explore the moral choices a Jewish family faced under the regime of Adolf Hitler and during the confusing time immediately after World War II.

All these issues come up, focused through the lens of the narrator searching for his own identity in this family, in this town, in this country. But the novel lacks a coherent structure. It follows a historical timeline, but the beginning already is confusing. Too many characters are introduced at the same time, you never quite now what time the narrator is referring to at a specific moment. Later the story is at times repetitive, the episodes seem unrelated to each other and my reading pleasure was regularly thwarted by these experiences. Furthermore the story lacks active elements that propel it forward, there is no tension, no culmination point the story is leading to.

The family members have both Christian and Jewish roots and their quest for identity is the central element of the novel. This however gets blurred by 1001 anectodes, funny at times, but distracting from the main issue. The question of “who is the better Jew” and whether one can belong to the Viennese society as a Jew or only as a Christian remains unanswered.

On the positive side I freely admit that the main characters and the difficult family relationships and interactions are masterfully sketched, wonderful miniatures peppered with intense Jewish humour that made me laugh more than once. A book pleasant enough, but Thomas Mann has set a very high standard with “The Buddenbrocks” in the field of German family sagas, and compared to this masterwork, “Vienna” remains unsatisfying.

While I read the novel I explored the works of the composer Max Bruch and his Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor captures some of the sadness I felt when I imagined the characters of the novel in their struggle for their identity:

Natural elegance – of rocks and music

Love and Death in a White Desert

Gerhard Jäger: Der Schnee, das Feuer, die Schuld und der Tod. ISBN 978-3-89667-571-2 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Know thyself – the famous inscription at a Greek temple in Delphi was meant as a warning against man’s vanity. Man is weak, prone to errors, vulnerable and mortal. Plato, the ancient philosopher, went a step further and exhorted man to acknowledge his ignorance and to strive for a better understanding of himself and of the universe. The quest of oneself’s identity, the search for the origin of one’s beliefs is one of oldest challenges of mankind and a constant subject in literature.

The Austrian novelist Gerhard Jäger has written a gripping story of a historian spending the winter in a remote mountain village to write a book about a witch hunt. It takes time to bridge the gap between him, the academic, the city dweller, and the village folks, he remains an outsider at the beginning. As time goes by, a slow process of social integration starts until he reveals the subject of his book. Many a secret lie dormant in the village and the villagers have no intention to let a foreigner disturb the fragile peace. Nevertheless, the man makes a few friends until a girl enters the game. Maria, a mute girl with a tragic past. The historian falls in love and his first friend in the village becomes his strongest enemy. At some point, an avalanche destroys half of the village and in the middle of this emergency the constellation of the three main characters is heading to its climax. Death is the air – and I will say no more otherwise you won’t read this riveting book.

Jäger beautifully draws the psychogram of the historian and his search for himself. Who is he? What does he expect from life? Which truth is he to believe, which choices does he want to make? Besides the plot and the psychological dimension of the book I was impressed by Jäger’s suggestive language and I was often tempted to draw a parallel to Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain”. And the obvious piece of music to go along with this book is Franz Schubert’s string quartet “Death and the Maiden”:

Composing while death is knocking on the door

Moscow’s weakness and our own moral corruption

John Le Carré: The Russia House. ISBN 978-0-141-19635 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I remember the day the Soviet Union ceased to exist: December 26, 1991. I was dumbstruck by disbelief. The Soviet Union and the threat of nuclear war had been part of my cosmos since I had been able to think for myself. The Catholic priest in our little chapel once had remarked we were lucky to live close to a NATO logistics hub. In case of war we would be vaporized instantly by the nuclear blast. No suffering, no radiation sickness. A fellow student of mine had protested against the fielding of nuclear-tipped SS-20 missiles aimed at NATO countries. The Soviet Union was a fact and I had every reason to perceive it as a threat.

I came to think of that time when I read Le Carré’s spy novel “The Russia House”, his first post-glasnost novel, published in 1989. At the time I wanted to believe in Mikhail Gorbatchev’s new policy: a Soviet Union embracing transparency (glasnost) and setting out to systemic reform (perestroika). My dad called it a lie – the Communists were not to be trusted – and warned me: Don’t come home with one of these t-shirts with “CCCP” written all across it or else…

I greatly enjoyed “The Russia House” for it gives the blurred emotions of hope and misgivings I felt back then precise contours. After Gorbatchev had made public his ideas on glasnost, a Soviet scientist working in the field of nuclear misdiles, wants to pass intelligence about the failing Soviet system to the West, hoping to trigger nuclear disarmement by exposing Moscow’s weaknesses.

Idealism, the hope for peace, the moral responsibility towards the next generation – these factors propel the plot forward. The detailed and cynic narrative of a joint US-UK intelligence operation – running a reluctant agent in Moscow to make contact with the scientist – provides the background for a much more philosophical insight: that the Western societies at the time were no less corrupt and failing than the Soviet Union before its dissolution. The Soviet Union was a convenient scapegoat for many things that went wrong, a wonderful excuse for morally dubious policies. The Soviet Union suited the West fine as a projection of its own dark side.

You may ask of what interest this may be today, some 28 years later. Well, first it is a goid read. Le Carré is a brilliant story-teller and this novel is yet another proof of hos talent. Second, the Soviet Union has been replaced by an autocratic and thoroughly corrupt Russian Federation, the nuclear arsenal remains in place, Moscow pursues an aggressive foreign policy hoping to restore its former Soviet lustre (if it ever had any) and we seem to be again at the threshold of a new confrontation, possibly on European soil. As for our own moral corruption, the examples of the United States and the United Kingdom are not exactly reassuring.

It is certainly no coincidence that Le Carré picked Dmitry Shostakovich’s music to illustrate the only consolation of a secondary character of the plot, a man who had just been released from the Soviet forced labor camps. Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in C minor amounts to a look back at the Soviet Union, times of fear and broken dreams.

Paranoid feelings as the sun sets on the countryside

“We’re all gonna die!”

Don Delillo: Underworld. ISBN 978-1-4472-8939-5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ What a brilliant, disturbing tale! “Underworld” is one of those books that initially left me speechless when I had finished it. I was stunned by its powerful language, its intertwined plots and the precision of the writer’s social study. At the centre of the book is Nick Shay, an expert in waste management and his personal quest to give his life a meaning. His life is  a complex story beginning with a not-so-ideal youth in the Bronx and leading to random encounters with other people looking for wisdom like himself, trying to make sense of their lives. Multiple invisible links connect the different characters, some meet several times under unforeseeable circumstances.

It all happens in the midst of the Cold War, and the story is told backwards gradually reveals these links. Delillo’s calm and detached narrating style brutally exposes the absurdity of life in a world defined by the possibility of nuclear annihilation, by the unequal chances in the American society any an ever-growing production of consumer goods and mountains of waste the consequence. It can be summarized by the ironic outcry of an US stand-up comedian at the climax of the Cuba missile crisis: “We’re all gonna die!”

While reading this novel, I discovered the beauty of Sergei Prokofiev’s opera “Love of the Three Oranges” and the piano suite that he derived from it:

The quest for identity or a fool among fools

A power struggle between father and son

Franz Kafka: Das Urteil (English title: The Judgment) ISBN 978-3-596-20019-1 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Another short story with a subject dear to German Romanticists: the longing for death! I truly enjoyed this text about a power struggle between father and son where the balance of forces is quickly  reversed and initial emotions turn into their opposite.

It didn’t take long to come up with an appropriate piece of music, a piece flirting with death, Franz Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in A minor, D.784:

Sadness transfigured with sublime delicacy