The Tobacconist

By Robert Seethaler, 2012
(Translator:  Charlotte Collins)

This book seems a bit like a fable reset in the mid-20^th century. It opens with Franz, a simple/innocent young man in a forest village, who loses his father and has to make his own way in the world. He discovers much about life that is not good. In his innocence, he tries to side with truth, justice and love. And, as in many of the original European fairy tales, this life journey does not end well. The strength of the story is in what it illuminates about life, not the happy ending of the hero.

Instead of going into the forest to seek his future, at his mother’s bidding our modern hero goes to the capital city, Vienna. There he meets a one-legged gnome, (his mother’s former lover) who advises him to read the newspapers in his tobacco shop so that he will gain knowledge about what his customers want. He meets a wise man who can offer him no advice. He falls for a beautiful young woman who cannot return his love. When he objects to the terrible things he sees in 1937 Vienna as the Nazis take power, the henchmen of the evil leader take him off to prison.

While certainly not fated to a bad end – Franz could have made many choices that might have led to a different outcome – he finds himself in conflict with history and society. Many of those around him go along with the evil around them, sometimes enthusiastically. His love, who is certainly the least idealistic character in the story, chooses to make her accommodations with evil, and seems to be the only one who survives. Some people choose to oppose the Nazis, but they come across as heroic but futile sacrifices. Franz is himself one of these sacrifices, although I wonder to what extent he is heroic, and to what extent he is merely innocent, or foolish. He knows that he is facing an overwhelming power, but he sees no alternative other than direct opposition. In the face of Naziism, this is not a winning strategy.

There may be something of a happy ending. Franz tries to share his dreams, which people find whimsical, but meaningless. Nevertheless, at least one person seems to be inspired by them and keeps Franz alive in her heart.

The writing reinforces this fable-like sense. Seethaler’s simple declarative sentences and poetic descriptions of nature and of the streets of Vienna give them a universal character. The writing is in fact quite engrossing and makes a moving story.

Modern western fables often end with a simple moral, but there’s no simple moral here. Franz has an unquestioning innocent belief in justice and love, but his belief does not guide him to a positive resolution. And how could it in an overwhelmingly evil society? The story offers no guidance to a reader other than the sad reality that certain forces – such as Naziism – will not be defeated by idealism. It was only the combined military force of a world war that defeated it, although Seethaler is more interested in the lead up to the war than in its conclusion. Austria, notably, has tended to avoid, rather than to acknowledge, its embrace of Nazi power. Seethaler here shows how the ordinary citizens of Austria accepted the clear and brutal evil of Naziism in spite of the examples of those who opposed it.

While it may have been futile for individuals to oppose it on their own, a united resistance by ordinary citizens before the Austrian Nazis gained power might have changed this history. This may be Seethaler’s hope in writing this book, that it would lead to Austria starting to face its past.

Berlin Alexanderplatz

 By Alfred Döblin (Michael Hofmann, Translator), 1929

Franz Biberkopf is a weak man. He tries to make good in his life and to make the right choices, but he can’t succeed. Everything seems to work against him. Certainly, he makes some bad decisions, but in working-class Berlin in the 1920s his options are limited. I don’t want to make excuses for a man who, before the story begins, has drunkenly killed his girlfriend, and who trades girlfriends around like objects. He tries to make a living peddling, but he is ripped off by his friends. He commits thefts, although only from profitable businesses. And he pimps his girlfriend, although she is happy enough to make money for him. And yet in this story, Franz’s struggle to get by becomes a comic epic.

Döblin sets the story within the chaos of life, bringing in a wonderfully rich background of the sounds, sights and especially the texts of Franz’s time. Franz’s story would be quite pathetic without the rich background. He would be a sad-sack loser who stumbles along until he somehow has a miraculous conversion. By capturing the whole scene, Döblin makes Franz a kind of Everyman who has to face everything that the Fates choose to throw at him. He struggles doggedly, often making mistakes or falling prey to his own weakness, but coming back time and again to his effort to get things right. Ironically, his most epic and successful struggle occurs when he is motionless in a hospital bed after Death has written him off saying you only think about yourself and you don’t even deserve to die.

Although highly specific to one small area of Berlin in the 1920s, the complex literary references also shift it into a universal theme. While Franz struggles in his life, the narrator compares him to the biblical Job (I didn’t realize how terrible Job’s afflictions were until I read Döblin’s paraphrase) and comments on the contemporary political slogans and advertisements that Franz spouts.

The narrator is a key part of the book. He (a male in my mind – I wonder how it would sound in a female voice) tells us what a loser Franz is, and tells Franz to smarten up. In fact, he tells us the whole story in half a page at the beginning of the book, and again at the start of each section, so there is no mystery to the plot. The only question is what Franz will go through to get to the end. But while the narrator comments acidly on Franz and Berlin, he also has some remarkable lyrical passages. He is poetic about the thoughts of a calf waiting in the slaughterhouse. Other parts are like rants against the failings of the German republic: “parliamentary democracy merely prolongs the agony of the proletariat,” the narrator says. It is corrupt and preserves the bureaucratic state. “We aim to destroy all the institutions of state by direct action.” Although this is in quotes, it’s not clear who is saying this – the narrator seems to be voicing a sentiment that is in the air.

There is much about Franz and his friends that is ugly, not merely a question of bad choices. Women are secondary objects in this world of men, and most relationships with them are transactional. Although Franz and Mitzi develop a caring relationship for each other, he beats her badly when she embarrasses him. His friend Reinhold is a psychopath, who turns on him, as well as on the women in his own life. Their lives are shaped by a toxic masculinity that we would recognize today, 100 years after the book was written. They often turn to violence to resolve issues, and they are drunks and criminals. They are anti-Semitic, although the first generous exchange Franz has after getting out of prison is with a Jewish shopkeeper. They are nationalistic, although they don’t take Nazis, socialists or anarchists very seriously.

While showing the details of their behaviours and relationships, Döblin’s style places them in a holistic web of social influences. Their poverty and inability to see any alternatives come from the disintegrating society after World War I. It is specific to Germany but seems universal in the wild cultural soup that Döblin creates. It appears extreme, but in many ways it describes the confusion and futility that lead people today to authoritarian figures offering clarity. Somehow, in the end, Franz escapes this and finds a way out, but this is more like the satisfying conclusion of an epic story than a likely resolution.

Kingdom of the Blind

By Louise Penny, 2018

Some things about this novel are well done, but if Louise Penny were not someone whose writing is recommended by people I respect, I might not have read further than the first chapter.

To give Penny her due, this is a well crafted, suspenseful novel that holds a reader’s interest and moves propulsively from one plot point to another. New events and storylines introduce different angles that engage a reader’s intrigue. The details of the police procedures seem plausible. And Penny doesn’t gloss over the psychological impacts of a life trying to understand murders and crime. (If anything, she overdoes the psychology, musing on the implications of each line of dialogue. In a Henry James novel, I like this slow-paced, considered story-telling, but it does slow down the suspense of a story driven by events.)

The detailed description of rural Quebec life in the depths of winter is engaging. The cold, the challenges of driving in snow, the camaraderie of the village friends are nice details. I might have been aware of these lifestyle details in a vague sense, but Penny shows it in a way that goes beyond the romanticized postcard view. She makes sure that, while admiring the beauty and the human warmth, a reader also sees how it can be miserable and life-threatening.

But in spite of Penny’s strengths, I found the writing annoying and contrived. Some things I didn’t like: Penny’s portentous language seems intended to set a suspenseful tone but it becomes tiresome. The repeated structure of half-sentences feels like an overworked device to create a fast-moving pace, a beginner technique from a suspense-writing class. The frequent authorial asides don’t add to the characters or the plot; they often seem obvious and unnecessary. Many of the characters are clumsy stereotypes (the prickly poet, the charming gay couple, the understanding partner), with no depth. And throwing in the odd French expression to remind us that we are in Quebec feels patronizing rather than authentic.

Some of the language I found extreme and oversimplified. The repeated references to fentanyl as a gateway to hellish and fatal existence, while grounded in reality, doesn’t reflect the fact that the fatal issue is the contamination of the drug, not the drug use itself. It plays into drug-war rhetoric to describe fentanyl as a categorical evil, as Penny does here. And her formulaic references to “junkies, trannies and whores” doesn’t help when it reduces drug users to empty stereotypes. This language makes Penny sound like a moralistic anti-drug preacher.

Also, I did find both of the storylines a bit ridiculous. The set up of the mysterious will seems so implausible that I kept asking myself why these supposedly rational people would go along with it. The second storyline of the drugs on the street and the strategy to recover them seem equally implausible. While I’m sure there is a lot of backbiting and bureaucracy in the Quebec police forces, I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t work to recover the drugs if the threat were as serious as Penny describes it.

With all of this, the tidy wrap up feels constructed and contrived. The bad guys are taken out, society is safe, warm feelings return to the village. Ho hum.

I know that many people like Penny’s writing, and I see from other comments that this may not be her best writing. My response to the book is, of course, idiosyncratic. If I had to find a book to read in an airport with a tiny selection, I might well pick up another of her novels, but she is not to my taste, and I won’t be searching for another.

The Berlin Novels

 

By Christopher Isherwood, 1945 

Having enjoyed the film Cabaret since it came out in 1972, I have wanted to read Isherwood’s novels for a long time. Of course, the novels are not the movie. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to see Isherwood’s depiction of the social and political context of Berlin in the early 1930s from his very personal, up-close perspective.

Although not strictly autobiographical, the stories draw closely from Isherwood’s life and contacts. And it’s hard to imagine that he could, or would want to, create the detail in the stories without having seen them in person. His descriptions are often sketchy, but nevertheless give enough detail to leave a vivid picture of the milieu and the characters. He takes the stance of an outside observer – “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking,” he famously says in the first page of Farewell to Berlin. He reports what he sees in a non-judgemental tone, while clearly sympathizing with the left-wing (communist) anti-Nazi characters.

Perhaps it was a fear of censorship or social intolerance, but it’s a little disappointing that he chose to underplay the queer scene of Berlin almost entirely. (I think there’s one point where the character Christopher responds Yes when asked if he is queer.) Many of the characters can be read as queer, and there is a degree of homoerotic attraction in their relationships. But actual queer sexuality was certainly a part of the scene that Christopher inhabits, and it seems artificial to have left it out. Isherwood’s later book, Christopher and His Kind, apparently deals with this, and perhaps anything more explicit would have been unpublishable in England in the 1930s.

The most vivid of several memorable characters is Sally Bowles. (I can see why the film producers wanted to focus on her.) It’s not clear why Sally and Christopher form such a strong relationship. Sally is irreverent, unconventional and fun, which brings a lot of energy and laughter to the otherwise staid Christopher. She perhaps appreciates his stability and the fact that he seems to adore her and she can manipulate him. Many of the other characters are memorable in their own ways – a bit like the caricatures that stand out in Dickens’ novels. The mysterious Norris convincingly plays every side for his own advantage, but seems to be constantly on the run. The working-class Otto seems to be in a sado-masochistic relationship with Christopher’s friend, and then welcomes Christopher into the two-room apartment he shares with his impoverished family, and introduces Christopher to his communist friends and his Nazi brother. Most poignant is the wealthy Jewish esthete Bernard, with whom Christopher has a very personal and close relationship, although apparently not an erotic one. Although somewhat exaggerated, these characters all come across as actual people.

The stories seem a bit random and unconnected, but they all fit into the background of the growing Nazi influence in Germany in the early 1930s. At the beginning of the stories, the Nazis seem a vague but ridiculous threat. As the stories continue, they are elected to government and acquire more power by intimidating people on the street and managing a semi-legal coup. In the final segments, they are a dominating malevolent force that imprisons some of Christopher’s friends and is responsible for the death of at least one of them.

The overriding narrative describes how people in various parts of a complex social situation respond to growing Nazi-ism, and also how the society fails to deal with the clear threat. People know what is happening. The fact that Isherwood’s books were published in 1935 describing the violence and arbitrary power grab also makes it clear that Isherwood’s contemporaries knew it, too. The inflation and unemployment of Germany in the 1930s may have convinced people that anything would be better than the status quo, and that the whole system needed to be overthrown.

That gives the stories relevance today – we may also be in a time when alienation and disillusionment are taking us to the same catastrophic path.

Flight Behavior

By Barbara Kingsolver, 2012

Didactic though it is, I enjoyed this book quite a bit. The characters are empathetic portrayals of real personalities, struggling to find their way through a contemporary crisis. The writing is a lyrical and descriptive evocation of a beautiful setting that I don’t know. The plot has enough humour and satire to be lively and engaging. The fact that it all moves in line with a big theme that Kingsolver wants to illustrate is just fine with me, since I agree with her message.

The extended metaphor of the butterfly colony’s displacement due to climate change is quite wonderful. First, the mysterious beauty of the colony is an inspiring image. It sparks my imagination to visualize the beauty of the scenes that Kingsolver describes, and beyond that, the beauty of the whole natural world. It makes me want to be there just to experience it. Equally, it fills the characters with a sense of wonder and a desire to protect the butterfly phenomenon. At the same time, it evokes a sense of dread in thinking that the phenomenon is already an aberration from the natural cycles, and it may be destroyed in the changed environment. Kingsolver effectively uses the metaphor to illustrate both the fragility of the cycles that we live with and depend on, and also the strength of the natural world. Life on Earth will carry on in one form or another, either with us or without.

The lead character, Dellarobia, takes readers through this range of stories and emotions. She is conflicted about her life. Initially she wants a dramatic change, but she doesn’t want to harm her family. Her life does change as she gains a view broader than the mountain valley she lives in and as she becomes exposed to science and education. That sounds a bit stark, but Kingsolver shows it as a natural progression for an intelligent and curious woman. Dellarobia was smart in high school and intended to go to college, but she got stuck in a marriage and a closed environment. When something beautiful and stimulating comes to her – an apparent result of climate change – of course she’s going to respond. The question for her is how she will resolve the conflict between staying with the family she loves and the external stimulation that she needs. I think this is a question that most of us face in some form, perhaps particularly women and people in isolated communities.

One intriguing aspect of this novel is the way that Kingsolver gets beyond the common one-dimensional image of rural Americans. Dellarobia despises the small-mindedness of her relatives and neighbours, but she finds that they all have unexpected sides to them. Her husband doesn’t really understand what she wants, but he loves her and he’s not a macho cowboy either. Even her judgemental mother-in-law has surprisingly warm aspects to her and a history of her own. In an iconoclastic picture of her rural megachurch pastor, he turns out to be one of the most liberal and supportive people around her. (I loved the description of the church with its bar-like men’s lounge and the drop-off childcare.) In its way, this novel offers a more complex and, I hope, realistic picture of a rural American community than any other that I’ve seen.

As one would expect, the interesting characters in this book are the women. Dellarobia discovers that the other women have complex inner lives and they respond to their world with strength and creativity within the limits that their circumstances allow. The men seem much more passive. Things happen and they try to cope, usually by doing what they have always done. When faced with something totally new, they have no clue and the women figure out how to react.

For me, this was an entertaining and enlightening way to talk about climate change and certain sectors of the American population that seem to resist it (and these days are Trump’s base supporters). I hope that many of those people read it and see themselves reflected in the effort to protect the world they know.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

by Umberto Eco (2004)

Umberto Eco always puzzles me, yet I read his novels whenever I find them. This novel is no exception, puzzling and intriguing, exploring questions about memory, storytelling, imagination, and the construction of reality. First, the narrator Yambo has a stroke which leaves him with stories and images from the literature he has read, but with no knowledge of his own past. Later, after a second stroke, he recovers his memory but cannot communicate and imagines a story line that may or may not resolve his life’s desires.

Eco says that we need our memories to know who we are and what to do. If we don’t know our past, what is the meaning of the present? How are we to know what we want for the future? As Yambo thinks, I recognize this image that I see in a flea market, but I don’t know if I like it or if I want to escape from it. Should I buy it or leave it? I don’t know. His wife even has to tell him what food he likes. Embarrassingly, he doesn’t know if he’s having an affair with his assistant or not.

He returns to his childhood home, where books and papers from his past have been stored. He hopes to recreate his past, but finds that it just raises more questions. When he reads the fascist Italian propaganda from his school days, it seems at first a happy memory, but reading more he sees that the reality of fascism led to his disillusionment. He realizes that the consciousness of his youth was shaped by the comic books he loved to read, which may have been more influential than the slanted education he received in schools. That consciousness he acquired from eclectic – and unreliable – sources seems to be part of his mature life.

This raises a question that we all face if we choose to think about it: how much of our current consciousness, values, beliefs comes from comic books, television, games that we encountered and continue to encounter as adults? How much comes from government, schools, religion, families and the formal sources that society entrusts with forming our minds? And setting the story in the period of Italian fascism and its aftermath, Eco implicitly asks if societies entrust the formation of consciousness to institutions that have their own flawed values. In the current social struggle for the minds of people in Canada (and the USA and elsewhere), questions about trust in social institutions are fundamental to both liberals and conservatives (as they always have been to radicals.)

It's interesting when this story moves into Yambo’s recovered memories. It becomes a time when he can relive the pleasures of his life and imagine a happy future without having to worry about time or what’s happening with his body in care. It becomes a positive way to exist in a coma, unlike the endless frustration that I would have imagined otherwise.

Woven into all this internal reflection are a number of intriguing stories that reflect on Yambo’s life. The story he finds about his grandfather’s treatment by local fascists and the revenge he executes after the war are hard to forget. His own role in the death of some German soldiers and the saving of some partisans become part of the guilt he feels through his life, although he’s forgotten the incident itself. Leading through the whole narrative is a highly idealized love, which he can realize as a comic-book blaze of glory in his detached state. But he says, “I want to know who I am. Life may be indistinguishable from a dream, but in life we have to choose to believe in what we see and know.” He does make a choice to reject illusion and live a mature life. Inevitably, or ironically, he can make a choice, but he cannot change the reality of his life.

Like all of Eco’s books, this is a book of philosophy as well as a curious story. It’s puzzling and sometimes frustrating to understand what’s going on in the narrative, but Eco always has something to say that makes the reading stimulating.

Musée des Confluences

By Musée des Confluences

I was so impressed with this museum in Lyon that I wanted to comment on it by writing up my notes to this museum guide. It’s one of two very good museums in Lyon that we visited, the other being the Lugdunum - Musée et Théâtres romains.

The Musée des Confluences is a fairly recent update of a traditional museum of natural history. It presents the story of life on earth, including the role of homo sapiens in the diversity of cultures and the chain of life. It takes a multidisciplinary approach to four themes, looking at the work through both a scientific and a symbolic perspective.

More concretely, each section of the museum presents themes such as the origin of life through diverse artistic works as well as through a display of scientific knowledge. The first gallery opens with contemporary creation-story artworks from Inuit and Australian Indigenous peoples alongside models of early hominids that might have existed 25,000 years ago. Similar juxtapositions happen throughout the museum. For me, this puts the scientific facts in the museum into a broad human context, and gives meaning to a history of life that in other exhibitions can be very abstract. (The Lugdunum museum did something similar with the Gallo-Roman history.) It also shows a philosophical approach that values distinct kinds of knowledge, including ways of expressing humans’ relationships with the world.

The Origins gallery illustrates mind-blowing diversity of life, and where humans fit into it (almost invisible). It shows the evolution of life from the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) to the domains of bacteria, archaea and eukarya (cellular organisms, where we fit) in response to the environment.

The Species gallery looks at aboriginal and European perspectives of how nature is connected and the impact of humans on the environment. It suggests that the human-animal boundary is just an idea that has existed in western thought for only about 300 years – and for many, it is breaking down again.

The Societies gallery looks at the social organization in religion, military objects, technologies. And the Eternities gallery looks at visions of the “beyond” through shamanism, funerary cultures and conceptions of death. These two galleries seemed a bit spotty and confused. It was as if the curators wanted to create a narrative from the variety of pieces in their collection rather than illustrating the narrative with their collection. Perhaps at this point, I was overloaded and didn’t see the connections they wanted to make, but reading the guide didn’t make it any more meaningful. More likely, the project of representing the meaning of human society and life in a few hundred objects and one hundred pages is too much to expect. Nevertheless, the galleries were a thoughtful exploration of some of the biggest themes in human thought, and worth more than an hour’s walk through.

The guide itself is an imaginative approach to representing the galleries. It’s bound into five sections, one for each gallery plus an introduction, with a fold-out cover wrapping around each section. It’s as if there were five separate booklets within one cover. Each one has many illustrations, with a minimum amount of text to highlight the ideas. I like the idea, but the binding makes the guide very stiff and it doesn't open well enough to comfortably view and think about the pages.

I also loved the building, a striking glass crystal enclosing the galleries and the related facilities on the point of land where the Saone and Rhone rivers converge. Rising on the escalator through the lobby up to the top of the building (and the excellent coffee shop) not only gives visitors a great view of the region, but it also creates a sense of openness and wonder that’s entirely appropriate for the museum.