The Ogre!

Our book today is Michel Tournier's great, grim 1970 masterpiece, Le roi des Aulnes, translated into English in 1972 by Barbara Bray with the title The Ogre. It was Tournier's second novel, and it won him the Prix Goncourt and sold with fervor throughout France (even the paperback of the English translation sold well in America). The whole generation of Western writers born around the '20s (Tournier was born in 1924 and is still alive, composed almost entirely of tobacco and merlot) visited the Second World War when they reached middle age, and the works they produced are generally first rate, rich with mythic overtones. The Ogre is a magnificent example of this sub-set, a deceptively simple tale of a gigantic man-boy named Abel Tiffaugues who's portrayed as something insightful and quasi-human - with an innocence ripe for warping by the Nazis. Tiffauges has a fascination with children and a reflexive (ironically invoked) desire to protect them, even from such rarefied dangers as literary condescension, as when he finds a co-worker reading Pinnochio:

 I picked it up and looked through it, shrinking in advance from the atrocities children's stories are full of. As if children were dull brutes, dim and insensitive, who can be moved only be fearsome tales, real literary rotgut! Perrault, Lewis Carroll, Busch - sadists with nothing to learn from the divine Marquis.

Tournier's sharp commentary is buried at varying depths everywhere in the novel, often cloaked in folkloric colors, as when the populace is warned by posters that would have looked natural nailed to trees in the Middle Ages:

 BEWARE THE OGRE OF KALTENBORN!

He is after your children. He roves through our country stealing children. If you have any, never forget the Ogre - he never forgets them! Don't let them go out alone. Teach them to run away and hide if they see a giant on a blue horse with a pack of black hounds. If he comes to see you, don't yield to his threats, don't be taken in by his promises. All mothers should be guided by one certainty: if the Ogre takes your child, you will NEVER see him again!

Tiffauges for a long time is suborned into helping the Nazis (the scenes where he realizes his mistake are absolutely shattering, even in English), and he himself can be oddly, unconsciously brutal. But readers are never in any doubt who the real monster in these pages is:

"But why April 19?" asked Tiffauges.

The man looked at him incredulously.

"Don't you know April 20 is our Fuehrer's birthday? And every year the German people give him a whole generation of children as a birthday present!" He pointed proudly at the big colored photograph of Hitler scowling down from the wall behind him.

When Tiffauges took the road back again to Rominten the Master of the Hunt, with his shoots and trophies, his feasts of venison and his coprological and phallological science, had dwindled to the rank of a little, imaginary, picturesque ogre out of an old wives' tale. He was eclipsed now by the other, the ogre of Rastenburg, who demanded of his subjects the exhaustive birthday present of five hundred thousand little girls and five hundred thousand little boys, ten years old, dressed for sacrifice, or in other words naked, out of whose flesh he kneaded his cannon fodder.

Despite its initial burst of popularity and acclaim, The Ogre hasn't become quite the modern-day classic I've always thought it should be considered. Reprints of the Bray translation have been few and far between (there was a recent one I vaguely recall, but nothing in bookstores now), and the book is neither read nor taught today. That's a shame; as a portrait of monsterhood in all its contradictions, it's more honest and ultimately far more effective than something like The Kindly Ones from a couple of years ago. Maybe it's time for a new translation and a bit of hoopla.

The Pigeon!

Our book today is the 1987 novella The Pigeon by Patrick Suskind, better known to the reading world as the author of Perfume. Unlike Perfume, Pigeon is only a novella in length, and it has no riveting villain, no action, and no real plot to speak of. Instead, it's a deft little scenario, and the English translation by John E. Woods will work its way into your mind and stay there for a while.

The scenario is simple. Jonathan Noel is a timid, mindless middle-aged bank guard who's been living in the same eleven-by-seven-foot room in a lodging house for years. The room has no bath, no stove, only one window, but he loves it, loves the rote security of it, has almost managed to save up enough money to buy it outright from his landlady. His days are completely circumscribed - he goes to work, he comes back to his room, where he can mutedly revel in his ability to shut out the rest of the world. He has no friends, no social life, no hobbies or activities - but he has the security of his little room, and as anybody who's ever been briefly homeless can tell you, that sometimes means a great deal, as Jonathan reflects while watching a homeless man defecate in public:

What could be more demeaning than those pulled-down trousers, that crouch, that coerced ugly nakedness? What could be more wretched and humbling than being forced to do your embarrassing business before the eyes of the world? Nature's necessity! The very term betrayed its tormented victim. And like anything that you had to do out of duress, it demanded, for it to be at all bearable, the radical absence of other people ... or at least the appearance of absence: a wood if you found yourself in the country; a bush if you were overcome in an open field, or at least a farmer's furrow, or twilight or, if there was nothing else, a good steep bank that commanded a view of several miles in all directions, with no one in sight. And in the city? With its teeming masses? Where it was never really dark? Where even the ruins of an abandoned lot offered no adequate  safeguard against obtrusive stares? In the city, nothing but a good lock and bolt helped you distance yourself from other people. And the man who did not have this one, this sure refuge for the necessity of nature, was the most miserable and pitiable of men, and freedom just silly talk.

The monotony of this routine is disrupted one morning when Jonathan opens his door, steps out into the hallway, and encounters a pigeon that has somehow managed to make its way into the building. The perfectly controlled way Suskind brings us inside Jonathan's visceral horror at such a thing is the showpiece of this novella:

It had laid its head to one side and was glaring at Jonathan with its left eye. This eye, a small, circular disc, brown with a black centre, was dreadful to behold. It was like a button sewn on to the feathers of the head, lashless, browless, quite naked, turned quite shamelessly to the world and monstrously open; at the same time, however, there was something guarded and devious in that eye; and yet likewise it seemed to be neither open nor guarded, but rather quite simply lifeless, like the lens of a camera that swallows all external light and allows nothing to shine back out of its interior. No lustre, no shimmer lay in that eye, not a sparkle of anything alive. It was an eye without sigh. And it glared at Jonathan.

Jonathan retreats into his room and covers himself with a blanket, quivering in terror. Even when he eventually summons the courage to open the door again and finds the pigeon gone, he can't stand the thought of living in the building one more minute. He packs a bag and takes a room in a hotel across town, and only through the most strenuous and convoluted internal twistings can he force himself to return one day to his building and mount the stairs to his hallway, dreading the whole time that when he reaches the landing he'll see that dreadful little bird again.

He reaches his hallway. The pigeon is gone. The carpet has been cleaned, the window through which the bird entered has been locked shut. Jonathan re-enters his beloved room, having survived the crisis.

That's the whole book, but modern-day fables don't require much in the way of either elaboration or page-length. Suskind has crafted a canny look at the silliness of panic and the anatomy of inconsequence, and he's presented it stripped of almost all artifice. The reader is given no lectures, no arias of digression, and no answers. The language is as precise as the lines of Jonathan's life, and the carefully modulated histrionics are merrily out of proportion to the triviality on every page. The combination is oddly mesmerizing.

 

The Murderess!

Our book today is a slim, weird masterpiece of 20th century Greek literature, The Murderess by Alexandros Papadiamantis, published in 1903 and translated into English by Peter Levi in 1983.

Translated into English, with the usual apologies. Translator apologies almost always bug me, and Levi’s is no exception; they almost always take as their premise that precise or even cognitively close translation isn’t really possible – that the best even a skilled translator can do is cobble together a series of more or less serviceable approximations … that everything, in other words, is lost in the translation.

Levi is fairly explicit about it all, in his Translator’s Preface to Papadiamantis’ jagged, admittedly idiosyncratic book. The particular twists and turns of Papadiamantis’ prose, Levi tells us, “… the realism and the exoticism, the narrative gift and the excessively romantic lyricism, make it impossible to disentangle his virtues from his vices as a writer. They are also extremely hard to render in modern English."

Needless to say, I never have any idea what to make of a translator who openly tells his readers that the one thing he wasn’t really able to do with his source text was translate it. Resorting to incomprehensible evasions like maintaining an author’s strengths can be indistinguishable from his weaknesses doesn’t help any, as does imputing blame to the very regionalism that is the reason for translating the work in the first place:

It has been impossible to produce accurately the texture of the original. I had trouble with proverbs and the names of herbs. Certain popular phrases exist in every language that have roots in an entire culture, and Papadiamantis uses more of them than most writers. Then at times he can be painfully slow and repetitive, or he can drag in by the hair some weighty phrase out of a literary journal. Nowadays a publisher’s editor would simply strike it out. It is not the task of a mere translator to underline such phrases.

Fortunately, Levi’s own work in translating this little book bears out a different tale, one in which his skills as a translator positively shine. Papadiamantis’ tale is that of an old woman named Hadoula, sometimes known as Frankojannou, who as the book opens has gone four days and nights without sleep at the side of a newborn granddaughter, a little baby born sick who’s done nothing but cry for days. Drifting in and out of aggravated patches of half-sleep, Frankojannou’s mind more or less snaps; she sticks two fingers in the baby’s mouth and holds them there until the infant is completely still. The child’s mother is asleep in the same room of the poor little hovel, and the tiny village’s doctor is away from town – his temporary substitute rather easily puts the death down to fever, but by that point old Hadoula’s mind has permanently altered. Whether she’s reacting to the grinding poverty and social nullity in which all the women of her world live, or whether she’s simply gone insane, we don’t know. But it isn’t long before she pushes two little girls down a well and cold-heartedly waits while they first struggle then float face-down.

Shortly after that, she’s seen nearby when another girl goes down a well, and the police begin to suspect she’s somehow involved. In the classic tradition of ancient Greek tragedy, Frankojannou has by this point become little more than a beast at bay, tormented by the same memories that exhilarate her, intent on fleeing into the mountains rather than be apprehended and put in prison:

As she went out, the lamenting voice of the infant, the tiny girl unjustly slain, moaned inside her. She stood in the doorway, peering carefully outside, right and let, up and down the road. Not a soul, not a shadow. She put wings to her feet. It was not the first time she had heard that sorrowful infant cry in the cavernous, echoing darkness of her soul. Now she thought she was escaping from danger and disaster, escaping from dungeon and prison, but prison and Hell were within her.

The bleakness of this story moves effortlessly from the hardscrabble streets and huts of the poor Greek villages that are its setting to the minds and memories of its characters as they gradually react to this horrific tragedy unfolding amidst them. And of course nobody’s reactions are more intense than the murderess’ own:

In her [Frankojannou’s] sleep she thought she was still young; her father and mother married her off in her dream as they had done in fact, and gave her ‘the blessing of the dear departed’ and the dowry, including her father’s plot, where she had dug and watered cabbages when she was little. And her father rewarded her for her hard work, and gave her ‘four heads’ out of the cabbages. Hadoula took the four plants happily into her hands, but when she looked, Oh horror! she saw they were four little dead human heads.

Despite his protestations, Levi does a wonderful job conveying all this. Papadiamantis is entirely unknown to the world outside Greece, and he represents a large gallery of such regional artists in similar positions. Such artists represent entire worlds, of course, and each one of them is worth exploring. I can recommend Papadiamantis as one of those destinations, and this book – his strongest and bleakest – is his best.