In 1976, Solzhenitsyn moved to the USA where after an initial period of adulation, the opinion of many turned against him as they became aware of his contempt for American society and his support for Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox Church – “..the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits … by TV stupor and by intolerable music”.  While offending many, Solzhenitsyn’s “reactionary” views increased Solzhenitsyn’s popularity with more conservative commentators such as Malcolm Muggeridge who wrote in 1978,

The pack is after him because what he says is unbearable: that the answer to dictatorship is not liberalism, but Christianity. I mean, that is an unbearable proposition from their point of view, and it is where he stands . . . It has been something wonderful to watch and, to more people than you might think, enormously heartening: that that is what this man should have to say instead of a lot of claptrap . . . They started off by never mentioning that he was a Christian. I mean, for a long time, he was made a hero of the cause for freedom, but it was never mentioned that an integral and essential part of it was his Christian belief.

The stories in Apricot Jam date from the period 1994 to 2008 when Solzhenitsyn had returned to Russia and was living in a dacha outside Moscow.  They look back at the days of Soviet Russia and include stories about the persecution of peasant farmers (the “kulaks”), stories set in the Second World War and stories of everyday life in Russia before the fall of the Soviet Empire. While I enjoyed reading these stories, I found myself thinking that the outrage Solzhenitsyn felt about the terrible living conditions of the previous century was a bit of a spent force, an almost nostalgic look back to a period which had provided him with such fruitful ground for developing his earlier successes.

Many of the stories are written in the “bipartite” form Solzhenitsyn experimented with towards the end of his life, in which two sections complement one another and provide a balancing narrative.  The title story, Apricot Jam for example, tells the story of Fedya, the son of a kulak who leads a dreadful life of slave labour and oppression and eventually writes an impassioned letter to a “famous Writer” appealing for help.  The scene then switches to the “famous Writer” a member of the privileged intellectual class, who is deep in discussion with a professor of cinema studies about literary forms in a revolutionary age.  They have the most arcane debate about linguistics and the need to find a language which reflects the glorious state of the Russian worker.  To illustrate a point, the writer declares,

“I had a letter not long ago from a workman building a factory in Kharkov.  His language doesn’t follow today’s rules yet it has such compelling combinations and use of grammatical cases!  I envy the writer!  And his vocabulary!  It makes your mouth water”.

“Are you planning to reply in the same fashion?” asked Vasily Kiprianovich.

“What can I say to him?  The point isn’t in the answer. The point is in discovering a language”.

In another bipartite story, Ego, Pavel Ektov, the leader of a peasant rebellion against collectivisation ends up in the Lubyanka prison where under torture he finally gives way when he is threatened with having his wife and daughter abandoned to Hungarian soldiers and agrees to commit a dreadful act of treachery against his former comrades.

Road construction by inmates of a forced labour camp

In The New Generation, a professor of engineering helps a student from a poor background gain a pass by marking up his exam papers.  Many years later, the student has risen to a position of prominence while the professor is in the cellar of a prison being interrogated.  The interrogator is about to send him to a prison camp but then offers him the option of informing on his colleagues in return for freedom.  The interrogator turns out to be the young man the professor helped earlier by falsely marking his exam papers.  The story ends with the  professor dropping his head to the table and sobbing, but, “A week later he was set free”.

The military stories are perhaps the best, particularly Adlig Schwenkitten which describes a Russian battalion advancing into East Prussia towards the end of the Second World War.  This is noteworty because Solzhenitsyn is describing a battle he himself took part in and he writes himself into the story as Sasha, a reconnaissance battery commander.

These are of course stories in the great Russian tradition (Wikipedia records 147 Russian writers of short stories) and are a delight to read in terms of vivid characterisation and forward moving narrative. They are what might be called “traditional” short stories rather than the type of literary snapshot with neither beginning nor end which so characterises the form today.  But something is missing somehow.  Had they been contemporaneous with the oppressive systems described in they would have felt more authentic: the fact that they are the product of an old man’s memories somehow diminishes them and makes them a museum exhibit rather than a living literature born out of the fires of suffering.

Mills has the ability to create dysmporphic scenarios from everyday narratives – ordinary things happen to ordinary people, but the effect is sinister and unsettling.  He uses cliché and colloquial expressions but there is something of parody in the way he uses them.  His characters’ over-prosaic conversational style suggests that they live stilted emotional lives with a preference for home and the routines of a boring job.  Humour is never far from the surface, but the reader laughs in an uneasy way, never quite short whether he is on safe territory or not.  His characters love the everyday and the routines that support them, but they seem to be locked into situations that ultimately do them no good and from which they would best advised to get out of as quickly as they can.

Magnus Mills’ new short story collection, Screwtop Thompson is as usual a bit of a disappointment – not least because only three of the stories are new, the other eight having been published before (although probably out of print).  But here and there we catch enough of Mills’ sideways-on humour to keep us reading on – and waiting in hope for the next offering.

I will just take one story to try to capture a little of the flavour of this collection.  “They Drive By Night”  opens with the phrase, “It was a dark and stormy night, with the threat of rain moving rapidly in from the west”.  A hitch hiker waits by the side of the road, but there is little traffic.  He has a hundred miles yet to travel and has been on the road since early morning.  He hears a faint roar in the distance, “like a great beast labouring under an enormous burden”.

A huge eight-wheeler truck emerges from the darkness and pulls up and a face appears at the window to offer a lift, “the whole cab seemed to be shaking with the motion of the engine”.  The traveller gets in and has to climb over the driver’s mate in order to sit in the middle of the bench seat, his leg crushed against the gear stick.  He is expected to converse, but the noise in the cab is so great he can only hear snatches of what the other two men are saying and when they ask him a question he is uncertain how to reply.  The weather worsen and the wind-screen wipers don’t work properly but the lorry hurtles on through the atrocious conditions.  The traveller has never said where he is going and seems to have no idea where the truck is headed to.  It all seems very sinister and not a little threatening.

The conversation seems to turn to a discussion of where to stop for a meal but its almost impossible to fully understand the conversation because of the racket from the engine and the road.  There are two options, a lorry drivers’ cafe called The Tiger Lily, or a restaurant called Joys which is run by a fierce woman who the customers are in awe of.  It turns out Joy’s is closed that night, so the driver pulls up at The Tiger Lily and soon the traveller finds himself sitting at a table with the lorry driver and his mate.  They eat their pie and chips in total silence and the story ends.  We have not gone anywhere at all with this story, but Mills’ flat style of writing has created a strong impression of something unfinished.  Is the traveller going to resume his journey with the two men?  Will it get him to his destination?  This seems like an endless night and we feel that he has perhaps slipped into a hellish world where there is no destination and no way of getting home.

There is plenty more of the same in this little book. With eleven stories spread over 114 pages, it takes very little time to read this book, but despite its brevity, it sticks in the mind and is a must-read for those who Mills first entranced with The Restraint of Beasts.  Perhaps its better to order it from the library than to buy it.  You won’t suffer through waiting for it and it will only take you a couple of hours to read it.

Alice Fisher in The Guardian seemed to like this book commenting that “Magnus Mills’s gift has always been his ability to create the weird from the workaday” and goes on to say, “These are stories you marvel at for their precision rather than narratives to lose yourself in. You certainly wouldn’t take this book on a long train journey”.

Leyla Sanai in The Independent writes that “Magnus Mills unerringly sharp eye for human foibles combines with a dry, deadpan wit to create comic genius”.

I just hope that Screwtop Thompson is followed by a longer novel which I can spread over a few days rather than this too-short reminder of what Mills is capable of.

Robert Walser's Microscipts - (grabbed from amazon.co.uk book listing)

I won’t go into the life-stories of these two eccentric authors as Hermann Ungar’s life is described well in this biography on the Twisted Spoon website and Robert Walser’s in this excellent article by J M Coetzee on the New York Review of Books website.

Walser’s Selected Stories is a very satisfying little volume containing some very short stories and a a smaller number of longer ones.  The most substantial story seems to be The Walk.  Walser specialises in descriptions of his over-sensitive state of mind and delights in writing about banal, trivial events but with a level of descriptive writing which reminds me slightly of a Buddhist writings which exhort one to value the present moment (“mindfulness”) and to meditate on little things as a way to enlightenment.

In this story, the narrator wakes up in a relaxed state of mind and sets out on a long rambling walk, partly to conduct a couple of items of business but mostly to experience the flow of daily life around him.

I found myself, as I walked in the open, bright and cheerful street, in a romantically adventurous state of mind, which pleased me profoundly.  The morning world spread out before my eyes appeared as beautiful to me as if I saw it for the first time.  Everything I saw made upon me a delightful impression of frienliness, of goodliness, and of youth.  All sorrow, all pain, and all grave thoughts were as vanished, although I vividly sensed a certain seriousness, a tone, still before me and behind me.

The narrator proceeds to visit a bookshop, a bank, a tailor, a tax office.  Along the way he encounters various people who he stops to talk to.  In one sense, the “story” is completely pointless other than as a vehicle for the narrator’s meditations on life and current affairs (his intense dislike of motor cars for example).  But I believe the “point” as such is as I mentioned above, to take a certain joy in the simple routines of daily life.  I was reminded of Henry David Thoreau, who when asked if he was much travelled, replied, “I have travelled much in Concord County”.  A man who could live by Walden Pond for two years would surely have appreciated the writings of Robert Walser.

With an introduction by Susan Sontag, Selected Stories would be a good introduction to Walser’s work and is a very attractive book to dip into.

As an aside, I’d like to include this painting of the Robert Walser’s death, by British artist and novelist Billy Childish.  Robert Walser was found dead in the snow while walking near the asylum in which he spent the last 27 years of his life.   Childish produced this memorable painting which I am allowed to reproduce here due to its inclusion in Wikimedia.

Hermann Ungar’s book of stories Boys and Murderers is a much less innocent volume of stories than Robert Walser’s.  Ungar’s tone is sinister, even disturbing, and when we embark on reading one we never know what strange people we are going to encounter there.  In The Story of a Murder for example, we read of a hunch-backed barber Hascheck, who cruelly manipulates the narrator’s pathetic father by encouraging him in a series of lies about his past, and then suggesting that he is about to be exposed as a fraud.  It is not so much the emerging story which holds the reader’s interest, fascinating though it is, as the dark thoughts and convoluted reasonings of the characters.

Similarly, in A Man and Maid, we learn of a young man’s obsession with an older house-maid despite her unattractiveness and her complete lack of personal qualities.  As he rises in his career and becomes wealthy, he persuades her to travel with him to America where he eventually installs her in a brothel – for disreputable reasons which are only partly elucidated by Ungar’s description of his inner dialogue.

Despite the unpromising material of many of these stories, Ungar created a unique collection quite unlike anything else – with the possible exception of other writers of the Kafka school of writing.

I took these two books on holiday with me – neither qualified as typical holiday reading but they were good to dip in and out of and are definitely two small volumes which will remain on my shelves rather than ending up in my usual charity-shop book boxes.

Best European Fiction 2010 is a case in point, being a fascinating collection of short fiction which very much pushed the boundaries of this reader at least, and much to his reading pleasure.

The idea is simple, but executing it must have been a huge exercise:

- take one author from every European nation and publish a short work from them all,

- provide a biography of each author, together with a personal statement,

- provide a comprehensive list of online literary resources for each of the nations represented.

This bookblog, A Common Reader, tends to specialise in European literature in translation, but even I had never read anything before from the lesser known countries like Slovenia, Serbia and Albania.  And the effect of reading these 35 or so stories was to make me want more from quite a number of these previously unknown authors.  The quality of the writing is high throughout the book and the range of topics is vast.  There are very few stories in the book which don’t surprise in one way or another.

I couldn’t possible review all 35 stories, but a few are worth a quick mention:

Ornela Vorpsi of Albania give a perfect snapshot of life as a child in Albania in “The Country Where No One Ever Dies”, a piece of writing which combines the comfort-blanket experiences of a sick child being cared for by her grand-mother, with the threatening future awaiting her in a society of macho-values where a much loved sister can morph into a whore without even realising it, attracting all the penalties she apparently deserved all along.

Romanian Cosmin Manolache writes in “300 Cups” of a visit to his country’s Military Museum where he finds the space capsule in which the only Romanian cosmonaut ventured into orbit.  This surreal piece ends with a list of the 300 toasts the space travellers might have drunk while hurtling through the void, each toast contributing in some way to a bizarre history of Romania (?) or maybe just a picture of the writer’s trouble mind.

On a much more accessible level, Stephan Enter of the Netherlands writes in “Resistance” a wonderful story of a junior chess club.  Their mundane and plodding instructor ex-Army major Mr Vink has drilled his charges in the basics of chess and has done a reasonable job in introducing the boys to the game, but perhaps without the style and flair they would need to win tournaments.  One day, the boys arrive for their meeting to find Mr Wiesveld in charge, who explains that Mr Vink has gone away for three months.  Under Mr Wiesveld’s charge, the boys take off in new directions, away from the systematic  calculations of Mr Vink and into a place where intuition and instinct come to the fore and chess becomes a matter of gambling and bluffing, with style at the forefront rather than mathematics.  This is a brilliant portrait of an inspired teacher who manages to impart a love for the game which goes much further than the mild interest the boys had before.

I enjoyed Slovenian Andrej Blatnik‘s episodes from his book, “You Do Understand”, a set of brief portraits of relationships, full of resonance and yearning:

I lay there with my eyes closed, waiting for my husband to vacate his half of the bed.  To go to work of course.  He’ll get a sandwich on the corner.  He’ll have a coffee during his first meeting.  Then he’ll call home.  To make sure I’m still there and haven’t run away.  I’m not going to.  I’m going to open that box of old snapshots again.  There were no hard drives in those days.  I’ll go through photo by photo, and with each one think, That was a day I loved you.

The United Kingdom is represented by Wales (Penny Simpson), England (Deborah Levy) and Scotland (Alasdair Gray).  Being very familiar with Alasdair Gray’s work I am a little surprised at the the choice of his poem, The Ballad of Anne Bonny – the only poem in the book in fact.  However, its not one I’d read before so I’m glad it was there.  Penny Simpson’s story, Indigo’s Mermaid, is superbly funny and is set in the market town of Lewes, East Sussex, near  where I live – a bonus for me, but a rather incongruous setting among the Budapests, and Bucharests of the other pieces in the book!

I have found reviewing this book has reminded me of how very good it is and once again am struck by its uniqueness.  In the preface Zadie Smith refers to its, “epigraphic, disjointed structure.  Many of these already short stories are cut into shorter sub-titled sections, like verbal snapshots laid randomly on top of each other – and they end abruptly”, but, “for me this anthology and the series that is to follow reprsents a personal enrichment . . . there should be more of that sort of thing”.   I found that although the book is composed of these sketches, they do in fact make a very satisfying whole.  Its a little like a collage put together by someone with a view to the final overall pattern, a snapshot survey of radical writing in Europe, which is surely valid in its own right.

The editor Aleksandar Hemon reminds us in his introduction that there is no better way to monitor the rapid development in European literatures than the short story.  “The short story still has the flavour of a report from the front lines of history and existence”.

Finally, I’d just like to comment on the quality of the translations.  Obviously I can’t comment on their fidelity to the original (couple of dozen?) languages, but they certainly read completely naturally with none of that “clunkiness” which can so easily creep in.  I am pleased that the book lists all the translators at the back with a short biography of each.  They deserve as much.

Really, I can’t recommend this volume enough.  I can only hope that the Dalkey Archive Press and Aleksander Hemon can fulfil their goal of making this “Best of” an annual event.

Gregor von Rezzori is a deeply reflective writer.  He writes what might be called memoir-based fiction, but he is not just interested in his stories, but wants to bring out the meaning behind them.  His mind is hugely inventive and the reader gets the impression of someone who can see all points of view and incorporate them into his stories.  He seldom allows his characters to get away with expressing their prejudices and long-held opinions but always sets them in juxtaposition with someone holding an opposing view, or else shows the absurbity of their statements by setting them in a context of personal decline and ultimate failure.

A true European, Gregor von Rezzori (1914-1998) was born in Czernowitz (now Chernovtsy, Ukraine) towards the end of the Austro Hungarian Empire.  His home town was absorbed into the Romanian Kingdom and after World War 1, Rezzori studied in Vienna and other European cities, settling eventually in Bucharest until 1938 when as a German speaking Romanian he was compelled to move to Berlin.  After the war he earned his living as an author, a screen-play writer and an actor moving around Italy, France and the USA, eventually settling in Tuscany.

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite consists of five stories, illustrating the decline of the old European aristocracy and the prejudices they took with them to their demise.  It would be a mistake to think that this book is as its title might suggest, “anti-Semitic”.  Quite the contrary, for although the book’s characters exhibit anti-Semitic attitudes, the author allows this to show their ignorance and stupidity.  Very often the Jews they despise are more clever, witty and successful than their old-European adversaries, and in some ways, the book would be better titled as “confession” rather than “memoir”.  However, no doubt Rezzori, known for a mischievous streak, preferred the bolder title as a provocation to his readers.  I can’t help but be reminded of Jonathan Littel’s opening sentence to his novel written in the first person about a senior SS officer, The Kindly Ones;

Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened.  I am not your brother you will retort, and I don’t want to know.

For in the same way, Rezzori teases his readers by drawing them along with his first-person accounts of these prevailing mid-20th century attitudes, until suddenly they are forced to protest, No, that’s not right, and quickly distance themselves from Rezzori’s undeniably sympathetic characters.

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite consists of five stories, each one revealing a different aspect of the anti-semitic position.

The first story, Skushno (a Russian word meaning ennui, a dreary boredom, perhaps a spiritual condition), concerns Bubi, a boy sent to live with his uncle and aunt in “one of those out-of-the-way hamlets with tongue-twisting names which on maps of the European south-east make the riverine regions along the Prut of Dniester seem like civilised territories”.  Bubi’s uncle and aunt are kindly people and allow Bubi to live in a tower usually reserved for hunting guests.  Bubi explores the deeply rural and run-down townlet and the first discordant note is introduced when he finds that,

On weekdays, the place was almost lifeless, if we disregards the straggling gangs of lice-ridden Jewish children who romped among the sparrows in the dusty roads

Bubi forms a strong relationship with his Uncle Hubert and learns with relish of the beer-drinking fraternity which he belonged to while at University.  He is entranced by the stories of student life, particularly the uniform the fraternity used to wear, a ludicrous outfit of white trousers, knee-length boots, a velvet jacket and a fur hat.  He persuades his Aunt Sophie to make him a replica of this outfit and delights in strutting around his tower rooms, observing this new self in the mirror.

The next day he walks out to the village in his new clothes, only to be set upon by a gang of Jewish children who dance around him, mocking him as more and more children join in the ribaldry.  Outside the Jewish doctor’s house he is met by a boy his own age who blocks his path.  Bubi thinks that “he looked like a yong ram staring closely into the blazing fire.  But even more unforgettable than the stamp of this face, the look of a downright smug self-assurance lodged in my mind”.  The boy touches Bubi’s fox tail cap and enquires if he is a Hasidic rabbi.  The boy turns out to be the doctor’s son, Max Goldmann, and rapidly dismisses the gang of children. As the two boys talk they discover things in common and despite Max’s supercilious and condescending manner they form a casual friendship.

The rest of the story describes an increasing and unrelenting challenge to Bubi’s anti-Semitism. Max turns out to be more clever and sophisticated than Max in every way.  Bubi’s Aunt Sophie discovers that Max is a brilliant pianist and becomes his sponsor.  Uncle Hubert has a dispute with Dr Goldmann and refuses to duel with him, resulting in Uncle Hubert being expelled from his fraternity for cowardice.

Despite the anti-Semite tones of the opening of this story, Rezzori depicts the ascendancy of intellectualism, Jewish or otherwise, and the decline of old reactionary Austro-Hungarian values.  The story is about the new, modern world rising over the old world, but also about the irrelevance of race as an indicator of talent.

The next story, Youth, finds a young man away from home, living in city lodgings and trying to build a career as an artist.  He is tormented by sex and has many causal and sordid encounters, at one point suspecting that he has caught the dreaded syphilis.  He falls in love with a young girl he sees in a wheel chair, without any real contact with her, and builds up a picture in his mind of a beautiful, tragic, pure woman, the feminine ideal which he can never possess.

The young man is forced by financial problems to take a job and finds employment as a window-dresser, imagining that his creative talents will be recognised by his company leading them to invite his to become a designer.  This of course never happens and despite his longing for “the girl in the wheel-chair” he forms a deep and long-lasting relationship with a Jewish shop-owner, some years his senior, who has the title “The Black Widow”.

The story is of course about the oft-found literary conflict between the slut and the madonna.  The girl in the wheelchair is complete fantasy.  Had the young man got to know her he would no doubt have found all sorts of human failings in her.  But in The Black Widow he actually finds a complete woman, clever, loving, faithful, who is actually a real-life and whole person and a far better proposition than the disabled girl who he has never met.  The young man of course ruins the relationship with the Jewish woman and never finds the girl in the wheel-chair (or what she represents in his mind).

The other thee stories show similar conflicts, ending with the final story Pravda (Truth), giving an insightful voyage around the memories of an elderly “old-European” as he reflects on the second of his three marriages, showing his inability see his Jewish wife as anything other than Jewish despite her secularism and disconnection from Jewish tradition.

This book is rich, not only in the quality of the story-telling but also in the writing.  Rezzori’s talent is on a par with other writers of the inter-war period such as Stefan Zweig.  I have been able to build up a collection of Rezzori’s books by using ebay and AbeBooks and I am pleased to see that this title Memoirs of an Anti-Semite has been republished by the New York Review of Books. I hope that other publishers pick up his other titles to bring Rezzori’s writings to a new audience.