I struggled through The Brothers Karamazov soon after and then felt I’d had enough of Russian authors for the time being and haven’t returned since.

Hesperus Press have provided me with the perfect way to reacquaint myself with Dostoevsky by publishing Uncle’s Dream, a shorter (150 page) novel which he wrote in 1859, seven years before he wrote Crime and Punishment.   All the qualities of the great author are there – insights into Russian lives with all the insights into hidden motives and the psychological manouverings which underpin so much human behaviour.  And also, in the case of this book at least, a great sense of humour, which at times lead Dostoevsky to set up almost farcical scenes as family members vie for an inheritance.

In Uncle’s Dream, an amibitious mother (Maria Alexandrovna Moskalyova – and I won’t write that again) seeks to marry off her twenty-three year old daughter Zina to the senile Prince K, a distant relative who is passing through the town in which the family live.  After all, a 23 year old daughter, however beautiful and talented is starting to become a bit of a liability particularly when she had a proud nature prone to setting herself above the common society.

The prince is decidedly doddery, a frail old man, prone to forgetfulness and unlikely to last for more than a couple of years.  The mother is going to have a difficult job persuading her daughter to commit to this travesty of a marriage even if the ultimate goal is a title and a fortune, but she makes a valiant attempt,

There’s no dishonour in marrying an old man and a cripple, its in marrying someone you can’t stand, and at the same time truly being his wife!  Whereas you won’t be a real wife to the Prince.  Its not even a marriage is it?  It’s simply a domestic contract!  I mean, there’ll be a benefit for him, the fool – the fool, he’ll be given such inestimable happiness!  Ah, what a beauty you are today Zinochka!  Not a beauty but a super-beauty!  If I were a man I’d give you half a kingdom if you wanted it.

Eventually the daughter agrees to go along with this ridiculous scheme and when eventually the mother is able to present to the Prince the goal of marriage to her daughter, the old man is flattered and beguiled by the thought of acquiring such a rare beauty for his very own.  But due to senility, he keeps forgetting what is on offer and is easily beguiled by other grasping relatives with schemes of their own.

As I read this, I was reminded of how vividly Dostoevsky writes.  The story unfolds as though in a theatre, with each scene arriving with a swoosh of the curtains and a new set as the character re-emerge from the wings.  The novella length suits the story very well for it enables Doestoeveky to present snapshots and cameos without the need for a lengthy character development.  The characters are in any case slightly familiar types – the ageing relative only respected because of his wealth, the grasping mother, rival aunts and cousins determined to undermine their relation’s schemes , the imperious daughter, the slighted younger suitor who watches from afar.   These are all people we have met before, but Dostoevsky assembles his cast so skilfully that his readers are drawn into the plot and gaze on as the disreputable thoughts of men and women are revealed.

Alongside this book, Hesperus have published a short biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky by Anthony Briggs in their Brief Lives series.

I’d forgotten how troubled Dostoevky’s life was as he struggled with poverty, imprisonment and addiction.  The book is not only a short biography but also a critical introduction to the Dostoevsky’s works.

In reading again about Crime and Punishment, I am reminded of what a great book it is.  As Briggs writes, “It is for these penetratingly original perceptions of human mentality and subconscious prompting that Dostoevsky has been credited with anticipating the broader and deeper work of prominent psychologists in the 20th century, who have acknowledged him as an important forebear”.  A book to re-read perhaps.

I am going through a busy period of my life at the moment with building works in progress on the house.  I’d forgotten how involving it is having builders on site. A friend of mine remarked on how embarrassed he feels when builders work so hard while he just sits at a computer all day.  I agree – I almost feel I have to look busy rather than sitting around reading the newspaper and drinking coffee.  I’ve started repainting the woodwork in several rooms now in order to reduce my sense of being a slacker.

Agnès Desarthe has written a complex story here which works on several levels.  We read of the disruption to Jerome’s well-ordered life as he confronts deep issues from his childhood.  The book reflects on the intense emotions of a teenager and their ability to bring chaos to themselves and those around them.  But also, this is a story of how random events can bring powerful change into a seemingly settled life, launching it in unexpected new directions.

Jerome has a complex biography.  He is a foundling – the police found him wandering in the woods in 1956 when he was a little boy.  He seemed to be a forest child, adapted to life among wild things.  Many years ago his adopted mother told him,

I remember the light so clearly, dappled sunlight everywhere, peeping through green leaves, line in a fairy tale. . . then when we were just comoing out of the woods, the sound of twigs grew louder, but I didn’t turn around.  And then the exact moment we stepped out of the woods, I felt a little hand in mine. In my left hand I was holding your father’s hand and in my right, the hand of my little woodland darling.

His adopted parents proved to be loving and kindly people, but nobody ever got to the bottom of why Jerome was in the woods and who had left him there.  The past however is about to catch up with him when he meets a retired policeman who is doing some freelance investigation of his own into the accident that killed Marina’s boyfriend Armand.

Jerome finds himself as much affected by Armand’s death as is Marina.  Agnes Desarthe writes of how grief comes upon the small household of father and daughter as they move through the rituals of being comforted by friends and family.  Marina’s mother Paula comes to stay for a few days, causing considerable anguish to Jerome – she left him a few years ago, leaving a level of emotional pain in his heart that he has failed to come to terms with.  Although Jerome has looked after his daughter since Paula left, as is so often the case, the absent parent becomes a comforting reference point for the stricken child and soon the female companionship leads to a betrayal of Jerome which he finds impossible to deal with.  The author captures Jerome’s frustration

He feels powerless and completely disorientated.  Sentences come to him about how difficult it is living with women, the fight it entails, the feeling you keep showing, the pathetic little games of seduction and then afterwards: the dolls’ house, making babies.  Making them, yes, fine, it’s all fireworks, pride and superpowers, but after that you feel knocked back, slowed down by all those endless, boring, repetitive tasks.  The way you talk to each other as if to a colleague, to a nurse, to a dog.

The book is not all emotional pain and the experience of loss however.  Jerome is an estate agent, and one of his customers provides some light relief throughout the book, leading him around the countryside and eventually settling into an old dilapidated piggery.  The slightly wild personality of this woman acts as a useful counter to Jerome’s introspection and it is interesting to see how the author brings these two together to provide a touch of humour in her novel.

This is a complex novel, but not difficult to read.  Although it a rather Gallic intensity surrounds the main theme of grief and loss, the investigations into Jerome’s background and the dealings with the estate agency do anchor the novel in the real world of tangible affairs.  This balancing is rather skilfully done, granting the book a level of interest which it would not have had had is focused only on the events surrounding the death of a young man.

The Foundling deserves to be successful – certainly I am grateful to the excellent Portobello Books for introducing English speaking readers to this fine French writer.  I am not qualified to offer technical comments on the translation (by Adriana Hunter), but I will say that the book reads elegantly and seamlessly with no clues that it might have originated in a language other than English.

I was drawn to read The Unit because I was intrigued to see what Swedish writer Ninni Holmqvist would make of the organ donation theme.  After all, Sweden has an unpleasant history of eugenics having sterilised more mentally ill and deviant people than even Nazi Germany, in a programme that was brought to an end in 1975.

I have to say, I thought The Unit was rather good.  It is unlike Never Let Me Go in many ways, not least that in the Ishiguro book it is children who donate their organs while in The Unit it is the older generation who contribute their bits and pieces for the good of others.

The Unit takes place at an unspecified time in the future.  The world looks similar to ours but society has moved on.  The population is shrinking and priority is given to those who can bear children.  Childless, single or gay people are classified as “dispensable” and at the age of 50 for women or 60 for men (men produce viable sperm for longer than women produce viable eggs) they give up their homes and every aspect of their lives and go to live in The Unit where they spend the rest of their days – a place which has all the features of a luxury spa hotel, while going through a series of medical experiments and organ donations which will eventually kill them (via their “final donation”).

It is the matter of fact way in which this happens which shows how far this society has travelled.  There is no protest on the part of the donors – they accept that this is how things are, and while they lament the loss of their previous lives, they seem content with their lot, forming a mutually supportive society to help them get through their final two to four years (nobody last longer than this).

The book opens with Dorrit, a single 50 year old woman waiting outside her house to be picked up by a dark window’d four wheel drive to be taken away to the Second Reserve Bank.  She has had a hard time of it lately.  Her lover won’t leave his wife for her, commissions for her free-lance writing have dried up, and she can’t afford to maintain her house.  There is nothing left for her other than to respond to the letter that arrived a few weeks ago telling her to tidy up her life as best she can and prepare for her final journey to The Unit.  She has nobody to say goodbye to other than neighbours and she has arranged for her much loved dog “Jock” to go and live with a family who promise to look after him.  A poignant moment indeed!

I couldn’t reach the outside from now on, not by mail, e-mail, text messages or telephone calls. From now on the telephone existed for me only in the form of a fixed internal line, and as for the Internet, I was allowed to surf only under supervision, which meant an orderly or another member of staff sitting beside me, and I was not allowed to join chat forums, contribute to blogs, create or respond to advertisements, or vote in opinion polls.

She finds The Unit to be a sort of glorified Holiday Inn.  There are gymnasiums and swimming pools, pleasant atrium café areas, walks in quiet gardens set under an artificial roof which mirrors the changing seasons by clever lighting.  There is a better social life than most of the dispensables experienced in the outside world and every facility is provided for their amusement – from art galleries and libraries to theatres and massage clinics.

Dorrit soon makes close friends but of course, these people have a habit of disappearing for a couple of days while they donate a kidney or a cornea, returning just a little diminished in some way, but somehow taking it all in their stride for after all this is a well understood destiny to which they have been conditions for many years.

Dorrit takes part in medical experiments herself, finding these exhausting, but at least filling her days and giving her a sense of purpose.   She returns to her room to write her novel, under the watchful eye of surveillance cameras located in every part of her apartment, even the bathroom.

The book raises many questions, perhaps the most significant one being what happens when a dispensable become non-dispensable by meeting and falling in love with another dispensable and forming a viable unit of their own.  The result is not good although Dorrit seems to find some sort of satisfaction in the outcome.

I though this book was rather good.  OK, so it seems similar in some ways to Never Let Me Go, but I don’t actually believe that Ninni Holmqvist meant it this way.  The Unit has all the hallmarks of wholly original thinking and I’d rather see it as an independent take on the dystopian society genre of books which describe a world of “repressive social control systems and various forms of active and passive coercion” (Wikipedia).

Its a compelling read that kept me turning the pages (well, pressing the next button on my Kindle) and I’d overall I’d score it

7/10 – well written, good story, many good ideas, entertaining in a rather gruesome sort of way

According to his Wikipedia entry, Dimitri Verhulst was came from a broken home “and spent his childhood in foster homes and institutes”.  The publicity for the book says that it is semi-autobiographical – a book where the author has taken his life as a starting point and then embellished the bare bones of his life to make it more entertaining and readable.  The reader never knows where reality ends and fiction begins but as the boy in The Misfortunates is called “Dimmy” there is obviously enough reality in the book that the author can say, “This was my life”.

The Misfortunates is a collection of vividly described episodes from the childhood and youth of a boy living in a family which is so dysfunctional that its difficult to see how a child could survive it.  This is a world of drinking, violence and poverty so severe that it is not surprising that Dimmy ends up being taken into care.  The book reminded me a little of Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha in that it doesn’t try to tell the whole life story of the boy but describes various episodes in his life.

Dimitri Verhulst was born in 1972 and apparently Belgium still had homes like this in the 1970s:

I spent my first years with my parents in Kanton Street on a tiny courtyard with a communal water pump and a communistic toilet – a hole in a plank, directly above the septic tank.  Water ran down the inside of the living room walls and we stuffed balls of newspaper into the worm-eaten window-frames to keep out the wind.  When we moved to Mere Street, it was only to be worse off.  Our new toilet was a hole in a plank as well, but this house had the advantage of a leaking roof. Our kitchen floor was covered with buckets that caught the drops from the ceiling . . . we refilled the little bowls of rat-poison daily.

When an aunt visits from Brussels, Dimmy goes on to describe how,

we were ashamed of the pounds of raw mince we ate because it was cheap and easy, and we were ashamed of the way we stuck our fingers into the mince to grab a handful to stuff into our mouths before washing it down with cold coffee that had been left standing in a mug from yesterday.  We were ashamed of the worms we got from the mince and didn’t do anything about.

With a background like that its not surprising that the episodes which Dimmy goes onto describe are going to be pretty distasteful.  The family’s life revolves around the pubs of the locality including The Liars’ Haven, which hosts a drinking competition based on the Tour de France, in which each stage consisted of drinking monumental amounts of beer.

On another occasion a bailiff comes to the house to claim recompense for the family’s debts only to find that the furniture is so broken and battered that its not worth taking.  Eventually taking the television with him, the family are left having to find somewhere to watch that night’s Roy Orbison concert.  They con their way into the home of a local immigrant couple, bringing a case of beer with them and show the couple “the true face of Belgium” by hurling cushions at the ceiling and dancing on the table.

One riotous episode follows another.  Social workers pass through, sessions in drying-out clinics are wasted away with extravagant, beer-soaked, home-coming celebrations.  Eventually Dimmy grows up and away from his dreadful family – a man apart, driven by an internal search for something better.

I haven’t been one of them for a long time and the proof is that they’ve started talking to me in something that’s supposed to pass for standard Dutch, the same wat they speak to my son. Even though I know how stuck-up they find it. I no longer speak my own dialect.

I tend to think of Belgium as a fairly cultured European nation and was surprised at the level of debauchery apparently found in Dimitri Verhulst’s Aresendegem.  However, the book is humorous throughout and despite the crudeness of the events described, the author frequently launches off into lyrical prose which adds a layer of unexpected beauty onto this terrible world.

The Misfortunates has been turned into a film, available with English subtitles.

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.

Book bloggers can’t afford to get bogged down in a mediocre book for they end up with nothing to write about.  And I don’t feel inspired to write anything at all about 1Q84 – plenty of other people have had a go at it (“once again Murakami has produced something that is truly magical. . .”) and I don’t want to spoil their party.

On the other hand, After Midnight, but Irmgard Keun really is worth reading and manages to say more in 160 pages than Murakami does in 900.

Set in 1930′s Frankfurt, After Midnight tells the story of Sanna, a young woman who finds herself embroiled in controversy among friends and relatives who have very mixed opinions about the new Chancellor, Adolf Hitler.  Sanna is not political, but at a time when politics is forcing its way into every aspect of life, even a love-lorn young woman finds herself having to be careful what she says.  Even close relatives can betray you if you seem half-hearted about the Nazi party.

Sanna’s best friend Gerti has the misfortune of being in love with a person of mixed-race (i.e. partly Jewish).  Sanna finds it hard to understand why the beautiful Gerti has fixed on Dieter Aaron when there are plenty of men around the authorities would let her love.  Sanna finds life so confusing,

Its hard enough to know your way around all the rules the authorities lay down for business – business as we all know can be very trickily organised – and now we have to know the rules for love too.  It isn’t easy, it really isn’t.  Before you know it, you may find yourself castrated or in prison, which isn’t pleasant.  Love is supposed to be all right and German women are supposed to have children, but before you do that, some kind of process involving feelings is called for.  And the law says no mistakes must be made in this process.  I suppose the safest thing is not to love anyone at all.  For as long as that’s allowed.

The fascinating thing about this book is the street-level accounts of conversations and relationship.  Irmgard Keun is adept at describing the lives of ordinary people as they go about their business.  I was reminded of Hans Fallada’s books, but there is more humour and a lighter touch about After Midnight, particularly in the descriptions of afternoon and evening sessions in bars and café in which Keun’s writing sparkles with life and humour.

I particularly  enjoyed the story of Hitler’s arrival in Frankfurt in grand procession.  Sanna and her friend have been dragged up to a balcony window to watch the proceedings.  A thrill of expectation surges through the crowds as they hear the motor cavalcade, and just as Hitler’s car passes,

A little sky-blue ball came rolling out of the ranks of the crowd and into the street, making for the car.  It was little Berta Silias, who’d been chosen to break through the crowd, because the Fuhrer often likes to be photographed with children.  But he can’t have felt like it that this time.  Berta was left standing there, a little solitary speck with a huge bouquet of flowers.

Later on in the day, Berta’s family and friends gather in the Henninger Bar and Berta is persuaded to recite the poem that her father had written for her to recite to Hitler.

A little German maid you see
A German mother I shall be
My Fuhrer, and I bring to thee
The fairest flowers of Germany

Sanna and her friends fail to catch the new spirit of Germany and before long they are being classed as dissidents.  This non-political girl find that politics affects everything and she has to make some terrible decisions.  The writer’s skill is in blending the more serious passages with a generally satirical commentary on the new mood in Germany.  In thinking of the German people under Nazi rule as a homogeneous mass, we can forget that by the time Hitler came to power, a considerable opposition movement had been eliminated by the most brutal means.  Those who were not wholly for him were assassinated or exiled, and Irmgard Keun records some poignant stories of those who had to make terrible choices in order to survive.

I am grateful to Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Caroline and Lizzy’s German Literature Month for introducing me to this book.  I was also fascinated to read about the life of Irmgard Keun on Wikipedia.  Her books were banned by the Nazis and she was forced into exile – evidently After Midnight is based on first-hand experience.  I highly recommend it as an insightful read about terrible times, but made accessible by a warm human touch which makes this an enjoyable reading experience.