Tim Lott, Under the Same Stars – TLS
“A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving”, Lao Tzu thought. By which measure the two middle-aged brothers in Tim Lott’s sixth novel begin as very bad travellers indeed. Carson, the Americanised older sibling – implacably upbeat, wedded to comfort, a creature of “mindless satisfaction” – has mapped out their American road trip in a way that leaves nothing to chance, while the neurotic Salinger, a Londoner loathing all things American, agrees to the journey only because he is fixed on getting to the root of his depression, and plans to needle Carson into admitting responsibility for it. His affront at being in the dark, at the “sensation of not knowing” what makes him downcast, worsens when he discovers among his mother’s possessions a fading Polaroid of a battered child.
The purpose of the brothers’ trip is to find their father. Out of their lives for some thirty years, Henry named his sons after the American poets of sadness and absence, then, in an act of unalloyed selfishness, deserted them for the country he felt could best aggrandise his loneliness. Having repeated the rejection by following in his fathers’ footsteps, Carson now hopes the brothers can become reacquainted, bridging the Atlantic-sized gap in their relationship. But beyond the usual sibling rivalry and sniping, the memory contest over how things really were (“You must remember”), Salinger’s rage is so strong that it requires a more commensurate target. So Lott performs a sleight of hand: Carson’s character – religious, reactionary, repressed – is melded with America’s.
The country’s failures, noted by Salinger at every turn in the road (the superdome where Katrina victims were left to rot, the Louisiana State Penitentiary putting prisoners on display in rodeo spectacles, the grassy knoll in Dallas where a man sells his memories as part of “disaster tourism”), all these signs of cruelty and abandonment reverberate with Salinger’s sense of familial betrayal. It’s a strategy that lends the novel a continuous edge of ambiguity, one that exists alongside the polarising differences between Salinger and Carson, England and America, and prevents them from descending into cliché.
New Orleans Superdome after Hurricane Katrina, 3.8.2005
Lott has made no secret of the fact that his contemporary Cain and Abel story (riffing off Steinbeck) is a personal one. A road trip with his brother produced 150,000 words of a memoir – a form he used for his first book about his mother’s suicide. Inevitably, critics have wondered about the work that might have been. But Lott’s choice has allowed him to replace the memoir’s constraining sincerity with the irony of the novel.
Under the Same Stars invokes the fight with religion and certainty that Milan Kundera and others argue is the form’s essential trait. Salinger’s scepticism, his disgust at Carson’s religio-Darwinian ideas (Katrina was “nature’s test of commitment”, “the weak moved on”), his refusal of its mangled justice (“revenge is a kind of grace”) and absolving belief (after killing a dog he hits on the road Carson explains this was God’s will) reveals the great gulf between the brothers. But it also opens up the novel’s conversation, creating a robust dialogism in which their at-odds sense of the world is tested one against the other.
There is debate, too, about how art works and what it can do. Salinger is an artist, not a grand one – he is most successful at greeting cards – but aware of his shortcomings and thinking about the search for “arête” or quality, and the artist’s fear of being cowardly or unoriginal. En route he sketches his brother, and Carson finding himself well-captured, repeats the old accusation that Salinger is “stealing [his] soul”, that his work rests on exploitation. Lott rejects this, pointing out that we all “edit ourselves” and suggesting that what art or writing does in response is to scrutinize what’s visible (“the slight blueness of Carson’s stubble, the tiny nick on his cheek”), and to wonder what candour might look like (“He tried to imagine the expression that Carson would wear if he was unguarded”). “Think of it as me giving you back your soul” Salinger tells Carson, meaning that art’s presumption is not theft but restoration, and that what this novel is doing is returning his brother in full, putting back what “self-censoring” has omitted.
Courageously, Lott gives full reign to the idea of writing as retribution or consolation: the revelation of who the bashed kid in the photograph is plays dangerously close to both notions, but these, too, are cast aside as falsely simplifying. Salinger’s father, his brother and their adopted country are all shown to be more complex, though perhaps no less tyrannous, and he finally understands there will be no expiation or solving answer: he must travel through the flux as best he can. “Damage was nothing to be ashamed of. Everybody had it. Artists were there to share it.”
This review appeared in the TLS as ‘Country Man’ on 27.04.2012.
Mr Lanchester sidles in out of the Clapham sunshine, unostentatious in old grey t-shirt and trainers. He’s friendly, chatting about having a sense of London only through the tube map (North East and South East, we agree, are unknown territory), though there’s a note of reserve, too – a certain recoiling, as if the world was turned up a bit too loudly.
It’s a manner at odds with the brasher characters in his new novel, Capital, in whose lives conspicuous consumption is so powerful and defining an idea that even the houses they inhabit have become “imperious, with needs of their own”, demanding to be fed by a parade of delivery vans, pampered with make-overs and extensions, constantly worked on and attended to.
Despite chastising himself for laziness (in his memoir, Family Romance), Lanchester has an impressively productive career. “I always felt I needed to have a day job if I wanted to write books”, he says, and off the back of an editing post at the London Review of Books he’s managed four quite distinctive, critically-lauded novels, Whoops!, a myth-busting account of why things went so disastrously wrong in the economic collapse of 2008, and the memoir, which delicately unpicks a whopping family secret.
In yet another career as a journalist he’s written about gaming and technology, and he’s interested in how the net is making us more porous and multifaceted. The variety of his writing seems in tune with this, and though he thinks it’s not something you can plan for, some of it has cross-fertilised: his debut, The Debt to Pleasure, about a murdering gourmand, was cooked up out of his work as a restaurant critic, while Whoops! came out of the financial research he conducted for his latest novel.
Capital, one of a recent clutch of books about the demographic changes to London that have so transfigured and enlivened the city over the past decade, has a cast of Zimbabweans, Senegalese, Pakistanis, Hungarians and Poles, as well as the odd native Londoner. Less usually, Lanchester’s novel registers how growing inequality warps relations, segregating rich and poor and making people blind to the lives of others.
London Citizens, 2012
Much of this unseeing, of course, is one-sided. If, like Lanchester’s characters, you’re a nanny, a shop assistant, a builder or a parking attendant you have a pretty good idea of how the other half lives: it’s the rich who are oblivious. This is something Lanchester first registered as a student in the early Eighties: “The thing about Oxford that radicalised me was I was quite shocked by the extent that I saw proper, oblivious privilege at close hand. These were people my age who wanted to smash the state, smash the miners, smash the unions, sell off the NHS.”
It was a much more politicised era, he thinks, with the miners’ strike, the riots and “punk, which was against the idea that your self-definition should come through labels, and was deliberately distressed and ugly and messy”. He still feels a measure of punk’s abrasive disgust at “the degree to which we’re now invited to invest our feeling in owning bits of stuff by Louis Vuitton.”
But Thatcher’s counter-revolution meant that everyone started to understand themselves in this way: now consumerism, Lanchester says, is “a central preoccupation of the culture”. In Capital although it’s the banker’s family who have the greatest difficulty coping with change – unable to grasp that their well-padded lives are threatened, that thirty quid cab rides and round-the-clock nannying are a thing of the past – it’s striking that everyone in the novel is oblivious to the impending economic crash.
In his memoir Lanchester notes that what people don’t know is often what they choose not to know. Perhaps we’ve lived through an era of collective unknowing, succumbing, he says, to “a whole variety of different techniques that try to normalise these things, as if that’s just the way the economy works. But this is not the reality principle, it’s a distorted capture of the system, and it seems to me we’re being sold a pup. There are other versions of capitalism, including the one we had ourselves, until ten minutes ago, that function fine.”
When I ask him about the problem inherent in our current version, of making a system as fantastically complex as today’s globalised markets democratically accountable, he scoffs: “The analogy would be that cars have got so powerful and so fast that we need to get rid of the rules of the road.” The problem is one of economic illiteracy: “de-skilling among the public is so fundamental that people no longer feel entitled to have views about the banks.”
What’s his hunch about the direction Britain will take? “Our economy will be flat probably for two decades with not much growth and a decreasing importance on the global stage. But that doesn’t mean we have decreasing importance in our own lives.” The model for us might be Japan: “What you see there is a great variety of different forms of self-expression and people deciding what they’re interested in, making up their own versions of themselves. It’s a much more diverse, creative place.”
This idea of everyone making it up as they go along, finding their own connections and constructing their own meaning is something that’s echoed in Capital. The experiences of people on Lanchester’s London street are widely different (from banquets and performance art to detention and torture) but they are all given equal billing and presented on the same plane: “It’s up to the reader to decide what’s shocking and what’s not, who they like and who they don’t, and what the tensions in it are.” There’s a democratic impulse here and an understanding that the grand narratives which made sense of life for us have irrevocably broken down. Now, he says, “we just have a tremendous cacophony”.
A version of this article appeared as ‘Life in a lower-case capital’ in the Camden New Journal, Islington Tribune and West End Extra on 5.4.2012.
Will Eaves, This is Paradise – TLS
After two novels much lauded for their acuity and quiet wit (Oversight, a gay coming of age debut, and Nothing to be Afraid Of, about actors working on the theatrical fringe), Will Eaves brings to the surface a subject lurking in these earlier books: the exploration of Englishness and “the Eden of normality” built after the war out of the sacrifice, stoicism and solidarity of preceding generations.
The particular England in question is middle – dead centre one might say, because as with his previous works, This is Paradise takes the long view, ingraining now with earlier thens, lending even his most up to date England a quality of overhang or afterlife. The sense of belatedness is reflected in the narrative structure – a story of two halves concerning the suggestively-named Allden family, a minor-middle class bunch who start out in Bath in the Seventies and then regroup in the present day a few miles down the road in a nursing home where Emily, the family’s now amnesiac mother, has been taken to be looked after by the professionals, and to die.
In the interim, time has worked its reverse magic and the four children in adulthood seem less vivid and more aimless than their younger selves, though three lead averagely successful lives (Benjamin, the youngest son, imagines his mother rising from her deathbed and exclaiming: “I’ve got one of each, haven’t I? One married, a single parent, a homosexual and a black sheep”). The location of the nursing home in which they come together again, in a wasted mining village, an infernally “bleak outpost”, reinforces the idea of drift, as if Eaves is registering the once steadfastly middle class now sliding to the periphery. It’s a falling off, however, accompanied by persistence, a mundanely heroic muddling through by which the family cope with their mother’s deterioration, and continue, as they have always done, to tread gingerly around Clive – the difficult, brilliant son whose adult life has turned out to be one of “catastrophic independence”.
Clive’s predicament is at the heart of the story – the trap in which he exists and the way, in turn, it entraps the entire family: this is the novel’s quarry and plot. Born with a heart defect and crippled in leg “clamps” as a child, Clive is his mother’s most beloved, and the family’s most adversarial member – the Allden’s very own rebel angel. His difference and ferocity cow his siblings, provoke petty one-upmanship in his father, Don, and leave unchecked the taunting “endearments” he aims at Emily (“beastie”, “witch”, “hideous crone”). The family “conceal themselves from him”, fearful of his brutal honesty, repulsed by his pedantry, pride and self-neglect (all “coming at you in waves”, too overwhelming and disproportionate for dailiness or rubbing along); and so, lied to, Clive’s “need to establish the truth”, his radar for hypocrisy, becomes ever keener.
Outside the family he also arouses mistrust – “The gap between his abilities and his deficiencies made people suspicious…How could he read Milton and stumble over four times four?” – further undermining him. Wondering at his abnormality, he seeks models of power (Wagner, von Clausewitz). But Benjamin, who is obscurely aligned with Clive through the subtle ostracism of his own homosexuality, guesses that his brother believes himself emotionally crippled not because of the way he is spurned, but as the result of some inherent flaw, “Some evil, welling up inside” – which is how conformism works its discipline.
Around this hellishness ordinary family life proceeds. As in his earlier novels Eaves writes with great insight about human interaction: the countless ways in which we read and try to come to terms with one another’s meanings and performances (the “charades” Clive is so quick to identify); the abiding sense that the more familiar we are, the more life becomes a comedy of cross-purposes. There is too the rough justice of families: Don’s paternal solipsism, which makes him incapable of entertaining other people’s difference (a very God-like quality), is admired for its truthfulness, while Emily’s perceptiveness is resented, her attempts to engage with her children often seen as intrusive and manipulative. He is excellent too on those things common to all family life – the effort to forge collective well-being and the exasperation caused by dissent or non-cooperation: on holiday in France, infuriated by Clive’s violent outburst over a category dispute (whether their holiday home is infested with hornets, bees or wasps) Don shouts at his squabbling offspring, “We didn’t have…this when we were growing up…You’ve no conception. This is paradise.”
William Blake, 'Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels', Paradise Lost Illustrated, 1808
In the novel’s second half, there is a shift in tone: the Alldens in facing Emily’s disintegration are exposed to their own mortality; Clive returns to his miserable Hastings flat and then walks out into the night sea. But the outcome is not what we expect. The novel retracts and an ending is contrived, one circumventing the question George Orwell put to writers, and which Eaves discussed in a recent TLS Freelance column: “What am I trying to say?” In the final pages there are several nudges about not trying to pin meaning down: an elaborate doodle by Clive, an “extraordinary envisioning” adorned with lines from (an unattributed) Paradise Lost, displays great intricacy but bears “no single sense”; Benjamin tries, unsuccessfully, “to make a pattern of unrelated things…And the lesson was that you shouldn’t go looking for significance”; while in the novel’s final paragraph Don, thinks “He would be sorry…Or not sorry. What did it matter?”
The question lingers of quite what Eaves intends by his Miltonic frame. He reads Satan as a psychological not political figure, and Clive’s perversity, given no outlet or ambition beyond his family, finally succumbs to domestication, the bonfire in his mind “relaid in a swept-clean hearth”. When Don holds Clive’s newly framed drawing up to the window, the world and the picture meld together and “the Devil” seems to disappear into the light. A coda reprises a moment from the opening pages concerning Miss Voy, a clairvoyant. It all makes an oddly consoling finale – about the power of art to recast, elucidate and dispel fear – for a work so indebted to Milton’s satanic adversary.
This review appeared as ‘One of Each’ in the TLS on 17.02.2011.
I was wondering what Jessica Riches – public school educated, Lib Dem voting – was doing in the middle of Paul Mason’s new book on the global revolutions of 2011. In the company of turbulent figures like Musa Zekry, a Cairo rubbish recycler who joins the protestors at Tahrir Square “to make a revolution and get freedom”, and Len-len, an unemployed mother trapped in a rural Philippino shack, but dreaming of escaping to the city to become a “lady security guard”, Riches, with her taste in chick-lit and talk of dinner parties, seems a little unpromising, historically speaking.
Then it struck me that she shares some of the qualities of an oddly un-imprinted character in Angela Carter’s first novel, Shadow Dance (1966). Having somehow escaped the clutches of history, Emily is invulnerable to myth, in control of her biology, adaptable and pragmatic. Riches may not be quite so original, but as a child of the technological revolution who “tweets in her dreams”, and who deploys her digital self (@littlemisswilde) in the services of the Occupy movement, she is, like Emily, a harbinger – one of the figures in Why it’s Kicking Off that Mason is trying to identify, not unambitiously, as “a new type of human being”.
In the January round-ups few critics will fail to register 2011’s historic nature, but Mason, I’d wager, will be the only mainstream figure who’ll go so far as to propose – as Virginia Woolf once did of human character in 1910 – that in this year human consciousness altered. He calls himself a “technological determinist” and argues that just as body shape changed during the industrial revolution, so the way we relate now, as “networked individuals” with socialised cognition, will change the map of our minds. The key point about the internet is that it is an ever-expanding learning loop, feeding back information about how things might be otherwise and already are elsewhere; its strongest meme is that being linked, we are powerful, because “a network can usually defeat a hierarchy”.
It was this knowledge, Mason argues – the fruit of “info-capitalism” – that created a tipping point in 2011 bringing people onto the streets in greater numbers than ever before. Those in the Middle East, unable any longer to put up with what Auden called “the elderly rubbish dictators talk”, came to topple tyrants; while westerners disappointed of their expectations (“the graduate with no future”, the worker losing her pension), challenged the ‘market is king’ orthodoxy that was destroying livelihoods and corroding democracies.
His account of this collapse in deference is engaging and informative – particularly fine is the opening chapter on how globalisation destroyed the micro-economy that, with great ingenuity, Zekry and other workers created out of Cairo’s rubbish, depriving them of a living and leaving them no option but to join the uprising. It is a story that distils a larger argument, though one not immediately apparent to the reader because the full audacity of Why it’s Kicking Off takes a while to reveal itself. Mason’s title promises answers to why 2011 was such a momentous year, but the narrative he comes up with does much more, suggesting that events now unfolding demand a revised reading of history, one from which we might – just possibly – find a new way into the future.
Yet what he’s writing, he insists, is journalism, albeit today’s opened-out journalism, still rooted in street-level reporting and the detail of individual lives, but invigorated and made increasingly speculative by the pressure of information (he draws on voices from social media, internet psychology, modernist art, radical manifestos, political and economic theory, labour history, sociology and urban planning, as well as re-working his own tweets, blogs, Newsnight reports and earlier books). Like the ‘netizens’ he describes, Mason is intellectually promiscuous, chopping between different ways of considering the world, but in a voice so conversational it goes some way to masking the designs he has on us.
As well as reportage from Egypt, Britain, Greece, America and the Philippines, there’s a briefing, updated from his 2009 book, Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed, on the decisions that brought capitalism to the brink, characterisation of the new activists (non-ideological, “without loyalty”, highly individualised), debate about why the year’s revolutionary uprisings were unforeseen (dogmatism on the right, defeatism on the left), analysis of how today’s ‘horizontalist’ movement is succeeding where earlier democratic movements faltered (a congruence of popular mood and technological means, making radicalism fashionable and potent again), and a range of historical and cultural parallels to mull over, many where economic decline and technological innovation also spurred revolt (Europe in 1848, the Paris Commune, modernism and the belle époque, syndicalism and the Great Unrest, the counter-culture of 1968).
In order to understand these connections between past and present, though, Mason thinks it necessary to reconsider the narrative of workers’ history and, with this, the left’s idea of what it should be doing now. The attempt of ordinary people to wrest control of their lives and communities, he believes, is not the dominant story of trade unionism and class struggle, but (as syndicalists once claimed) something more pioneering of modernity, more autonomous, imaginative, and less straitlaced.
It’s an argument he was already making in 2007 in Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global, before Lehman Brothers collapsed and before the current wave of uprisings, and which now, in their wake, seems vindicated. What we see in today’s protests and occupations – resourcefulness, improvisation, knowledge- and pleasure-seeking, the euphoria of annexing spaces or simply of taking part – can be seen throughout history in waves of creative revolt and experiments in living. This is what Mason is thinking of when he tweets: “I will never tire of the minutae of minute by minute conquest and reconquest of #Tahrir by the people, a year after it started…”
Unlike “the actual history of organised labour”, these intermittent raids on freedom were invested with what Karl Marx, in his early, humanist phase argued for: not proletarian power, but the desire for “the liberation of individual human beings” in which people would “express their freedom through communal interaction”, so becoming a “species-being”. Because capitalism atomised and alienated workers Marx thought this could only be achieved after its rout. But Mason suggests that new technology poses the possibility we can achieve species-being – connected and expressive as we now are – inside capitalism.
Such an idea raises questions about the ground the left is fighting on: if we no longer need to wait for the revolution to end time and start it up again, we can begin to change things here and now – precisely what Mason thinks his “new type of human being” is already doing. What they have grasped is that capitalism’s most advanced form may not be run-for-profit corporations like Microsoft or Toyota, but a “semi-communal form of capitalism exemplified by open-source software and based on collaboration, management-free enterprise, profit-free projects, open-access information.”
It’s a wildly iconoclastic thought that turns capitalism into a machine of emancipation rather than enslavement, driven by curiosity and cooperation rather than greed. The prospect it holds out of accelerated learning and problem-solving makes our current ‘free-market’ system look archaic and superstitiously restrictive. More than this, for the left it allows reconciliation with a re-modelled capitalism without the spectre of apostasy, without losing faith with the history and tradition of workers’ liberation.
For these reasons the book ends not in one of 2011’s hotspots, with the dancers and drum-beaters facing down power, but in a Manila slum where the future is beginning to take shape. With great inventiveness, in cramped and shit-smelling conditions, inhabitants here have created something “orderly, solidaristic” and entrepreneurial. Making his way in a warren of tunnels Mason finds a store, an internet cafe (“the unmistakable whizz and pop of something digital”), and a DIY police force, all run by graduates in business admin, engineering and political science. He sees satellite dishes and solar panels, and thousands of people living hugger-mugger without too much in the way of crime or prostitution or drugs.
Paul Mason, Estero de San Miguel in Manila, August, 2011
He talks to urban planners who explain how much we have to learn from slum-dwellers – how those who are managing such low-impact, highly-educated, technologically connected lives, look like a good model for our future on an overcrowded planet with limited resources. It is by no means a starry-eyed response, however: as in the opening chapter, Mason’s narrative emphasises the complexity of slum politics while keeping his eye trained on individuals like Len-len, who – barely able to feed her children, unable to pay for the course that might change her life – has no control over the global system she is part of.
A book as propositional as Why it’s Kicking Off (“The lesson is this”, “Exhibit one”, “I propose a different reading”) means to provoke argument. My reservations concerned the paradoxical way in which his new human beings, for all their “elevated individualism”, are presented as so improbably alike, largely undifferentiated by religion or sex, all jeans-wearing, looking “just like you” – as if homogeneity were a necessary pre-condition for their modernity. There is too, and perhaps for the same reasons, a disregard of the extent to which multinational corporations and power elites have already infiltrated the net (a Saudi prince owns 5% of Twitter) and to which governments are increasingly using it as a tool of repression. One of Angela Carter’s last prophecies, made not long before she died in 1992, was that surveillance would become a major political issue in the 21st century.
In early reviews some critics have raised questions about Mason’s infatuation with the power of new technology and his belief in its potential for liberation. These doubts perhaps stem from the perspective of the west. For those already living in relative prosperity and freedom the changes may not be so great. But this book begins and ends in the slums of the third world – where one billion of the world’s population live, and where soon many more will follow. For these people the revolution in technology and the possibility of sharing out globalisation’s dividends more equitably, of putting info-capitalism’s knowledge-power into their hands, will be utterly transformative. It’s not hard to hear those locked out from modernity, still only permitted “accidental glimpses of human freedom”, clamouring at the door: this week newspapers carry the story of rioting outside an Apple shop in China, where frustrated customers were unable to get their hands on the latest iphone; while on the radio, a Nigerian man declares, “We have the will and resources to look after ourselves, just bring us the technology”
This article first appeared on the Red Pepper website on 22.1.2012 as ‘History in the Making’.
Christa Wolf: An Exemplary Life – Guardian
Christa Wolf, who died yesterday, was a German writer of rare purity and sensitivity who grew up under nazism and became an adult under communism. Her work records the impact of these ideologies on individual lives. She was as one critic put it, “a writer of scrupulous ‘touchstone’ honesty”, and it is the pursuit and uncovering of truth, under the most beleaguered circumstances, that defines her.
When in 1992, it was revealed she had been used by the Stasi from 1959-1962 as an inoffizielle Mitarbeiterin (informal collaborator) the ensuing attacks on her integrity nearly brought her writing to a halt: “I have the feeling”, she said at this time, “that a bush is growing in my throat”. That she provided no information of value to the Stasi, was soon dropped for “reticence”, and was herself the subject of surveillance for thirty years, did not mitigate the ferocity of the attacks from “the stone-throwing West Germans”, as her translator, Michael Hoffman, called them.
It was argued that the writer who had done most to articulate “the difficulty of saying I” was herself little more than a state poet, a mouthpiece for the regime. Her refusal to simply exonerate herself was read as a sign of guilt, rather than for what it was: a continuation of her life’s work of intense self-interrogation and reflection, in which one must “execute the verdict oneself” – as she wrote in her most important work, Nachdenken über Christa T. (The Quest for Christa T., 1968) – rather than succumb to the demagogue’s version of events.
Born in 1929 in Landsberg an der Warthe in Brandenburg to a grocer and his wife, who were protestant, middle class, pro-Nazi, Christa was a member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the female counterpart of the Hitler Youth. She was ten years old when she watched the SS march through her town as they advanced on Poland, and sixteen, in 1945, when her family ran from the invading Russian army.
This moment of ‘liberation’ recurs in her fiction, in Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood, 1976), in which she tries to reconnect East Germans to a past from which they believe themselves acquitted; and in ‘Blickwechsel‘, a story from 1970, (translated as ‘Exchanging Glances’ in 1992), where a family snatch their belongings and flee westward toward the Oder-Neisse border. As flames rage in the night sky, the youngest daughter laughs uncontrollably at the spectacle of her resolutely bourgeois family, sellers of sour pickle and malt coffee, literally going to hell in a handcart.
Wolf’s family didn’t make it to the border, and when the dust settled and the maps were redrawn, Landsberg, the town of her birth, became Gorzów Wielkopolski in Poland; Mecklenburg, where her family landed, was now part of a newly-minted nation, the German Democratic Republic. She was finishing high school before she began to understand the full extent of “what happened back then”. Against this, the new republic offered another faith. Marxism, she believed, was the polar opposite of what happened in fascist Germany: “At all costs I didn’t want anything that could be like the past…That was the source of [my generation’s] commitment and…why we clung to it so long” – something critics in the West have often failed to grasp.
In 1949, as the GDR came into being, Wolf joined the state communist party (SED). She studied literature at Jena and Leipzig universities, was involved in the Bitterfeld movement of worker-writers, and spent three years as a research assistant in the East German Writers’ Union. Here she met “comrades who had come out of the concentration camps, out of prison, back from exile, impressive people”. Her generation’s guilty conscience about what happened to these men and women was another reason for commitment to their cause.
Her first book, Moskauer Novelle (Moscow Novella, 1961), was well received in the east but never translated in the west. A novel influenced by her Bitterfeld work, Der geteilte Himmel (The Divided Heaven), followed two years later. It won the Heinrich Mann Prize, bringing her international recognition. But in 1965 she spoke at the Eleventh Plenum of the SED Central Committee and began a long process of disenchantment with actually existing socialism, which, she felt, “wasn’t moving in the right direction.” A pattern emerged: disillusion, followed by withdrawal and contemplation, from which she would surface with a vindicating work: “Each time…I’d moved a bit further along the road to myself.”
Out of the “deep depression” she suffered after the Eleventh Plenum she wrote Nachdenken über Christa T. To read it now is to encounter an indisputable feminist classic: in its assault on patriarchal authority and in its fragmented sensibility, the novel pursues the difficult “attempt to be oneself”, for which she was accused in the GDR of being “individualistic”. The book was banned, then published only in a limited edition. Rather than the image of perfectibility that socialist writers were encouraged to present, Wolf set out in Christa T. to imagine the life of an outsider, but she does this from inside socialism, reinventing the heroic mould, or questioning at least whether a life like this – marginal, hesitant, obscure – might not also be of value, full of “latent possibility”; might be, in fact, what socialists looked for in art: the exemplary.
She continued to produce innovative work, countering crude Zhdanovite prescriptions with her notion of subjective authenticity – an author should not hide behind her characters but include intertextual commentary. While her position as a “loyal dissident” was not easy, it was undeniably a source of strength. It is as a writer from inside the socialist project – however distorted the GDR version of this was – that she seems so interesting, casting new light on questions of philosophy, genre, form, delivering insights on the writer’s ‘inner censor’, and in the process making much western writing seem too easily conformist.
Her success meant that she was allowed to travel and teach abroad, and in the Seventies she made friendships with other women writers, consolidating her interest in feminism. A study trip to Greece brought an oddly late epiphany about the extent of her sex’s marginalisation: “I…had a real shock when I realised that in the past two thousand years women really have not been able to exert any public influence.” The work that resulted from her forays into Greek myth in novels such as Kassandra (1983) and Medea (1996), was instantly recognisable to friends in the west like Margaret Atwood, who wrote Medea’s Introduction, observing that “the heroes are really like devils, and the victims are the most important”.
Following a further experience of defeat over the enforced exile of the singer-poet Wolf Biermann from the GDR in 1976, she continued her work of re-evaluating literary tradition from a specifically German context. In this she found inspiration in debates between Georg Lukács and Anna Seghers about the meaning of Romanticism. In Kein Ort. Nirgends (No Place on Earth, 1979), she imagines a meeting between two writers, Heinrich von Kleist and the poet Karoline von Günderrode, both of whom killed themselves in the early 1800s, as a way of examining the German tendency to alienation, malady and self-destruction. Again, the exploration takes on greater force for being cast from inside a society whose ideology dismissed despair as a luxury.
A later work Leibhaftig (In the Flesh, 2002), draws on her experience of illness as the dream of socialism unravelled. In 1988 as Wolf finished writing Sommerstück (Summer Play), her appendix had burst, leaving her with peritonitis. The following year she resigned from the Party. Five months later she gave a speech at the Berlin Wall, then collapsed with a heart attack shortly before it came down. A few weeks later she wrote the final wording for the Für unser Land (For Our Country) petition, which argued against reunification and was signed by 1.1 million people, (“we were thinking about preserving an entirely different country”), but history’s doors were banging shut and the moment of possibility quickly passed.
Christa Wolf, Berlin, c.1975
In recent years, as Germany has come to feel more at ease with reunification, less bedevilled by the ghosts of history, Wolf has been recognised, alongside Günter Grass, as the nation’s most important postwar writer. She received the 2002 German Book award at the Leipzig Book Fair, and won the 2010 Thomas Mann Prize for her last novel, Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud) based on a period of research she undertook in Los Angeles at the time of the 1992 Stasi revelations. This was a work ten years in the making and critics hailed it as her final reckoning, a courageous act of remembrance and leave-taking, a proof, Die Welt argued, “of the ordering mind’s triumph over the chaos of emotion”.
Wolf ended her life in her beloved Berlin, doubly exiled in her own country and shorn of her faith, left only with Was bleibt (What Remains) – the title of her account of being under surveillance by the Stasi; written in 1979, it aroused considerable controversy when published in 1990. Like her friend, the American writer Grace Paley, she came to believe that change would never again be born from an ideology, but progress might occur through shifts and pushes made at ground level from grassroots associations. And for such projects she remained engaged, believing in the importance of activism and hope.
Her 1987 book Störfall: Nachrichten eines Tages (Accident: A Day’s News) about the Chernobyl disaster reflects some of this, with its concerns about technological advance and ecological decline, in the face of which she poses “the significance of daily structure”, the reiteration of human scale. Still, the loss of the comradeship and self-realization socialism had promised was hard to recover from; as was the possibility she refused with customary honesty to dispel entirely: that one may have done wrong in its name. And with all this was her abiding sense of “the abyss that yawns before us”, the fear of a future with no countering vision, a world with nothing but the military-industrial complex to guide our dreams.
“A post is vacant”, Wolf wrote, when her friend and sparring partner the Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch died in 1991. It’s taken from the Heine poem, ‘Enfant Perdu’, whose first line runs, “Verlorner Posten in dem Freiheitskriege ” (Vacated positions in the war of freedom). Asked later about her choice of encomium she replied, “No one talks like that any more. I think these ‘posts’ no longer exist. The times and people’s objectives have changed.” The times have indeed changed, and the terms of our struggle for freedom with them, but the need for voices like Wolf’s that remain fully human and compassionate even under the strongest pressure and provocation, is greater than ever.
Versions of this article appeared on the Guardian website as Christa Wolf Obituary on 1.12.2011 and in the newspaper on 6.12.2011.
November is going to be a critical month in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Today three officers of the Gulf Air union will appear in court on unspecified charges concerning “national security”. In a fortnight a group of sports journalists and athletes that includes the country’s top-scoring footballer, A’ala Hubail, are to be tried for “illegal assembly and inciting hatred against the regime”, and on November 28, the doctors arrested at the Salmaniya Medical Complex, already tried in a military court, will, after international outcry, have their appeal heard in a civilian court.
In the middle of this period, on November 23, the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) – set up by King Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa and chaired by the international jurist, M. Cherif Bassiouni – will produce its report into whether or not there were human rights violations during the spring uprisings.
A lot rides on this report. The fate of hundreds of protestors already imprisoned or still going through the courts may depend upon it. And for the Bahraini state – where financial services have overtaken oil as the nation’s prime business – at stake is its credibility on the world stage and ability to do business in the international market. In America, after objections from a handful of senators, Hilary Clinton has decided to delay a $53 million arms sale to Bahrain until the BICI’s findings are announced; while complaints raised by international trade unions and the European Parliament about the mistreatment of workers have put the US-Bahrain Free Trade Agreement in jeopardy.
Since the uprising began on February 14, the Al-Khalifa Sunni ruling elite – governing a nation that is 70% Shia, and where the King’s uncle, with a forty year incumbency, is the world’s longest-serving Prime Minister – have proved themselves expert at combining antique methods of control with modern ones: not only the use of foreign troops, martial law, military courts and torture, but ‘soft’ power attacks on civil society. To date, nearly 3000 workers have been dismissed, television and social media are being used to name and shame ‘traitors’, and American and British PR and intelligence gathering firms such as Potomac Square Group and Olton Ltd have been employed to ensure that the government’s story is the one the world is listening to.
The stories they are trying to suppress are those being told by Faisal Hayyat, one of the sports journalists being tried, or Habib Alnabbool, the Chairman of the Gulf Air union, also on trial. “I was tortured by the Bahraini army and by security men connected to the Ministry of the Interior”, said Hayyat. “They tied my hands from behind, blindfolded and beat me with pipe, cable and their military boots.” Alnabbool also claims that after his arrest he was handed over to the Ministry of Interior, where, he says, “I was interrogated, humiliated, blindfolded and forced to sign documents I wasn’t allowed to read”.
Hayyat is one of more than sixty journalists who have been arrested. “There is no real journalism, no room for expressing opinions”, he says. When Al-Wasat, Bahrain’s main opposition paper, was closed down for a day its editor-in-chief, Mansoor Al-Jamri, was forced to resign; he was reinstated four months later but in October he and three colleagues were fined 1000 Bahraini Dinars ($US2650) for “publishing news that defamed the image of Bahrain abroad”. Alnabbool also feels that rights guaranteed him under the constitution to speak publicly about his area of work have come under attack. He was warned by Gulf Air’s CEO, Samer Majali, not to talk to Al Jazeera or to other press. Alnabbool is part of the largest group of victimised workers in Bahrain where twelve companies (Gulf Air, Alba, Batelco, and nine others) have been responsible for 919 dismissals.
Gulf Air over Bahrain
All these companies are related to Bahrain’s sovereign wealth fund, the Mumtalakat Holding Company, which has substantial shares in each of them. This is important because it appears to link the victims of torture to the royal family. “Mumtalakat companies sacked workers”, Alnabbool said, “and then passed their names to the military prosecution”. Mumtalakat is presided over by the Crown Prince, Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa. He appoints the board whose members include one of four Deputy Prime Ministers, Khalid bin Abdulla Al-Khalifa, the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Cabinet Affairs, the Minister of Works, and Gulf Air’s Chairman, Talal Al Zain.
“During the implementation of the ‘national safety’ [martial law] by the army”, said Alnabbool, “it was not safe to go into work. Samer Majali sent an email to all his employees, stating that workers who stayed away because they feared for their own or their family’s safety, would not be penalised.” Despite this, the blanket grounds given for dismissal in the Mumtalakat companies was “non-attendance”. At Gulf Air there were 230 dismissals and Majali sent an email to his remaining staff inviting them to inform on fellow workers. “This email was used by some to settle personal issues”, Alnabbool said.
Since then, union executives have been prevented from entering their office in the Gulf Air premises, and holding meetings with their members. The International Trades Union Confederation say that 59 union leaders have been fired, and two unions have been dismantled altogether: in March Bahrain Petroleum (Bapco), where 293 workers were dismissed, dissolved its company union, and in April the Bahrain Teachers Association was closed down, and its president and vice-president arrested.
Faisal Hayyat, Journalists' Rally Against Censorship, 14.2.2011
Alongside these attacks on trade unionists, public vilification has continued. There are many websites such as Bahrain Online and Bahrain Arabia on which photographs of workers on demonstrations have been posted, their faces circled and names identified. One site, Awakened Giant, has 131 photographs identifying Gulf Air pilots, engineers, ground staff and cabin crew. “The government have closed down opposition sites”, Alnabbool says, “but continues to allow these people to target workers, to list their names and addresses, to call them traitors and conspirators. It’s fear and fear only that they’re spreading, and it sets people against one other.”
After international pressure the King, the Prime Minister and the Crown Prince have all made announcements that sacked workers should be returned to work, but these announcements are perhaps for western ears: the Mumtalakat companies have been slow to respond. At Gulf Air, where all of the dismissed workers are Shias, only 136 staff have been reinstated. Of these, however, 79 have not been returned to their former posts but are now required to spend their working hours cramped into a room 7 by 21 metres with only 30 chairs between them, an environment Alnabbool describes as “totally disgusting”, pointing out also that they are finger-printed on their way in and out and checked regularly throughout the day. “It’s possible these companies are using the political situation in Bahrain to restructure”, says Jane Kinninmont, Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House. “Some have been riddled with corruption and Gulf Air is losing money.”
Foreign businesses operating in Bahrain like DHL have also been caught up in the political situation. Shukri Hassan, president of the Bahrain DHL union and eight of his colleagues have been charged with “violating national security”, though their case has been temporarily suspended without reason being given. And senior staff at RSCI Bahrain, the prestigious training college run by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, where twenty medical staff have been arrested and imprisoned, asked three students to swear a loyalty oath to the Bahraini royal family. The RCSI in Dublin have since apologised for this, calling it “unacceptable”.
There are some in Bahrain who believe the King set up the BICI in order to give himself a weapon with which to fight more conservative elements in the Al-Khalifa family. If so, he may find that he gets more than he bargained for. Should Bassiouni’s report reveal even a fraction of the human rights violation protestors claim have taken place, the country’s reputation as one of the most forward-looking of the Gulf states will be tarnished, and conducting twenty-first century business while presiding over an archaic political system that breaches human rights, as well as ILO and OECD guidelines, will become more difficult.
The Al-Khalifas are already spinning the BICI report. On Sunday the Crown Prince said that after last year’s cancellation, Bahrain was now “safe” to stage next year’s Grand Prix, and that the BICI report would allow the country to “move on”. He made no mention of the 27 workers who were sacked at the International Circuit, where the Grand Prix has its home, nor of the allegations that some of these were tortured after arrest. Mumtalakat have a financial interest in the Grand Prix because it owns 42% shares in the McLaren company, and because, as the Crown Prince said on Sunday, the “race is what ties Bahrain to the world”.
The protestors share one thing in common with the Crown Prince: they also want to “move on”, but their idea of progress and modernity is not the same as the Al Khalifas’. “We want a civil state”, Faisal Hayyat says, “not a backward country where we are subjected to the armed forces and security police.”
This article appeared on 14.11.2011 as Latest Bahrain Trials Begin Tomorrow on the ITF website, on Counterfire as Bahrain: western-backed police state puts trade unionists on trial, and on the Gulf Air Trade Union website as Latest Bahrain Trials Begin Tomorrow. On 15.11.2011 it was picked up on the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights website as Latest Trials Begin Tuesday and on The Bahrain Justice and Development Movement site, where it appeared as Bahrain Trials and the BICI.
Irène Némirovsky, The Wine of Solitude – TLS
The resurrection of Irène Némirovsky’s writing over the last decade has been the cause of much pleasure, argument and anguish. Suite française, the unfinished novel about the French reaction to German invasion – interrupted when she was taken to Auschwitz and killed in 1942 – will remain the pinnacle of her achievement, a tantalising indicator of what might have been. But The Wine of Solitude, first published in 1935 as Le Vin de solitude, and appearing now in Sandra Smith’s fluent translation, is the book that holds the key to her oeuvre.
The novel begins with a swirl of yellow dust, a pale sunset, a gas-lit town. From this impressionist haze emerge the Karols – a family at war. Eight year old Hélène nurses thoughts of revenge against a mother whose fairy-tale looks (“snow-white skin…claw-like nails”) arouse feelings of revulsion in her. Bella, the scornful mother, dreaming of Paris and the arms of some anonymous lover, longs to escape from her provincial, Ukrainian family: from her husband, a banker who dreams only of money, and from her parents, the fading, aristocratic Safranovs, dependent now on their “peasant” of a son-in-law, “the little Jew who came out of nowhere”.
Hélène loves only her reserved French governess who dispenses nothing but the most practical advice: “Hélène, don’t read while putting on your socks. One thing at a time.” Yet even she is marked by “the stain of desire”, a story in her past (to do with “’love’, ‘kisses’, ‘fiancé’” and throwing herself in the Seine) that Hélène instinctively recoils from, stamping her feet and singing at the top of her voice in an attempt to banish the fate she senses lies in wait for her as a woman. What she likes best, what feeds her turbulent imagination, is to write in the pool of light at her bedside table, or to hear Mademoiselle sing the Marseillaise while she plays Napoleonic games with toy soldiers, “in a dream of bloodshed, of glory”.
The figure of the rebellious daughter is common enough in literature, but it is rare to find one as affronted and intelligent as Hélène. She stands shoulder to shoulder with Louisa in Christina Stead’s novel of 1940, The Man Who Loved Children, not just in her desire for revenge on an adult world that denies and humiliates her, but in her Nietzschean resourcefulness, transforming what material she has available – her repudiation and alienation – and making from it the steel in her back, the will to create herself: “if no one really cares about me I’m going to have to love myself”, she vows. It’s an idea Némirovsky returned to the year before her death in a poem she dedicated to herself, also titled ‘The Wine of Solitude’: “To lift such a heavy weight/ Sisyphus, you will need all your courage.”
Némirovsky wrote several versions of the daughter story including The Ball (1930), which Ian McEwan found “perfectly controlled”, and Jezebel (1936), a more melodramatic affair about matricide, but The Wine of Solitude is her most autobiographical fiction. Her identification with Hélène produces some complex narrative strategies that throw doubt on the teller’s memory and reliability, as Sartre was to in Nausea three years later. At one point Hélène is projected into adulthood: “The truth is that I came to understand gradually and now I’ve convinced myself I saw everything in a flash.” But the child rises up against this rewriting, thinking it further evidence of the bad faith between generations in which children (denied seriousness and the use of grown up language) feign ineptitude, and both adults and children see one another obscurely, as “insubstantial ghosts”.
Irène Némirovsky with her mother, Anna, 1918
When the Karols move to St Petersburg, Hélène’s illicitly scribbled words, “The husband, the wife and…the lover”, force the drama, leading to the death of Mademoiselle Rose. As revolution comes to the city the father stuffs dollars into sofas and under carpets, and Bella’s jewellery is sewn inside her clothing. The family leave for Finland, and it is here, in “air like ice-cold wine”, that Hélène has her first love affair and realises she can exact retribution by seducing Bella’s lover. The flirtation brings her “wild, proud pleasure”, demonstrating her power as a woman but also yielding a childhood freedom she has never before experienced – kisses happen on exhilarating sleigh rides, amidst shouting children and in the “rough and tumble” of snow play.
The affair ends when White Russians seize the town and the Karols are exiled to Bella’s beloved Paris. Here Hélène finally lets go of her obsession, as neither of her parents have been able to, realising “my desire for revenge isn’t strong enough to risk my own happiness.” But the damage is done, Bella is now the abandoned one, reduced to paying for lovers, and when her husband dies she is left searching for a fortune that no longer exists. Without saying goodbye, Hélène slips out onto the Champs-Élysées, shedding her past like an unwanted skin.
After much argument about the treatment of Jews in Irène Némirovsky’s writing, and claims from Gabriel Josipovici that Suite française was too highly praised, the republication of so many of her novels now allows us to consider her career in full. The Wine of Solitude is part of an analysis of Jewish life that begins in the caricatures of David Golder (1929) and culminates in the passionate illumination of The Dogs and the Wolves (1940). It places her among modernist contemporaries such as Stead and Jean Rhys who also wrote about estrangement and the modern diaspora, about women who “lived on the sidelines”, and the savagery of family life. Most importantly it lays claim to Némirovsky as one of literature’s great defenders and vindicators of children.
This review appeared in the TLS as ‘Bon Courage, Sisyphus’ on 10.11.2011.
