*****This book received the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2019, it was ranked 5th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st ce*****This book received the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2019, it was ranked 5th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.*****
”Standing on the ruins of history, standing both in and on top of history’s depository, Jacques Austerlitz is joined by his name to these ruins: and again, at the end of the book, as at the beginning, he threatens to become simply part of the rubble of history, a thing, a depository of facts and dates, not a human being.”
His name is Jacques Austerlitz. He did not grow up with that name. He grew up in Wales as the son of a Calvinist preacher/retired missionary and his timid, colorless wife. They called him Dafydd Elias. It was a relief when he escaped this dreary half-life of oppressive thoughts and a plodding existence, waiting patiently for an afterlife. When finally he was allowed to go to school, it was as if he’d escaped from a prison sentence. It was at school that he learned of his unusual name. It is a name that denotes a merging of cultures, Czechoslovankian and French. Are there clues in that?
He discovers that he arrived in Britain during the summer of 1939 as an infant refugee on a kindertransport from Czechoslovakia. His life before he arrived in Britain is a blank canvas, as if, while he was carried across the ocean, his memories fled back to his homeland.
He goes to Oxford and discovers he is drawn to European architecture. He has a nervous breakdown. He knows he must return to Czechoslovakia and fill in the gaps of his missing life. He finds some clues that help unlock the hidden door in his own mind, allowing the language of his past life and the memories to start flooding into his brain. ”I have even thought that I could still apprehend the dying away of my native tongue, the faltering and fading sounds which I think lingered on in me at least for a while, like something shut up and scratching or knocking, something which, out of fear, stops its noise and falls silent whenever one tries to listen to it.”
An unknown narrator tells us this story through a series of meetings he has with Austerlitz. They meet first in Antwerp and then in a cavalcade of European cities. It is as if they are drawn to each other and there is almost a supernatural need for this story to be told to the narrator so that he can share it with us. Each time they meet, Austerlitz picks up the thread of the story at the very moment he left it when they last parted. He weaves together sections of his life and introduces us to people he met along his journey to find himself.
There are so many wonderfully written passages to quote, but the ones that are lingering in my memories this morning are the ones that involve loss. ”I remember, said Austerlitz, how Alphonso once told his great-nephew and me that everything was fading before our eyes, and that many of the loveliest of colors had already disappeared, or existed only where no one saw them, in the submarine gardens fathoms deep below the surface of the sea.” There is certainly a nostalgia for the past being felt by Alphonso, but to even think about the loss of colors from the modern age that will never be seen again is a disconcerting thought. We’ll never see the world the same way as Alphonso did, and neither will our children see the same world we did. Maybe the color isn’t gone though, maybe it has just faded from his own eyes?
”It was as if time, which usually runs so irrevocably away, had stood still here, as if the years behind us were still to come.” I once stepped into an old man’s house, and it was as if his front door had been a portal to 1942. In the world that he could control, the interior of his house, he made time stand still. I felt this moment of discombobulation as if, when I stepped out of his door and back into the real world, my era would be waiting in the distant future.
”Unfortunately the tribe of the Aztecs had died out years ago, and that at best an ancient perroquet which still remembered a few words of their language might survive here and there.” It freaks me out to contemplate the idea that a race of people can die out and that their language only survives in the feeble lexicon of a handful of parrots.
”I wandered, all through that winter, up and down the long corridors, staring out for hours through one of the dirty windows at the cemetery below, where we are standing now, feeling nothing inside my head but the four burnt-out walls of my brain.” I’ve never had a nervous breakdown, but it is always one of those lingering concerns that, eventually, one day, my brain will rebel against me and say, enough is enough...I’m pulling the plug. One doesn’t know who he will be on the other side, or if he will ever recover who he was, or maybe it's best he doesn’t. It is a scary thought to think of the shattered remains of my brain, like a building that has been hit by a bomb.
I have, of course, dabbled with the idea of reading W. G. Sebald. Nobel committee members have stated that he would have eventually won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He had an untimely end, an inconvenient car crash, that left him dead at fifty-seven. I wonder if he had time to be incensed that the stories still left to be told in his head would forever be just a few jottings in a notebook and of course, there are all the stories that he hadn’t even discovered yet. Louis Erdrich is the one who gave me the two-handed push in the back to finally read him. She was on a trip through Ojibwe country, and at night, while stuck in some cheap motel being gently swayed by the passing semi trucks, she would read Austerlitz. I was riding along with her, reading the tale of her travel in her Books and Island book. She talked about the long, complex sentences in Austerlitz. There is one sentence that goes on for more than seven pages. That might even be more Faulkneresque than William Faulkner himself. She said she had to read sentences over and over again, but she didn’t see it as a burden.
I have a very good attention span and found it interesting (I actually chuckled a few times at finding myself caught out) to discover myself losing the thread of a sentence. I, too, had to go back and reread sentences, whole pages; sometimes I skipped back two or three pages to begin again. There is one point when I contemplated whether I was really smart enough to read this book, but I’m a stubborn man when it comes to books. As I read, there was a growing understanding that I simply must finish this book, not because it is challenging, but because this book is too important not to understand its story. I kept waiting for that familiar click in my head when my brain has made the adjustments to the writing style, but it never really happened. I’m not sure we are supposed to be comfortable with the complexity of the structure. I also felt the fluttering of butterflies in my stomach that told me that I had stumbled upon something special.
As I sit here at my computer writing this review, contemplating my reading experience, I have the strong urge to reread it. This time I will be completely zoned in, impervious to distractions, and grasp the nuance of every sentence the moment I read it (I do beguile myself). I want to brush away the feeling that I failed the book in some way. With that feeling, I also feel euphoric, like I’ve ventured into something unknown and came away a better person. New vistas may have opened up in my mind. What else can I deduce from all this other than that the book is a masterpiece?
When . . . some leisurely passer-by stopped . . . and spoke of cheating, that was in its way the stupidest lie ever invented by indifference and inborWhen . . . some leisurely passer-by stopped . . . and spoke of cheating, that was in its way the stupidest lie ever invented by indifference and inborn malice, since it was not the hunger artist who was cheating, he was working honestly, but the world was cheating him of his reward.
The main character is a professional, fasting artist. His manager takes him from town to town across Europe, locks him in a straw filled cage for forty days, and advertises his feat of hunger, drawing large crowds. He becomes indignant when the town would assign men, usually butchers, to watch him to make sure he is not cheating. As time goes on, interest in his form of entertainment wains, and he ends up working for a circus, still fasting, but now his cage is nestled among the wild animals outside the main arena.
Why would anyone want to be a professional hunger artist? Interesting that he refers to himself as an artist, which would imply creating something or doing something. I’m not sure not doing something really counts, but it shows how he sees himself and why he is so indignant when people do not recognize his sacrifice for his art. So pride is a big part of what drives him to starve himself. He wants to show the world that he can deprive himself, and he wishes he could go longer than forty days, but part of the spectacle is the ending of the fast when people watch him removed from the cage and put before his first meal.
He admits something that also changes the perception of what he does. “If I had found [the food I liked], believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.” So giving up food isn’t really a sacrifice for him, not in the way it would be for me, anyway. I’m sure he still has the gnawing hunger and the flurries of desperations that accompany the craving for food.
I understand someone fasting to bring attention to an injustice, maybe their own; maybe they have been unjustly incarcerated. Gandhi might be one of the most famous “hunger artists,” but he was trying to change the world. Going to see someone intentionally depriving himself of food to entertain people is about as interesting to me as going to see a beheading or a hanging. I don’t see other people’s misfortunes, or in the case of the hunger artist someone intentionally torturing themselves, as a form of amusement for myself. Paul Theroux talks about people going on “safari” in Africa to experience what he calls poverty porn. They would intentionally drive into the poverty stricken areas of Africa to see the desperate situations in which the very poorest people on earth are trying to exist, trying not to die from hunger or exposure due to drought, civil war, or any number of reasons beyond their control.
* A bone shaking shudder along with a healthy dose of loathing for those entertained by poverty.*
The moral of this story revolves around the pitfalls of the hunger artist’s pride. I also believe that Franz Kafka is casting a light on those who are entertained by his starvation. This short story is considered one of his masterpieces, which as I was writing this review and accessing my emotional response to the story, I have to say, mission accomplished, Mr. Kafka. It is so tragic that he died at age 40, long before he reached the zenith of his abilities. What masterpieces died with him when the final flicker of neurons in his brilliant brain went dark forever?
”The epoch of unexpected happiness and drunkenness lasted only two short years; the madness was so excessive and so general that it would be impossibl”The epoch of unexpected happiness and drunkenness lasted only two short years; the madness was so excessive and so general that it would be impossible for me to give any idea of it, except by this historical and penetrating reflection: the people had been bored for a hundred years.” Stendhal
The Velvet Revolution happened in Prague between November 17th through December 26th 1989. Crowds of protesters swelling to as many as 500,000 descended on Prague and riot police were sent to disperse them. Protesters held flowers out in the face of the police guns. On November 24th the entire top tier of communist leadership resigned. After 41 years of communist rule the Czechoslovakians were able to finally begin governing themselves. The velvet refers to the fact that the protesters achieved their means without violence. It was such a gentle revolution that even Gandhi would have been impressed. Jacob arrives in Prague soon after the end of the revolution to teach English. He wants to be a part of something happening and at the same time he wants to put off the looming responsibilities of adulthood waiting for him at home.
”In fact Jacob dreaded the burden of earning a living. To be here was something more than a holiday; it was a kind of rift in the net, so new that it was not yet clear how it would be rewoven into the systems of money and responsibility.--I want to write, Jacob added.”
Writing as it turns out is just something to tell people so they will think he has some greater purpose than just trolling gay nightclubs looking for hookups and finding ways to work just enough to pay for his entertainments and his necessities. He must have had true aspirations to write at one time or at least he did when he knew his friend Meredith. Her suicide, happening back in the real world of America, is a blow bigger than just her death.
”A blank sheet sat fixed in his machine so long that the platen set a curl in it. It seemed wrong to write about Meredith and wrong not to write about her. He knew he was angry with her. She had been the poet of their generation--all her friends had thought themselves lucky to have met her in her youth--and she had thrown away her talent with her life. She had also thrown away an understanding they had shared, a little prize they had conspired to give themselves, that no one their age would have deserved: the sense not merely that they were going to give their lives to writing but that somehow they already had.”
Jacob is part of a circle of friends, mostly fellow English teachers, that when he isn’t busy with his “relationships” he spends his evenings drinking and talking with them. There are special moments like this when intriguing people with similar interests find themselves caught in a web of intimacy. It is doomed of course because one thing that makes intriguing people interesting is that they don’t stay still for very long.
”The connection was going to outlast the time that they were going to share, and somehow they felt the afterlife of it now, while they were still together, almost as a physical thing, casting a retrospective aura, which they felt prospectively. And it was terribly sad, as it turned out, and something else, too--exhilarating, somehow, maybe because they hadn’t lost one another quite yet--and he wouldn’t even be trying to talk about it if he weren’t drunk. They had become the world to one another, both those who had fallen in love and those who hadn’t.”
That it will never come again Is what makes life so sweet. Believing what we don't believe Does not exhilarate.
That if it be, it be at best An ablative estate -- This instigates an appetite Precisely opposite. That it Will Never Come Again Emily Dickinson
The arrival of Carl (a straight man that Jacob had a crush on in the States)to the group is really the beginning of the end. If he had been a part of the group from the beginning things might have continued to spin for a while longer. He is taken with Melinda.
”She was wearing a black velvet gown, which showed her off--an English beauty with black hair, slender features, bad posture, and a classic complexion, three drops of red wine in a glass of whole milk.”
Melinda is one of those rare people that are intelligent, beautiful, witty, and one feels if she can be possessed that she can make you capable of achieving anything. Everyone male, female, straight, and gay are a little in love with her. She has been with Rafe since before the group was formed and by the unspoken rules of such a group there are no serious attempts to pry her away from him.
”Rafe had the excitement of a boy looking forward to a math test that has scared all the other boys, not because he’s better at math but because he’s better at thinking while scared.”
Rafe is a serious lad. Carl is more of a rogue. *Sigh*, but we know how women like their rogues.
Rafe is busier than the rest of the group. He is almost a spy of some sort, but really just an analyst who could be mistaken for a spy. He might be taking his English Rose for granted and she is at an age where it is easy to be impulsive. The pain is less acute, because she may not yet have fallen in love with the person she is when she is with that person...which to me...is when love transcends infatuation.
”The question of how to know whether one is choosing or whether one is giving in to something one hasn’t understood. I wonder if the answer is that a choice always feels a little supplementary, a little unnatural--because it’s unforced it also feels unnecessary--as if one had figured out a way to get away with something for a while.”
[image]
A picture I snapped while in Prague. It will give you some idea of just how beautiful the city is.
Annie will be very disappointed that I haven’t mentioned her. She is the wallflower of the group; and yet, of course the most sensible maybe too sensible for this time in her life. She is the first of the group that Jacob confides in about his sexual orientation. She is good with confidences, but not very good at having things to confide. Jacob is at times a surrogate boyfriend for her. They do things together that would have been more fun with someone they were in love with. She is a complicated piece of the puzzle, like the spring that must be sprung at the proper moment for the watch to work.
This group of friends are still lingering with me. I know their names and their quirks as if they were my actual friends, as if, for a few months I were part of that group. I had a similar situation with coworkers in the bookstore business. It lasted for about three months before people began to get on with their lives, but those three months were a time when every day I could feel my mind expanding exponentially. This book shimmers with a vision of Prague in transition. It is a chance to spend time with some people that you will wish you had known when you were at that magical age before life seduced you with a good paying job, a mortgage, and respectability. I suggest you let this book and these characters become a part of your memories.
”It is wrong, then ,to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and de”It is wrong, then ,to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.”
We all have odd, wonderful, and disastrous things happen to us that make us believe that, as mysterious as life is, there are still times when we experience a series of sometimes small events, serendipitous moments, when we feel the Great OZ or some wizard or creature is pulling the levers of our lives. We can ignore them or scoff at them, demean them by calling them coincidences, or we can choose to believe there is a bit of magic gently bumping us in directions that will hopefully lead us to greater happiness. One could be paranoid and think that, when we ignore the magic, maybe that is when we lead ourselves to tragedy.
There have been times when I’ve wanted to tackle these enigmatic moments with a white board, colored markers, and logic. This event has to happen for this series of events to happen to encourage me to make this decision. But what if I do prove that everything is just a series of random coincidences influenced by my haphazard decision making ability and that there is no magic? Well, then I would deprive my life of a “dimension of beauty”. Stark truth is rarely a good trade off for a belief in the possibility of magical moments.
So what brings Tomas and Tereza together? A shared interest in Beethoven? The number six? Anna Karenina? An ordered cognac? They have a brief meeting in Tereza’s small town, which Tomas is visiting to perform a specialized surgery, but somehow as Tomas speeds off back to Prague, Tereza manages to snare a hook in his collar that unspools a line between them that’s even better than bread crumbs. When she shows up on his doorstep in Prague, Tomas is surprised, but not too surprised. He has this effect on women that makes them want to do whatever he wants. He accepts this as just part of the natural order of his life. What does surprise him is that he allows Tereza to spend the night and then more nights and more. ”Tomas came to this conclusion: Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”
He doesn’t stop sleeping with other women, even as his relationship with Tereza deepens. One “conquest” in particular, an artist named Sabina, becomes a friend as well as a lover. They are very much alike. Men flock to her in the same way that women flock to him. Sabina is actually my favorite character in the novel and made forever famous by her portrayal by Lena Olin in the 1988 movie. Who can forget her grandfather’s bowler hat, her mirrors, her casual nakedness, and her enticing lingerie? Kundera defines her character best through her relationship with the married and besotted Franz. The more committed he becomes the more anxious she becomes. Her lightness of being is threatened.
Even though Tomas is philosophically opposed to marriage, he surprises himself when he asks Tereza to marry him. The whiteboard diagram for this odd occurrence would be circles upon circles. He isn’t right for Tereza, but somehow he is perfect.
Tomas has a lightness of being that is admirable and could make the most level-headed person covetous of his easy, charming manner. If truth be known, many people would like to have a life with a stable spouse, but still be able to have affairs. Those who resist the urge do so out of fear of losing the stability of their lives. Tereza does know about his affairs. His dalliances are trapped in the follicles of his hair. He regrets the pain he causes her, but cannot resist the siren songs of other women. ”Tomas was obsessed by the desire to discover and appropriate that one-millionth part; he saw it as the core of his obsession. He was not obsessed with women; he was obsessed with what in each of them is unimaginable, obsessed, in other words, with the one-millionth part that makes a woman dissimilar to others of her sex.”
Tereza does leave him, and in the end, the fact that he follows her deprives him of his profession. The novel is set against the Prague Spring in 1968, and as Tereza makes trouble with her politically incendiary pictures, Tomas writes an article comparing communism to the Oedipus story. The Soviets are not amused, so instead of plying his talents as a brilliant brain surgeon, the Soviets decide he is more useful as a window washer.
Oh, and I mustn’t forget Karenin, the dog they acquire by “chance” on their marriage day. There are particularly poignant scenes with the dog that have proved to be among the most memorable for me from the book and movie.
The reason I score the book a 4 instead of a 5 is because Milan Kundera gets sidetracked with sharing his philosophical beliefs. I found myself mildly annoyed by these diversions because I wanted to get back to the saga of Tereza, Tomas, Franz, and Sabina. After rereading the book, I decided that I needed to rewatch the movie as well. The movie weighs in at 172 minutes, which is a lot of film for a rather short novel. The book is here, carefully trapped in cellophane, and the movie doesn’t exist without Milan Kundera, but the director, Philip Kaufman, has stripped out the unnecessary diversions and allowed the viewers to concentrate on the evolving story of the four main characters. I love the casting for the movie, with the incredibly talented Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche, and Lena Olin, who were all so young in 1988 and just beginning their fabulous careers.
I believe that reading a book and then watching the movie enhances my experience. Some feel one or the other is enough and even think that one might “ruin” the other, so depending on what type of reader/watcher you are, you do have a decision to make. Will your decision be serendipitous or will it be based in a framework of logic? If my reviews are an influence (dare I say magical influence :-)) on your book life and I am asked my opinion between the book or the movie, I would give you a gentle push to the movie. I wash my hands of the ripples that ensue.
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