Wu Wei

Christmas books

We survived a family Christmas, not really as bad as it sounds. As Bee says, if we have outsiders visiting, the three of us are on our best behaviour to each other.  Now I am reduced to absolute slobbery. Way behind with the reading never mind the reviews and the latest tag from ViolainVilnius. 

And of course I got more books for Christmas, even the same one from both daughters, plus two other duplicates of books I have read. Not even had time to change them yet.

At this time of year gloom and lethargy always descends after New Year.  But at least I finally got all my reports done so at least I am a free woman. 

Real Life Adventures in an Inner-city Ambulance

In line with Lotus reads' suggestions that we ought to finish our "Books we have been meaning to read" pile before getting new ones, here is one I have finished.

Blood, sweat and tea is a blog book.  I've never read a blog book before, but I have read this blog, called Random Acts of Reality, for the last 18 months or so, so I was interested to see how it turned out.  It's a bestseller, which is good for Tom Reynolds who writes the blog.  Subtitled Real Life Adventures in an Inner-city Ambulance, it chronicles the interesting bits of his life on the ambulance as he goes out at night in the (rough) East End of London.  Containing a mixture of medical stuff, comments on the obnoxious and unhelpful people he has to deal with (he claims to hate everyone, without any discrimination) and compassion for both patient and relatives, it is gripping reading on the blog. It has a large following of commenters.  The interesting debates about medical ethics and the state of the British health service mean that part of the appeal  is the variety of comments each post draws. 

The book begins with Tom having to an AIDS test because blood and vomit from an HIV-positive patient landed on his face.  As a result, he had to take a cocktail  of drugs until the test was clear.  He blogged despite the side-effects of the drugs "messing with his mind".

From the book I learnt that right now in the UK, one in four women loses a baby during pregnancy or birth. In fact losing a baby is so common that he fears that hospital staff have lost sympathy for individual mothers, because to them, this is so "normal". 

The book covers people being found dead at home, found dying at home, being rushed to hospital to be "saved" then dying, and being dead on arrival despite all the crew's efforts.  He ponders each case, wondering how to preserve people's dignity, trying to protect and support the relatives, and hardly ever loses his empathy with his patients.  When he does, they are usually drunk and/or undeserving, having called an ambulance unnecessarily. 

There are descriptions of road races to get to the patient, and the frustration of just having got some food when a call comes in, as well as the relief of a cup of tea back at the station.  Somewhere in there, there is also some commentary on the London bombings, though they weren't in his area.  He also has given advice on how to blog on your work and not be sacked.  The London Amublance Brigade seem to be supportive of his blogging (done under a pseudonym, but soon outed at work). 

I enjoyed reading all the posts again.  Most of the posts in the book have a note after them (and some a note before them) where Tom reflects on the background to the post and the comments he received, but somehow it's not the same as the blog.

So I would recommend you to buy the book (usually with a special deal on Amazon) but afterwards read the blog.

 

Technorati tags: blogs, Random Acts of Reality, blogging at work

Winter Challenge

After my "book I have been meaning to read" list turned out to be longer than I thought, (found some more this morning) I was pleased to find I was not alone.

Lotus reads directs us to Overdue books' winter challenge

According to Michelle from Overdue Books, this is how the challenge will work:

For this challenge we would be reading 5 books that we have already purchased, have been meaning to get to, have been sitting on the nightstand and haven't read before. No going out and buying new books. No getting sidetracked by the lure of the holiday bookstore displays.

The bonus would be that we would finally get to some of those titles (you know you picked them for a reason!) and we wouldn't be spending any extra money over the holidays.

The time frame would be Nov. 1st until Jan. 30 and there will be some small, fun prizes awarded to random participants and/or those with clever review posts. There will be one random drawing for a prize to those who submit their list of books in the comment section by Nov. 15th but feel free to join any time. There will be another random drawing for those who submit five reviews by Jan. 30 for a small gift certificate to Amazon.

Unfortunately I already got lured by the bookstore pretending I was buying presents for someone else. For me Christmas and New Year holidays are not a good time for reading. What's the winter equivalent of lying on a beach, which is conducive to reading? Lying on the sofa in front of a good log fire, knowing it is too cold outside to go out? Global warming seems to be removing that pleasure this winter.

Book meme Part II

A book I've read more than once 

I guess this has to be War and Peace. I must have read it as a teenager and again in my 40s. I was surprised how modern its perspective on families was, and the characters are straight out of life today. It's anti-war as well, with some of the stupidities described so that you wonder why anyone thinks a war is worthwhile. I hope to read it again in my retirement.

A book I would take to a desert island

I never travel anywhere new without one of the Lonely Planet or Rough Guides, but perhaps they wouldn't cover it. In Your Pocket Guides tend to cover the sort of places I normally go for work, but so far they are not desert islands either, unfortunately. A book which has helped me in many unmapped Soviet locations is the 1914 Baedeker Guide to the Russian Empire which was reprinted in 1971. But I guess there are no Russian desert islands. I have been saving up Dickens to read when I get old, so I guess that will provide plenty of new stuff to read. And a large volume of Sudoku puzzles and pencils and erasers.

A book that made me laugh (or cry) 

The book I remember laughing at the most is Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America. I read an extract from it in Granta, and then was pleased to find there was more.

I can remember crying buckets with a broken heart reading DH Lawrence, but when I reread it, it didn't work for me again.

A book I wish had been written

I wish my father's family history had been written as now we shall never know it.

A book that I wish had not been written

I think the worst book I read, which could have been really interesting with proper editing and maybe a ghost writer is about two ordinary women who go to the North Pole. It's called Frigid Women. The title is probably the best bit about it. I won't give any more details as you don't need them.

A book that I wish I had written

The book I wanted to model my blog on is Slavenka Drakulic's Cafe Europa: Life after Communism. She writes about the contradictions of life in former and current Yugoslavia and how to explain them to her husband now she lives in Vienna. Whenever I go to a new town I look for the inevitable Cafe Europa which she mentions.

I also admire Alain de Botton and his ability to write simply about philosophy and our anxieties (including his own). My favourite at the moment is the Architecture of Happiness, but The Art of Travel was pretty good as well.

A book that I have been meaning to read

There are several on these on my shelf at the moment. Probably the most anticipated is Imagining the Balkans by Maria Todorowa. For a long time I didn't realise this was influenced by, but not the same as Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. They are both about nationalism and how it is a social construct. I should write a review of Imagined Communities because it made such a big impression on me.

What are you reading now

I still haven't finished Rory Stewart's Occupational Hazards - My time Governing Iraq. It's not finished because it's a heavy hardback and I haven't been able to take it with me. But it tells stories of stupidity and ignorance of other cultures, plus simple bad management on the part of the Americans. You can read a sample on an earlier post here. Or Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: memories of a city which I lent my sister before I finished it. Or AJP Taylor's The Hapsburg Monarchy, which I shall have to start again as I started reading it in the summer and have forgotten everything. At the moment I am carrying Tom Reynolds' blog book Blood Sweat and Tea: Real Life Adventures in an Inner-city Ambulance round with me, because being based on a blog, it is easy to pick up and put down. The blog is here.

I did manage to finish the Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, but I wouldn't recommend it much.

What would you like for Christmas?

I would like the novel David Golder by Irene Nemirovsky which she wrote before Suite Francaise, but unfortunately it's not due out till February.

To sum up, no fairy tales and no physics any more.

Then you are supposed to tag your fellow bloggers to respond in the same way.

So here's your challenge: Copydude, ViolainVilnius, Carpetblogger and anyone else who reads regularly.

A Fairy Tale in Physics

Lodged in my "list of things to blog about some day" is the book meme. With everybody recommending books for the holidays, I thought I would do my own recommendations (of a sort). :)

Memes seem to have variations on:
A book that changed my life
A book I've read more than once 
A book I would take to a desert island
A book that made me laugh (or cry) 
A book I wish had been written
A book that I wish had not been written
A book that I wish I had written
A book that I have been meaning to read
What are you reading now

Then you are supposed to tag five of your fellow bloggers to respond in the same way. 

So here is Part I A BOOK THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

The Rainchildren  by TH Orpen published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Subtitled (unbelievably)   A Fairy-Tale in Physics, it was probably my first science book.  I liked it for the colour prints and the personification of natural forces: Aunt Cold, Aunt Heat, Colonel Lightning and the explanations of steam engines and glaciers.  I probably read it when I was about 7 or 8.  It's clearly why I became an energy specialist.

The book lives in my box of family treasures due to my ex-husband's habit of throwing tatty old books away.  Dragging it out for a new look and some photographs for the blog, I was quite surprised by what I found. First of all, it seemed it was a Sunday School Prize of my mother's for "regular attendance and good conduct" in 1923-4.  But it has a slip bound into it stating all the author's profits will be divided between the Belgian and Serbian Relief Funds, which dates it to around 1914. 

Here's a sample of the style:

The Aunts' Battle Meanwhile Aunt Cold's face outside was pressed tight against the window pane. "Condense, condense, children!" she called out, and a thick fur settled on the glass, and presently little drops of water began to trickle down.  This was followed by another call, "Crystalize, crystalize, children!" "What does she mean by that, I wonder?" exclaimed Esther. Oh! I'll show you," said a little rain-child that was dancing about on the window-pane, "she wants us to make fern-leaves". And quick as thought, the tiny creature whirled round, and spread out her skirt on the pane of glass, where it formed itself into a beautiful white lace-like pattern something like a fern-leaf.

Fern-leaves (or Jack Frost as we called them) on the windows was a regular part of winter in a house with only one coal fireplace for heating in the 1950s.

Colonel Lightning "Wake up, Colonel Lightning," she (Aunt Heat) said, "let us come for a ride." The Colonel sat up    rubbed his eyes and looked about him. "Yes that looks like a nice soft place," he said pointing to the other dark bank of cloud lying far below. "Hallo! Sergeant, my horse!" thereupon the low rumble was heard again, and a man appeared leading a horse.  Esther noticed that he wore a dark grey uniform with scarlet facings and carried a big drum slung from his shoulder.  Halting the horse, he held the stirrup for the Colonel, who quickly swung himself into the saddle. "Oh do please take me up behind you," pleaded Aunt Heat, "I should so like a ride with you," and without waiting for an answer, she jumped up behind the rider, and together they galloped off down to the lower bank of cloud, tracing a bright zig-zag streak across the sky as they went, while the sergeant jogged more slowly after them, making a loud rattle on his drum.

Description of a power station

"Well, there are big engines fitted up in what they call a 'power station', and it is their business to catch Colonel Lightning and keep him quiet till he is wanted.  Then there are long wires running in all directions from the power station to carry him wherever he is wanted. He simply loves metal wire, and will run along it as fast - well, as fast as lightning. And then when you've got him, he'll do almost anything for you; light up your house for instance."

I wonder what the author would have made of the Internet.

I remember thinking that the illustrations were a bit creepy.  Old Greek philosophers on the cover, grumpy old aunts looking like ghosts, 'rainchildren' looking like the fake fairies on photographs. 

But looking back it was quite a modern book in recommending education for girls, though not for everybody clearly.

"Oh dear!" exclaimed Mrs Campbell (her mother), "I don't quite like this letter about the dear girl. Listen to what her Mistress (at boarding school) says: 'Esther is working splendidly, and developing so fast in every way. I am only afraid of her over-working herself, but there is really no stopping her. She takes such a keen interest in all her work, but especially in every branch of Natural Science. She says she wants to go up to Girton (a special College for women, in Cambridge University) when she is old enough, and take the Natural Sciences' Tripos! .... I should advise you to insist on her taking a complete rest from mental work of any kind during her holidays. ..... I think if you could take her right away, and give her an entire change of scene, it would be the best for her'".

The book is shot through with descriptions and photographs of English upper class life of the period.  The father (a vicar) applies for an August chaplaincy in Switzerland to the SPG, which I think stands for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospels (to the heathen).  It is a bit surprising that the Swiss are considered heathens, or that heathens don't have holidays in August.  It is clearly a bit of a skive for Dad, but he gets away with it.  They go off to Switzerland and Italy for a month where Esther has a lecture by her father on glaciers and how tunnels are built.  

So although the book is not very scientific, and shows a very privileged little girl, with whom I had nothing in common, it somehow made its mark on me.  I never managed to go up to Girton. But  I think I have better understanding of how power stations work now.

Part II comes tomorrow.

Technorati tags: book meme, physics, fairy tale,

Nostalgie de la boue

While writing the last post I discovered the phrase Nostalgie de la boue, while googling to check my French. The list Google produced was so interesting I decided it would need a follow up post.

It's not clear when it arrived in literature (French or otherwise), but I can think of many examples, not least those Russian nobles who went into the countryside to "help" the peasants, and my own apparent ignoring of the barbarism in Ismail Kadare's Broken April (see last post).

But here is a more interesting extension from Ed Driscoll headed Nostalgie de la Left (which might just about sum it up)

But in fact it is more global and cuts more deeply than the recent history of the West. As Freud noted in Civilization and its Discontents, the civilized have always longed to be uncivilized and attributed great virtues to them. Tacitus admired the Germanic tribes, Herodotus the barbarian Scythians, Ibn Khaldun the nomadic Beduin, and the Chinese the Mongols. Bruce Chatwin's admiration of nomads in recent popular books is nothing new. Even the sixteenth-century Aztecs considered their primitive and nomadic ancestors to be superior to themselves. The nostalgia for the mud of origins seems to begin as soon as one foot is out of the mud, and history has probably seen many Lady Chatterleys in love with a hard-to-understand blue collar accent. Note that "civilization" is often imagined as feminine, searching for that lost, primitive, masculine lover.

And a rant from Theodore Dalrymple called Exposing Shallowness, pretending to be a book review. Actually it's quite a funny rant, though I'm no fan of tattoos, middle class or proletarian.

It is also no accident that some members of the middle classes should have adopted a typically proletarian form of bodily adornment as a badge not only of independence, but also of liberal virtue. A tattoo establishes them as tolerant, open-minded, and sympathetic towards those below them in the social scale: the highest virtues of which they can conceive. The tattoo thus appeals to the kind of modern bourgeois who believes that foulness of language is a token of purity of heart, or at least of sincerity. The tattoo, like the constant resort to the swearword, is an attack on bourgeois propriety, and as such a demonstration of largeness of heart and generosity of spirit.

Or even, from a site labelled "everything", a sort of ironic wikipaedia:

Nostalgia pour la boue is a term dealing back to the 1850's when les grandes horizontales were first entering Parisian society in large numbers. The phrase was first used in connection to to the play Olympia's Wedding where a woman (not anything like Marie du Plessis) was married to a nobleman (again no connection with reality is implied...). The phrase, wholly enunciated is "A swan is a swan, but a duck who thinks itself a swan will find itself longing for the mud in which it was laid."

The fact that swans (and ducks) are more-or-less nesting in the same turf is to be contemplated....

Later, it was in vogue when Tom Wolfe mused on the fact that most of the High Society of his time were wearing blue jeans, swearing, and trying very hard to disassociate themselves with their background....

And even the Economist returns the phrase back to its roots:

Nostalgie de la boue

May 27th 2004 | VELLERON, VAUCLUSE
Why France is still so keen to support and protect a declining business

WHEN President Jacques Chirac visited the agricultural fair in Paris in March, he stayed for three hours. He was upstaged a few days later by his prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who squeezed in an astonishing seven hours. Such is the lingering hold of farming on the French imagination that no self-respecting politician can ever miss the chance to pose with a heaving Charolais bull, or to cuddle a kid goat. Now France's strange bond with farming is under fire once again. The European Commission wants to revive the Doha round of world trade talks by offering to eliminate all export subsidies for farm products, a concession that is fiercely resisted in Paris. What is it about the French and farming?

Ismail Kadare

One of the advantages of living in Oxford is that there are plenty of "book" events, though I usually miss them as I'm away. Sloph spotted a talk by Ismail Kadare at the Maison Francaise and so we turned up one evening to a packed hall and had to stand at the back.

The talk was introduced in English by Noel Malcolm (of Short Histories fame) and everything was translated back and forth by David Bellos, his current translator. I was pleased to see my French held up under the strain of bad acoustics and Kadare's answer was often funnier in French than the translation. Actually this is normal. The raconteur has complete control of when he delivers the punchline, gauging the amount of suspense, but the translator has already had the reaction from half the audience and the moment has gone.

The audience was more interested in his early life under communism. I, on the other hand, have only read the later works (Three Elegies for Kosovo, Broken April) and am now working backwards, from The Successor. The review of Broken April by Violainvilnius gave a completely different impression of Broken April than I received. I thought it was a flirtation with feminism, since it was the only book I have read so far by Kadare where a woman had a character. She described it as barbaric, mainly about the besa (honour) code of revenge killings. But more of that later, when I have reread it to see if I have become very desensitized to violence in Albania. Nobody mentioned this book at his talk.

Noel Malcolm kicked off the questions, asking Kadare if he had much influenced by his Ottoman heritage and Ottoman literature. "What, those dry old books in a script that none of us could read?" came the answer. One of Kemal Ataturk's reforms was to change from the Turkic script to the Roman alphabet so no one could read old books. A very cunning way of cutting off the past, which no communist has ever managed to do! It was clear that in the 30s and 40s when Kadare was growing up Albania was building on its western orientation.

In the 50s, he went to study in Moscow at a writer's school. He described it as a very good school for writers who were trained in propaganda and socialist realism. It was a good school for him as well. Whatever they stressed as important, he neglected and vice versa. So when they told him to write about the achievements of the workers and the shining future of communism, he wrote about rain and the countryside and "la boue". Of course he was criticized for his books being too much realism and not enough achievement, but he survived that.

Here is another pitfall of translation. Kadare writes in French mostly now. Although it is clear what he means when you translate "boue" as mud, it seems there is also a phrase in French "nostalgie de la boue", which I found when googling to check the translation. Here is an example:

"Nostalgie de la boue" means ascribing higher spiritual values to people and cultures considered "lower" than oneself, the romanticization of the faraway primitive which is also the equivalent of the lower class close to home. I have been submerged in such ideas since I was born and am just getting my head out of the waters. My parents romanticized Hungarian folk culture — my father photographed and published peasant architecture, my mother wore folk dresses, my uncle and father promoted native handicrafts in the weaving workshops they organized in the 1930's. I went much further in romanticizing the seemingly most unromantic Aztecs, leaping across an ocean, a continent and five centuries in revalidation.

His first book (of poetry not prose) was published in Moscow. By then he had acquired a reputation as a decadent writer (meaning one with western leanings). He said that this made him very exotic in his girlfriend's eyes, as she had never met anyone decadent. One suspects this allowed to him to get away with rather a lot. His publisher urged him not to publish, since as well as his first book, it might have been his last. However, he was determined and they compromised by the publisher writing an introduction describing him as a decadent writer. Since this was during the Khrushchev spring, they got away with it, and the "damaging" introduction actually improved his sales.

He also talked about censorship in Albania during Enver Hoxha. I think most people are surprised to find there was any cultural life at all during the period, so primitive was the society painted. However, according to Kadare, Hoxha had been educated in France, and considered himself a little bit intelligentsia. So it was impossible to have censorship. Books were published and then condemned afterwards, but not before. Of course, one can suspect that there was a considerable amount of self-censorship based on the results of the post-publication criticism of other books.

After that there were some very silly questions about his life as a foreigner in France (how did it feel?), that really made me ashamed of how parochial the British were. Kadare dismissed them as irrelevant.

The time allocated was far too short for me, and it was clear that Kadare was an amusing and ironic speaker about his experiences. I definitely shall read more of his books.

My favourite bookshop (update)

Update
I since discovered it has its own website where you can order from its online catalogue. The website is www.dukagjini.com. Be careful with the spelling, as often it is spelt dukadjini, but not in this case.

I first visited this bookshop (Dukagjini in Pristina) in 2003 and was astounded as to what was packed into it.  When I came back to Pristina two years later, I didn't really expect it to be there, as I wasn't sure I hadn't imagined it.  But I easily found it, and it hadn't changed.

It functions as the university bookshop of Pristina and has a large selection of classics both in and out of Albanian.  Basically the size of any other shop in Pristina, it has a Tardis feel about it, as you wander round discovering sections on art, medicine, management and computers, not forgetting architecture, maps and the children's corner.  Upstairs on two balconies are selections of poetry, translated and Albanian originals, plus learned tomes written by Albanian professors.  The shop is brightly lit and has a cozy friendly atmosphere, and the assistants never hassle you to buy anything.  It also seems to be the only place in Pristina selling foreign newspapers and magazines, so I go there for the Economist.

All sorts of things are next to each other.  "Children's Book of Dinosaurs" is next to "Colour and Art: War at Sea" and "Storybook Cakes". "It's my Money" is next to "Essential Skills in Family Therapy". "Little-known Museums of Rome" is next to "Las Vegas". "Car maintenance" is next to "The Book of Perfumes".  Next to the usual Grisham, Coelho, Murakami and Irving are also the best sellers of Ismail Kadare, which I am working my way through. In the corner near them is a small pamphlet-sized book printed in Pristina -- "Run of luck, a collection of patrol stories by a policeman".

There is a large art and architecture section.  All you want to know about Impressionists and Urban Gardens jostles with books of photos of Kosovo and Albanian vernacular architecture, described using such words as autochthonic. 

I don't know why I find it so satisfying a place to browse.  The stock presumably doesn't change that much, but it seems to get rearranged, so that new juxtapositions appear, surprising you and offering new discoveries.  It's rather like supermarkets are supposed to rearrange their stock every now and again so you are forced to examine new items, on the search for the familiar items you always buy.  But I am already like some of the Poles and Lithuanians in Oxford, gradually reading their way along the supermarket shelves, looking at the unfamiliar labels trying to guess what the disguised names really are.  Here are a sample:

Mjermi i historicizmit by Karl Popper
Apokalypsa i marketing
Nje van per Boris Davidovicim by Danilo Kish

My absolute favourite this week is by Miguel Asim Palacio:  Eskatologija Muslimane ne Komedine Hyjnore.  I mean just the title, I never got as far as looking inside, I was distracted by some other gem.

Other books I am sure I saw last week but have been shuffled this week are:

Cursive writing for children
Marimbo bongo (in the computer section)
The Albanian princess
Who is Kosovo (sic)

The book I really want to buy is the Kanun of Dukagjini,  but it only exists in translation in German. The Kanun is the codified set of rules the hill clans of Northern Albania lived by, when honour killings were regular, not so long ago.  Actually (French) Wikipaedia says it is an Ottoman Code.  Several of Ismail Kadare's stories include examples of the rules in action.

The only improvement to the bookshop would be to have coffee and comfy armchairs, and maybe newspapers to read, but there simply isn't room. 

I think the bookshop reminds me of the library I used as a teenager.  In those days I was already an avid reader but we couldn't afford to buy any books.  So my busfare on Saturdays was to enable me to get my six books from the town library.  The Harris Library in Preston was free, built along with the Art Gallery and the Arcade in neoclassical style by a Victorian philanthropist, presumably a cotton mill owner. 

                                                          Thanks to its rather extensive selection, I worked my way systematically along the shelves of world fiction carefully avoiding everything written by an English name. This bias came from the boring classes at school, which turned me off Eng Lit. As a result, I have always had a rather hazy knowledge of  English Literature but managed to read translations of Maupassant, Gogol, Chekhov, Ehrenburg, de Queiroz, Bashevis Singer and Arthur Koestler (he didn't sound like he was "English") already by the time I was sixteen.  At the same time, I read Non-Euclidean Geometry, Stories from the  Opera  and Folktales from anywhere that was available. 

Ever since then I collected books as soon as I could afford them, and to me it is still a luxury to browse in a bookshop and then bring some home to add to my collection. 

 

Technorati tags: books, kosovo, bookshops

Let them take it all to the grave with them

Just finished reading Ismail Kadare's book The Successor.  According to the jacket, Kadare is compared with Gogol, Kafka and Orwell.  But for me this particular book has more similarities with Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and Victor Serge's Comrade Tulayev, though it is decades since I read them.

The Successor is about the ways totalitarian leaders keep their colleagues in check, by invoking the good of the Party.  Or perhaps the ways in which the colleagues keep themselves in check by their own fear, having given their leader all power.  This check extends to the families of colleagues, whose happiness is sacrificed, "for the good of the cause". And to professionals like the architect designing an expansion of a house: should he design something mediocre and no risk, or something more satisfying to himself and eventually others too, though with the risk he will be misunderstood and condemned for bourgeois tendencies.

At the same time, Kadare draws on Albanian history and traditions: sons are obliged to avenge the deaths of fathers and daughters are sacrificed.  He draws on legends to illustrate the difficulty of keeping secrets, even when spoken out loud in empty places. Forgotten relatives arrive to deliver enigmatic messages, which can be interpreted many ways, including as a visit from the secret police.

He also mocks the foreign press for their interpretations for what is happening in Albania and the conspiracy theories, when perhaps the cause of the death will never be untangled, whether the "Successor" committed suicide or was murdered, and if so by which of his rivals.   

At the end what is memorable for me is how much of what happens revolves round rumours and interpretations swirling round the town and round the heads of the leader and his potential successors.  All are psychologically isolated, though the leader ("the Guide")'s own isolation is increased by his growing blindness.  Only the women are given any grounded reality, the wives in the need to support their husbands and the daughter on the basis of what actually happens to her.

Near the end, Kadare puts these words in the mouth of the Guide:

He did not want to know what had gone on in that house. How they had striven, then taken fresh counsel, whether they had delayed, or screamed in the fog. Let them take it all to the grave with them!

In most Western countries, schools encourage teenagers to read and discuss books like 1984, Animal Farm and Brave New World but no one in the west has been subject to the psychological trap of "those who are not for us are against us".  Can we really understand the psychological isolation they felt and how to guard against it in future? 

Most old communists are now in their seventies if not already dead, though many are still politicians in their home countries and with loyalties little changed. It is noticeable that the so-called lustrations have not produced much light on what happened in the excesses after the Second World War when communists took over.  Films were made in Poland and Hungary about the period in the 80s, about the manipulation of ordinary people (one thinks of Angi Vera, Ashes and Diamonds and the later Man of Marble) but there are no novels or biographies about leaders since the fall of communism.  One of the reviews of Man of Marble on Amazon UK says:

A must for anyone trying to understand what living under Eastern bloc Communism was really like, and a gripping story too, with some shocking moments. This is the reason why many Poles don't want to watch the movie any more - ironically, the highest compliment that can be given. It is too close to the truth that many people in this now thoroughly Westernised country would rather forget.

After Gunter Grass's revelation, who knows what else happened.  What should teenagers in Eastern Europe be reading now to understand their parents and grandparents' dilemmas and hardships.

It seems they will take it to the grave with them.

tags: Albania, post-communism, Ismail Kadare

Granta photographs of Russia

I can't resist scanning and posting these photos, since they are so evocative of a Soviet past.

Granta (a quarterly magazine of new writing and photography) has just published a preview of a book of photographs of Russia taken by Simon Roberts in a journey across Russia covering the (Russian) Far East (Sakhalin Island, Magadan, and Chukhotka) and the furthest west (Kaliningrad), also the Volga and the Altai Republic where Russia borders China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan. In short all the places I still have an urge to get to, for reasons I really can't explain even to myself.

His photos are all taken (or printed) in rather dull colours which echo the sadness and monotony of the lives of the people in the pictures, when seen with western eyes. The photos presented are generally devoid of a natural environment, or even then without bright sun, without golden church cupolas, without healthy growing trees (you can tell I have just come back from Kiev).

Nevertheless Roberts comments:

Meeting people .... led me to think about what it means to be Russian. The idea of a Russian identity seemed to be so important to the people that I met. Most of them were so patriotic, intensely proud of their homeland's beauty and its size. The concept of motherland --rodina in Russian-- wasn't just about the enormity of Russia's landmass or about its future potential. The concept of rodina insists that Russia is an exceptionally spiritual place: soulful, mysterious and holy. ..... I wanted my photographs to explore Russia's many conflicts: economic, cultural and social, but continually to insist on its ability to be dignified and spiritual.

I know what he means, but I'm not sure he really succeeds. Where is the dignity in most of these pictures when you know enough about the background.

Here are some of them: (excuse the scanning, some of the photos extend across two pages and the book was not easy to flatten)

The town of Binibino (sic) celebrates its 50th aniversary, Chutotka Autonomous District, September 2004.

I think this must really be Bilibino, home of Russia's only nuclear plant providing district heating as well as electricity and as such rather a research plant. Techies can find out about the plant here. The incidence of safety problems does not make happy reading, and the failure of citizens to pay for heat and power suggests that even the scientists are not paid well. The plant is due to close soon but won't as there is nothing to replace it.

Not much to celebrate then.

'Drivers! You are answerable for the lives of the inhabitants of Kolyma', September 2004

Kolyma is best known as the Soviet Auschwitz. Kolyma Tales (described by Amazon as among the Twentieth-Century Classics) written by a survivor, Varlam Shalamov, has many good reviews.

Who will be answerable for the lives of those who did not survive Kolyma?

Departure lounge, Magadan airport September 2004

I chose this photo perhaps because I had spent too much time waiting in Boryspil airport the other day. Not that Magadan resembles Boryspil much. But it is a standard Soviet design, which I recognise from somewhere I have been. Irkutsk maybe? Leningrad? All Soviet public buildings have those high windows, and dark ceiling tiles or dark metal structures and a few quite inadequate light fittings lost amongst them. The bufet, seating (or perhaps one should say "standing") are typical. So is the complete lack of seating for waiting passengers.

So are the vitrines (I've no idea what they might be called in English) showing off what looks like dried fish, or in the far one, nothing at all. At least the mural is not the usual socialist realist art. It looks more like it was influenced by Picasso's "Guernica".

Here too, Stalin has something to answer for, as Magadan was the administrative centre for the gulags in the region.

As Wikipedia puts it

A highway leads from Magadan to the gold-mining region on the upper Kolyma River. This is known as the "Road of Bones" because of the prisoners who died during its construction—their bones were incorporated into the road.

During the Stalin era, Magadan was a major transit center for prisoners being sent to labor camps. The operations of Dal'stroi, a vast and brutal forced-labor gold-mining concern, were the main economic driver of the city for many decades during Soviet times.

Magadan is very isolated. There is only one road in and out, and the nearest city is Yakutsk, 2200km away down a road that is only half paved.

Magadan has an enormous Cathedral under construction, and the Mask of Sorrow memorial - a huge sculpture in memory of Stalin's victims.

Some more photos of modern Magadan (with natural colours) here and here

The US warship Daniel Morgan, torpedoed by the Germans in 1942, abandoned in the Barents Sea, Murmansk, January 2005.

This, to me, looks like a scene from the "zone" in Tarkovsky's film Stalker, described by one reviewer as "Visions of Faust in a post Chernobyl-like hell".

Hadjihat, a Chechen refugee, with her children, outside their temporary housing built inside a derelict factory, Ingushetia, April 2005.

This photo really upset me. Imagine those kids growing up there. Where is the dignity in that?

And finally

Slava, Yuri and President Putin, Pytiagorsk (sic), Caucasus, march 2005

Granta should definitely be more careful with its proof reading of Russian names, as this must surely be Pyatigorsk. It's not clear to me whether this is the new casual Putin, jacket hooked over his shoulder, or whether he is really raising two fingers in a papal blessing.

Those two guys look pretty smart in their suits and ties. Must have been an important occasion.

I shall have to get the book, when it comes out.