Category: Poland

Olga Tokarczuk: The Empusium

“Wojnicz had noticed that every discussion, whether about democracy, the fifth dimension, the role of religion, socialism, Europe, or modern art, eventually led to women.”

Reading Olga with UP Symphony rehearsing Shostakovich as background.

Mischief. More literary mischief from Olga.

That the first death in the book happens to be of a woman whom our dear Wojnicz mistakes for a servant, when she is in fact the guesthouse proprietor’s wife, is not negligible.

And then, mushrooms. Then the puns in the names: January and August, two characters named after months, months named after a two-faced Roman god and a Roman Caesar; Dr. Semperweiss, because, always white; and it’s not a mere coincidence how the owner of the Guesthouse for Gentlemen where Wojnicz lodges is named Wilhelm “Willi” Opitz (see Opitz syndrome, especially in males); the Tuntschi, definitely a nod to the Sennentuntschi of Alpine folklore involving an ill-treated doll that retaliates; and Empusium, after Empusa, the female shape-shifter of Greek mythology.

The Empusium is Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain reframed, they say. Friends who have known me way back from my Thomas Mann reading phase know the story of how I developed a fever while reading the Magic Mountain. (They tried to assuage my sickness by saying that it’s the best state in which to read Thomas Mann. Hah!) Strangely enough, I also got sick a day after I started reading The Empusium. Whether that’s part of Olga’s mischief, I cannot say for sure, but, “The story has a spirit of sickness,” says my mom ominously. 

While Mann’s mountain was an allegory for a sick Europe, Olga’s mountain is glaringly sick with misogyny. In the author’s note, Olga divulges that the chauvinistic passages were paraphrased from the words of history’s famous men, and she names all of them. Why do you think it’s labeled as a “horror story”?

Ryszard Kapuscinski: Shah of Shahs

“As a journalist, I say: Long live the magic. Kapuściński is an advocate for all who have chafed in a straitjacket called the house style, seen their lyrical phrases slashed for space, cursed the whole pedantic army of editors and fact checkers… he is a journalist’s writer, an example of what so many of us would love to be — if only we had the nerve.” — Christopher de Bellaigue

When one has had their fill of different accounts of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, fiction and nonfiction, Iranian and foreign; when an ample idea of its unfolding and its chronology has finally taken root; when details and events have been repeated enough and begin to sound redundant unless they are written with an exceptional voice and perspective; it is time to read Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuściński — my personal cherry on the top of an Iranian Revolution literary stack.

It is not the book to read if one prefers a sequential list of events, a full cast of characters, an emotionally-charged dramatization, or a detailed portrayal of the Shah. This is not a portrait of the last Shah of Iran, neither is it a consummate portrait of a nation. From the collected clutter on Kapuściński’s hotel room desk in Tehran emerges a portrait of the nature of dictatorships and revolutions.

I can only wish he elaborated on that extravagant celebration that the Iranian despot held in Persepolis in 1971, which contributed to the flames of revolution, and in which the first guest to arrive at the event was Imelda Marcos. I would have loved for Kapuściński to have written a book about the Marcos family and our own EDSA Revolution!

For a Filipina reader and albeit dormant journalist, the writing method is illuminating and the subject hits close to home. There are too many passages that feel as if he were describing my own nation’s recent history. But then again, “The rather small arsenal of political tricks has not changed in millennia,” observed Kapuściński, who reported on twenty-seven revolutions during his illustrious career as a journalist.

Within a corrupt government, “Whoever tried to be honest looked like a paid stoolie.” “The higher up, the fuller the pockets,” and in that world, “development” has an entirely different meaning. “Any dictatorship appeals to the lowest instincts of the governed,” “A despot believes that man is an abject creature. Abject people fill his court and populate his environment.”

That a fed and entertained populace does not always signify a free society is a truth that burns: “A terrorized society will behave like an unthinking, submissive mob for a long time. Feeding it is enough to make it obey. Provided with amusements, it’s happy.”

And this is what he says about truth: “It takes a long time for a truth to mature, and in the meantime people suffer or blunder around in ignorance.” I’d like to believe, however, that reading the writings of Kapuściński speeds the process.

At the back of my mind, this question: Is Iran in the cusp of another revolution?

Olga Tokarczuk: The Books of Jacob

I will not be stingy with truth. And because the truth is often bound to be difficult and makes us squirm in our comfortable seats, the question is not whether you will like this. The question is whether you can swallow it — the nature of flawed leaders, of spiritual shepherds who are wolves to their own flock, of society, of human beings, of real characters.

This is what Olga Tokarczuk conveys to me right from the first of seven books in The Books of Jacob.

She thrusts us into 1752 Poland where there is a growing animosity towards the Jews and the longing for a messiah is intensified. But only in the second book do we meet the messianic figure: Jacob Frank who asks, “What do we want some sage for?” Jacob whose sexual perversities are now being slowly divulged to the reader. Jacob who ridicules his most earnest followers while they, in the goodness of their hearts, concoct half-truths and falsehoods about him to glorify him; because he is seemingly authentic in everything he does; and although repulsive, he is charming.

All these, eerily juxtaposed with current events in the Philippines: the FBI issuing a poster of church leader Apollo Quiboloy’s warrant of arrest for fraud, coercion, and sex trafficking; a dictator’s son who is a tax code offender leading the presidential polls; the former being an open endorser of the latter.

With an increasing throng of followers, this charismatic Jacob Frank preached the idea that the notion of sin no longer applies. There was no room for conventional morality in his philosophy. “We are to trample all the laws because they are no longer in effect…”

There is no more morality — a common refrain among leaders and their supporters today who justify wrongdoing and do not wish to face accountability! 

I was wrong. Olga did not thrust us into events over two centuries ago with this opus. She brings us to the present. This is us. This is us. Because isn’t morality dead to us unless and until the injustice is done by those we dislike, and then we cry foul and demand morality and justice?

This colossus — a lyrical galaxy of darkness and light, weakness and strength, of comets and plagues set in some of the most exciting places I have actually been to, of beautiful passages about literature and how it somehow makes solid the ground beneath us despite this chaotic world, of history and its excruciating details — is not exactly about Jacob. It is about society and how we create the tapestry of history with our actions and our choices… and it seems like we never learn.

Olga Tokarczuk: Flights

The main motivation for reading this book was in knowing that it recounts the transit of Chopin’s heart back to Warsaw while his body was interred at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Every classical musician knows this strangely romantic story of how his homesick heart finally returned home; but naturally, I also wanted to read it narrated by a Nobel winner.

Flights turned out to be an unexpected reading experience. It is a literary collage written the way the author describes postcards nowadays: “Postcards of landscapes, panoramas of old ruins, postcards ambitiously prepared so as to show as much as possible on that flat surface, are slowly being replaced by photographs focusing on details.  This is no doubt a good idea, because they relieve tired minds. There is too much world, so it’s better to concentrate on particulars, rather than the whole.”

And so she does. These details and particulars in question are the mind, the soul, psychology, the physical brain, the heart, and the entire human body; which, ironically, also turns out to be “so much world.” It is a travel book with emotional itineraries and mental maps. A special trip around, or more accurately, inside the world. But in its entirety, it is an unusual research on pain, and a unique meditation on traveling, space, time, and movement.

The literary phases of my life have always been geographic, I now realize. Even my shelves are organized based on geography. Russia on the topmost shelf, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom on the succeeding tiers, and so on… and there’s the presently expanding Fertile Crescent and Silk Route section. Tokarczuk being Polish might seem like a veering away from my current authors of choice, and yet, the undeniable influence of the Arabian Nights is still lurking in this masterpiece. Even though I have a feeling that this book will ultimately settle down in the Eastern European section beside Kundera, this one feels like it belongs to each and every section.

As it is with masterpieces, this one transcends geography and other borders.