“I wanted to be with you sooner…” This first line, a faint melody, I imagine played by a solitary piano. This unwavering, melancholic undertone, suggesting that Eszter Encsy is addressing someone who is no longer in her life.
There is a calm, almost cold, but delicate aching to be accepted and understood. Recollections of childhood come across as confessions and explanations… including that time she did not mean to kill the fawn.
But how did that seemingly dispensable incident earn the title of the book? Perhaps the fawn is meant to symbolize the fragility of youth, and how easily it can be broken.
Magda Szabó, who died with a book in her hand, has bequeathed to the world novels that aim straight for the soul. She wrote of women; women who do not have to be faultless. She did not demand heroics from them or for them to be worthy of admiration or to be idealized. She only asked that they live — live intensely, and learn.
And yet, I did not expect her to go to the extent of Eszter. The moral puzzles are not vague here, it is made quite clear what kind of person we have as a central figure right from the beginning: “I could never have undertaken to be a good girl and never to tell lies…” “I lie so easily I could have made a career out of it…” “I was also laughing at the monster I really am…” “I wasn’t a very nice person and I wasn’t very friendly…”
We immediately get the picture. Appalled, we double-check the synopsis, even though Szabó readers know that her synopses hardly describe what one encounters between the pages. But we read on. Because Szabó is brilliant. Because we suspect that a gut punch or two awaits round the bend. Because oftentimes, nothing is what it initially seems. Because she writes of those difficult spaces between people that most of us are too inattentive, too timid, or too unimaginative to explore. Because we know that behind all her stories is a carefully woven leitmotif of a history she mourns. Because Szabó is always subtly reminding us of consequences, of how we cannot extricate our personal histories from that of our nation. Because she is eternally thought-provoking, and therefore, rewarding.
…and because those elegiac strains from that lonesome piano will linger long after you’ve turned the last page.
“Finally, I would like to say, I intended to write… not just in Turkish, but in the language of all who lament for the dead. And I intended to write it with the language of figs…”
The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres that was signed between the Allies of WWI and the Ottoman Empire is not explained here. There is nothing here that mentions how it marked the beginning of the partitioning of the empire, how Armenia was subsequently recognized as an independent state and a referendum was scheduled to decide the fate of the dream of a Kurdistan, but nothing of how the referendum never took place. No details of what exactly happened when the Kurds within Turkish borders clashed with Turkish nationalism; nothing of the decisions, events, or indecisions that led to the extermination of more than half of the Kurdish population in Turkey by 1938.
Throughout the book an unnamed and unidentified narrator addresses a woman muted by grief and coaxes her, not to speech, but to remembrance — a remembrance not of a specific event but of her spiritual and personal history, and the ancient mythology of her people; and I believe here lies the genius of this novel. Without explicitly saying that this book is about identity, Sema Kaygusuz makes this book wholly about identity.
Out of the silence roars a powerful voice that resists all attempts at wiping out Kurdish identity. I have come to understand that this book is, above anything else, a rallying cry for the Kurdish people: For them to never forget who they are. To never give in to the silencing, and to never allow grief to estrange them from who they really are.
What is between these pages is something that we won’t find in the chronologies of history. What is written here is more profound. In this novel that reads more like a lengthy poem, Kaygusuz achieves the impossible task of giving shape to grief and silence, and intimating a manner of history that can only be expressed through obmutescence or poetry.
“Finally, I would like to say, I intended to write not just in Turkish, but in the language of all who lament for the dead. And I intended to write it with the language of figs… the fig tree whose fruit has, over the course of the history of civilization, seduced and destroyed, poisoned and healed, struck panic in those captivated by its pleasure, and been served like jewels at the tables of kings, pharaohs, and sultans — in order that I might set aside its vitalizing force, its enviable adventure, in writing. What I mean to say is that, over the course of this novel, I am not only my grandmother who survived the massacre: I am also her granddaughter, I am Hizir, and I am a fig, with its countless tiny seeds. Each of us has written the others into being.” — from the Afterword of Every Fire You Tend by Sema Kaygusuz
Thank you for knowing exactly what I’d love to read and for lending me your copy, Gabi. Always grateful. 🤍
Fleeting patches of sunlight that decorate pieces of furniture, linger on book pages furtively as I read, or momentarily set the crema of my espresso aglow, are lovely indications that summer is gently slipping into the Philippine islands after a sunless wet season.
But why do I even dare write this in the face of a Liberaki who is an authority on sunshine? This Liberaki who does not merely write about it but makes it so tangible that one’s heart becomes dappled with sunlight, too?
There is a little bit of the Little Women in Liberaki’s three sisters in that it portrays in each sister how Woman can make different choices, pursue different interests, hold different priorities, think differently and still remain Woman; portrays how Woman can mean, or can be, “A great many things,” in the words of Alcott’s Jo March. Or as Liberaki’s Katerina replies, “Not just two, but thousands, Maria, or one which could be a thousand,” when Maria remarks on how Katerina seems to want to live two lives.
But Liberaki, daughter of Dionysus that she is, has a certain sensuality that Alcott did not make space for in her conservative depiction, although we love her just the same. This Liberaki sensuality is an elegant one, however, and treats female sexuality as part of life.
What made me pick this up for Women’s History Month was the curious case of an author who insisted on transliterating her name as Liberaki, rather than the more accurate Lymberaki, so that it would correspond to liberation. It is rare to come across an author’s name that already alludes to an untethered mind and sets the tone for a book. But how wonderful to discover that the same author has a command of artistic laws and lavishes attention to detail while creating an exquisite balance of light and shadow!
This sensitivity to art was what enthralled me! For what is sensitivity to art but a reinforced sensitivity to life?
“The sun has disappeared from books these days. That’s why they hinder our attempts to live, instead of helping us. But the secret is still kept in your country, passed on from one initiate to another. You are one of those who pass it on.” — Albert Camus to Margarita Liberaki
Three Summers was originally published in France through his recommendation.
During WWII, women served in all branches of the military: 225,000 in the British, 450,000-500,000 in the American, and about a million in the Soviet army. The women in the Soviet army contributed to the German defeat, but little was known and little was said about them and the price they had to pay for victory.
Over the course of twenty six years, Svetlana Alexievich sought out many of these women and became the repository for their untold stories. This is part of the body of work that earns her a place as one of only seventeen women out of a hundred and fifteen Nobel Laureates in Literature.
Maybe it’s because Svetlana Alexievich says that she isn’t writing about war nor the history of a war, “but about human beings in a war… the history of feelings.” Maybe it’s because she is what she says she is, “A historian of the soul.” Maybe it’s because she believes, for good reason, that suffering is “a special kind of knowledge,” “the highest form of information,” that suffering has a direct connection with the mystery of life. (“All of Russian literature is about that. It has written more about suffering than about love. And these women tell me more about it…”) Maybe it’s because she makes this book of unburdening into an overwhelming choir of over two hundred voices singing a soulful rendition of an unsung threnody for the first time, that it answers my question as to why a piercing account of war can be so beautiful and so important.
Special thanks to Gabi for encouraging me to read this and for giving it to me as a birthday present last year. 🤍
Oh, what would it have been like to be Teffi, born into a remarkable time that made personal encounters with Tolstoy, Rasputin, Gorky, and Lenin possible, and to have made a name for herself as a writer in an androcentric literary world?
These delightful autobiographical essays answer that question. From childhood recollections, what her multipurpose desk was like, how her pseudonym came to be, to encounters with history’s formidable men, Teffi writes with a poetic simplicity that makes for light reading while never lacking depth.
“I adore oranges. They are round and golden, like the sun, and beneath their peel are thousands of tiny pockets bursting with sweet, fragrant juice. An orange is a joy. An orange is a thing of beauty.
And suddenly I thought of Ganka. She didn’t know about oranges. Warm tenderness and pity filled my heart.”
Stealing from the crate of oranges, she managed to give one to Ganka, who, in return, “Bit off a piece together with the peel, then suddenly opened her mouth wide, made a horrible face, spat everything out and hurled the orange far into the bushes.”
“I had become a thief in order to give her the best thing I knew in all the world. And she hadn’t understood, and she spat it out.”
And dear Teffi who apparently knew what it’s like to give one’s best and have it discarded just like that, called this short piece “Love”.
“I wanted to be with you sooner…” This first line, a faint melody, I imagine played by a solitary piano. This unwavering, melancholic undertone, suggesting that Eszter Encsy is addressing someone who is no longer in her life.
There is a calm, almost cold, but delicate aching to be accepted and understood. Recollections of childhood come across as confessions and explanations… including that time she did not mean to kill the fawn.
But how did that seemingly dispensable incident earn the title of the book? Perhaps the fawn is meant to symbolize the fragility of youth, and how easily it can be broken.
Magda Szabó, who died with a book in her hand, has bequeathed to the world novels that aim straight for the soul. She wrote of women; women who do not have to be faultless. She did not demand heroics from them or for them to be worthy of admiration or to be idealized. She only asked that they live — live intensely, and learn.
And yet, I did not expect her to go to the extent of Eszter. The moral puzzles are not vague here, it is made quite clear what kind of person we have as a central figure right from the beginning: “I could never have undertaken to be a good girl and never to tell lies…” “I lie so easily I could have made a career out of it…” “I was also laughing at the monster I really am…” “I wasn’t a very nice person and I wasn’t very friendly…”
We immediately get the picture. Appalled, we double-check the synopsis, even though Szabó readers know that her synopses hardly describe what one encounters between the pages. But we read on. Because Szabó is brilliant. Because we suspect that a gut punch or two awaits round the bend. Because oftentimes, nothing is what it initially seems. Because she writes of those difficult spaces between people that most of us are too inattentive, too timid, or too unimaginative to explore. Because we know that behind all her stories is a carefully woven leitmotif of a history she mourns. Because Szabó is always subtly reminding us of consequences, of how we cannot extricate our personal histories from that of our nation. Because she is eternally thought-provoking, and therefore, rewarding.
…and because those elegiac strains from that lonesome piano will linger long after you’ve turned the last page.
Katalin Street
October 13, 2022
Of the invasions of history into our lives; of moral intricacies, those shadowlands between right and wrong; of the love we give, we take, or do not receive — and a fatal overdose of any of the three; of faulty assumptions and miscalculations; of the tangled complexities of relationships between friends, family, and lovers, and even with ideologies and a nation; of the deaths we die before our real deaths; of things we realize too late; of the damage we wreak on those we love; and the irretrievable losses that time inflicts on us… Some books carry with them all that is unutterable and aim straight for your soul, not out of cruelty but out of an earnest art, and disclose that life will silence you… over and over again.
Abigail
September 22, 2022
“In any work of literature the most interesting bits are in the detail,” Kőnig had often said in his lessons. “Be sure to attend to them closely.”
If I had a daughter, she’d find this book in a collection I created for her.
Reading this, she’d be reminded that heroines do not have to be faultless; that the surest assumptions can often be wrong; that no matter how clever we think we are, there are people wiser still; that actions always have consequences; that friendship is precious; that even in the most repetitive of routines and what we deem the bleakest of days, life will find ways to astound or surprise us.
If she philosophizes and reads deeper into the book, as I suspect a daughter of mine will, she will venture to question where childhood ends and adulthood begins, and attempt to come up with answers of her own, or a hundred questions more.
If she develops an awareness of history and politics, as she must, she will be sensitive to Magda Szabo’s subtle activism and glean the lessons of sacrifice and duty.
And I imagine this book — so engaging and difficult to put down — will only fuel the love for reading in her.
Can you tell that I read this through the eyes of a wide-eyed adolescent, and not through the eyes of an adult still haunted by the painful and confounding strains from Iza’s Ballad and The Door but who, nonetheless, acknowledges that Magda Szabó has now become a favorite?
Iza’s Ballad and The Door gnaws at the soul. Abigail educates the heart.
The Door
September 2, 2022
“But a door can hint at so much more.” — Geetanjali Shree, Tomb of Sand
Having come fresh from a streak of world literature for Women in Translation Month, which included Tomb of Sand, I have become more attuned to the implication of doors being more than architectural features. Doors as metaphors for boundaries.
But in contrast to Geetanjali Shree’s doors where, ideally, anyone came and went; Magda Szabó’s door was meant to remain shut. The physical door of the latter was not only a boundary but the framework of a person’s dignity.
Szabó’sIza’s Balladturned out to be the most exquisitely written work from my WiTMonth selection, so I wasted no time in taking a peek into this door.
Curiously, Iza’s Ballad and The Door both have characters hired as household help who do not work for the money. One is a minor character in Iza’s Ballad, but in The Door it is the baffling, the imposing, elderly Emerence, one of the two central figures in the story. Adding to the intrigue is the younger and other main character, a writer, the author’s namesake.
Two decades of love-hate relationship yield misunderstandings and reconciliations, but also critiques on each other’s lives, on art, and on their clashing beliefs. At some point, the writer eventually achieves “the prize” and receives a prestigious recognition for her work, but not without the question of what it cost.
There is a challenge in talking about this book without giving away what the author meticulously wrapped in layers, because reading Szabó is like a careful and deliberate peeling of an onion. The core is shrouded in well-executed veneers where even the revelations continue to maintain a mystery that lead toward a confounding finality.
But she is yet another testament to my hunch that 20th century writers remain unsurpassed. Even with a tinge of absurdism, there is that deep exploration into the dark of interior characterization, a delving in the psychological, spiritual, and philosophical condition of its characters, if only to pose the argument of what it is that really matters in life.
“As he spoke Lidia could see the schoolgirl Iza discussing the future with her father. She saw her as her father described her, as a pint-sized redeemer spreading out her school atlas and examining the map of Budapest because she wanted to see a major city, a really big city, and trying to work out where in City Park the statue of the historian Anonymous might stand. Iza loved the look of that hooded faceless figure. She saw it once when she was a young woman visiting Budapest…” – Magda Szabó, Iza’s Ballad
How pleased I was to have identified with Iza so much! There was even something close to a silent pride that I initially felt. It was as if I were reading my own mother’s description of myself – how Iza organized her life and her schedule, the tidiness, the discipline, the sense of responsibility, the restraint, her satisfaction in not having to give account of herself to anyone!
But how I trembled, as I turned the pages approaching the finale when I realized that it was because of this unrelenting self-discipline seeping into the cracks of her relationships that led to heartbreaking consequences.
It is for readers with aging parents. It is for every new generation that believes they are so much wiser than the previous one, so practical even in matters of the heart, and yet, unwittingly, so heartless.
It is for societies that reject the past and the old deeming these to be outdated and sentimental, failing to acknowledge that the past and the old hold the clues to the present and the new.
Although set in postwar Hungary, the spirit of this novel is contemporary: the timelessness of its message, its tragedies that are themselves the lessons, will gnaw at my soul for years to come.
Few books leave me feeling defeated. This one did. I felt so helpless under the influence of such simple but penetrating prose.
It is that dazed emotion one undergoes when someone so much wiser with experience sings in a pensive gasp, “I really don’t know life… at all…” Yes, someone like the inimitable Joni Mitchell, only Magda Szabó does it with an outstanding novel that she affectionately hands over to the reader saying, “You really don’t know life… at all…”
And in the presence of such masterful artistry and truth, what else can one do but applaud and weep?
“In any work of literature the most interesting bits are in the detail,” Kőnig had often said in his lessons. “Be sure to attend to them closely.”
If I had a daughter, she’d find this book in a collection I created for her.
Reading this, she’d be reminded that heroines do not have to be faultless; that the surest assumptions can often be wrong; that no matter how clever we think we are, there are people wiser still; that actions always have consequences; that friendship is precious; that even in the most repetitive of routines and what we deem the bleakest of days, life will find ways to astound or surprise us.
If she philosophizes and reads deeper into the book, as I suspect a daughter of mine will, she will venture to question where childhood ends and adulthood begins, and attempt to come up with answers of her own, or a hundred questions more.
If she develops an awareness of history and politics, as she must, she will be sensitive to Magda Szabo’s subtle activism and glean the lessons of sacrifice and duty.
And I imagine this book — so engaging and difficult to put down — will only fuel the love for reading in her.
Can you tell that I read this through the eyes of a wide-eyed adolescent, and not through the eyes of an adult still haunted by the painful and confounding strains from Iza’s Ballad and The Door but who, nonetheless, acknowledges that Magda Szabó has now become a favorite?
Iza’s Ballad and The Door gnaws at the soul. Abigail educates the heart.
Samadhi, a word that denotes a meditative calm greets like a namaste on the first page.
And then, cacophony! An onslaught of sounds, smells, colors, and wordplay! You are planted right smack at the center of a palpable, household chaos — the matriarch sinks into depression, the matriarch disappears! Bickering. Finger-pointing. A familial upheaval. What samadhi?!
But cacophony, if we listen closely and do not shut it out immediately, can turn into polyphony; and we chase after as many melodic lines that make themselves heard to us. Although sometimes, as in the case of the old woman, just one particular melody line, the one that meant most to her in her last days, the one that muffled all others, the one she pursued as the path to her own personal samadhi.
– – –
Tomb of Sand, winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize; written by Geetanjali Shree and translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell is the culmination of Women in Translation Month that came to me by chance, but just in time.
If not for a dear friend who mailed me her copy for infinite adoption after reading and reviewing it insightfully, then I would not have rushed into acquiring one.
Tomb of Sand turned out to embody in its polyphony the leitmotifs explored in my significant picks for #WiTMonth:
Georgian Nino Haratischwili’s The Eighth Lifeon the topic of how we are all reflections of our own time but inheritors of intergenerational memory. In Shree’s words, “I feel as though a bullet was fired in some other century but didn’t stay in that century. It keeps hitting the people who came later…”
Hungarian Magda Szabo’s Iza’s Balladon the relationship of mother and daughter and the collision of old and new.
Palestinian Adania Shibli’s Minor Detailon the painful subject of encroached boundaries and artificially imposed borders; reminding me that there were two massive Partitions in world history that transpired in 1947, and that both involved religious segregation. “Divisions. A jubilee of hatred. The joy of rifts.”
But Tomb of Sand’s old woman, whose life and interfaith romance was a victim of the Partition, has this powerful thing to say about how borders should be: “Do you know what a border is? What is a border? It’s something that surrounds an existence, it is a person’s perimeter…. However a border is not created to be removed. It is meant to illuminate both sides…. A border does not enclose, it opens out… Where two sides meet and both flourish.
Every part of the body has a border. So does the heart. A border surrounds it but it also binds it to other parts. It doesn’t wrench the heart from the rest. Fools! If you cut a border through the heart, you don’t call it a border, you call it a wound…
Asses! A border stops nothing. It is a bridge between two connected parts…
A border is a horizon. Where two worlds meet. And embrace.
A border is love. Love does not create a jail… A border is a line of meeting… It is a confluence…
A border, gentlemen, is for crossing.
The border exists to connect, one to another. If there’s one, there’s another. Through love.
If you hate, the blood that flows through arteries to deliver strength from here to there will flow out and away; each side will die bit by bit. What fool would want this?
But this is what you fools want. You’ve made the border a sort of hatred. Not an exquisite border enhancing beauty on both sides, but one that kills them both, a murderous beast cutting the artery. Ignoramuses!
…borders running with blood can have only one consequence. The blood will burst their borders and seep away, all the limbs will dry up and stiffen, but everyone will keep chanting Allahu Akbar and Hare Rama Hare Krishna.
Though it marches to its own rhythm, the literary symmetries it shares with the works of other women authors across borders only pronounce the universality of this novel.
It is life, crossing the boundary to literature.
Thank you, Gabi, for passing on the tears and the lessons along with a pretty bookmark!
_ _ _
WiTMonth Wrap-Up
It is my first time to observe Women in Translation Month since its birth in 2014. I’ve never felt the need to participate because of a consistent presence of translated works by women in my literary diet. But now that I’m back to maintaining a book blog, I feel this is the time that observing #WiTMonth will make a difference.
Meytal Radzinski started this tradition after a critical assessment of the publishing world led to the discovery that only thirty percent of translated literature were works by women authors.
So here I am, along with those celebrating, reminding the publishing community that there is an overwhelming readership eager to tip the scales.
Freya Stark once wrote, “No medium has yet been devised for the translation of life into language.”
Most of this month’s selections come rather close.
My father’s sculpture with The Sculptor’s Daughter.
This book was a birthday present I received years ago; given to me perhaps because I, too, am a sculptor’s daughter.
If not for the wintry setting, my childhood would not have strayed too far from Tove Jansson’s. Ice and snow aside, I immediately recognized the environment of an artist’s household! A world of creativity and wonder in which the gravest insult one can muster is, “You are not an artist!” Haha!
I know what it’s like to be made aware of chiaroscuro, composition, shapes, and shades, and to perceive the world with this awareness so early in life; and to realize only as an adult that this is rather unconventional.
Sculptor’s Daughter is the first book she wrote for adults, and although written in her senior years, Tove Janssonis once again a child speaking with simplicity and a disarming, childlike wisdom. She makes indelible images of amusing experiences, encounters, and juvenile feelings, and often leaves traces of artistic ideals.
While this may not fall under the category of books I would readily recommend to anyone, I would suggest it for days when a reader wishes to revisit a particular place called Childhood.
The first few things you will ask yourself after reading this are questions in the vicinity of, “Was that really 934 pages long? How was I able to read that so quickly?”
Tougher questions will follow: The question of identity, the question of who you are and what shaped you. The question of history and how you cannot ever separate your personal history from history in general.
What do you really know about history? What do you really know about yourself?
“For me, the greatest reward was her stories.” – Nino Haratischvili, The Eighth Life
At the beginning of the century that would suffer two World Wars, and many other wars, a chocolatier prospers in Georgia under the Russian Empire. His chocolaterie thrives and caters to townsmen and Russian nobility, but after a tragedy following the devouring of the the secret recipe in its purest form, he soon suspects that it holds a curse. The recipe would, however, always manage to find its way to the next generation and throughout the entire century.
The accursed hot chocolate recipe was something I would normally expect to savor from Latin American magic realists and I was initially unsure of how I felt about coming across this flavor in The Eighth Life. I thought it could easily be dispensable in the grand, cinematic scope of the story.
But wasn’t this family saga set in junctions of the immeasurable Silk Route where anything could happen, and where the influence of Scheherazade’s fantasies still linger at every bend?
I eventually gave in to this literary ingredient and pondered if it was meant to symbolize the intergenerational curses — inherited pain, memory, and trauma — to which we become heirs and which we unknowingly impart.
_ _ _
The casual tone of the narrative deceived me at the onset. You could tell you were not reading Vasily Grossman or Olga Tokarczuk. (The comparison is unavoidable as theirs were the novels I read this year that are similar in length and with similar intersecting eras and geographies.)
It is, after all, addressed to Brilka, an adolescent; and so the narrator spells things out. We know that this is something masters of literature usually avoid, but it was this casual and explanatory tone that made me so unsuspecting of how it would sweep me up in its emotional and historical hurricane. I found myself wiping away tears a number of times, grieving for the characters with their extinguished hopes and dreams, and for the entire broken century that was also partly my own.
It is remarkable how the novel captured the spirit of each era it depicted, even the confusions and the troubles of each age reflected in the characters. To present these — along with the complex convergence of Russian and Georgian histories and politics, and how Soviet tyranny affected so many lives across borders — in such a readable manner only made me recognize Nino Haratischvili’s command of such topics.
This novel is a strange oxymoron to me: For being simultaneously accessible and wise, for being both painful and satisfying, and for lending answers as it asks questions.
_ _ _
What do you really know about history? What do you really know about yourself?
Could it be true, that chilling thing Kostya said about everything waiting to come back?
‘What statues and pictures?’ I asked.
‘You know, of Lenin, Marx, and Engels, the Generalissimus — all those men!’ He seemed to be giving it serious thought.
‘They’ve gone.’
‘But they can’t all just disappear, just like that!’
‘Apparently they can. Everything disappears sooner or later.’
‘Nothing disappears. Nothing, Niza!’ He laid is hand on mine.
‘You mean, everything is hidden somewhere, waiting to be found again?’ I tried to bring myself to smile.
The Book-Butterfly 