Book 219: St Kitts (Christopher) & Nevis (English) – A State of Independence (Caryl PHILLIPS)

 

The applause was thunderous, and Bertram watched the new flag slide up the pole and cross the old one slithering down. In the distance he heard the cracked report as the guns of the British Royal Navy fired their salute, and overhead a cloud of doves flew in all directions, glad to have escaped their independence baskets. As the church clock struck midnight, and the cheering and celebratory noises grew even louder, Bertram heard raindrops beginning to slap against the leaves of the trees above him. Then as the wheels of history turned, and Mount Misery became Mount Freedom, and Pall Mall Square became Independence Square (although the island had decided to keep its old colonial name), someone punched a hole in the sky and everybody ran for cover as the rain broke through. As they did so the police band started to play the new national anthem in G major like the old British one, but they struggled to find the notes to this new tune. Bertram listened to their waterlogged and unmusical rendering of what seemed an otherwise pleasant composition, but before the band could rescue the anthem the heavens opened wide. The musicians now ran for cover, and all around the umbrellas bloomed like flowers, and the sharp bullets of rain joined the sky to the earth.

Here we are in our last nation in the Americas. The main island is also (though not usually) known as St Christopher. The novel is set in an unnamed country on the cusp of gaining independence from the UK, presumably based on St Kitts & Nevis – it has two islands, and had a third (Anguilla?) which perhaps uniquely fled the terrors of independence back to the colonial uterus.

And the theme is the time when St Kitts – or a country very like it – gained independence from Britain. The protagonist, Bertram, whose father had died when he was 8, won a scholarship to study law in England when he was 19, and doesn’t return until 20 years later, days before the independence ceremony ‘to help’. (St Kitts & Nevis became independent in 1967 with Anguilla, and in 1983 without it). While overseas, he had abandoned his family responsibilities, just like his country. He has not been very successful, and like his native country he hopes to succeed at “something that doesn’t make me dependent on the white man”. His old boyhood friend Jackson has become the Deputy PM, but when he visits him to explore his vague business ideas, the latter has become arrogant and insulting (only interested in the US). But Bertran is also arrogant for thinking that he can waltz back in to the country he had abandoned with nothing to offer. He no longer understands the place and seems very naive about life and the island. The new nation’s politicians are obviously on the make. Bertram has jumped from one island to another, and fallen into the water between.

So, a rather cynical view of independence in general and of his own islands in particular. Is it really possible for any nation (or person, going back to Independent People, our Icelandic novel) to be really independent? None can be, 100%. And experiences will always fall short of hopes – and politicians’ promises. (Some people are unable to get a bus to watch the independence ceremonies).

Short as it is, the writing is great. The novel has some wonderful passages, e.g.,

The room disturbed him for it looked like a museum, but a special kind of museum where only he could be aware of the significance of the items on exhibition.

Or,

Like all politicians, Jackson’s conversation was as straight as a motorway on which undernourished ideas flashed past in both directions.

I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting such an excellent novel so close to the pointy end of this project!

Phillips, Caryl (1958 – ), A State of Independence, New York, Vintage, 1999, ISBN 0-679-75930-1

(originally published 1986)

Book 203: São Tomé and Príncipe (Portuguese) – Crónica de uma guerra inventada (Sum MARKY)

Nobre de Carvalho was 36 years old when he was taken prisoner in his house, in the State cottage 42, in the Dr. Marcelo Caetano District, on that night of the 10th of February 1953. He was wearing pyjamas and was preparing to go to bed, when they pounded, thunderously, on the door of his house. He had been expecting to be taken prisoner at any moment, but never at such a late hour. The city was boiling with frightening rumours about the native revolt. He was sure that they were false, but the fear remained, insidious. So, when they opened the door and he faced Carlos Silva, his heart seemed to leap out of his chest. “You can consider yourself a prisoner!” he said, in a harsh voice. “Get dressed and come with us!”

[my translation]

With its smallest country, we have to bid a fond farewell to Africa. So many amazing books I’ve now read from there! It’s also sad that, as far as I know, no novels have been published in English from this little country in the gulf. This rather classic novel in Portuguese is based on true history.

While Salazar is running his dictatorship in mainland Portugal, in the then Portuguese colony of São Tomé & Príncipe the local governor Colonel Gorgulho seems to be running an even more ugly and paranoid regime with his own personal dictatorship with control over the life and death of the people. And the way he keeps control and persecutes his opponents (real and imagined) is to invent, not so much a war as in the title, as a rebellion. This revolt never existed. To ‘prove’ that it did, his henchmen torture ordinary innocent people to concoct and ‘confirm’ the details and the ‘participants’ in this putative plot. There are the usual sick tortures, with a few imaginative local variants. All of the ‘Blacks’ and many of the ‘Whites’ in the country are terrorised. Into this hell-hole (set in what look like paradisaical beautiful islands in the Gulf of Guinea) comes a saviour.

In summary, what happened from 3rd February 1953 was:

1. The Government of the Island tried to prove at any cost that there existed an uprising of the natives, which it had named “The War of Batepá”;

2. It tried to implicate as chief of the “revolt” Engineer Graça and as accomplices most of the native public servants;

3. To obtain, by whatever methods, including torture and death, the proofs necessary to prove the existence of this “war”.

A very brave and moral lawyer, Dr João Carlos, comes from mainland Portugal to investigate and to defend the prisoners. To Dr Carlos’ embarrassment, the hopeless prisoners see him as a prophet sent by God to save them and their country. When he arrives, he is obviously expected; all the hotels had been told to say they were full (at some personal risk, a Dr Simões lets him use one of his rooms).

Perhaps the most memorable character in the novel is the curandero (traditional healer, or witch doctor) Sum Clé-Clé, who saves the life of the administrator and turns out to be the one who had instigated the lawyer’s arrival.

I felt that Dr Carlos’ and his assistant Aida’s final speeches sounded unnatural and staged.

Despite the depressing theme, the novel is often funny (for example, the wife who abandons her husband who does nothing – in bed!)

This is the longest book I’ve ever read in Portuguese (426 pages) and frankly I felt it was too long. The horrors inflicted on each victim begin to sound repetitive and there is a fair amount of repetition. It could have been substantially cut without losing any impact, on the contrary. But it is a great novel and I’m glad I read it. Hopefully one day it will be translated into English. (Since ‘sum’ seems to mean ‘Mr’ in the local Creole, I assume that Sum Marky is a pseudonym. The author himself was imprisoned by the regime.)

Sum Marky (1921 -2003 ), Crónica De Uma Guerra Inventada, Lisbon, Vega, 1999, ISBN 972-699-627-9

Book 187: Suriname (English) – Hoe duur was de Suiker = The Cost of Sugar (Cynthia McLeod)

All this time Rutger had said nothing. He could only look at the hand on the crusher, at the man on the ground and all that blood. Only one thought went through his mind: all this for sugar, and a pound of sugar cost five cents! Five cents for a pound of sugar, and how many hands, arms, legs and human lives were sacrificed for this! He looked towards Mr Vredelings, for whom such a thing was apparently completely normal, for as soon as the victim had been removed from the building he called another slave to the crusher, saying roughly, “And take more care, you.”

 

Sadly this is the last country in South America (although French Guiana is yet to come) – I love the literature from this continent and wish there were more countries to read!

The Cost of Sugar is set in the 1700s among the wealthy Jewish sugarcane plantation owners of Dutch-ruled Suriname. I was surprised (but perhaps I shouldn’t have been) that even here there was racism against the Jews from other Dutch plantation owners, despite them having been instrumental in the establishment of the colony. But even this was nothing compared to what the slaves suffered. The two main characters are the sensible Elza and her more daring step-sister and best friend (although not for long), Sarith. Sarith is a flirt, even with her friend’s husband – she tries to steal him. She marries Elza’s boring but relatively liberal spouse Rutger while Elza is in Europe.

There is also the inevitable (then, at least) power imbalance between men who are allowed to act and their women who are supposed to be decorative and put up with their sleeping around and keeping a powerless black concubine.

This is a colony where the sugar economy is everything. Even the price of everything was expressed in a pound of sugar. It is nothing for the slaves to lose hands – and lives – in the sugar mills. The overseers are brutal and callous. The fluctuations in the sugar price are matters of life and death.

The plantation owners have personal black slaves. (The masters and concubines are mulattos). The slaves as usual are at the mercy of their masters’ merest whims, as when Ashana is whipped to death for telling the truth about Sarith.

Eventually, the slaves decide to fight against their ill-treatment and increasing numbers flee. At the end, Elza belatedly realises that the whole society was totally dependent on slavery. By themselves, the whites were helpless; they were dependent on the slaves, but not vice versa (as evidenced by the way the Maroons had flourished in the jungle – and the slave owners are terrified by the example they set, more than by anything they do).

I really enjoyed this historical novel which taught me so much about the story of Suriname, which was both similar to and different from other slave societies. There was much to think about, and it’s not all in the past – even if formal slavery has mostly vanished, how much do we think about what people go through so that we can enjoy ‘reasonably priced’ chocolate and coffee? Cynthia McLeod is the wife of Suriname’s first president, Dr. Johan Ferrier.

 

McLeod, Cynthia (1936 – ), The Cost of Sugar, translated from Dutch by Gerald R. Mettam, London, 2013, ISBN 978 1 908446 27 5 HopeRoad, 1987, 2013

 

Book 174: East Timor/Timor Leste (French) – Requiem pour Alain Gerbault = Requiem para o navegador solitário (Luis CARDOSO)

“Are you waiting for someone, Catarina?”

He had surprised me on the balcony watching the sea.

César Semedo didn’t seem to me to be caught up in the atmosphere of fear which had seized the city. I said to him that, while time was passing, everyone was watching the sea, waiting for the arrival of its ghost. This could be just as well a Portuguese ship as the Japanese fleet or the sailboat of a solitary sailor.

[my translation]

This romance by East Timor’s premier writer (now living in Portugal) is inspired by real events. During World War II, this little Portuguese colony, isolated on the other side of the world from its ruler in the middle of the Dutch East Indies (which was soon to become Indonesia), is feeling abandoned and gripped by an atmosphere of waiting. It is waiting for the solo French sailor, who had circumnavigated the globe, Alain Gerbault; for the Portuguese ship on which everyone depends for survival; and for the Japanese, who are sweeping down through Southeast Asia and menacing the abandoned colony.

In a few ways the love story was reminiscent of my Jamaican novel. Catarina has read the journal of Gerbault’s voyage and can’t wait for his arrival, she dreams he will be the Prince Charming to save fer from the cruel life she has suffered. When Gerbault finally arrives, he is sick with malaria and needing the nurse which she becomes (he is more like a ghost than her Prince Charming), and he ends up dying in Dili in 1941. She is an avid cat collector and gives them people’s names (the novel seems to be populated with more cats than people). She ‘inherits’ his boat, and all her visitors bring her a cat as a present. Here she witnesses the Japanese invasion.

Alain Gerbault is probably mostly forgotten nowadays, except perhaps in Timor Leste and in France (the original Portuguese and the other translations – it hasn’t been translated into English – don’t mention his name in the title, but are called more anonymously “Requiem for the Solitary Sailor”). What I enjoyed most about it, apart from learning about a corner of history unknown to me, was the atmosphere of tropic torpor and expectation.

CARDOSO, Luís (1958 – ), Requiem pour Alain Gerbault, translated from Portuguese by Catherine Dumas, Toulouse, Arkuis, 2014, ISBN 978-2-919090-02-0

(First published in Portuguese, 2007)

CARDOSO, Luís (1958 – ), Requiem pour Alain Gerbault, translated from Portuguese by Catherine Dumas, Toulouse, Arkuis, 2014, ISBN 978-2-919090-02-0

(First published in Portuguese, 2007)

 

Book 171: Estonia – The Czar’s Madman = Keisri Hull (Jaan KROSS)

So, back to the first question: should I support him in his madness or in his sanity?

            That would seem to depend on whether he is, in fact, mad or sane. I can’t tell – I don’t even know what I consider him to be. Is it possible to recover from such a state, in such circumstances? I believe (while being aware of my deep ignorance, I still have to voice an opinion) – I believe that such a recovery may well be rare but not impossible.

Timo has been released from prison into house arrest but is still in danger from police informers. He is generally considered to be insane (if you criticise the tsar, not to mention if you are a noble who marries a peasant woman, ipso facto you are mad), and it was his madness that got him out of prison. He has written a dangerous critical memorandum to the then Tsar (Alexander I) – posing a dilemma for the narrator, the brother of his wife (Eeva), who has discovered it in its hiding place and has to decide what to do (most of all, whether he really is mad, or just pretending to be for his protection). And what is the secret link between Timo and the tsar?

The narrator, Jakob, keeps an equally dangerous secret diary over the decades, which is this novel, supposedly found long after the events.

The characters in the novel are great, especially the enigmatic Timo, who has the enormous courage, morality, brainpower and luck – in short, ‘character’ – needed by the dissident. He is ‘guarded’ by the clever, beautiful Eeva (who is nevertheless not a comfortable fit in her newfound nobility), then also by the much less sympathetic Peter Mannteufel (whose surname aptly means “man devil” in German).

Kross is one of Estonia’s best writers, who was himself imprisoned by the Russians (under the USSR), and this novel, written during the Soviet occupation of Estonia, carries clever criticism of Russian authoritarianism, though it is far more than that. He, and his novel (one of the best historical novels I’ve read, though you might like to brush up on your Russian history of the period before starting – it’s based on a true story), deserve a much wider audience abroad.

Kross, Jaan (1920 – 2007), The Czar’s Madman, translated by Anselm Hollo, London, Harvill Press, 2003, ISBN 9781860465796

(first published in Estonian 1978 as Keisri Hull)

Book 169: Goa (English): Saudade (Suneeta PERES DA COSTA)

 

My mother told me that the dead walk backward; she said, they try to walk forward but can only walk backward. When she told me that, I was sitting on the step that led from the kitchen to the compound, my hand cupped on her kneecap. A draught of shadows from the pink guava tree splayed on the concrete when the sunlight pierced the clouds overhead. That was our first house; the one in which I was born in Benguela, and I can still see it in my mind’s eye, close and shimmering like a still life, although it probably has like so much else now gone…

 

This novella is actually set almost entirely in Angola. Young narrator Maria Cristina, from a family of Goan immigrants, grows up under Portuguese rule there during its excruciating independence struggle (which doesn’t seem to have much effect on the colonialist families in the cities, until the end). She is haunted by a fear of the spirits of the dead – with their reversed feet. Her relationship with her mother is beautifully described. Only right at the end does she go to India – in a dream. (She gives herself the name Saudade, which the author translates as ‘lostness’ – as good an interpretation as any for this untranslatable, iconic Portuguese word). For Portugal was going to lose Angola, and its whole empire. It was interesting to see the close ties between the various constituents of the Lussophone world – apart from Angola, Portugal, Brazil, Mozambique, Goa, Madeira, Cape Verde and the Azores all put in cameo appearances. In Luanda and other cities, the street names are of Portuguese heroes – renamed since independence – which seems to underline the sense of impending loss.

I wish that some of the blank pages had been used for a glossary – almost none of the Angolan, Indian or Portuguese words are explained. The political situation in Angola (for example, the differences between the contending groups of freedom fighters) is also left as a mystery to most people nowadays.

Although we follow her life as she matures, not a great deal happens, and I wish it were longer. The author admits that she discovered some errors of fact after the event. But don’t let that put you off – the descriptive writing is really beautiful and I really enjoyed reading it.

 

Peres da Costa, Suneeta, Saudade, Oakland, Transit, 2019, ISBN 9781945492280

(first published Australia 2018)

 

Book 152: Armenia (English) – Three Apples Fell from Heaven (Micheline Aharonian MARCOM)

Why is it we are unable to mark the moments, except in hindsight, of inauspicious endings? Can you remember the last time you carried your father’s slippers to him? You didn’t know it was the last time, how could it have been in your mind? And so you don’t have the image of your father receiving the brown woolen slippers from your quiet hands. Your guilt composes a song; it pervades the pores of your skin and dips into every cell of your body. It reverberates inside you. You should have known when you took Baba his slippers for the last time. Your should have kneeled and kissed his hand. You should have stopped and made an etching in your mind, not run to check on the simmering fava beans.

It’s dangerous buying books online. This one was my choice for Armenia, but what I was sent was Three Apples Fell from Heaven: a collection of Armenian folk and fairy tales, retold by Mischa Kudian. Mind you, this was also very interesting, and from it I learned why every Armenian book has the same title (or so it seems to me; I’ve just now finished Three Apples Fell from the Sky by Narine Abgaryan, a beautiful novel of rural life; and there is at least one more called Three Apples Fell from Heaven, this one by O. Sheohmelian). Basically, an Armenian storyteller finishes with the lines “and three apples fell from heaven: one for the storyteller, one for the listener, and one for the eavesdropper”. Anyway, I’ve ruled out short stories for present purposes, and the bookseller tried again and sent me Marcom’s novel, so I didn’t need the laws of three.

Marcom’s is a historical novel covering the years 1915-17 when the actions of the Ottoman government, deliberate or otherwise, led to the deaths of more than a million Armenians living in that territory. According to the blurb on the back cover this was the twentieth century’s first genocide, though some may beg to differ (to take one example, the German campaign against the Herero and Namaqua peoples in South West Africa, modern Namibia?) Be that as it may, the outcome was an unmitigated tragedy for the Armenians, whose survivors lost their homes in eastern Turkey, the greater part of their territory (modern independent Armenia is the remainder of a small part that was under the USSR).

Armenia is one of the oldest Christian nations. During the First World War, The Ottoman government expelled its Armenians in forced marches which resulted in their deaths. (And it’s worth noting that a lot of the cruelty was carried out by Kurds attacking the convoys – and saving some – as this novel shows). The Kurds themselves also continue to suffer in their relations with the Turkish government. The Armenian families were told that their menfolk were being sent to labour camps, rather than being murdered. Some of the women were forced to become Muslim wives.

Some of the Turks rescued Armenian children. On the other hand, the government was not above selling stolen goods (there are numerous parallels with the Holocaust…)

We follow the lives of a cast of characters with their differing experiences. It sometimes took a while to catch up with which of the characters was featuring in a particular chapter – I wish Marcom had started each chapter with the character’s name as with some of the other books I’ve read lately.

On the whole though, and despite some confusion on my part, this poetic novel is fantastic. I finished it feeling I really need to read more about what happened to the Armenians during WWI to try to find out the truth (or truths…)

Micheline Aharonian MARCOM (1968 – ), Three Apples Fell from Heaven, NY, Riverhead, 2001, ISBN 1-57322-915-6

The other books mentioned are:

Three Apples Fell from Heaven: a collection of Armenian folk and fairy tales, retold by Mischa KUDIAN, Hart-Davis, 1969, ISBN 9780246639608

Narine ABGARYAN, Three Apples Fell from the Sky, translated from Russian by Lisa C. Hayden, London, Oneworld, 2020, ISBN 978-1-78607-730-1 (originally published in Russian as С неба упали три яблока, 2015)

Book 117: Bulgaria (English) – Under the Yoke (Ivan VAZOV)

Kableshkov spoke with enthusiasm. He was a very clever man and must have had a clear picture of the situation, which he now presented in a false light. But he was carried away by the force of his cause, and all means seemed permissible to him for its realization. Only this lofty faith in the sacredness of the cause he was serving could explain the assertions, tendentious or sincere, of this honest soul. And indeed they were so convincing in their eloquence as to provoke no remonstrances. Everyone was already convinced of what Kableshkov was trying to convince them of. It was obvious that everything would happen in just that way.

As promised by the label, this is a searing indictment of the harshness of life under the rule of Ottoman Turkey (the Bulgarians are mostly portrayed as heroic and the Turks as villainous) shortly before its liberation. While life may appear relatively tranquil on the surface, the April Uprising of 1876 is brewing (although unsuccessful, its harsh suppression by the Turks would ultimately lead to Bulgarian independence). It follows Boycho Ognyanov from his escape out of imprisonment in Diyarbakir, his preparations and final struggle against the Turks. It is an intensely nationalistic novel, written in exile.
The chorbadjis (wealthy Bulgarian city-dwellers) are labelled as a whole class as collaborators and traitors, yet they are not beyond redemption, like Marko Ivanov who gets swept along with the patriotic enthusiasm. Sadly, the Turks are also portrayed as unexceptionably evil. For our days it seems uncomfortably biased. But we should of course judge a work by its time, its context and its purpose.
It is a vivid, enthusiastic, if sometimes naive portrayal of the Bulgarian revolution’s false dawn. Perhaps its main value is as an historical document, but it was still very interesting to read this, the foremost classic of Bulgarian literature.

VAZOV, Ivan (1850 – 1921), Under the Yoke: a novel about the life of the Bulgarian people on the eve of the Liberation, 1876, translated from Bulgarian by Marguirite Alexieva and Theodora Atanassova?; Sofia, Borina, 2004 (originally published 1889-90), ISBN 954-500-127-5

Book 111: West Papua = Western New Guinea = Papua (English): Last Wild Place (Rosemary I. PATTERSON)

 

Carmen Young tries to still her galloping thoughts and surging emotions as she and her exciting new boyfriend neck passionately in the back seat of the Boeing 737 that is about to land in a part of the world she had never expected to visit yet [sic] alone move to accept a job. Jayapura, West Papua had not been in the vision plan she had imagined nor had the exceedingly handsome, young Dutch/Indonesian descendant in the seat next to her.

 

As I said in the post on Xinjiang, people of the same culture can find themselves with totally different experiences of freedom and history depending on which side of an arbitrary colonial border they find themselves on (and you only have to glance at the ruler-straight border down the centre of New Guinea – except where it is briefly displaced by the Fly River – to know that it is arbitrary). For a quick history of this Melanesian territory – it was part of the Dutch East Indies but stayed with the Netherlands after the Asian part of the colony won independence. After Sukarno’s konfrontasi campaign, the Dutch had to hand it over to Indonesia. The locals were supposed to be allowed to confirm or reject Indonesian rule in a UN-supervised so-called “Act of Free Choice” in 1969. In the end, instead of the entire population, just over 1000 delegates were allowed to vote and allegedly pressured into accepting. The bulk of the population had no choice. The OPM guerrilla movement arose to fight the Indonesians and the military retaliation has been heavy-handed and counter-productive. Flying the independence Morning Star flag will lead to a jail term. It seems most Papuans want full independence but they have dim prospects of achieving it, especially since a million Indonesians have been resettled from overcrowded Java and Bali, Indonesia is desperate to hold onto the rich resources, and the rest of the world has little knowledge of the problem (even in today’s democratic Indonesia, foreign press is effectively banned here) or interest. Like Tibet, the province has been divided.

Native Papuans have experienced racism both here and in other parts of Indonesia (to their credit, many good-hearted Indonesians have protested against a particularly ugly incident against Papuans in Surabaya last year, and been influenced by the “Black Lives Matter” movement).

The history of the messy nomenclature of both the western (here called West Papua) and eastern (Papua New Guinea, independent from Australia since 1975) parts of the island is too complicated and confusing to go into here…

Anyway, it’s time to discuss the present novel, Last Wild Place.

Here we are deep in the jungles of self-publishing land. The cover is amateurishly printed so that the back cover blurb is half illegible because of the picture. There are factual inaccuracies: on the very first page the writer says that New Guinea is the world’s largest island (that is Greenland). There is no such language as Papuan (there are hundreds of languages on this island). There are innumerable typos. The author loves capitals! (Why would you capitalise words like yaks, dance, cannibals, paranoid, cyanides, international episode?) In one sentence we have

“Carmen cannon [sic] believe her eyes as she, Gus and her mother arrive at what looks like a luxury hotel in one of the Hotel’s [capitalised] land rovers [not capitalised]”)

 

There are quite a few misplaced apostrophes. Then there are examples of gauche writing:

“She tries to warn Gus that he has to stop arguing with her mother.

                ‘Gus, you’ve got to stop arguing with my mother.’”

 

The heroine Carmen (sometimes spelt Carman) always seems to be wincing and sighing.

As for the plot, it is not really thought out and sometimes a bit ridiculous – well it does have that in common with many other thrillers! (”every Army plane in west Papua is being sent to shoot down any helicopter resembling the cargo plane the soldiers reported seeing”). Carmen basically takes up a career in tourism to get revenge on her mother for childhood neglect (not just from rivalry). Her mother is stupid (wearing high heels for a jungle expedition), arrogant and blind. Among her plans to kick start tourism in this contested region are a Revue (like a kitschy Hawai’ian-style tourist show), including a “Tahitian hula” (hula is Hawai’ian) and a “Tahitian fire dance” (which is Samoan); and the said jungle expedition for a group of seniors which doesn’t go as planned. They see soldiers with AK-47s burning huts (but the soldiers don’t see them!) The first week of the tour is skipped over, and after they have been kidnapped by separatists and rescued by helicopter (despite the best efforts of the dastardly Indonesian military) we don’t find out what happened to them. Much of the story doesn’t make sense, such as the crocodile attack. At one point Carmen is more scared of remaining in “a foreign place by herself” than being “at the mercy of some helicopter pilot she does not know anything about.”

It is such a shame, because this is such an important subject which really needs to be known by the whole world, and this may well be the only West Papuan novel at the moment. What a pity the author didn’t get a friend to look over the manuscript, or better still pay a proof-reader. It could have been a worthy tale with more careful writing and production, and fleshing out of the story. As it stands, I’m afraid it’s the worst novel I’ve read so far and I can’t recommend it.

 

PATTERSON, Rosemary I., Last Wild Place: an adventure novel set in West Papua, BookSurge, 2009, ISBN 9781439256763

Book 109: Austria (German) – Radetzkymarsch = The Radetzky March (Joseph Roth)

The Emperor was an old man. He was the oldest emperor in the world. Around him death was circling, circling, and reaped and reaped. Already the entire field was empty, and only the Emperor, like a forgotten silver stalk, still stood there waiting. For years, his clear and hard eyes had been looking forlornly into a lost distance. His cranium was bald, like a vaulted desert. His whiskers were white, like a pair of snowy wings. The wrinkles on his face were an untidy undergrowth, wherein dwelt the decades. His body was lean, his back slightly bent. He walked around at home with tripping little steps. But as soon as he went out onto the street, he tried to make his thighs firm, his knees flexible, his feet light, his back straight. He filled his eyes with artificial benevolence, with the true characteristic of imperial eyes: they seemed to see everyone who saw the Emperor, and they greeted everyone who greeted him. But in reality the faces only glided and flew by him, and they looked straight ahead at that delicate, fine line which is the border between life and death, out to the edge of the horizon, which the eyes of old men always see, even when houses, forests or mountains hide it. The people believed that Franz Joseph knew less than themselves, since he was so much older than they were. But maybe he knew more than many. He saw the sun going down on his empire, but said nothing. He knew that he would already be deceased before its descent. Sometimes he stood there innocently and was glad when someone explained things to him at great length which he already knew very well. Since, with the slyness of children and old men, he loved to mislead people. And he was pleased with the vanity with which they proved to themselves that they were more clever than he. He concealed his cleverness with simple-mindedness: since it was not seemly for an emperor to be as clever as his advisers. Better for him to seem simple than clever.

[my translation]


That was Roth’s genius description of Emperor Franz Josef I of the doomed Austro-Hungarian Empire, which ruled a large part of eastern Europe and which some see as a sort of proto-EU while others as a prison of nationalities. In any case, it was due to disintegrate in defeat in the First World War, going (as the author describes it) into glorious dirty defeat, with its vain banners flying. It is the moment in history when people’s loyalty was to be no longer to a monarch but to a nation.
The novel follows the fortunes of three generations. The first is a baron who fortuitously becomes the hero of the Battle of Solferino (a battle which heralded the decline of the Habsburgs), saving the Emperor’s life by pushing him down just as he’s about to be shot. He is subsequently angered by a school book which makes him out to be more heroic than he was – he couldn’t stand to be exploited for propaganda purposes.
Regardless of the truth of the legend (like that of the Habsburg Empire itself), the succeeding generations do not come up to the standard. His son works as a government official. As for the third generation, Carl Joseph gambles away his money, gets the District Commissioner to look for money, and cadges money from the Emperor himself by reminding him about his ancestor at Solferino. For Carl Joseph, it is easiest to die (in the First World War) to the sounds of a military band, especially playing the jaunty Radetzky March of Johann Strauss (the novel’s leitmotif, so well-known to us now from the end of the Vienna New Year’s Concerts).
Austria-Hungary was obviously doomed, but the Austrians didn’t (or didn’t want to) see it. Those at the centre held strange ideas about the outer parts of the empire (where much of the story takes place) which they may never visit.
The novel is full of vivid images and wonderful descriptions like the one above. It is one of the great historical novels of the 1900s. I was certainly glad I chose it.

Roth, Joseph (1894 – 1939), Radetzkymarsch, Köln, Anakonda, 2012, ISBN 978-3-86647-866-4