September 2019

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

September 27, 2019

Book Choice for March 2019: By Milan Kundera, 1984

On the one hand, I have so many thoughts about this book, and on the other, I felt like not bothering to write about this book at all. Which is exactly the plot and point of this book, ironically.

I wasn’t sure about whether this book was worthy of being written about as one of my 12 books for the year, as my 12 books are meant to be mostly classics, or challenging reads, or things I always meant to get around to…and while this book has been described as a modern classic, it initially didn’t seem to contain enough for me to dissect here. However, what I have come to notice via writing this blog is that having more fiction on the brain IS helping me with my journey through life. The right stuff is coming into my hands at the right times, and now I will talk about this book as it impacted basically only me, and where I am with my politics at this moment, while proceeding to miss the point of this entire work (probably). But then again, when people just say the same stuff over and over again (it’s a great work, great greaty great)….don’t you get the feeling that they were not personally impacted at all? And we will all be impacted by different parts of works. Isn’t that the point?

I am definitely not a reviewer, able to speak on the technical merit of a book, or its artistry (although do those really matter if you are not impacted in any way?) I am merely a millennial, with a fixed, eternal, self-referential point, as the sun is to the earth.

Moving on. This book is about a man, name unnecessary, as he is a stand-in for the melancholy yearning-ness of life (which can also be expressed as “Damn it, why can’t I literally f*** everyone on the earth?”) But don’t worry, he has a very good try, and I don’t remember which city they lived in, must have been Prague, and by the end of the book you are literally asking yourself, “was there any woman in Prague that he left unsexed?” Likely not. But it doesn’t matter, it is part of showing you that carnal encounters are necessary somehow to living/suffering, although they are shallow, but oh wait, he is also married and THAT is deep, because like, it is?

And there is a sad woman, I do think her name is Teresa (the book is right beside me but I am refusing to check) and she is The Wife, and when I say sad I mean pathetic. She just loves Mr. Sexyman; because of course she does, women just love things because they can’t help themselves, even if they are being hurt by it every day, because do women ever grow, really? Or learn? Or have spines? No. They just wonder who their Man was with last night and internalize the tears. There is literally no other way to live in the melancholy shit that is life.

But you know, I didn’t hate reading this book. And now I will say the things that I am unqualified to say: the writing is good (?) It does keep you going. Not in a page-turner way, but while you are reading it you actually DO want to know what happens to Mr. Sex and Sad Teresa. It is well-written in the way that it really condenses huge feelings and experiences that you and I and everyone has while living life into 1-2 sentence epigrams which cause you to put the book down and stare at the wall or window for awhile. And THAT is valuable, really, above rubies, and must be the reason why people have taken to this book so much. Those scattered sentences of extremely dense meaning can only be written by having lived. I don’t remember the words being particularly beautiful, but they were certainly effective.

But I won’t read it again, I think, and I will tell you why.

This book panders to the West. (Yes, I live in the West and have a whole bag of privileges and everyday trials to show for it). But once you have woken up (see Marx, above), you have, and you can never go back. There are several times in the book that the horrors of Communism™ are subtly dropped-in, and these dark HINTS seem worse than when the charcters openly come into contact with the “stupidity” of the Czech communist regime.

There is a character in the book I will call Bowler-Hat because of some sexy routine she does with her hat, and she is an artist. But she CAN’T BE AN ARTIST under the regime, it’s just cramping her style on an existential level (by the way, yes, there was art and culture in the Soviet block countries). But you wouldn’t know it from this book, as this flighty artist woman (probably a symbol of freedom) “escapes” to other European countries where she can just keep flirtin’ around and doing not so much. Oh actually later she lives with an old couple for no apparent reason.

At another point Bowler-Hat tells a very TELLING story. It’s about how when she was a teenager growing up under Communism, the regime “forced” you (forced is not said, but implied) to do parades with your school peers. But Bowler-Hat didn’t WANT to do parades “with everyone smiling” so SHE hid in the bathroom. It was “fake” to her, ergo, it must have been fake for everyone involved. All readers living under free-market capitalism nod vigorously.

Parades are so gross.

It is interesting to me that some people just can never get over a cherished belief in their own uniqueness. They are INDIVIDUALS, never part of a (gasp, horror!) group. This short description in this book haunts me, exactly because I know it will impress many people very deeply the other way: “Can you believe it? All those jumped-up parades? Forcing everyone to dress the same and wear BIG FAKE SMILES?”

So now that you have learned almost nothing about this book, except that I would say that you COULD read it yourself and see what you get from it (and there is an amazing character named Franz who I have definitely met in real life, doomed from birth by his outrageous Euro-privilege) I will continue with a story about how this book fits in with the general trajectory of my life:

On irregular Tuesdays I give an hour of Conversational English to an older lady in town, let’s call her Diana (She’s 75 and she looks great, actually I met her in the gym!) She has had a very interesting life. She was born in Slovak and was studying in Czech when the regime changed and she had to decide to go to Germany, permanently, with her boyfriend, in just a weekend. To do that, they also had to get married that weekend. They did, and both continued their medical studies in Leipzig, in what became (that weekend I guess) East Germany, which I will refer to as the DDR, because it used to be called the Deutsch Democratic Republic, and DDR is much faster.

Anyway, this past week we met and we just chatted as usual about art (now that she is retired you just can’t keep her out of art galleries and museums and we usually talk about what she has seen and where she has been lately). And then books, and I told her that I bought my boyfriend a book called Liebe, Sex und Socialismus for his birthday (as you do) but as he read it, it wasn’t exactly what it said on the tin. Although it had been translated into German, it was a study of the love lives of people in the DDR by an English researcher, who turned out to be prey to the same West-splanations as is, it seems, everyone outside of Socialist regimes, or you could say, everyone without personal experience of them.

L,S & S is written from this stance: “Oh, well yes, these people say they were happy, but like, do they even KNOW what happiness is? Yes, they had more time for sex and relationships than we do now [because they worked fewer hours] and women seem to have had a higher level of equality in the workplace than anywhere ever before [or since]* and they weren’t constrained by childcare [all children went to free kindergartens, then free schools] but these poor people were obviously just confused and brainwashed, so we can never know.”

It is Western mantra that people in socialist regimes such as the DDR cannot have been happy.

But Diana says they were. And ya know, she was THERE. Or here, I should say.

Diana, regarding the authors of Chernobyl and LS&S: “They cannot understand if they were not here. They will not.”

(And she means will in the sense of the German verb, as “they do not want to understand.”

Diana: “Here it was very good. Everyone had a job, and the schools were excellent, very excellent.”

Already she has said one unthinkable thing in our culture: That everyone can be assured of a job and a secure income. Can you even imagine that? No, you can’t. Not worrying yourself sick every week that you could lose your job and die on the street? Sounds good to me. Also, NO ONE in the DDR was living on the street, not one person. Homelessness solved, by social programs. It’s unthinkable in our culture, truly.

But then Diana continued:

“But you know, it is always the people who make Communism not work. There are always people who don’t want it, and they make it fall down for everyone.”

Practically since birth advertisements teach us that our personal need to feel independence (which is of course a mirage in this complicated, interdependent world) trumps the right of everyone to obtain a good standard of housing, work and family life. Those last three aren’t even worth smiling in a parade for.

*Along with perspectives like Diana’s, which Western ears don’t commonly hear, I want to add the testimony of one of my Russian friends. While my own grandmother was a homemaker (and a wonderful one) with a sixth-grade education, who got married at 18 to escape an abusive father, my friend’s grandmother was a Floor Manager (over men and women) in a bustling factory. Different situations, different expectations, different opportunities, but underlying it all are different social structures.

The Canterbury Tales

September 21, 2019

Book Choice for January 2019, by Geoffrey Chaucer, published c. 1387

Yes. It is September now. Late September, it’s definitely autumn, and while there is golden sunlight, I am homesick, because frankly, we do “fall” way better in Canada. Let’s also pretend that I have been enjoying a sun-drenched two month holiday during which it was just not necessary to blog because I was living life in the moment. It’s better that way. I’m not such a fan of summer but –bip– the record has scratched and it is over anyway. Vorbei.

The Canterbury Tales is a book that most people do hear about. The major golden oldies of English literature are known to almost everyone; a smooth pebble skipped across a pond that makes contact on –Beowulf—ping—Chaucer—boiiing—Shakespeare—dunk!! With a splash, the pebble sinks to the bottom until, like, Jane Austen or something. (Maybe I did miss out by basically not going outside this summer. I’ve forgotten how nature works. Or sounds).

To be fair, I did not start The Canterbury Tales in the summer. I did start it in January, under incredibly ideal circumstances, which will be helpful for you, dear reader, to hear as well. For one thing, I started to read the Canterbury Tales when it was the only book I had access to, in a language I could read. So let that be a lesson to you, if you are in a country you have never been to before, without the prospect of obtaining any other reading material, it is a good time to consider The Canterbury Tales (assuming you have it with you).

As well, I started to read it when I was going on a 10-day holiday where I forbade myself (and I was very right about this) to bring any work. As well, there was no internet where I was staying. So, also, if you want to read the Canterbury Tales, do that, abandon your job and cut yourself off from the modern world. It will help, trust me. Get the circumstances right and you will find that you will soon be driven to reading a nearly 500 page tome (including the necessary explanatory notes!) But I must be real here: even with all the advantages of time to burn, no chores to do, and the only goal of enjoying myself—I still only got three-quarters of the way through before I stalled.

The Canterbury Tales is very much of its time, misogynistically speaking. But hey, it could have been much worse. Chaucer actually thought women were kind of interesting, and that like men, some of them have merit and some don’t. Which is quite fair. With his characters, I did feel Chaucer was being fair at least— I actually felt that from the writing, it was just more the subject matter that bothered me. (It’s my blog so I can be bothered if I want). Ooop–another rape, but don’t worry, it’s not portrayed as a problem for anyone involved. Next story—rape, oh no, not again, what a curious twist! While I can’t remember any example of sexual assault explicitly being played for laughs, it was a nonchalantly repeated occurrence, possibly echoing what people often say, —its just what happened in those days. Ughhhh (see above, me sitting in my garden).

Most people nowadays come to The Canterbury Tales academically, and not really for the enjoyment factor (although when I have heard about the Canterbury Tales, I have heard things in the vein of ‘its a rollicking good time!’). When you read about misogynistic crap, even fictional, in Uni, everyone just bounces over it as part of Ye Olde Plotting Devices. We somehow have developed a stomach, over time, for overlooking things that make us, naturally, squinch up our noses with distaste. We know that we HAVE to read it, because its, like, literature. And literature is valuable. We don’t have to love it, but we have to get through it, if we want to be well read. At many, many times during this collection of tales, which as I said, were not disturbingly graphic (rape was just a matter of course) or incredibly unfair, I still sat back and said “Am I really doing this to myself for fun?”

It may be that you say “hell no” to this great work. I would not blame you, although many would, aghast that you could ignore something GREAT because of your personal tastes. I plodded through. The particular translation I had was really brilliant, even I could tell that David Wright had made an incredible achievement, making the source material understandable, and arranged in cute little stanzas. Like I said, I stopped reading with about 100 pages to go in January, and then in about the end of May I finished it off, using sheer willpower. As this is the way that I read it, and now I am writing about it nearly 9 months later, only a few things stand out to me:

1. The Wife of Bath is quite good. (She’s a character that you may hear about before you read the book, often held up as a feminist archetype). She does say a lot of cool stuff, she had a lot of husbands who treated her in varying ways, and well, she was a woman and was given a chance to speak, it was interesting, but it didn’t leave me shocked and changed. In sum, I had always meant to learn more about her, and now I know.
2. There is a tale called “The Prioress’s Tale” and it is a disgusting thing about the evilness of Jews—and that’s when you realize that just because a piece of literature is old, doesn’t mean it’s not a piece of crap. The fact this tale was copied for centuries was a horrible waste of parchment, with potentially very real repercussions. I suppose, the fact that it was preserved allows us to see that everywhere in medieval Europe (except I think Spain, before Ferdinand and Isabella) it was completely ok to murder your neighbors because you coveted their things. Now I will interject with a story: once I went to York in England with a school friend. We had a nice day of eating treats in the market and looking at the cathedral. It was lovely. At one point we went up a hill and walked into an old tower which was very cold inside. We poked around and went out, happening to read the British Heritage plaque which said that in 1108 (or thereabouts) all the York folk put their Jewish neighbors into that tower and burned them alive. In thr Prioress’s tale Chaucer has preserved for us the mindset that allowed our ancestors to carry out such deeds! Over and over in almost every major city!*
3. Thank goodness that this Oxford edition I have cuts out the several pieces of dry religious writings which were once between the tales, and certain sermon-like poems (Chaucer thought he was very good at writing sermons apparently, and that his audience had infinite time on their hands). I’m so grateful they cut these parts (in the words of the editors “as this is of interest to almost no one today”) or I would never have finished this literary work.
4. At one point, I was planning to read my translated version of The Canterbury Tales and then read the original poem in Middle English (I have a copy at home) and compare them and make a video for youtube, and be very detailed and draw from supporting works, etc. But now I’m not going to do that. I’m happy to let Chaucer go!

I cannot say that a very long book made up of alternatingly fairly boring or alarming tales, which actually has no proper wrap-up or ending, is very good. If I had to “rate” it, The Canterbury Tales would get 2 stars–one for the plethora of mentions relating to astrology and horoscopy—it IS interesting that everyone used to believe in this alongside Christianity—and because the poetic form was probably once pretty impressive. But it was not a cracking read. I found it more of an Ugh.

*If you go to the Jewish Museum in Erfurt Germany you can see medieval Jewry from the other side, the thriving, cultural side. But this population was also massacred twice and forced to relocate several times. It is a real learning experience.