The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (1915)

 Some of the reviews of this edition call it "fiendishly funny" and as having "sheer mischief" in its makeup, which I find frankly puzzling. Though it has an occasional moment where one might be able to 'interpret in' a fairly vague attempt at humorous lightness, it most definitely doesn't feel majority-comedic. My overwhelming emotional response is pity. And aesthetically it feels dark and expressionist. I really don't think this is a black comedy, but it's my first Kafka, and maybe I need to learn more. The storyline is well-known, but it is interesting to note that it most definitely wasn't a cockroach that Gregor became, rather something like a louse, because he had a squishy back in which could be embedded the apple his father throws. Kafka's original language is apparently general enough simply to indicate 'vermin'. I like his attitude to detail: a particular point that serves the plot will be drawn out with an emotional specificity relating to something tangential, thereby enriching the picture. Often these embellishments go toward the further elucidation of character, so we get a subtler portrait of where someone is at, their pride or timidity or social anxieties. I haven't read around this at all, wanting the work to speak for itself, so there may be answers out there to a major question I have: how far is this allegorical? Is Kafka dramatizing a feeling of dehumanization he felt at some point of his life? Or a period of incapacitating illness? Or some sort of social pariah-hood? It's also interesting how matter of fact he is in his ending. Gregor's parents and sister experience a great relief and buzzing high when he finally dies, and seem to be selfishly concentrated on future happiness, all thought of his plight left behind happily. Is this an indictment? Or a recording of melancholic truthfulness about the pleasure that comes from lifting the weight of familial burdens? With its minority-playfulness, crabbed and fierce darkness and grey, limpid sadness, anyway, this is a splendid thing.

Anno Domini by George Steiner (1964)

 This is three novellas, and very early on in his career. In a sense, there will have always been a lot at stake, given that his reputation rested on literary criticism. "OK, buddy, let's see how you do, eh?" might be an imagined expectation from the world of fiction, which formed one of the centres of his critical work. In two instances, these feel like apprentice work, an author feeling their way into a voice. The third is incredibly fine, as mature and impactful a piece as anyone could ask for. Alongside the work of many a classic fiction writer, it could hold its own. Return No More is the story of the return to the scene of a war crime by the man who ordered it carried out. Set in 1949 in a small village in Normandy, it details a German officer, relying on the use of a stick due to a war wound, alighting on a high road from a truck which has given him a lift, and finding the place where he spent a good segment of the last part of the war. The villagers recognize him, abuse him and chase him out of town. Rattled, he seeks out the farmhouse and family where he was stationed just outside of the village. They are astonished to see him, and the atmosphere, already blunted from the emotional depredations of war, gets immediately and naturally spiky. Behind the action, and quickly revealed, is the crime - he ordered the death of the eldest son of the family, by hanging, in the yard, for resistance activity. Then follows a period of uncertainty about why he's there, and, extraordinarily, a slow defrosting. In a way which slips by real believability, though I guess it's theoretically tenable among rural people who lived by ground-level ethics when it came to marriage, he makes clear that he's come to marry the younger daughter of the family. The odd mixture of expressed hate and allowed intrusion settles unevenly. A time of back and forth over the possibility of his marrying the elder daughter, a set of conversations about what he did, and the varying reactions in the family to Jean, the son who was executed, from adoration to irritation with his radicalism, make for uncomfortable reading. Danielle, the younger daughter, comes round to the idea, seemingly thinking that her options are limited, and it's a job she needs to get done. But at the marriage feast, some villagers and the one member of the family who's never come around, brother Blaise, fall in around the officer and cause him to fall into their midst while dancing. Then they kick him to death. I think the idea with this one was a jagged atmosphere of mixed response, danger at every turn, even when things might have been improving. As it is, it's impressive if psychologically unsure. Cake is set during the war in country France, at a nursing home. An American, who has stayed beyond the invasion both to continue his research into an early playwright, and because there wasn't a lot at home to draw him back, soon realises that things are going to get very tight. He makes various alliances among the resistance, existing on its outskirts. Eventually he needs protecting, and they have found a way, through the assistance of the doctor who runs the home, to have him (and others) placed there as a resident. Then follows a period of worsening circumstances as food gets scarce, and a little black comedy as the residents' opinions come into contest - suspicions of stealing, of moral turpitude, and, more seriously, diffidence toward unmentioned Jewishness, reflect the world outside and its grim preoccupations. Our American falls for a young Jewish woman who has lost the rest of her family to 'transport'. Just after their relationship is consummated, the Gestapo arrive. The young woman is dragged away with them, and his world collapses. He returns after the war, and discovers that one of the residents has remained there, a woman he called The Owl, who was comically over the top about her social superiority and looked askance at many others as being below par. Reminded of the period by her silly talk, and a gift she gives him of an inkstand-prop from a play they all acted, he is overcome and runs. Again, this one has many fine ingredients, but feels uncertain and uneven in its slightly too consciously poetic writing. Sweet Mars drafts a close relationship between two public schoolboys and how it came to mature in the war. Duncan Reeve and Gerald Maune develop a typical schoolboy alliance, which is intensified when Gerald gets a girl pregnant right near the end of their tenure, and Duncan promises (he is much more worldly and practical) to get it sorted. Gerald never sees the girl again, and is assured by Duncan that she just wanted his money, and wasn't really pregnant at all, and scarpered when confronted. Then they grow into full adulthood, and the war comes to each separately. They have some hellish experiences and Gerald, being the more sensitive of the two, suffers a lot for his, hearing the initial screams and then unhuman noises of men who were trapped in a tank in the desert while it burnt, in nightmares long after. Well after the war, Duncan returns from the States and a failed marriage to find Gerald married a little unhappily. They form a group called the Desert Fathers with others of their North African experience and meet once a month to drink and reminisce. But one night, memories clearly playing heavily upon him, Gerald disgraces himself by harping on the theme in an impromptu speech, which goes on a long time. It is clear he needs help. Without telling Duncan, because he knows he'll disapprove, he begins to see a psychiatrist. When Duncan finds out he is profoundly troubled. One, because his ex-wife and her friends in the States had been devotees in a way which excluded him, and anyway felt unhealthy to his British sensibility, the prevalence of Jews in the profession not helping, given his prejudices, but also because it feels like Gerald is slipping away from him into the dominion of another, though this is barely acknowledged in his mind. He berates Gerald and says the doctor is most likely a fraud, as so many of them are, to his mind. To prove it, he asks Gerald to present him with fake dreams (which he will write for him) and see if the doctor can spot them. Gerald agrees with reluctance, in a lowered state. We then get a somewhat stream-of-consciousness section from the doctor's point of view - he does indeed recognize the falseness of the scenarios, and has interesting insights into Gerald's psyche and his possible homosexual fascination for Duncan from way back. Also compassed is a small week of complete happiness Gerald has felt in Cairo during the war with Jan, a Polish soldier, where their companionship did not reach sexuality, but did include sleeping together and great mutual affection, about which Gerald has told no-one, holding it as a sacred memory, not to be touched with other hands. We then see in flashback that Gerald has regretted submitting the fake dreams to the doctor, and has headed to Poland to search for Jan. He finds him, and Jan has moved on, the memory being nothing like of the same importance to him. Gerald, feeling that finally the last reasons for remaining alive have been broken, with Duncan prejudicially enjoining him to lie, and Jan not comprehending any specialness of feeling, can settle quickly and quietly to suicide. He writes the letter to the doctor explaining what has happened by which we learn of these events, makes a short friendship with a lonely and wizened student girl in Cracow for a day seeing the sights, and goes home to his hotel room to end things. The maturity in this piece compared to the others is marked. It has a sense of cleared power, Steiner's capability in recognizing balance so as not to overplay psychology or style being much more subtly poised. This full-flavoured piece fully answers the questions that might have been raised as to whether this monumental critic could write in the field he investigated. 

Youth by JM Coetzee (2002)

 The thing that strikes me about this, like the first volume of the trilogy, Boyhood, is the blankness of some parts of the narrator's personality. I say 'narrator', just to acknowledge the fact that a narrative has been created here, we're not in some world of immediate reportage in-the-real. I think many of us have that friend we can think of who seems to exhibit a kind of carefulness and hesitancy, a lack of spontaneity and love of cautious order, who holds back and seems inhibited, to the point of slightly unresponsive blankness. I think Coetzee in these times may well have been one of these people. Alongside this impassivity, he is enormously well-armed with information. The level of detail here about his life in London in the early 60s indicates that he had a penchant for diary-writing and the retention of correspondence. That has had one good result, if my supposition about this is correct - he has had such access to who he was in that time that he has been able, at least in part, to send himself up a little. At least I hope that's what he's doing. There is the faintest sense, deep in the weave, of the fact that, while representing as exactly as he can the workings of his youthful mind, and making sure that they add up to a 'complete' picture (albeit hamstrung by personality) which does not comment on the action from posterity's haughty hindsight, he is also smiling slightly at how obsessed or self-defeating he was, however quietly. He is making sure we know which subjects were important to this guy, and raising an important point in the process: this is an autobiography without that hindsight, meant as a record from exclusively within its times, not benefiting from the wisdom that came later. This is an interesting experiment; fundamentally, I don't know how successful it can be, mainly because he is looking back from a much later standpoint, and even if he's scrupulous about retaining the contemporaneous perspective, it seems likely that the now of the writing will impinge in some fashion, perhaps with regard to choice of matter, perhaps having reference to some wider view of what this book was 'designed' in the less conscious sense to achieve. Coetzee here is a mildly interesting fellow, with a young man's love of poetry, and quests into sex, love and the writing art. A man very much like so many, self included, that I suppose it can function as an everyman-portrait. But the straining after art is still at this point quite ordinary. I'll be interested to read (in the next volume?) of the time when things began to change up. Not bowled over by this at all, but just patiently interested.

Commonplace Book

 '"No. I often felt like that in America. They've had a war. But it's theirs. Not like ours at all."

Gerald's voice thickened. "That's exactly it, chum. And if everyone is going to act as if it hadn't happened, as if we'd dreamt it up on a bad stomach, I'm going to start believing them. But it's a lie. A lot of spivs who don't know what it was like and don't have any use for us." His arm was on Reeve's shoulder: "Mustn't let the buggers steal a man's shadow...."'

from Sweet Mars (Chapter 3), a piece in Anno Domini by George Steiner

The Book of Months by EF Benson (1903)

 This one is well-known as a contributor to the story of Benson as a bad author. My interest lies in how accurate that story is. It's certainly a mixed affair. This purports to be a record of a recent year in Benson's life, presented in twelve essays, one for each month. These have a personal-philosophical musing quality, where the author recounts experiences which challenge him, or contrastingly confirm his beliefs. The early part of the year conforms to this prospectus; but when, during the summer months, he is taken up by recent memories of the love of a woman, her marriage to one of his closest friends, that friend's death in the Boer War, and her subsequent death in childbirth, the focus narrows greatly. And then as the year closes he meets a relative of hers who looks a lot like her, and love comes to him again, this time returned. December figures its bliss. By modern standards, this last piece is mawkish indeed, though that criticism is too easy to dash off. Of course, the elephant in the room is the now-current story of Benson's homosexuality. My exposure to this in any detail came from a reading, long ago, of Brian Masters' biography. I only remember it vaguely, but there was a suggestion of the fact that it was a tendency upon which Benson never acted, regarding the sexual act as "beastly". I wonder whether his sexual history was quite complicated, with internal conflict seething - he was still a young man when he wrote this. And all this fed through a classicist mindscape, whereby war raged in the image of the chaste love of beauty at odds with its potential physical results. And of course the times and Benson's upper middle class milieu of boarding schools and single-sex education, and what no doubt that will have exposed him to, even further snarling the picture. What the literary world needs, dare I say it (!), is a proper psychological study of Benson. The style and content here is the other issue, and I can see why first-past-the-post types have seen this very simply as a bad book, typifying the weaknesses inherent in the author. I think it's a bit more complicated than that. It does have a somewhat self-satisfied air, where he breezily dismisses subtle explanations, and opts for homespun moralities. At other times, though, he begins to push at the envelope a little, and sees himself as much less certain, and subject to bad impulses. It is carefully kept anodyne, in the spirit of his age, where decorousness is vital. What's interesting is examining the account-book of this piece in the light of its times and the personality of its author - given when it was written, and by whom, how much is that envelope pushed? How self-critical is it? And the conclusion one can come to is 'a little'. It's not the atrocious book some claim it to be, but neither is it markedly revealing. It's a cautious book, which, by its own faulty internal compass, claims much more challenging territory than it discovers.