The insoluble pancake

Last weekend I read Imre Kertesz’s slim novel, “Fatelessness”, a book about the experiences of a fourteen year old boy, George Koves, in the infernos of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. I had bought this book last summer in New York but had been inspired to read it by seeing a theatre production of Vassily Grossman’s “Life and Destiny” (maybe I will write about that tomorrow) and seeing a film about Primo Levi’s return to Turin.

“Fatelessness” is astonishing because of the completely dispassionate and unsentimental narration. One day in Budapest, on the way to work with his friends, fourteen-year-old George Koves is plucked from the his bus by a local constable and made to pass a long and tedious day in the customs house. No-one knows why they have been arrested, not even the constable (although those there carry the yellow Jewish star). Before long, he and his friends are made to march across town where they are locked up for the night; thrown into some strange and terrible play. The next day they are faced with the option of traveling to Germany now, to work — or later, when, they are told, the trains will be even fuller. George thinks as a boy might think about his knowledge of Germany and Germans, wonders idly that perhaps it would have been better if he had studied more foreign languages at school, reflects perhaps that he might now get a chance to see something more of the world. So he travels on the first train leaving. They are sixty to a carriage; but the next trains, they are told, will be even fuller. No-one shows any special maliciousness, with the exception of the German camp guards in Budapest; it seems, this is just something that happens.

The rest of the story everyone knows, in outline: the long journey without water, the arrival after several days of sweltering summer heat. Through a gap in the carriages’ wooden slats George sees the words “Auschwitz-Birkenau”, but of course they mean nothing to him. Arrival is chaotic, and he is relieved to see German guards: surely they will be able to restore some order. Lines form, people queue; in the factual, bare way it is described, they could be queuing at a post-office. There is an inspection by a doctor. George lies about his age; he says he is sixteen. The doctor takes a few seconds to decide who is fit and who is unhealthy. The fit ones live. George realises soon afterwards what has happened to the people who waited in the other line.

And so life begins in the camps. He is transferred to Buchenwald. Work wears him down almost to the point of death. He is treated with incredible cruelty, his body becomes the body of another person. He becomes weaker and weaker until he can no longer work. He is transferred to the hospital. He is really too young for such work. But he does not die, he survives until the liberation of the camps by the Americans in 1945.

All this you may have read before in many other stories from the camps, but what is different here is George’s ironic, detached voice. There is no trace of bitterness. This is the “banality of evil” that Hanna Arendt wrote about. He says: “We hung around and waited in actual fact, if I think about it, for nothing to happen. That boredom, together with that strange anticipation: I think that is the impression, approximately, yes that is in reality what may truly denote Auschwitz — purely in my eyes of course” (p.119).

Incredibly, George survives, and in the final chapter he returns to Budapest. People see his camp uniform. Tell us about the hell of the camps, a journalist asks him. But George refuses to be led, saying only that he knows what a concentration camp is, but not hell. But wasn’t it hell? He says, “Then I would imagine it as a place where it is impossible to become bored”. You must find some way of filling each second of each day of each month of each year; in the camps, all knowledge, all understanding of one’s situation arrives crashingly at once, and must fill out years of time. The journalist gives him his address on a scrap of paper; he throws it away.

In the next scene, he returns to his old family apartment building to find others living in his flat; his father was deported to the camps before him, his step-mother has remarried. But he does find some people in the building he remembers. They invite him in, but he rapidly becomes exasperated by their conversation. They continually talk about how things “came about” while they were stayed in Budapest during the war — the ghetto, shootings, and finally liberation. George instead recounts the story of the queue at Birkenau, the entry to the camps, and he says …”but it was not quite true that the thing ‘came about’; we had gone along with it too. Only now, and thus after the event, looking back, in hindsight, does the way it all ‘came about’ seem over, finished, unalterable, finite, so tremendously fast, and so terribly opaque. And if, in addition, one knows one’s fate in advance, of course.” (p. 257) George does not want to “forget” or “put behind” what happened to him because “…I now needed to start doing something with that fate, needed to connect it to somewhere or something; after all, I could no longer be satisfied with the notion that it had all been a mistaken, blind fortune, some kind of of blunder, let alone that it had not even happened.”

But fate is arbitrary; in the queue, his path could have so easily led to the left or the right. Moreover, awful crimes can be committed by ordinary people in banal circumstances (he talks about the beautifully tended flower-beds near the Auschwitz crematorium); all this has become possible thanks to our complete control of systems and processes; no one person is responsible; instead, each instead are part of a larger process, a larger mechanism. That, for me, was the core of this book.

Technorati Tags: Auschwitz, Imre Kertesz

In Ireland I finished Orhan Pamuk’s epic novel of Istambul, “The Black Book”. It’s long and dense book, and it required a great deal of concentration. The wilds of Ireland is really an ideal place to read it. It had taken me almost two months of Parisian time to reach the half-way mark: in a week in Ireland I finished it.

I’d bought on a recent trip to New York because I realised that most novels I’m reading these days seem to be by authors I’ve already read. Not too experimental, that! Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel prize for literature, seemed to be an interesting writer, so I thought I would give his book a spin.

There is only really one theme in the book, identity, which I understand is a typically Turkish concern. I can understand that, living on the frontier between East and West, Asia and Europe. (Istambul/Constantinopole/Byzantium has always fascinated me, in fact I made several fruitless attempts to memorize W. B. Yeats’ wonderful and incomprehensible poem about that city, and I have always been interested to visit there, but I haven’t had the chance so far). In Pamuk’s book, everyone is trying to be someone else, is switching identity and place. The principal character spends the entire book searching for his friend and his wife, who aren’t there, who are absent, who never show up, and before the end of the book he actually assumes his friend’s identity and begins to write his famous newspaper column for him.

The book is full of similar stories of blurring of identities. The real scale of the book are stories of a few pages in length, and there seem to be hundreds, some more fantastic than others. Of an enormous underground city beneath the streets of Istanbul filled with mannequins which are flawless copies of real people. Of an old journalist who, confined to his flat, finally convinces himself that he is Marcel Proust and he is living inside his novels of Proust, and is forever waiting for his sweetheart to return. Of the prince who wants to write only that which is “real” and “true” and which speaks from his inner self; to do this he destroys his library so that these books might not possibly influence him, he strips to furnishings from his house so that his thoughts might be uninterrupted by such distractions. Isolates himself. Returns to zero. Speaks to no-one.

The book’s ending is cruel and shocking. I understood, too, why Mr. Pamuk is sometimes less than popular with the Turkish authorities. There is a perhaps a little too much X-ray vision in his picture of Turkish society….
Technorati Tags: Orham Pamuk

Back in Ireland once more. The evening before I last I stepped onto the tarmac at Belfast International Airport. The cold, damp night air smelled slightly of manure. Clouds lurked only a few meters above my head, and the tarmac gleamed with rainwater. So now I have time to write about whatever I care to write about.

This time, I choose Constantine’s accusing finger. This is one of the first things one sees on entering the Musei Capitolini in Rome, on the Palatine Hill. It was a Wednesday in November, cold and unusually wet. The museum was almost empty. Entering one passes directly into a small courtyard filled with fragments of statues most of which are more than a thousand years old, arranged around the courtyard, mounted on the walls. Amongst them is an enormous head, the head of Emperor Constantine, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire — and his hand, an accusing index figure pointing skywards. This is all that remains. Echoes of Ozymandias, but no “trunkless legs of stone” here.

The museum is a wonderful collection of artifacts spanning thousands of years of the city of Rome. One of the first public museums in the world, we are told. Before I went there, I knew almost nothing about the collections and so I was constantly amazed when each right turn or left turn took me back through another few hundred years of history. Even back into pre-history. After carefully examining room after room of sculptures and bronzes, a sudden turn took me before the foundations of the temple of Zeus, one of the very first structures constructed in Rome. Here were the foundation stones. Another turn, and there was a vast atrium with an ancient bronze statue of Marcus Aureilius on horseback. In the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci had placed this statue at the centre of the square on Palatine hill, on a plinth he had designed himself. Now the plinth holds a copy, and the original is here, in this beautiful glass atrium.

A tunnel, descending deep into the hill, connects the old museum building to the new one, and the dimly lit walls are lined with Roman funerary inscription for slaves, freemen and senators. But before ascending to recent centuries, a left turn leads to another ancient temple, more foundation stones and statues. Another turn, follow the corridor here, and we leave the museum behind, we are in the Tabularium, which once housed the archives of the Roman state. A long hall with tall windows looks out across the ruins of the Roman city, the Foro Romano. Another level of history.

Climbing back up the tunnel and ancient Rome fades away, and we are back in the Renaissance. There are many wonders to be seen here. One small room is completely filled with busts of famous philosophers, many of which are Roman copies of Greek sculptures. Serried ranks of great thinkers. Nearby, in a small alcove, there is a beautiful statue of a woman. What most struck me about this was the incidental detail that the statue had been found buried near one of the walls of the city. The owners had presumably hidden it there for safe keeping during one of the many invasions which had swept over Rome. They never returned to collect it.

Technorati Tags: Rome, Voyages