Author: Harper Lee
Theme: Understanding the whys and wherefores of human motivation
Do: Try and honestly place yourself on the spectrum of tolerance
Don't: Make the mistake of confining this story to race relations in the American South
Spoilers: Delicately avoiding them
"Are you reading To Kill A Mockingbird again?"
"Ahaha, yes... again, right you are. Read it countless times, American classic, know it off by heart..."
The lovely problem of being a long-term incurable addict to books is that most of the people you meet assume that you have read a significant proportion of the great classics. And the modern classics. And the niche bits and pieces like The Lost World or The Midwich Cuckoos. It is an unutterably flattering and pleasing state of affairs when those around you presume the bookshelves of your mind are chockablock with Austen and Hollinghurst and Sartre and Dickens and Kureishi and Beckett and Wodehouse and Wharton.
It is, unfortunately, pure shite. You're about half as likely to find something with a heaving bosom or geometric spaceship on its cover in my extensive library of books well read and loved. I'll read the back of cereal packets and old receipts and occasionally what someone is tapping out on Twitter beside me on the train (don't tell me you haven't done it too...) Indiscriminate constant reader, that's me.
So when I picked up "To Kill a Mockingbird" for the first time I had that dreadful feeling of standing in front of an elderly relative you promised to call every Sunday but what with one thing and another, you've somehow ended up completely forgetting to speak to them for four years.
"Apologies," I whisper and pat the cover affectionately.
My first thought in these reviews, is what inspires these books that became so culturally important to us as a people. In the case of Mockingbird, it is the truth. To whit, the book is semi-autobiographical and inspired by happenings and circumstances in Lee's own life. Her father practiced law in Munroe County, Alabama and once defended two black men accused of murdering a white shopkeeper. Both clients were hanged.
Your image of Mockingbird may well be of Gregory Peck standing manfully before a courthouse and proclaiming a young black man's innocence of the crime of raping a white woman. In the novel itself, the trial makes up only the smallest percentage of the prose.
Our narrator is Jean Louise Scout Finch, daughter of Atticus Finch, public defender of Tom Robinson. Everything that happens in Maycomb County, Alabama is relayed to us through the filter of Scout.
Using a child as a narrator is a wonderful device. Children have boundless curiosity and no inbuilt bias. Children are constantly learning and growing. We learn with Scout, we understand with Scout, we grow up with Scout.
So why should you read Mockingbird?
I remember a concept from one of the late great Terry Pratchett's books at this moment. The further down the social ladder you climb the more and more rungs there are - and the spaces between them become very small indeed.
Mockingbird surprised me by not being a book about race relations in the America South, but a book about human relations and the arbitrary dividing lines we draw between ourselves and others. When taken to extremes, this alienation results in crosses burning in front yards and crazed mobs taking 'justice' into their own bloody hands. In seemingly ordinary citizens dragging young black men and women from Woolworth's lunch counters and spitting on freshly enrolled students students walking up to the entryway of the University of Mississippi.
The most unsettling thing to realize is that the same sentiment is ever-present in everyday life and everyday interactions. It is an immense underlying facet of the human condition. And I think you should read Mockingbird to become aware of that tendency to divide up the human race and hold up a mirror to where you draw your lines.
The obvious starting point in any discussion on Mockingbird is the shocking treatment of Tom Robinson during trial - from the mutterings of the womenfolk of Maycomb to the lynch mob that arrives one night outside his jail cell. Far more erudite pens (well, keyboards) than mine have made discourse on the impact of this novel on the collective understanding of racism and the experience of black people in 1930's Deep South. All I will say is that I would much rather read something written by the child of a Tom Robinson than of an Atticus Finch if my main goal was to explore that particular issue. Mockingbird is a good read - but if you want to truly understand prejudice and persecution I would very much recommend The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, Negroland A Memoir by Margo Jefferson or Welcome to Braggsville by T Geronimo Johnson.
Mockingbird is a brilliant book - but when you've finished with the daughter of the warden, read something by the prisoner's children if you want a rounded worldview.
But on to humanity as a whole and how we divide each other. The book is not just about the division between black and white. Every single chapter highlights difference and what it means to be on the wrong side of a perceived 'normal.' I'd like to take a look at that, because few other reviews have.
Jem and Scout Finch are fascinated by their shut-in neighbor, Boo Radley, about whom they make up games, call names and generally do their best to draw out of his mysterious house. It is accepted that Boo Radley is an oddity and weirdo.
Miss Maudie is the Finch's neighbor and cultivates beautiful azaleas in her well-tended garden. But when the Baptists roll past her house in their horse-drawn buggies they glare and pronounce her garden to be a sin. Miss Maudie is destined for hellfire and brimstone.
The Ewells are central to Mockingbird. Robert E Lee Ewell, or Bob Ewell to his questionable friends, is the father of Mayella Ewell, the defendant. The Ewells live beside a garbage dump, the children run about unsupervised and undernourished, unloved and un-looked for - the Ewells are looked down upon by every member of the Maycomb society. One of the most striking lines of the book is Tom Robinson's confession. Not an admissions of guilt. No no no - he "felt sorry" for Mayella Ewell.
Jem and Scout Finch themselves are subject to the ire of their classmates, children of a man who defends those the rest of the county views as less than human. Different, different, different.
It is worth reading this book to think about how many distinctions you draw in your life - without realizing it. I would hope we all keep a careful eye on ourselves for instances of bigotry, rascism or sexism. But day to day, do you treat the waiter as politely and respectfully as you treat your manager as you treat you friends as your bus driver as your dentist as your binman as your fleeting flashes with people on your commute? I think we should. Unless we're Elon Musk, in which case, you just sit in a quiet room until we find you the professional help you need.
George Orwell said it best in Animal Farm, through the medium of Snowball the Pig - "four legs good, two legs bad." We humans take prejudicial basis a lot further than approved number of appendages...
Lastly, you should read this book to introduce yourself to Atticus Finch. As well as being almost blind in one eye (#myhero #wedontneeddepthperception #Atticusgetsme and I suppose obviously #metoo) he is a quiet, measured presence who dedicates himself to doing what is right above all. He is compassionate and level-headed, a trier who stands by his principles. We could all stand to be a little more like Atticus.
A Young Author's Inspiration
"I wanted you to see what real courage is...courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what."
This, I hope obviously is an Atticus quote. It resonated a heck of a lot. Because we talk a lot about hope and trial and error and always believing in the best possible outcome. But what is so particularly important is to keep going when you know there is no chance of success. To keep doing what is right, what you believe in, and what you love, even if you will fail. Conviction is key.
And, somewhat selfishly, I adhere to Atticus' creed in the writing business. And I jot down the three rejections that popped up in my inbox this week - and keep seeing it through, no matter what.
A Very Devlin View
Wednesday, 18 July 2018
Thursday, 12 July 2018
Where we're going Marty, we might need the EU...
Hooyah! Hooyah! Hooyah!
A great cry arose from the entrance to the Tham Luang cave complex as the first of the young lads of the Wild Boar football team were stretchered to freedom. The world's media has descended on Chiang Rai province - the northern-most region of Thailand - to watch the drama unfold.
Every single one of those boys made it out of that cave safely, thanks to the dedication and selflessness of an international team of divers, who lost one of their own during the perilous mission to liberate the boys and their football coach before rising floodwater made rescue impossible.
The mission was meticulously planned. Nothing was left to chance. I am sure they even had someone monitoring Elon Musk's increasingly laughable attempts to propel himself into the thick of it. What started as a heart warming gesture of common humanity ended in something along the lines of "For fuck's sake Elon they've got it. They've got it, alright? You go home, have a hot chocolate, sober up - they're grand, they're grand."
In the interests of transparency I would like to asseverate that I am imagining Mr Musk ineffectually lunging at a bouncer keeping him at arm's length from a pub fight which has long since finished. Great word - asseverate. To proclaim positively and enthusiastically. Nothing whatsoever to do with severing.
In other news, England have just dramatically been defeated and a halt called to their best performance at a World Cup since Italia 1990. When I say never in all my life have I seen such a performance from an English squad, I mean it very literally. I hadn't made an appearance yet.
I perched high on my dark bell tower...erm sorry, balcony - I'll avoid the hunchback comparisons. Anyway, I perched high on my balcony in what was actually sweltering sunshine and listened to London celebrate victory over Sweden. And I mean the whole of London - the view from our place, before we get kicked out next month, is a vista from the tower at Pimlico, past the Houses of Parliament, the Eye, St Paul's Cathedral, the sweep of the Thames up to the Isle of Dogs and Canary Wharf, and right out again over the green expanse of Greenwich Park and out past the Thames Barrier towards Kent and Dover.
That Saturday, it wasn't just me. Everyone was high as a kite.
I had watched the previous England v Columbia in a sports bar under the Town Hall on South Bank. The atmosphere was electric and every single fan was lovely. This was worlds and hours away from the image of the typical English football fan which had loomed like a specter in my mind. Everyone jumped up and down and hugged each other and hooted and hollered. And not one bad word was exchanged between the English and Colombian contingent. 50/50 colombianos to limeys. 100% enjoyment from all sides. 'Twas glorious.
And glorious was that sunny summer Saturday - when all the cars and all the lorries on all the roads in Deptford, Greenwich and beyond beep-beep-beeped their elation. Everyone came together - it was magical.
Even the not-so-great bits redeemed themselves through the generosity of the human spirit. Many's a one I have spoken to knows all about the taxi smashed in Nottingham or the ambulance damaged in London. But do you know that a good citizen of Nottingham set up a very successful fundraising page to help with repairs? And that Millwall Supporters Club have raised thousands to help pay for the damage to the ambulance?
That's the kind of press which doesn't get the airing it should, perhaps because it doesn't have the visceral tug which gets a newspaper editor's Y-fronts tented, pasting pictures of plastered England fans jumping up and down on the emergency services' transport.
Look for the helpers...
The Wild Boars and the Three Lions got me thinking about teamwork. About my firm belief that we are all better working together as people and that the place of international agencies and bodies and trade associations and yea verily even fan clubs is growing ever more important in our world of instantaneous connectivity and shrinking borders.
I haven't seen much team work about in politics these days.
I am a very proud Remain voter. I will be the first to admit I cherish close ties to Europe. However, with a completely clear head I knew that the practicalities of the British public expecting a clean Brexit from the current pack of incumbents was pissing in the wind. Once you start, it's very hard to stop - it will provide temporary relief, but at what cost to your dignity and ah... trousers. Here the metaphor runs thin.
I always thought of Brexit this wise. Imagine, if you will a man in a crippling car accident. That was Britain after the financial crash of 2008. He wakes, kisses his significant other and expresses a desire to climb Everest. Wonderful, great goal - not everybody's first choice and you'll need to commit to a long and torturous program of training and strengthening. That'll be the saving and planning we should have already done. You'll give up on your social life, you'll rearrange you priorities. That'll be distancing yourself from your closest allies as you focus on Britain. You'll focus on yourself and not your cousin's wedding nor uncle's marathon nor friend's new baby. You'll talk about it non-stop, you'll understand there will be painful trade offs but it will ultimately be worth it.
Super, we say. Great stuff, not what we would recommend for you but it's a (democratic) choice so let's get to it.
I'm going now, you say.
"Say what?"
"Right now, get this cannula out my hand."
"Are you? You can't go now, we're waiting for X rays back."
"No I'm going right now."
"Alright, alright, calm down. Let's see what doctor says and I promise if it's what you really want then the minute you're discharged we'll set up a savings account. Maybe even a Just Giving... eh, here stop plucking out those wires!!"
Another imperfect metaphor, my point being that even though your long suffering partner (48%) may not like it we're all old enough and committed enough to democracy as a populace to compromise for the sake of our marriage. But for Heaven's sake before you take such a drastic step, have a goddamn plan and understand the consequences!
Team work isn't just a buzzword. It's necessary to our existence as a human race. It's the loveliest of us and the most practical of us and it is our ability to work together that creates a better world for everyone. If I could, I'd stop Brexit immediately in its tracks before we all suffer. But I am not so arrogant to assume the other side doesn't have a point. Nor to exonerate the EU completely from its responsibility to pull itself together on borders.
So to combat this, I wanted to give you some examples of really good teamwork you may have missed. Apart from the marvelous cave rescue and the inspiration to a nation of another football team.To prove we can all work together cross borders and cross nations. To quote Jo Cox, who echoed the wisdom of ages, far more unites us than divides us.
- Senegal & Japanese foot ball fans clean up stadiums after respective World Cup matches
- Huntington, Virginia's compassionate response to drug overdose
- Conservationists team up with large tech companies to protect elephants from poachers in Kenya
- European Bank for Restructuring & Development backs Tbilisi, Georgia's green bus scheme
- International researchers break through research into prostrate cancer and polycystic fibrosis
It is of the utmost importance to work together. To find compromise and congruence. To listen to each other and speak to each other kindly, calmly and with compassion and understanding.
We must do this, not because it is kind or gentle or easy. But because it is right and just and hard. In the end, the best things in life are.
A Devlin View
I am a very proud Remain voter. I will be the first to admit I cherish close ties to Europe. However, with a completely clear head I knew that the practicalities of the British public expecting a clean Brexit from the current pack of incumbents was pissing in the wind. Once you start, it's very hard to stop - it will provide temporary relief, but at what cost to your dignity and ah... trousers. Here the metaphor runs thin.
I always thought of Brexit this wise. Imagine, if you will a man in a crippling car accident. That was Britain after the financial crash of 2008. He wakes, kisses his significant other and expresses a desire to climb Everest. Wonderful, great goal - not everybody's first choice and you'll need to commit to a long and torturous program of training and strengthening. That'll be the saving and planning we should have already done. You'll give up on your social life, you'll rearrange you priorities. That'll be distancing yourself from your closest allies as you focus on Britain. You'll focus on yourself and not your cousin's wedding nor uncle's marathon nor friend's new baby. You'll talk about it non-stop, you'll understand there will be painful trade offs but it will ultimately be worth it.
Super, we say. Great stuff, not what we would recommend for you but it's a (democratic) choice so let's get to it.
I'm going now, you say.
"Say what?"
"Right now, get this cannula out my hand."
"Are you? You can't go now, we're waiting for X rays back."
"No I'm going right now."
"Alright, alright, calm down. Let's see what doctor says and I promise if it's what you really want then the minute you're discharged we'll set up a savings account. Maybe even a Just Giving... eh, here stop plucking out those wires!!"
Another imperfect metaphor, my point being that even though your long suffering partner (48%) may not like it we're all old enough and committed enough to democracy as a populace to compromise for the sake of our marriage. But for Heaven's sake before you take such a drastic step, have a goddamn plan and understand the consequences!
Team work isn't just a buzzword. It's necessary to our existence as a human race. It's the loveliest of us and the most practical of us and it is our ability to work together that creates a better world for everyone. If I could, I'd stop Brexit immediately in its tracks before we all suffer. But I am not so arrogant to assume the other side doesn't have a point. Nor to exonerate the EU completely from its responsibility to pull itself together on borders.
So to combat this, I wanted to give you some examples of really good teamwork you may have missed. Apart from the marvelous cave rescue and the inspiration to a nation of another football team.To prove we can all work together cross borders and cross nations. To quote Jo Cox, who echoed the wisdom of ages, far more unites us than divides us.
- Senegal & Japanese foot ball fans clean up stadiums after respective World Cup matches
- Huntington, Virginia's compassionate response to drug overdose
- Conservationists team up with large tech companies to protect elephants from poachers in Kenya
- European Bank for Restructuring & Development backs Tbilisi, Georgia's green bus scheme
- International researchers break through research into prostrate cancer and polycystic fibrosis
It is of the utmost importance to work together. To find compromise and congruence. To listen to each other and speak to each other kindly, calmly and with compassion and understanding.
We must do this, not because it is kind or gentle or easy. But because it is right and just and hard. In the end, the best things in life are.
A Devlin View
Thursday, 5 July 2018
The Novel | The Magician of Lublin
Author: Isaac Bashevis Singer
Theme: Wrestling with faith
Do: Ponder the intricate relationship between a man, his God, his forefathers and his many, many, many many women
Don't: Expect these many many many many women to be more than plot devices
Spoilers: Delicately avoiding them
I begin reading "The Magician of Lublin" on my 8.56 am train to London Cannon Street.
It would be horrifically easy to assassinate me. I leave home at 8.38 am every morning, catch the aforementioned train to be at my desk at 9.23 am and there I stay until 12.30 am - my self-appointed lunchtime - when I will take whatever tome I'm currently engrossed in and retreat to the safety of the 9th floor breakout area where no one can come looking for me to do another 'urgent' press release. 1 pm sharp, back on the floor and I leave bang on 5.35 am, just in time to make my 5.49 pm train back to...
Well anyway, you'd certainly to know on what precise door handles and at what precise times to smear Novichok...
The point is that I was getting some strange looks from across the way. The reason for this might be the naked lady with very prominent titties on the front of my Penguin Modern Classic. That classy bit is covered by her left bosom. Behind her is depicted, we can only assume, the Magician of Lublin.
Yasha Mazur, our eponymous lead character, is variously a scoundrel, a bounder, a cad and a rogue. His trade is sorcery, smoke and mirrors. He is equally at home mysticising and hypnotising the gentry as he is shuffling out card tricks in a thieves den in Piask. The action is set mainly in the shtetls of 1870's Warsaw and if I had to pin down the central question it might be;
Where can you go to be free of yourself?
Bashevis Singer was born in Warsaw, Poland - then part of the great Russian Empire. In his dedications he wrote to those, "who spared no effort to make this translation as true to the Yiddish original as a translation can be." He wrote purely in Yiddish all his life and accepted the Nobel Prize in 1978. Despite emigrating to the United States, he remained within a very close knit Jewish community until his death in Florida in 1991.
Escape and identity must have been on every mind on the continent of Europe at that time and it shines through in Singer's writing. When who you were, and who you felt you were, and who others thought you were was a question of life and death. Alongside the normal literary questions of we ourselves, the ghastly specters of Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen loom in the mind reading this book. It may have every appearance of a light-hearted tale of a trickster roaming the countryside with a girl in every city, but simmering beneath is the plight of what it meant to be Jewish whilst Singer was writing. Every mention of 'casual' antisemitism grates - by casual, I mean to say that Singer mentions it almost in passing. It forms a backdrop to everyday life. Institutionalised injustice. It is there at the corner of your eye, just glimpsed, and merits mentioning before diving into other questions of indentity.
So why should you read it? First of all - it will transport you to another world in another time. Singer is a very sensory writer - he will go to great lengths to describe the foods and drinks. I could almost taste the crumble of the butter cookies and the sharp, astringent sting of neat vodka. Singer magics up cigar smoke and fusty bed-sheets and the reel of a drunken accordionist spinning out a Polish mazurka. He describes the texture of the cloth blindfolding Yasha's eyes for a party trick. The scrape and scratch of his skeleton key ministering to a yielding lock.
Secondly, and most importantly, it will give you a glimpse into another faith and creed. I will be the first to admit, I grew up in Northern Ireland, which (while, quite simply, home to some of the most marvelous people on the planet) has all the diversity of a packet of Fox's custard creams. It wasn't until I arrived at university that I spoke to someone who wasn't a white Irish Catholic.
But for that reason, I understand the insularity of Singer's world, despite resting firmly amoungst the goyim . In researching this post, I learned of Singer's reluctance to emerge from the safety of his own community. Do I not do the same when I surround myself with Irish friends? Did my community not do the same when cruelty and conflict broke out at home? We hide ourselves where we are familiar.
The lovely thing about this is that Singer set his books onto the world, like ships onto the sea. They come to us from his safe harbour - which during his lifetime, wasn't so safe. It gives us an insight into a world many of us might otherwise know very little about, that of the Jewish community and faith. From the intricacies of prayer shawls and phylacteries to proverbs and turns of phrase we've never heard before. I wondered at the differences Yasha notes between himself and "Lithuanian Jews." Could there really be such a chasm between them? But then I remember my own background and know that both communities might be white Christians on a small island in the Irish Sea, but the differences go parish-wide and bone-deep.
There was a reason I highlighted Singer's gratitude to his translators. It is that words are supremely important and more is 'lost in translation' than the meaning of this or that particular noun or verb. Nuance can be lost, and nuance we must always strive to find.
And now - a negative - and there is a little bit of me that understands the times in which Singer was writing and the attitudes which may have changed since then.
I found it hard to read about his women.
These women - Esther, the ever-faithful wife - Magda - the lovely young assistant - Zeftel - the abandoned wife of a talentless thief - Emilia - the cultivated widow of a university professor - they are all as one, madly in love with Yasha and desperate to be with him.
Mmmmmmmm-hmmmmmmm.
Singer lingers overlong on their physical attributes, which suits his sensory style but discomforts me. He focuses not only on their present bodies, but in older women laments the passing of their youth and in young girls (pre-puberty) projects what delights might be budding. There are a few telling lines in the book:
"It would be worth surrendering my last pair of drawers to be a man."
I chose that line, not for the obvious assertion by Singer that of course it would be better to be a man! <sic> I chose it because I am astounded by his complete inability to get inside a woman's head. This is a man who spoke to me in those pages about the impermanence of life, the possibility of a Creator, the flaws and perfections of human character and the great struggle that goes on inside each one of us when we look at the stars.
All of this, and when it comes to women, he's just completely fucking obsessed with their knickers.
Think about it ladies. And of course men too, because we're all people.
If you had a great desire, one great wish and you thought about everything it might be worth surrendering to attain it, what would you choose? Would you choose your dignity? Your independence? Your wit? Your very soul?
In Singer's world, if you're a woman, you choose your goddamn pants. There's a fellow that's never known the pain of snapped knicker elastic.
Of course we could explain the disrespect away by pointing to the consistent irreverence within the book. The milieu is meant to be picaresque i.e. he's a scoundrel in a city of scoundrels, don't take it so seriously, mate!
But it's the throwaway lines that hurt you. I read:
"Magda, like all women, wanted to have children."
Hold onto your horses there Singer - that is just an untruth!
I bring these up, not to dissuade you from reading Magician of Lublin, but in the tacit understanding that reviews on 'ere give you a personal flavour and it greatly saddened me personally to come to understand that this man who had written so compellingly would perhaps not wish to engage with lively conversation with me at a dinner table. Because I am a woman. I can't swear to it, I've never known him and never will, but it was the impression I received.
Besides, my complete lack of Yiddish might have been more of a stumbling block to good table conversation about his novel...
Identity and escape, and so we come around again. Where is Yasha at the end of the book and does he manage to make his escape?
Something quite horrific and jarring and enough to make me start happens three quarters of the way through the book. Something which pinballs Yasha right down the path of repentance, a path he has been idly zig-zagging along in previous chapters. Shall I run away to Italy with Emilia? Shall I haunt the bars with Zeftel? Shall I run home to my Esther? His restless spirit chafes at his perceived bonds, like oxen in too tight a plowshare.
Not so after The Incident. I won't spoil it for you - I want you to pull up short and reread in disbelief as well. But I will reveal that Yasha the Magician ends up back at home, bricked into a stone hut, where he intends to spend the rest of his days seeking redemption through prayer and abstinence.
I loved it. I loved it because my reaction was - you see, you can't run from yourself.
All of our Magician's problems are those of his own making. His reasoning is that to be captive and captured will be a great boon - he can avoid temptation for the rest of his life.
We all carry the seeds of our triumph and downfall within us. I am certainly not suggesting we all crack out the bricks and mortar - but the moment Yasha stopped running he became Yasha the Penitent. The faithful flocked to him for miles around, seeking his counsel and wisdom. He was considered to have achieved enlightenment.
Identity, innit. Do you make it yourself, is it something other people give you, or is it a mix of the two?
A Young Author's Inspiration
I found the most marvelous quote from Isaac Bashevis Singer:
"I think it is a great tragedy that modern writers have become so interested in messages that they forget that there are stories which are wonderful without a message, that the message isn't everything."
Theme: Wrestling with faith
Do: Ponder the intricate relationship between a man, his God, his forefathers and his many, many, many many women
Don't: Expect these many many many many women to be more than plot devices
Spoilers: Delicately avoiding them
I begin reading "The Magician of Lublin" on my 8.56 am train to London Cannon Street.
It would be horrifically easy to assassinate me. I leave home at 8.38 am every morning, catch the aforementioned train to be at my desk at 9.23 am and there I stay until 12.30 am - my self-appointed lunchtime - when I will take whatever tome I'm currently engrossed in and retreat to the safety of the 9th floor breakout area where no one can come looking for me to do another 'urgent' press release. 1 pm sharp, back on the floor and I leave bang on 5.35 am, just in time to make my 5.49 pm train back to...
Well anyway, you'd certainly to know on what precise door handles and at what precise times to smear Novichok...
The point is that I was getting some strange looks from across the way. The reason for this might be the naked lady with very prominent titties on the front of my Penguin Modern Classic. That classy bit is covered by her left bosom. Behind her is depicted, we can only assume, the Magician of Lublin.
Yasha Mazur, our eponymous lead character, is variously a scoundrel, a bounder, a cad and a rogue. His trade is sorcery, smoke and mirrors. He is equally at home mysticising and hypnotising the gentry as he is shuffling out card tricks in a thieves den in Piask. The action is set mainly in the shtetls of 1870's Warsaw and if I had to pin down the central question it might be;
Where can you go to be free of yourself?
Bashevis Singer was born in Warsaw, Poland - then part of the great Russian Empire. In his dedications he wrote to those, "who spared no effort to make this translation as true to the Yiddish original as a translation can be." He wrote purely in Yiddish all his life and accepted the Nobel Prize in 1978. Despite emigrating to the United States, he remained within a very close knit Jewish community until his death in Florida in 1991.
Escape and identity must have been on every mind on the continent of Europe at that time and it shines through in Singer's writing. When who you were, and who you felt you were, and who others thought you were was a question of life and death. Alongside the normal literary questions of we ourselves, the ghastly specters of Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen loom in the mind reading this book. It may have every appearance of a light-hearted tale of a trickster roaming the countryside with a girl in every city, but simmering beneath is the plight of what it meant to be Jewish whilst Singer was writing. Every mention of 'casual' antisemitism grates - by casual, I mean to say that Singer mentions it almost in passing. It forms a backdrop to everyday life. Institutionalised injustice. It is there at the corner of your eye, just glimpsed, and merits mentioning before diving into other questions of indentity.
So why should you read it? First of all - it will transport you to another world in another time. Singer is a very sensory writer - he will go to great lengths to describe the foods and drinks. I could almost taste the crumble of the butter cookies and the sharp, astringent sting of neat vodka. Singer magics up cigar smoke and fusty bed-sheets and the reel of a drunken accordionist spinning out a Polish mazurka. He describes the texture of the cloth blindfolding Yasha's eyes for a party trick. The scrape and scratch of his skeleton key ministering to a yielding lock.
Secondly, and most importantly, it will give you a glimpse into another faith and creed. I will be the first to admit, I grew up in Northern Ireland, which (while, quite simply, home to some of the most marvelous people on the planet) has all the diversity of a packet of Fox's custard creams. It wasn't until I arrived at university that I spoke to someone who wasn't a white Irish Catholic.
But for that reason, I understand the insularity of Singer's world, despite resting firmly amoungst the goyim . In researching this post, I learned of Singer's reluctance to emerge from the safety of his own community. Do I not do the same when I surround myself with Irish friends? Did my community not do the same when cruelty and conflict broke out at home? We hide ourselves where we are familiar.
The lovely thing about this is that Singer set his books onto the world, like ships onto the sea. They come to us from his safe harbour - which during his lifetime, wasn't so safe. It gives us an insight into a world many of us might otherwise know very little about, that of the Jewish community and faith. From the intricacies of prayer shawls and phylacteries to proverbs and turns of phrase we've never heard before. I wondered at the differences Yasha notes between himself and "Lithuanian Jews." Could there really be such a chasm between them? But then I remember my own background and know that both communities might be white Christians on a small island in the Irish Sea, but the differences go parish-wide and bone-deep.
There was a reason I highlighted Singer's gratitude to his translators. It is that words are supremely important and more is 'lost in translation' than the meaning of this or that particular noun or verb. Nuance can be lost, and nuance we must always strive to find.
And now - a negative - and there is a little bit of me that understands the times in which Singer was writing and the attitudes which may have changed since then.
I found it hard to read about his women.
These women - Esther, the ever-faithful wife - Magda - the lovely young assistant - Zeftel - the abandoned wife of a talentless thief - Emilia - the cultivated widow of a university professor - they are all as one, madly in love with Yasha and desperate to be with him.
Mmmmmmmm-hmmmmmmm.
Singer lingers overlong on their physical attributes, which suits his sensory style but discomforts me. He focuses not only on their present bodies, but in older women laments the passing of their youth and in young girls (pre-puberty) projects what delights might be budding. There are a few telling lines in the book:
"It would be worth surrendering my last pair of drawers to be a man."
I chose that line, not for the obvious assertion by Singer that of course it would be better to be a man! <sic> I chose it because I am astounded by his complete inability to get inside a woman's head. This is a man who spoke to me in those pages about the impermanence of life, the possibility of a Creator, the flaws and perfections of human character and the great struggle that goes on inside each one of us when we look at the stars.
All of this, and when it comes to women, he's just completely fucking obsessed with their knickers.
Think about it ladies. And of course men too, because we're all people.
If you had a great desire, one great wish and you thought about everything it might be worth surrendering to attain it, what would you choose? Would you choose your dignity? Your independence? Your wit? Your very soul?
In Singer's world, if you're a woman, you choose your goddamn pants. There's a fellow that's never known the pain of snapped knicker elastic.
Of course we could explain the disrespect away by pointing to the consistent irreverence within the book. The milieu is meant to be picaresque i.e. he's a scoundrel in a city of scoundrels, don't take it so seriously, mate!
But it's the throwaway lines that hurt you. I read:
"Magda, like all women, wanted to have children."
Hold onto your horses there Singer - that is just an untruth!
I bring these up, not to dissuade you from reading Magician of Lublin, but in the tacit understanding that reviews on 'ere give you a personal flavour and it greatly saddened me personally to come to understand that this man who had written so compellingly would perhaps not wish to engage with lively conversation with me at a dinner table. Because I am a woman. I can't swear to it, I've never known him and never will, but it was the impression I received.
Besides, my complete lack of Yiddish might have been more of a stumbling block to good table conversation about his novel...
Identity and escape, and so we come around again. Where is Yasha at the end of the book and does he manage to make his escape?
Something quite horrific and jarring and enough to make me start happens three quarters of the way through the book. Something which pinballs Yasha right down the path of repentance, a path he has been idly zig-zagging along in previous chapters. Shall I run away to Italy with Emilia? Shall I haunt the bars with Zeftel? Shall I run home to my Esther? His restless spirit chafes at his perceived bonds, like oxen in too tight a plowshare.
Not so after The Incident. I won't spoil it for you - I want you to pull up short and reread in disbelief as well. But I will reveal that Yasha the Magician ends up back at home, bricked into a stone hut, where he intends to spend the rest of his days seeking redemption through prayer and abstinence.
I loved it. I loved it because my reaction was - you see, you can't run from yourself.
All of our Magician's problems are those of his own making. His reasoning is that to be captive and captured will be a great boon - he can avoid temptation for the rest of his life.
We all carry the seeds of our triumph and downfall within us. I am certainly not suggesting we all crack out the bricks and mortar - but the moment Yasha stopped running he became Yasha the Penitent. The faithful flocked to him for miles around, seeking his counsel and wisdom. He was considered to have achieved enlightenment.
Identity, innit. Do you make it yourself, is it something other people give you, or is it a mix of the two?
A Young Author's Inspiration
I found the most marvelous quote from Isaac Bashevis Singer:
"I think it is a great tragedy that modern writers have become so interested in messages that they forget that there are stories which are wonderful without a message, that the message isn't everything."
Well said, sir. I think for a while there in writing my next book I was in danger of forgetting I was telling a story. Sometimes when you are surrounded by social media soundbites, when we sacrifice nuance for brevity, everything has to become a strong stance or a firm opinion. Sometimes, we're only looking for a good story.
And now, the action in taverns and taprooms has given me quite a thirst. I might seek out some of this wódka and try and (magician-like) coax a little inspiration out of thin air.
Devlin xo
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