“Heilbling’s Story” - A Short Story by Robert Walser - 1904 - translated by Christopher Middleton

Home of German Literature Month 10

"Walser’s virtues are those of the most mature, most civilized art. He is a truly wonderful, heartbreaking writer"'. Susan Sontag

"Since then I have slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time, the life of the Prussian writer Kleist with that of a Swiss author who claims to have worked as a clerk in a brewery in Thun, the echo of a pistol shot across the Wannsee with the view from a window of the Herisau asylum, Walser’s long walks with my own travels, dates of birth with dates of death, happiness with misfortune, natural history and the history of our industries, that of Heimat with that of exile. On all these paths Walser has been my constant companion. I only need to look up for a moment in my daily work to see him standing somewhere a little apart, the unmistakable figure of the solitary walker just pausing to take in the surroundings."  William Sebald

Mel first encountered the work of Robert Walser during German Literature Month in 2013, he followed up with posts on short stories in  2014 and in 2015 on his novel The Tanners. There were also posts on him during German Literature Month in each of the last four years.  We are returning to him this year through a very Walserian story, "Heibling’s Story”

“Heibling’s Story”, told in the first person, is the Short Story elevated to high art (see “Notes on Camp”).  Heibling, a bank employee, begins the narrative on his walk home at lunch. Walking plays a big role in the work of Walser.  He launches into what seems a depressive repudiation of his worth.  Under this I see a rejection of any power others think they have over him.  Heibling is both above and below the world he finds himself in.

“The moral core of Walser’s art is the refusal of power; of domination. I’m ordinary—that is, nobody—declares the characteristic Walser persona” - Susan Sontag 

Mel hopes once again to  reread Kleist in Thun this month 

Oleander Boussweau 

“The Party” - A Short Story by Shirley Hazzard - first published in The New Yorker - 1960

 “The Party” - A Short Story by Shirley Hazzard - first published in The New Yorker - 1960

Included in two collections - Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories and The Collected Short Stories of Shirley Hazzard 

My Prior Posts on Shirley Hazzard

 The  2020 Australia Reads Challenge 

Shirley Hazzard

Born January 30, 1930 Sidney, Australia

1963 to 1994 - Married to Francis Steegmuller - A highly regarded Flaubert scholar (They met at a party hosted by Muriel Spark in New York City.)

The Transit of Venus - 1980 - her most famous book

The Great Fire - 2003 - Natiinal Book Award - Best Novel

Dies - December 12, 2016 - New York City

““We should remember that sorrow does produce flowers of its own. It is a misunderstanding always to look for joy.”  -Shirley Hazzard

“Much of the drama in Hazzard’s work arises from the bruising interactions between those who are responsive to beauty, and those who are not.”  Zoe Heller in her Preface to The Collected Short Stories of Shirley Hazzard .  

From The Paris Review - “She has written five novels (The Great Fire, 2003; The Transit of Venus, 1980; The Bay of Noon, 1970; People in Glass Houses, 1967; and The Evening of the Holiday, 1966), a collection of stories (Cliffs of Fall, 1963), a memoir (Greene on Capri, 2000), and two books of nonfiction (Countenance of Truth, 1990 and Defeat of an Ideal, 1973), all of them ablaze with technical perfection and moral poise.”.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux in Publishing (September 2020) in Publishing The Collected Short Stories of Shirley Hazzard has done a great service to lovers of very high quality Short Stories.

“Collected Stories includes both volumes of the National Book Award–winning author Shirley Hazzard’s short-story collections—Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses—alongside uncollected works and two previously unpublished stories

“Including twenty-eight works of short fiction in all, Shirley Hazzard’s Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and talent. Taken together, Hazzard’s short stories are masterworks in telescoping focus, “at once surgical and symphonic” (The New Yorker), ranging from quotidian struggles between beauty and pragmatism to satirical sendups of international bureaucracy, from the Italian countryside to suburban Connecticut. “. From The Publisher.

I have so far read only one novel by Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire plus three short stories.

Here is my reaction to The Great Fire

The great fire refers, among other things, to the destruction of the traditional culture of Japan in their defeat in World War Two.  Set in 1947, mostly in Japan and Australia, the people in the novel are trying to get on with their lives now that the war is over.  Some of the men were badly wounded, all suffer mental trauma, parents struggle to understand why their son had to die.  The great fire is also, mentioned several times, a symbolic representation of the bombing of Hiroshima.

“The Party”, not surprisingly opens at a party.  The attendees read Browning and debate the revival of Swinburne.  One woman at the party tells the central female character, allegedly her friend 

“Minna, what a beautiful dress. How thin you are. Theodore, you never look a day older, not a single day. I expect,” she said to Minna, “that he is really very gray—with fair people it doesn’t show. He’ll get old quite suddenly and look like Somerset Maugham.  She gave Minna a sympathetic, curious look from her tilted eyes. (Minna could imagine her saying later: “I never will understand why that keeps going, not if I live to be a hundred.”) “Here’s Phil.” Evie’s husband came out of the living room, a silver jug in one hand and an ice bucket in the other. “You look like an allegorical figure”.

In reading this story one is struck by the shared culture of the party goers, I enjoyed these lines so much though you are forced to wonder who is to be taken seriously.

Minna and Theodore having been having an affair for 15 years. Hazzard takes us deeply into their relationship as each wonders why they keep it going.

I hope to participate a few more times in The 2020 Australian Literature Challenge.  I have a longer story by Shirley Hazzard in mind.  I would also like to read another work by Barbara Baynton, a writer of wonderful

stories about the lives of pioneering women living in the outback.

I also have a large collection of horror stories by Australian writers that has gone unread too long on my kindle application.

Mel u

Victory for all who love literature, art, history,simple decency

 A long nightmare ends 

Forgotten Dreams” - A Short Story by Stefan Zweig - first published in The Vergessene Träume, 1900- translated by Anthea Bell - 2013 - included in The Collected Short Stories of Stefan Zweig from Pushkin Press

 

“Forgotten Dreams” - A Short Story by Stefan Zweig - first published in The Vergessene Träume, 1900- translated by Anthea Bell - 2013 - included in The Collected Short Stories of Stefan Zweig from Pushkin Press

Website of German Literature 10

This will be my 8th year as a participant in German Literature Month.  It seems important in these dark times to continue traditions fostering culture, historical knowledge and literary depth. 

I first became aware of Stefan Zweig during GL Month in 2013.  He is now one of my favorite writers.   

My Posts on Stefan Zweig

My favorite works by Zweig are first "Mendel the Bibliophile", then Chess, and The Post Office Girl, and “Twilight”.  

 Stefan Zweig

November 28, 1881 - Vienna, Austria

February 22, 1942 - Petropolis, Brazil 

“Forgotten Dreams”, a brief work, begins with a description of the exquiste view from a magnificient Villa:

“THE VILLA LAY CLOSE TO THE SEA. The quiet avenues, lined with pine trees, breathed out the rich strength of salty sea air, and a slight breeze constantly played around the orange trees, now and then removing a colourful bloom from flowering shrubs as if with careful fingers. The sunlit distance, where attractive houses built on hillsides gleamed like white pearls, a lighthouse miles away rose steeply and straight as a candle—the whole scene shone, its contours sharp and clearly outlined, and was set in the deep azure of the sky like a bright mosaic.”

If Zweig’s body of work had to be summed  up in a sentence it might be described as an elegy to the lost glories of a culture in decline.

The plot is about a man revisiting a woman he once loved long ago.  When a servant gives her his card she is quite surprised.

“She reads the name with that expression of surprise on her features that appears when you are greeted in the street with great familiarity by someone you do not know. For a moment, small lines appear above her sharply traced black eyebrows, showing how hard she is thinking, and then a happy light plays over her whole face all of a sudden, her eyes sparkle with high spirits as she thinks of the long-ago days of her youth, almost forgotten now.”

Of course she is described as besutiful.

In their ensuing conversation we learn the woman once had dreams, hopes and values.   Over years, she settled for wealth and comfort.

Maybe Anthea Bell choice this as the lead story in the collection as it is a very Zweigian work, embodying his values.

I have still not read all the Short Stories in The Collected Short Stories of Stefan Zweig from Pushkin Press.  I hope to post on a few more this month.

Coffeeland: ONE MAN'S DARK EMPIRE AND THE MAKING OF OUR FAVORITE DRUG by Augustine Sedgewick - 2020

 

An autodidactic corner selection 

 

Coffeeland:ONE MAN'S DARK EMPIRE AND THE MAKING OF OUR FAVORITE DRUG by Augustine Sedgewick - 2020

There are three related but distinct aspects to Coffeeland

ONE MAN'S DARK EMPIRE AND THE MAKING OF OUR FAVORITE DRUG.  In part it is a history of the development of coffee into the world’s most popular beverage.  Sedgewick traces e coffee from Yemen, to Java, then to South and Central America.  He shows us how coffee’s spread followed the path of western colonial expansion and its partnership with slavery into Brazil and elsewhere.  Coffee growing was a very labor intensive enterprise and was initially, like sugar, cotton, and other crops profitable only with very inexpensive labor. Sedgewick goes into a lot of detail on Brazilian slavery, ending in 1888, and the immigration of Italians to Brazil.  

The one man in the title is James Hill, who emigrated to El Salvador from the slums of Manchester in 1889 at the age of 18.  He would end up running a coffee empire much like the industrial lords of Manchester ran their satanic mills.  The story of how James Hill rose to great wealth on the backs of thousands of often near starving indigenous El Salvadorians is fascinating.  In Industrial Age Manchester mills, a workers productivity was strictly measured.  Hill forced this on his employees through a cruel methodology of not providing enough food to employees who did not dig enough holes to plant trees, pick enough beans and such.  He kept workers hungry and made sure they kept to rigid guidelines.  He employed overseers who could use physical punishment.  Many of the workers were women who were subject to sexual exploitation.  They also used sex with overseeing men to gain advantages.  Coffee growing turned El Salvador into a one crop economy.  History teaches us this can lead to disaster.  Sedgewick traces the up and downs of the international coffee market.

Hill was very enterprising, he studied the works of other growers, he married into an affluent elite family of Spanish speaking planters.  He was a very fast learner, soon expanding his sales into San Francisco.  He developed vacuum sealed cans which preserved coffee for a long time.

We learn a lot about how coffee is  grown.  It takes five years for a tree to become productive.  Coffee is not an easy crop to raise.  

There is a third aspect to the book.   Sedgewick digresses into ruminating on world history and events.  

I enjoyed learning about coffee in El Salvador and the life of James Hill.

Have a nice hot cup of coffee as you read Coffeeland:ONE MAN'S DARK EMPIRE AND THE MAKING OF OUR FAVORITE DRUG by Augustine Sedgewick.

Of course Hill’s Coffee, very much still big in the coffee business after 110 years, has their own side of the story

“James Hill

Born in England, arrived in El Salvador in the 19th centuary. From a very young age he realized that by introducing new techniques to the cultivation and processing of coffee, he could export coffee beans that met the highest international standards.

He began exporting coffee on his own account at the end of the 19th centuary and, shortly after, won a silver medal at the Pan-American Exposition in New York, 1901.

James Hill founded Las Tres Puertas in 1896, in Santa Ana town, located close Santa Ana’s Volcano whose slopes produce coffee beans of the highest quality. His vision in promoting new ideas and methods to coffee production in our country included the introduction of the Bourbon variety of Arabica coffee.

So great was his contribution to the art of growing, processing, and exporting coffee that, in May 1948 he was awarded with Diploma al merito Agricola cafetalero by the federacion cafetalera de centro America y mexico.”  from https://www.jhillcoffee.com/

From Random House

“ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Augustine Sedgewick earned his doctorate at Harvard University and teaches at the City University of New York. His research on the global history of food, work, and capitalism has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Project on Justice, Welfare, and Economics at Harvard, and has been published in History of the Present, International Labor and Working-Class History, and Labor. Originally from Maine, Sedgewick lives in New York City.”

This book has received well deserved rave reviews in the main stream press.  There are links on the author’s website.

https://www.augustinesedgewick.work/

Coffeeland:ONE MAN'S DARK EMPIRE AND THE MAKING OF OUR FAVORITE DRUG by Augustine Sedgewick is a first rate work of narrative Non-fiction.

The Penelopiad" by Margaret Atwood - 2005 - 198 Pages

 “ Margaret Atwood Reading Month is hosted by me and Naomi at Consumed by Ink, inspired by decades of our reading Margaret Atwood’s words.

From Sunday, November 1st to Monday, November 30th we’ll be reading Margaret Atwood, and we invite you to join in! (And, don’t forget, the 18th is Margaret Atwood’s 81st birthday. We’ll be celebrating with books, quotes, and cake!) “ from Buried in Print 

The Penelopiad" by Margaret Atwood - 2005 - 198 Pages 

This is the first of what will be at least two works I will read as my participation in Margaret Atwood Month - November 2020

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood (2005, 198 pages)

This tale of privileged rich versus abused masses is a perfect commentary on the world today.

Everyone knows about Odysseus, the central character of the Odyssey.   He married Penelope, cousin of Helen, when she was 15.       The Odyssey is considered, among many other things, to be perhaps the first  the story of the use of human intelligence to deal  with and solve problems.   Odysseus was the king of a minor country in ancient Greece.  In an arranged marriage that was basically a business deal he married  the then 15 year old Penelope, cousin of Helen.    The Penelopiad is  told from the point of view of Penelope with her maids as a kind of Greek Choir commenting on the story.    It has been a long time since I  studied Greek Drama but the Chorus is sort of allowed to say the unsay-able, to tell the audience the "real story".

Penelope is none to happy about going to Ithaca, Odysseus's kingdom as it is a remote backward place compared to the home of her father, King  of Sparta.    She is only 15 and her maids have given her very confusing accounts of what will happen on the wedding night.   She is consumed by jealousy over the beauty of her cousin Helen.   She leaves Sparta with Odysseus and take up residence in the palace at Ithaca.    She has brought along one of her maids, a slave of course, for company.   The slave soon dies.    Penelope and Odysseus develop a close relationship.   She has issues with her mother in law who does not want to lose her position as the most important woman in her son's life.  There is an old maid, another slave, who in her youth wet nursed Odysseus, who really runs the house hold.   When ever Penelope tries to do anything or learn anything about running the household the head maid tells her basically "don't worry your pretty head about this just contemplate what fancy clothes you want to wear tonight".    

A son is born of the union, Telemachus.   The event is celebrated as a wondrous happening and all care is given to the son and the mother.   The maids see it a bit differently.

“For his birth was longed-for and feasted, as

ours births were not.

His mother presented a princeling.   Our various mothers

Spawned merely, lambed, farrowed, littered..

We were animal young, to be disposed of at will,

Sold, drowned in the well, traded, used, discarded when bloomless.”

One of the chapters is entitled "Helen Ruined My Life".   A prince of Troy, Paris, a notorious womanizer and his brother are on a state visit to Sparta.  Odysseus has sworn loyalty to the king of Sparta.   Paris seduced Helen, sounds like an easy thing to do as Penelope lays out her super vain character, and takes her back to Troy with him.   The king of Sparta declares  war  on Troy when Paris will not return her.   Odysseus leaves to fight at Troy.    The war lasts ten years.   The Trojan horse was the idea of Odysseus.   The trip back to Ithica takes ten years.    During these twenty years Penelope learns to run the kingdom.   She learns everything from bargaining with other kingdoms to how to raise swine.   Her son Telemachus grows to be a teenager and become rebellious.    She has no idea if Odysseus lives or not.   Sometimes she hears news of him.   Some times she hears he has been eaten by a monster, then next week she will hear he is living with a Goddess on an exotic island.    In the mean time an army of suitors for the presumed widow descend on Ithaca.   They begin to deplete the resources of the kingdom.  Penelope picks her 12 favorite maids, young girls who have been her slaves since birth, to spy on the suitors.   Some of them end up being raped by the suitors.  

Rape is defined in the world the maids are in as having sex with a slave woman without permission of her master.   Rape was a crime against the property of the male owner of the slave women, not against them.    It was common for visiting dignitaries to be given female company but any contact without permission is a great insult to the master or mistress of the slaves.   Some of them end up in love with the suitors and some remain loyal to Penelope.   We see Penelope begin to assert herself for  the first time.    We see how women are seen as property.   We hear the suitors, many in their late teens and early twenties, joke about the prospect of sleeping with Penelope.   The basic idea is marry her and do what you must then you get all her property and can have all the slave girls you want.  Penelope at first had  a hard time ordering the slaves about.   Her mother likewise had problems with directing the work of slaves but was not above killing them when they annoyed her.    

Penelope becomes a shrewd household manager and begins to intervene in the running of the country.   Her mother had taught her to behave like water, the water that will wear down a stone.   A lot of the story is taken up with class conflict.   When Telemachus sprains a leg numerous doctors are called in.  When a slave child is ill a business decision is made whether to drown him in the well or spend the funds to try to cure him.    The worse enemy of the attractive slave maids turns out to be the once beautiful but now aged former wet nurse of Odysseus.   Most people know the basic story of Odysseus and I do not want to give away much of the plot action.

The story is told from the world of the dead where Penelope and Helen both now reside.   A very funny scene occurs when Helen takes a public bath in order to show off her body to the men in the underworld.   Penelope says what is the point they cannot do anything now but Helen says she is just being kind to them.    

The Penelopiad shows Penelope growing from a totally helpless 15 year old to a woman of 35 with many capabilities.   She must still act like she is deferring to men.   When Odysseus returns (this is not a spoiler as it is on the back cover of the book and many will know it anyway) he kills the suitors and slaughters the maids.    Why he feels he has the right to slaughter the maids brings out the central feminist themes of the book.   Just like as in The Handmaiden's Tale, there is a incredibly clever change of narrative mode in which the maids give a lecture to a modern audience of male Anthropologists which is an explicitly feminist reinterpretation of the life of the maids and their death.   It has to be read with an ear for irony, not as a statement of dogma.

I am not sure if I like this or The Handmaid's Tale more.    The Penelopiad is easy to read and a lot of fun.   I would really say read both of them.   I am very glad I read these books.   The Penelopiad is a very creative interpretation  of the Myth of Odysseus.   It is funny, perceptive, the chorus of the maids is a superb  device and is a great account of class differences among women in a world in which all women were property.    Even the treatment of Helen shows a woman using her looks to get what she wants.   She seems a slave to her own vanity which is validated for her by the number of men killed in her name.   That vanity is  the vanity of  a woman who gets all their self worth from the admiration of men.   Her husband did not start the Trojan war because he missed Helen but because his property was stolen.   

I look forward to seeing what develops during Margaret Atwood Month.

Mel u

The Reading Life Review - October 2020

 October Authors

Column One

1. Ian Urbina - USA - author - Outlaw Oceans -first feature 
2. Denton Remoto - Phillippines - Award winning author of Riverrun - first feature
3. Kavita Jindal - India - UK- Multi - First Appearance - Kavita A. Jindal is a prize-winning fiction writer, as well as a poet, essayist and reviewer. She is the author of Manual For A Decent Life, Patina and Raincheck Renewed. Her work has appeared in literary journals, anthologies and newspapers around the world and been broadcast on BBC Radio, Zee TV and European radio stations. She is the co-founder of The Whole Kahani collective of British-Asian writers. I intend to feature her numerous times 

Column 2

1. Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay - India - first appearance - highly regarded Bengali author
2. Ethel Rohan - Ireland - USA - I have been featuring her work for over Seven years and soon shall post on her new Short Story Collection 
3. Katherine Mansfield - New Zealand to UK

Column 3

1. Elizabeth Taylor - UK - an exquisite artist.  I am doing a read through of her oeuvre 
2. Victor Lasalle - USA - The Ballad of Black Tom - first appearance- horror writer - I have added three more of his novels to my wish list
3. Andrew O’Shaughnessy - USA - distinguished historian of the American Revolution - first appearance 

Column 4

1. Florence M. Jumonville - USA - first appearance - Florence M. Jumonville, a native New Orleanian, is the archivist at Touro Infirmary. There and in previous positions at The Historic New Orleans Collection and the University of New Orleans Library, she has worked with Louisiana materials and special collections for over forty-five years and has written extensively on Louisiana history
2. Pekka Hanalainen - Finland - UK -First Appearance- author The Comanche Empire - Bancroft Prize Winner 
3. Neera Kashyap-  India - featured three times - award winning multi-genre writer- 

Home Countries of October Authors 

1. USA - 4
2. India- 3
3. Ireland- 1
4. Philippines - 1
5. New Zealand - 1
6. Finland - 1
7. UK - 1

Six male authors were featured as well as six women.

Two are  deceased.

Eight were featured for The first time.  I hope to return to their work.

I posted on four works of narrative non-fiction, five Short Stories and three novels

Review Policy

I have no rigid rules. I look at anything am sent.  

Future Plans

In November following a ten year tradition, I Will Focus on German Literature.

Much of my near term Reading hopes can be seen in the images in my sidebar

I Will join in with Buried in Print for Margaret Atwood Month

Blog Stats 

To date The Reading Life has received 6,144,996 page views.

In October the top home countries of visitors were 

1. USA
2. France - first time so high on list
3. Philippines 
4. India
5. Germany
6. UK
7. Canada
8. Taiwan - first time on list
9. Brazil - also first time 

Of the ten most viewed posts, eight were about short stories in translation 

There are currently 3816 active posts online.

I offer my thanks to Max u for his kind provision of Amazon Gift Cards 

A super typhoon has our home in its sights.  

To my fellow book bloggers, The greatest readers in The World, keep posting.  Your voice is needed in these dark times.