There has been a bit of a hiatus on Book Notes. Pressure of time, pressure of time...

But things I don't want to lose are piling up, so...

1.
Patrick Modiano's Paris.

This Nouvel Obs article suggests a "strange, but not necessarily unnatural, experiment". This consists of taking Patrick Modiano's novels one by one, and recording each street name and number in a notebook. You will see emerging, it says, a double trajectory: There are the novels that are rooted in a neighbourhood, peering into all its hidden corners; and there are those that crisscross the city, preferably on foot and at night, until this repeated passage becomes a time warp. Aside from those two categories, there are a few novels that evoke a menacing Paris, or focus only on the grand boulevards as a way to approach the capital.

And the article goes on to list the streets in all the novels...

Debarati Sanyal beautifully articulates Modiano's relationship with the city: "Over the course of almost 30 novels, Modiano's hunted and haunted narrators -- detectives, fugitives, amnesiacs, lost teens, orphans, refugees -- walk the creases and edges of an anonymous city that becomes a layered archive and fragile site of memory."

Must read more Modiano (to complement Dark Shops Street and Dora Bruder). Must do another little trip to Paris...


Paris, 2024

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2.
Continuing the Paris connection, here's another little visit to James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.

Worth quoting extensively:

"'Let everything happen to you,' wrote Rilke, 'Beauty and terror.'... [Rilke just KEEPS popping up. Must read Rilke.] It is not easy, this simple surrender. The courage and vulnerability it takes make it nothing less than an act of heroism... [Religion and psychotherapy] have sold us the alluring illusion that a state of permanent happiness can be attained -- in Eden, or across the finish line of our self-improvement project -- ultimately denying our fulness of being, denying the oscillation of 'beauty and terror' that makes life alive... When a man he encounters wonders why 'nobody can stay in the garden of Eden,' the narrator [in Giovanni's Room] is stopped up short... Baldwin writes:

"'The question is banal but one of the real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road — and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright -- and it’s true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden... Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.'"



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3.
Thoughts on Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Arendt, says Matthew Sharpe, saw Adolf Eichmann as an "efficient, bland bureaucrat", driven not by fanaticism but by lack of empathy. Subsequent documentation, however, reveals someone more akin to a "Nazi true believer", who was clever enough to morph into "the ungainly clerk next door" when captured and brought to trial. He pulled off this performance so successfully that he was able to deceive even someone as smart as Arendt. Sharpe concludes: "Eichmann remains an enduring illustration of how evil agents can use the masquerade of banality as one way to muddy the waters, deflect those who would hold them accountable and continue to deny their victims even the thin consolation of the moral high ground."

Peter Christoff, on the other hand, has a much more personal response to the work. His parents were Hungarian Jews, and the anti-Semitic killing machine had been set in motion with great zeal in that country.

"Arendt's book," he testifies, "spoke directly to me about my Hungarian family and our close Hungarian family friends. I knew some bare facts. Who had survived the camps. Who had lost some, many or all family members. But I grew up in a family without a history, one utterly silent about anything that preceded emigration to Australia in 1951. I was born in 1955, merely 11 years -- literally to the day -- after the German invasion of Hungary... Reading Arendt helped me ask new questions. Her book became a device for luring the occasional story to the surface. And so I learned about the faked identity papers and the Swedish 'passport' my mother obtained, her refusal to wear the yellow star, the months she and her mother spent hiding in a cellar... Mostly, however, the past remained sealed by trauma."

The book also made him consider the broader context of the "'Eichmann problem' of criminal disregard", prompting "questions about the nature of wilful blindness, and the sources of compromise, complicity, and collaboration with forms of evil in complex bureaucratic societies. Arendt’s underlying question about 'How should we behave?' became, for me, a question about how ordinary people -- like me -- can participate in awful things and contribute to terrible outcomes, sometimes knowingly, using exculpatory stories to salve their consciences."

He goes on to apply this insight to our continued systematic use of fossil fuels, despite clear evidence that we are contributing to global catastrophe.

And I guess we can now think of many other examples where "wilful blindness" is wreaking havoc, and have more cause than ever to wonder what exactly we can do about it.

Interesting. Must read more Arendt.


The Jewish cemetery, Sarajevo, 2023

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4.
A propos of all that, a moving tribute by Robert Manne to his Jewish grandfather, murdered in 1942.

I've frequently posted on work related to the plight of Europe's Jews in the first half of the 20th century. This year and last year alone, we've had Family Lexicon, The Radetzky March, Davita's Harp, Dora Bruder, My Father's House, and The Story of a Life.

Manne's family story is another of those tragedies. Chaim Manne, his father's father, migrated to the United States in 1900. But his business failed, and he went back to Europe 10 years later. To Vienna. March 1938 brought the German occupation of Austria -- and "a violent, vicious and lawless pogrom that historians have characterised as an 'open season' on the Jews." Occurring nine months before Kristallnacht, this was a sustained campaign of intimidation, humiliation, and theft. It also saw the beginning of detentions in Dachau, at this stage usually temporary.

A wave of suicides followed these events. Manne's family, in May 1938, also attempted to kill themselves using kitchen gas. His grandmother succeeded. His grandfather and uncle, Siegmund, survived, and bent their efforts to getting the younger man out. Although he had managed to get hold of a US migration visa, decided to stay in Britain, and later joined the British Army. For Chaim, however, in his mid-sixties, "the walls were now closing in". One hateful policy followed another. In October 1941, deportations to the east began. In May 1942, Chaim Manne was shot at the concentration camp near Maly Trostinec, 12 km southeast of Minsk.

The author's father, Henry Manne, just happened to be in Prague on business before the Anschluss of 1938. He didn't go home. Eventually, in 1943, he sought naturalization in Australia.

Proving, yet again, that there's nothing like being in the right place at the right time.


A synagogue in Budapest, 2023

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5.
A fascinating discussion of Joseph Conrad and Ukraine by Oliver Raw.

Conrad, that prodigy among the AWIALNTO (Authors Writing in a Language Not Their Own), has featured a couple of times lately: For The Secret Agent, and The End of the Tether.

Conrad was born in Berdichev, which is now in Ukraine. A small museum there is dedicated to his life, but few of the locals know much about him.

It's complicated, you see. Conrad was ethnically Polish, but there was no Poland at that point. It had been swallowed up (in the kind of great-power sphere-of-influence arrangement that Trump seems to want to reintroduce) by Prussia, Austria, and Russia. Conrad grew up in the Russian bit.

The powers' concerted attempt at national extinction has complicated history ever since. One local (himself ethnic Polish) tells Raw that most people don't think of Conrad as Ukrainian: "He identified as a Pole throughout his life." Another puts it more starkly: "He was a foreigner here." As Raw observes, it's odd that someone should be "regarded as a foreigner in the land where he was born and where his ancestors have lived for two hundred years". But that's often the story in this part of Europe.

Conrad's father backed the Polish independence movement. When his son was born, he wrote:

Baby son, tell yourself
You are without land, without love,
Without country, without people,
While Poland -- your Mother is entombed.

Kind of heavy... But Conrad did indeed grow up a wanderer. At one point, his father was convicted of conspiring against the imperial authorities, and was first imprisoned in the citadel in Warsaw, and then exiled, with his family, to Volgograd (east of Moscow), and subsequently to Chernihiv (north of Kyiv). After that, Conrad and his father (his mother was dead by now) moved to Lviv, which was then in the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia. After the death of his father, Conrad spent the rest of his childhood in Krakow. At the age of 16, he left for Marseille, where he embarked on a career as a sailor, "an unlikely career choice for someone who had, until then, little contact with the sea, but perhaps an obvious one for a young man without a land to call his own".


Toulon, 2024

Chernihiv, where Conrad's mother is buried, bore the full brunt of the Russian invasion in 2022. As Raw says, Conrad's "lifelong antipathy to Russia" would have left him unsurprised. There are still many people of Polish descent in the city. This, despite the fact that many ethnic Poles were killed or deported by Stalin (while thousands of Ukrainians were pushed out of Polish territories after WWII).

Natalia, a museum official, guides Raw around the city. With regard to Conrad, there's the following exchange:

"'He was here only a year,' says Natalia. 'He was a boy at the time.'
"I ask why there is not more recognition of him in Ukraine, given his global fame as a writer?
"'He was a Catholic,' she says. 'He was a Pole.'
"But he was born on Ukrainian soil, I say. So, doesn’t that make him a Ukrainian?
"'Partially,' Natalia says.
"To paraphrase Captain Marlow in Lord Jim, he was PARTIALLY one of us...
"'We want people to know we’re not Russians,' Natalia tells me. 'That we have our own culture, our own history, one that is older than Russia's.'
"An ethnic Pole, therefore, who wrote novels in English and died a hundred years ago, does not easily fit in. Or so it appears to my Western eyes."

Must read a bit more Conrad...



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6.
And, finally, an article on one of my favourite reading sources, the Internet Archive.

"In pursuit of its founder Brewster Kahle’s goal of building the Library of Alexandria anew," says Kieran Hegarty, "it has gathered and provides controlled access to millions of digitised books, audio recordings, videos and software programs... The Internet Archive takes risks that few libraries would dare contemplate. Sometimes those risks have negative consequences. But it takes those risks on behalf of all libraries and their users. It needs our support."

Totally.