Shortly after World War I, Philippe Marcenat is writing a journal trying to explain to his second wife, Isabelle, his personally devastating past life with Odile, his first wife. He believes that if the quiet and accommodating Isabelle can only understand his life with the vivacious and exciting Odile, that Isabelle will be even more understanding of his often thoughtless behavior during their own marriage. Starting his journal in the years immediately following World War I, Philippe reflects the pomposity and vanity with which he, and others of his time and class often treat the women in their lives. Though he wants to be honest, Philippe is limited by his own attitudes and those of his culture, however. He is unable to identify with women in any meaningful way, except as property, and is at a loss to understand why the most beautiful woman he has ever met – his first wife, Odile – has abandoned him for another. Isabelle’s story begins halfway through the novel. As Isabelle reveals their post-war courtship and marriage from her own point of view, the true nature of the marriage and the respective limitations of the two characters become even clearer. “What I want from love,” Isabelle remarks “is a warm, caressing climate, something my family refused me.” The novel, aided by the new translation, moves swiftly and smoothly through time, revealing much about the culture of France between the two wars.
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Opening with a brief preface, purportedly written in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, and in Barcelona between 1973 and 1974, the novel’s author describes himself as a “copyist,” asserting that he is trying to make sense of daily notes found in a soldier’s old green canvas rucksack containing “dog-eared exercise books, leaflets, bits of cardboard, scraps of paper covered with an untidy scrawl.” Jakob Bergant-Berk, the soldier who penned these notes during Slovenia’s World War II battles against the Germans and Italians has also included “several selected sayings, quotations, maxims, [which he] entered in the notes, sometimes for no apparent reason, and sometimes as a integral part of them.” The novel itself evolves from this introduction, and battle scenes from 1943 alternate with scenes which take place in Barcelona in 1973, sometimes shifting time and place without transitions. It becomes clear that the soldier and the man in Barcelona are the same person, and it is in Barcelona, on vacation many years later, that this man, Berk, meets a former German soldier, Joseph Bitter. In a series of local bars and tourist destinations, they discuss the war, its objectives, and its Machiavellian strategies, a technique which allows the author to expand on some of the many themes to which Berk, the soldier, has referred, however briefly, in his notes. Images of war as a dance of death – a macabre minuet – accompanied by the “twenty-five shot guitar,” mentioned in the opening quotation, are matched with the ironic rat-a-tat-tat of Barcelona flamenco dancers, accompanied by the throbbing of Spanish guitars in the background as the two men talk.
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In her final novel, Brazilian novelist/poet Clarice Lispector (1920 – 1977) writes an eerie, almost supernatural tale of Macabea, a nineteen-year-old woman almost totally devoid of personality, opinion, thoughts, and even feelings. Her story is being told by Roderigo S.M., a writer, similarly isolated, without a long-term idea of what he wants to write, though he says, as he begins the story, that he has “glimpsed in the air the feeling of perdition on the face of a northeastern girl [Macabea].” He tells the reader that his story, whatever it will be, will be both exterior and explicit in style but will contain secrets. He will also have no pity, and he wants the story to be cold. “This isn’t just narrative, it’s above all primary life that breathes, breathes, breathes,” he states. When Macabea arrives in Rio, where she lives with several other girls, she never contemplates her future or thinks much about it at all. “Did she feel she was living for nothing? I’m not sure, but I don’t think so,” the narrator muses. A trip to a fortune teller and its aftermath eventually provide the turning point of the novel. Irony builds upon irony as the author explores who we are, how we know, how we fit into the grand scheme of life, and ultimately, whether there actually is any “grand scheme.” In this odd but peculiarly thought-provoking novel, the reader will often be as confused and conflicted as the narrator, but the book may be unique in its subject matter and approach to writing, and after a slow start, I became enchanted with it.
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Yukio Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy, of which this novel is the second in the series, incorporates four novels set in four different time periods, illustrating Mishima’s extremely conservative attitudes toward the changes in Japan from the 1912 to 1970. Born in 1925, Mishima had, throughout his life, mourned the loss of samurai ideals, including reverence for the Emperor. As the novel opens, Shigekuni Honda, a main character in Spring Snow, the first novel in the series, is now a judge in the Osaka Court of Appeals. He has reached the age of thirty-eight, a man leading a quiet life of reason who believes that his youth ended with the death of his friend Kiyoaki Matsugae, eighteen years ago. When he is asked to substitute for his Chief Justice at a kendo exhibition in Nara, some distance away, he accepts. The star of the exhibition is young Isao Iinuma, the nineteen-year-old son of Kiyoaki’s tutor during their childhood. Honda, who has always grounded his life in reason, soon has reason to believe that Isao is the confident samurai reincarnation of Kiyoaki, who was a sensitive man of passion and emotion a generation ago. As he follows Isao’s life, he gives an ironic blueprint for his own life in 1970.
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Claudia Hampton, an iconoclastic, sometimes imperious, often maddening, and completely liberated seventy-six-year-old woman, lies in a nursing home awaiting death—very reluctantly. Having earned her living as a reporter during the Cairo campaign in World War II and later as a popular historian, she sees no reason why she should not continue her work as she awaits death. ‘Let me contemplate myself within my [own] context,” she says, “everything and nothing. The history of the world as selected by Claudia: fact and fiction, myth and evidence, images and documents.” As she fades in and out of consciousness (her nurse wondering aloud to the doctor, “Was she someone?”), she plans her story for her usual readers, indicating that she will omit the narrative but “flesh it out; give it life and color, add the screams and the rhetoric…The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history? I’ve always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out…There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water..there is no sequence, everything happens at once.” By turns humorous, thoughtful, satiric, wonderfully philosophical, and consummately literary in its observations and allusions, this novel is an absolute treasure, one that will appeal to every lover of serious themes presented in new ways.
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