This tiny book, closer to a short story than to a novella, was the last piece of fiction by author Joseph Roth (1894 – 1939), and was published posthumously in 1940. As such, it becomes a particularly poignant study of Roth’s last days as he waited for the death he knew was coming. The Leviathan his allegorical last story, features an observant but illiterate Jew living in Progrody in the Ukraine who has become the premier dealer of coral jewelry for the farmers’ wives in the community and surrounding area. Nissen Piczenik respects his customers, entertains them when they come to town to see his wares, and offers good corals at good prices. Nissen has never left Progrody and has always yearned to see the ocean where his corals live, and when a young sailor comes home on leave from Odessa, he persuades the sailor to take him with him when returns to port. At home, he learns that a new coral seller has set up shop in the next town, and when he meets this seller, he discovers why this merchant has been able to undercut him in prices and lead his former customers to believe that Nissen has been cheating them. Nissen’s world dramatically changes as he comes to know the new coral seller, and one day he makes a fateful decision which changes the world as he knows it. Allegorical, with clear parallels to the author’s own life.
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In this exciting and rather “old-fashioned” prize-winner from 1975, newly reprinted by Bloomsbury, Thomas Williams creates a novel about fiction writing and its relationship to the “immensities” with which every human being must contend, for better or worse, during his lifetime. Telling the story of a novelist who is writing a novel in which a character is also writing a novel, Williams creates, first, Aaron Benham, a professor at a small New England college in the 1970s. Williams tells the reader at the outset that the story Aaron Benham is creating is “a simple story of seduction, rape, madness and murder—the usual human preoccupations,” but that is a misleading summary. Aaron’s novel, set in the 1940s, is actually a study of very real characters dealing with their lives, their expectations, and the world as they see it within the microcosm of a small college. Constantly playing with fiction vs. reality, fiction as part of reality, fiction as an alternative to reality, and the special fictions one creates for love, the author writes a powerful and dramatic novel, filled with events which keep the reader constantly involved with his characters, even when they are behaving very badly. Powerful and unforgettable.
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Julio Llamazares will win many new readers with this powerful and richly atmospheric novel, a classic in Spain for the past twenty years, but only recently available in English translation. Capturing the love of an old man for his land and for the village in which he and his ancestors were born, it is also a study of the inexorable effects of time and the pressures it exerts on isolated communities and the human inhabitants who lack direct connection with a wider world. Told from the point of view of a now-elderly man who, along with his faithful, unnamed dog, is the last remaining inhabitant of Ainielle, a crumbling village in the Pyrenees, the novel details his physical and emotional deterioration as he observes the parallel collapse of the town, “whole buildings kneeling like cattle,” the village itself a mangled and sad “unburied corpse.” His wife Sabina, who had remained with him after all the other inhabitants gradually departed, has now been dead for ten years, and as the novel opens, Andres believes that this is the last day of his life.
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Nominated for the Booker Prize in 1982, when it was first published in London, Wish Her Safe at Home is a startling novel with an even more startling main character, Rachel Waring, a forty-seven-year-old woman who has a dead end job, a cynical roommate, and no friends. Brought up by an overbearing mother whose sense of “correct behavior” seems to have ruined any chances Rachel might have had for a happy life, she is lonely and repressed, with absolutely no understanding of how to meet and make connections with strangers. Every event here is filtered through Rachel’s own mind, and when she becomes the sole beneficiary of an elderly aunt’s Georgian home in Bristol, she decides to leave London and her roommate. Once ensconced in the old house, which she proceeds to refurbish and refurnish, however, she becomes a “new woman.” As her voice becomes increasingly confidential and revelatory, the involved reader cannot help but recognize with alarm the growing contrast between Rachel as she sees herself and Rachel as she appears to the rest of the world. Classic psychological novel.
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Written in 1933, and newly translated into English, Kornel Esti is Dezso Kosztolanyi’s last book, a unique combination of wild romp, thoughtful contemplation of life’s mysteries, and dark commentary on life’s ironic twists. Dezso Kosztolanyi (1885 – 1936), a Hungarian poet, fiction writer, and journalist, creates a narrator who is also a writer, telling us from the outset that the narrator, now forty, had not seen his oldest friend Kornel Esti, also a writer, for ten years. Now, however, the narrator has decided to contact him. Born on March 29, 1885, the same day and time as both the narrator and author, Kornel Esti also looks just like the narrator and is clearly his alterego, now down on his luck. What follows is a series of eighteen episodes, which may or may not be metafictional, ranging from Kornel Esti’s first day of school, in 1891, through a symbolic tram ride at the end of the novel, a brief chapter in which the author’s entire philosophy is summed up through Esti’s late-in-life experiences on an overcrowded tram. In between are moments of high comedy, poignant drama, and shocking cruelty, all reflecting aspects of Esti’s life, either real or imagined, and all contributing to the broad panorama of human existence.
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