Tag: alma classics

Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb

~ winstonsdad ~ 3 Comments

Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb

Hungarian fiction

Original title –Utas és holdvilág

Translator – Peter V. Czipott

Source – Personal copy

I thought I had reviewed this book. I had read it a few years ago, well, 12 years ago, and Hadn’t reviewed it. That was the Len Rix translation that was from Pushkin Press. This new translation came out a few years ago from ALMA CLASSICS. This is one that caught the zeitgeist back in the day. After a review from  Nicholas Lezard, he said he finished and restarted. I think I didn’t review it as it felt like one that everyone loved, and this review maybe couldn’t tackle it. I know, but now is a different matter. Antal Szerb was a writer, scholar, and literary historian. He was well received in this day, but due to being a Jew, he ended up in a concentration camp and died only in his mid-forties. One of the best voices of his generation was lost.

The letter really got under Mihaly’s skin. He was revolted by Pataki’s unmanly “goodness”, which in any case was not even goodness, just lack of masculinity; but would hardly have been more praiseworthy if it had been goodness, since Mihaly didn’t have a very high opinion of goodness. And all that obsequiousness! In spite of it all, Pataki remained a mere shop assistant, no matter how rich he’d become.

But all this was Zoltán Pataki’s business, and it was his problem if he was still in love with Erzsi, who had behaved truly scandalously towards him. That wasn’t what upset Mihaly, but the parts of the letter referring to him and Erzsi.

A letter he gets from her first Husband gets under his skin just before they end up losing one another.

 

This is what Evelyn Waugh would have written had he been Hungarian. This is a pair of Bright your things. But two different people. Mihaly is on his honeymoon with his wife, Erzi. But as they are heading to Italy . Mihaly is haunted by his own ghost of a broken relationship from his teen years. He eventually tells his new wife about the events and loses love from his teen years and a tragedy. As they are heading on the train. He talks about all the little places they could visit, but his wife just wants to move on and get to Austria and forget his revelations. But when he says I’m going jump off at this station, grab something to eat, and come back, she says ok happy for a break from him. But when he comes back and sees a train going, he thinks it is his train, but it isn’t and is on an express to Perugia  So the rest of the narrative follows both of them as we find out more about his wife. As she heads to Paris and looks at her own ghosts, they both meet ghosts from their past. He gets the chance to go back and be like he was in his teens as he makes his way across Europe. Will they get back together?

When he’d got hold of the cheque and his passport that night, he thought – of course, not entirely seriously – that happenstance might separate them during the journey. When he got off in Terontola, it again crossed his mind that he might leave Erzsi to travel on with the train. But now that it had indeed happened, he was surprised and at a loss. But in any case – it had happened!

“And what will you do now?” the Italian pressed him.

“I’ll get off at the next station.”

“But this is an express. It won’t stop until Perugia.”

“Well then, I’ll get off at Perugia.”

“See, I told you right away that you’re travelling to Perugia. Don’t worry: it’s worth it. A very ancient city. And take a look at the surrounding area too.”

When Mihaly gets on the wrong Train

I said this reminds me of Waugh. At times, there is the feeling of Charles Ryder or Tony Last in Mihaly as a character with wanderlust, and the sense of never feeling quite part of your world is strong. Also, the places they visit are places where. Waugh wrote about the paths of the bright young things of the 30s just before the war changed the world for them. This novel has it all love, loss, death, and regrets, all in beautiful places and on trains evoking a bygone era of travel and life when getting to a place led to chat and often people’s minds wandering as they travelled. This is also a couple haunted both in their ways around their pasts. As they head around Europe, they meet those ghosts as friends or memories of those now gone. I loved this. I have read it again. Unlike Lezard, it has had a gap of 12 years and a different Translation. Unfortunately. I can’t see my copy of the Rix Translation either I sold it when I moved as I had to get rid of a lot of books as I downsized shelf space, or it is hidden at the back of some other books and I just missed it when I had a good look earlier this week. Anyway, this is my second stop for this week’s 1937 club. What stops have you picked this week? I have a couple more to review at the weekend.

Winston score – A Love, Marriage, Regrets Secrets and Italy in the 30s. What more could you ask for?

 

Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet

~ winstonsdad ~ 8 Comments

Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet

French fiction

Original title – La Jalousie

Translator -Richard Howard

When I noted the other week that I was only 19 books away from 150 french books read I had a look back over all the books I had read from France over the years and looked at my shelves and thought I need a little more depth to the selection is mostly modern writers so I do have a lot of french books as they now are my go-to country to read from when I started the blog it would be German fiction but these days it is very much French literature but as I say more modern french literature. So I decide the next few french books will have a few older books and here we go with a book from the post-war era of French Literature. When we got a group of writers that were grouped together as the roman Noveau the new novel  Grillet and other writers like  Claude Simon (I have my eye on a new edition of his work from The Flanders road I have reviewed him and also a book from Nathalie Surraute. Robbe Grillet wrote a weekly column about his view of the modern novel. He was both a writer and also a filmmaker. This is his best-known novel I have already reviewed A project of a Revolution in New York which was written a number of years after this book. Anyway, I have watched a few of his films in the meantime and also read a bit about him and this book has a lot of common threads that appear in Grillet’s works.

Franck is here agaun for dinner, smiling, talkative, affable. Christiane has not come with him this time; she has stayed home with the child , who is running a slight fever. It is not unusal, these fays, for the husband to come without her like this, because of the child, because of christiane’s own ailments – for her health has difficulty adapting itself to this hot, humid climate – and also because of her domestic  problems, her difficulties managing her numerous and poorl organized servants.

There is an undercurrent of this short passage I felt !!

The book is the first-person narrative of a jealous husband as he is viewing his wife whom we only ever know as A in the book and her interaction with their neighbour Franck with his wife sometimes other times just Franck. We watch as the narrator glimpses on through the blinds. The title in french has a duel meaning as Jaluise is also the French name for Venitian blinds that the jealous husband is observing the action but this itself means that his description of the events is limited to our narrator’s vision of the event and is from the viewpoint that he feels his wife A is having this affair with Franck this love triangle is the heart of the book as we observe that action or well the events it is set in a Banana plantation and this is the time that the French Empire was like the British Empire was starting to fall apart so one imagines that there is a sense of that the heat also will add to the tension of the events happening I was reminded at times of the restored scenes of Apocalypse Now where we follow the evening in the old plantation. There is a feel of what is missed in the narrative also he like in his films jumps from time to time from one event to another event. This is a classic slice of what the New novel as a concept was meant to do and that is to rip up the novel as a norm away from the novel to the bare mechanics of what the work is!

They look at each other without adding another word.Franck widens his smiles, which wrinkles up the corners of his eyes. He opens his mouth as if he were going to say something, be he doesn’t say anything. A …’s features, from a point three quarters of the way behind her, reveal nothing.

After several minutes- or serveral seconds – both are still in the same postition. Franck’s face, as well as his whole body, is virtually petrified. He is wearing shorts and a short sleeved khaki shirtm whose shoulder straps and buttoned pockets have a vaguely military look. Over hus rough cotton knee socks he wears tennis shoes coated with a thick layer of white shoe polish, cracked at the places where the canvas bends with the foot.

The mechanic of the meet here also the reference to Military lok remind me of Apocalypse now

I said the mechanics as the bones of this book and it is true that he was trained as an Engineer and there is a sense of that type of mind at work I was reminded of my own father’s mind and the way he views the world which is very much how does it work? That is the heart of what he has done here it is like a hotrod of a novel it has been taken apart and rebuilt you can see its influence on other works after this the way the narrated glimpses into this world of his wife and his neighbours isn’t far removed from Jeffrey viewing frank through the slanted wardrobe door. Even the name is similar Franck and Frank! The glimpse of action even has a nod towards Hitchcock which came out before this book it is all about the angle the view we get the glimpses of the action it is shots of the events we are asked to think about what the events are we add the emotions and maybe even fill the gaps! in the book. So it is easy to see why this is considered an important work of post-war fiction as it is part of a canon of writers that wanted to shake up the novel after the war in France and Nabahkov called it the best novel about Love since Proust maybe the best about the despair of love. Have you read any books or seen the films of Robbe- Grillet.

Winstons score – A look at what one man views or doesn’t?