"Transit" by Rachel Cusk

     The narrator of Rachel Cusk's novel, "Transit," is a writer who is starting a new life after a divorce. She moves with her two sons from the country to London and buys the worst house on a "good" street, as she has had some advice that this is the way to go: renovate something that is in bad repair. The place she chooses is in terrible shape, and it still has a basement flat from which the occupants--like trolls from a cave-- sally forth again and again to insult her as the work of renovation proceeds.
     In this transitional state, the narrator (not named until well into the book) seems to float through life, living in the rooms that are being worked on, covered in dust and ghostly dust sheets. The narrator's two boys are shadowy figures, mostly staying with their father and occasionally telephoning their mother when there is some problem. The way she passes her time is not much in evidence: she never describes how she spends her day, although she mentions teaching and a pupil visits her for a lesson. She spends much of her time listening to others describe their lives, their problems, their strange epiphanies. First there is her old partner of fifteen years previously, whom she meets with his daughter on the street. He does not seem to have changed at all. The builder she employs to do the renovation wanders on about the problems the house presents, how much time he spends in his van, why the renovations will be very, very difficult...and why his van is filled with empty coffee cups. The narrator's hair stylist relates how one New Year's Eve he decided that he did not want to go clubbing and snorting coke with his gay mates because suddenly it all seemed very childish. His philosophy of life is interwoven with his remarks about what shade the narrator should dye her hair--a metaphorical aspect of her transition.
    The narrator appears at a literary festival as one of a panel of three speakers, where the other two rehash, at length, their childhoods and their literary aims. And as the other reported narrations proceed, we hear from the Polish and Albanian workers who are renovating the house, and the novel concludes with a long chapter in which Faye (the name is only mentioned once) goes to stay with her cousin, Lawrence, where there is detailed exploration of marriage, divorce, children, cooking, peculiar relationships...life.
    Well, what is it all about? Everything, really: yes, life, philosophy, the strange psychology that drives some human lives, the inheritance from our parents, the complications of 
relationships, the problems of first and second marriages, problems of parenthood, starting new phases in life--the list could go on.
     The novel has generally received excellent reviews, with the occasional criticism that some Cusk's obiter dicta about life are trite and banal.
      From a literary standpoint it is an extraordinary creation. Do not expect a specific story...just absorb with interest where Cusk takes you.

"A Meal in Winter"

This is a short novel, translated from the French. The author is Hubert Mingarelli (I had never heard of him), and apparently he usually writes books for what are called 'young adults'. But this is a very powerful novel and in every respect aimed at a sophisticated reader.
The narrator is a German soldier stationed in Poland during a very cold winter of World War II. It slowly becomes clear that his squad's mission is the extermination of Jews: hunting them, capturing them, and bringing them back to the camp to be shot.
The narrator and his two comrades have no stomach for the daily executions, but their only way to avoid this is to be assigned to search for Jews in the forests and bring them back to the camp. “We would rather do the hunting than the shootings,” he tells his base commander.  So the narrator and his two very different compatriots embark on a long, frigid search, and about a third of the way through the novel they capture a “Jew,” (the first time this word is used), who crawls out from an underground hiding place. Much of the rest of the novel finds the three soldiers and their captive in a ramshackle cottage, where they find refuge from the cold. They then face the problems of how to light and fuel the stove, how to cook, eat, and stay warm. The intrusion of a Polish hunter from the countryside further complicates their situation.  As they spend time and share food together, the captors experience some subtle shifts. Over the course of “the strangest meal we ever had in Poland,” the narrator and his companions wrestle with the morality of delivering their captive to the camp and his execution.

To quote a glowing review: "The command of tone and voice sustains tension until the very last page of a novel that will long resonate in the reader’s conscience."

'The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping,' by Aharon Appelfeld

    This slow, almost sleep-walking, novel begins as follows:
     "At the end of the war, I became immersed in constant slumber. Though I moved from train to train, from truck to truck, and sometimes from wagon to wagon, it was all in a dense, dreamless sleep. When I opened my eyes for a moment, the people looked heavy and expressionless."
    Erwin was sixteen or so when he arrived at a refugee camp in Naples, with little idea how he got there. Other refugees recognized him as 'the sleeping boy,' who was a serious encumbrance, but nevertheless they carried him, looked after him, and kept him with them. From time to time during the course of the book, he runs across people who remember him as 'the sleeping boy.'
    In Naples, with a group of other youths, he was recruited by Ephraim to train as a pioneer. They ran, they exercised, they learnt Hebrew, and eventually they were shipped to "The Land," where they were held by the British in an internment camp before being assigned to a kibbutz. But still, from time to time, he had to sleep all day. Not long after beginning to work in the kibbutz, the group begins military training, and subsequently they are involved in actual fighting. Erwin (or now Aharon, as they had to adopt Hebrew names) is seriously wounded. The novel slowly makes its way through hospitals, operations, rehabilitation, to a final epiphany. Much of that prolonged period is devoted to flash-backs, or dreams, or just plain day-dreaming, when he meets his mother and his father, and other lost relations, and has conversations with them about his present situation. And he is visited by other wounded comrades from the kibbutz, each of whom suffers from some problem of the disruption they have experienced from their days as children. And there is much focus on language: the loss of his mother tongue (German) and his slow immersion into Hebrew. He copies extensive passages in Hebrew from the Bible so as "..to train my right hand, I wanted to tell her, but also to connect with the hidden meanings of the ancient letters."
    Erwin's father owned a sawmill, but longed to be a writer and often submitted manuscripts that were rejected. And Erwin seems to want to achieve for his father what he had failed to do--become a writer that produces work that 'sings,' Close to the end of the book, he writes a short story, a memoir of his childhood, in which he feels he has achieved what he sought.
    This is not an easy book, but I found it fascinating. God knows how many awards Appelfeld has won. And it is surely not coincidental that--like Erwin--he was born in Bukovina, escaped into the forest at the age of nine, when the Romanian Army took his home town from the Russians and his mother was murdered. He and his father were sent to a German concentration camp in Transnistria, Romania, from which he escaped and hid for three years. He was in a camp for displaced persons in Italy before immigrating to Palestine in 1946.
    Give it a try...

"Here I'am " by Jonathan Safran Foer

    Apparently it took Jonathan Safran Foer eleven years to bring this novel to fruition; at least, his last novel was published some eleven years ago. But the new novel, "Here I'am" is great tome, running, if I recollect rightly, up into 500 pages or so, and it has clearly been long in the making.
    What's it about? I hesitate to say that it is about everything connected with being a secular, or atheist, Jew in the United States, as this will then seem that my reading in recent months has focussed narrowly on the subject of Judaism, what with Finkler and Shylock. But it is much, much more than an exploration of Judaism--it is about a marriage that is splitting up, has split up, and started so successfully--the author switches without much of an indicator from present to future and past--confusingly so at times. It is about unbelievably precocious children; a bar-mitzvah speech by a thirteen-year-old boy reads like a rabbinical study. It's about a huge earthquake in the Middle East that comes close to destroying Israel, leading the Israeli Prime Minister to make a speech imploring Jews to come and defend Israel and an firebrand ayatollah urging Muslims to exterminate Jews.
     The principal characters--the married couple on their way to divorce--are Jacob and Julia, and they talk about their relationship endlessly, often in successive pages of dialogue that go, annoyingly, something like this:
    You should have said
     I said it twice.
    Twice was not enough when you didn't mean it.
     I did mean it.
     Jacob is constantly wrestling with who he is. One of the sons, Sam, is living a parallel life with an avatar on his computer. Julia cannot make up her mind whether to start an affair. The great-grandfather commits suicide, and there is a set-piece sermon of religious philosophy given by a rabbi at the funeral.
      I cannot do justice to the whole range of Foer's approaches to writing. He is clearly some sort of genius, but frankly it often seems as if he is just showing off--"look what I can do: if Portnoy could do page or two on masturbation, look how I can do a whole chapter."
      But one reviewer noted that the book was like a puppy...once you put it down, it is not long before you want to pick it up again, and I did hang in there until the end. 
      My partner, Joan, gave up half-way through. Her comment goes towards the old question: can you like a book when you do not like the principal characters?

Margaret Atwood and Howard Jacobson

     I have mentioned before the list of books that the Hogarth Press has commissioned  to retell some of Shakespeare's plays. I have already written about "Vinegar Girl," by Anne Tyler, which was an agreeable little novel that hewed quite closely to "The Taming of the Shrew."

    One that I also enjoyed a lot was Margaret Atwood's retelling of the "The Tempest," in which the modern day Prospero runs a theatre but is 'exiled' by a couple of conspirators before he can produce his version of the 'Tempest.' In his exile, he works in a prison to produce plays, and eventually stages "The Tempest" at a time when his enemies, who have attained some political importance, visit the prison--and, like the shipwrecked crowd on Prospero's island, are led around and tormented by the prison actors. Sounds weird, I know, but it works well. A very likable tale--entitled "Hag Seed."

    To plagiarise one critic:

"this is written with such gusto and mischief that it feels so much like something Atwood would have written anyway. The joy and hilarity of it just sing off the page. It’s a magical eulogy to Shakespeare, leading the reader through a fantastical reworking of the original but infusing it with ironic nods to contemporary culture."  

    Another in this series I read recently and did not warm to in the slightest was Howard Jacobson's supposed retelling of "The Merchant of Venice," entitled "Shylock is My Name."
Having recently read "The Finkler Question," which is all about what it does or does not mean to be a Jew, I felt that "Shylock" was just running over that same old ground. Yes, a lot of it was funny, and--yes--he is a brilliant writer, but I found the novel, well, tedious--and, frankly, apart from bringing a post-Venice Shylock into the society of the greater Manchester conurbation, the parallel with "The Merchant' was lost on me.