A funny thing happened in the kitchen at work a few years ago. A colleague mentioned that she had been an intern at Archipelago Books, a Brooklyn-based publisher of translated lit that I deem highly, to put it lightly. The fact that she had interned there floored me since, up until that time and as far as I knew, it seemed like very few people at work — most likely no one — had heard of Archipelago, let alone owned/read any of their books or spent time in their offices etc.
Talking with this colleague in the kitchen one day, she asked for book recommendations after recommending an Archipelago publication she had worked on, Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski.
I can’t exactly remember what I recommended but I probably said that I tend to like to read translated lit by German and Austrians (Bernhard, Mann, Zweig, et al.), often from the peri-WWII period. I may have recommended Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kis (not German or Austrian, I know).
She asked if I’d read Erich Maria Remarque? I’d never heard the name and couldn’t even seem to wrap my head around it. Who? It really didn’t sound familiar. A few times I asked her to repeat it. Was it really possible that someone at work had recommended a heralded German writer from early/mid-20th century who I hadn’t even heard of, let alone read?! Was I one of those people who don’t even know how much they don’t even know?! (Yes, everyone is one of those people, ideally, right?)
Anyway, she said his A Night in Lisbon was one of her favorite novels but that I’d probably heard of All Quiet on the Western Front?
Yeah, sure, I’d heard of that one, knew it more as the title of an old movie, but honestly I think I sort of thought it was a western, a cowboy flick, set in some dusty plain, cacti and plateaus and gunslingers all around. I guess my attention had always stopped at the word “western” and never made it to “front” or thought of “front” as a weather pattern, a cold front, and not the front lines . . .
Soon after, I read AQOTWF, astounded by its intensity, its images, and in general its fractured narrative. A Night in Lisbon was OK — I was distracted by its POV — but, based on recommendations online, I then acquired A Time to Love and a Time to Die, despite its ponderous James Bond-ian title, and midway through I essentially impulsively ordered everything else EMR had written, although I haven’t yet made my way through it all.
I’ll update this as I read more EMR but for now, below I include my immediate impressions of four EMR novels, one of which I award the extraordinarily irrelevant prestigious Best Book I Read in 2018 Award, although TBH it’s actually probably definitely a tie with My Struggle: Book Six and my second time through War and Peace, this time in Constance Garnett’s translation.
A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1954)
Translated by Denver Lindley
WINNER OF THE AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL I READ IN 2018
Teleportive WWII novel, top-notch dramatization of the complexity of humanity, formal and thematic excellence throughout. It’s about a German soldier who leaves the Russian front during WWII as the tide is turning for the Nazis and goes on furlough to his home city for a few weeks. He can’t find his parents in the bombed-out ruins and runs into an old classmate, a comely young woman, and falls in love as, every few days, air raid sirens sound and buildings rise into the air as all hell breaks loose. A completely absorbing reading experience, couldn’t put it down, woke up early to read with coffee, that sort of book. Few reviews on Goodreads in English — many in Arabic, Russian, and maybe Romanian. My third novel by this author and I have another coming tomorrow.
Super-conventional form perfectly done, always patiently pushing ahead, therefore it feels like an organic/natural/real (ie, not imposed by the author) plot, the procession of days as a soldier’s on leave for a few weeks “between death and death,” the first bloom of love as everything around the lovers not so much withers as it explodes and incinerates; everything super-charged by the potential arrival of devastation from above, the inevitability of horror (“a howl arose, increasing until it became maddening and unbearable, as though a huge steel planet were plunging straight at the cellar”) and gruesome scenes of, for example, a five-year-old girl impaled on a shattered staircase. Streaks of gnarly description, always utilitarian and accessible prose, never clipped or degraded or showy — the tone is perfectly centrist, flowing, poetic at times, but best of all it disappears and yields to visions of this shattered German city, its inhabitants trying to survive, everyone living not so much under the thumb of the Nazis but more so under the rule of Luck. As with his famous WWI novel and every other WWII- and Holocaust-related novel or memoir I’ve read, survival always depends on luck.
But this earns my highest praise more so because it so naturally detonates Literature’s primary payload: it dramatizes the complexity of humanity more clearly than most novels I’ve read. Not all Germans are anti-Semitic monsters intent on taking over the world and eradicating their racial inferiors. The novel depicts arch-evil types, superhuman thoughtless automaton murderers in the S.S., as well as devastated, philosophical citizens who hide Jews — and other well-characterized characters most concerned with self-preservation during the worst of times. Toward the end, it’s impossible not to root for the hero Ernst even though he’s fighting with the Nazis — he’s an absolutely 3D sympathetic free-thinking human being in an extraordinarily difficult situation trying to stay focused and survive even as the guts of a new recruit splatter all over him after catching a flung grenade in the stomach.
Everyone’s read All Quiet on the Western Front (see below) but it seems like few have read the author’s other novels, most of which were semi-recently re-published in attractive modern paperback form. The title of this one probably in part accounts for it being previously totally unknown to me — it seems like an Ian Fleming/James Bond ripoff by way of The Byrds’ appropriation of biblical verses. Alternate titles could have been “Switzerland” (not reduced to rubble and therefore often mentioned as an ideal place to escape to, although it seems impossible to get to), “An Eden in Hell” (good assonance, bad pun — suggests a few of the spots where Ernst and Elisabeth take mental, spiritual, physical refuge and just live a normal life for a few moments), “Shelter from the Storm” (novel was published in 1957, pre-dates Dylan’s song by almost two decades) — the actual title seems a little too sentimental and monumental, a little too B-movie?
Here’s a fantastic passage where our hero Ernst and his future wife Elisabeth are sitting on a hill in a wooded area where the trees are covered in strips of tin foil that fall before air raids to jam and distort radio transmissions:
“The trees around the clearing were covered with strips that fluttered from their twigs, twisting and sparkling in the breeze. The sun broke through the mountainous clouds and transformed the woods into a glittering fairyland. What once had fluttered down in the midst of ravening death and the shrill noise of destruction now hung silent and shiny on the trees and had become silver and a shimmering and the memory of childhood stories and the great festival of peace.”
“Oh man” I said as I finished it, but I don’t want to spoil the end for anyone.
Also, I haven’t seen the old cinemascope rendition, “photographed where it happened,” but this trailer makes it all seem pretty cheesy.
All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
Translated by A.W. Wheen
What a novel — required reading for anyone with even a sliver of a glimmer of a warm feeling in their loins for warfare. Soldiers running on stumps, scorched lungs from gas, hands hanging on barbed wire separated from the body, an extra-active accelerated masterpiece of a scene involving a bombarded cemetery with no clear distinction between the body parts of comrades or the upturned occupants of caskets — totally gnarly and maybe alluded to in the fifth part of 2666. Or at least it felt familiar. Also moments of respite, cigars, R&R, brotherhood, barbecuing suckling pigs and idiotically attracting bombs with the smoke (this comes a few pages after the narrator derides black — probably American — enemy soldiers for smoking cigarettes and providing such easy targets), a great conjugal visit scene set in a room with eight injured soldiers. For most of the book I thought it occurred during WWII and therefore thought thematically it was about humanizing the Nazi, but then they’re inspected by the Kaiser and I checked the 1929 pub date and realized it’s really just probably the best “war is hell” novel I’ve ever read. Let the politicians slug it out in a ring and let the kids live their damn lives. 4.5 stars — the translation could use an upgrade, lots of weird outdated UKisms and wonky phrases that don’t quite make sense. But generally a kinetic, poetic, tense novel that feels absolutely real and everyone should read. Will read a lot more of this Erich Maria Remarque guy, who I’d never heard of until recently — I’ve generally been familiar with the title forever but associated it with a movie I haven’t seen and honestly probably thought was a western . . .
The Road Back (1931)
Translated by A.W. Wheen
PTSD in post-WWI Germany, the sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front. Episodic, not always linear, first-person narrator although it sometimes feels more like a close third, or even a sort of omniscient first-person when, thanks to Ernst’s deep connection with his troubled former comrades, scenes are dramatized that the narrator couldn’t know about (friend returning to the trenches alone at night and then shooting himself; how a room feels after another friend cuts open an artery and bleeds out). Teenagers taught to fight and survive, to kill and make it through, dreaming of home and returning alive, holding-up their return as their hope, have trouble reacclimating of course when they finally return and sit with loved ones and see the familiar landscape of their youth as a potential battlefield, have no patience for “fine phrases” about heroism or The Fatherland or anything along those lines, find their studies total bullshit, can’t sit in a classroom and teach penmanship to 7 to 10 year olds when the horror they’ve experienced, the sense of betrayal, solely occupies their mind — each of a handful of comrades not-so-deeply characterized (stage II case of Disembodied Proper Noun Syndrome) try to make their way back to a semblance of sustainable existence, some sort of coming to terms (Ernst ultimately finds a sort of peace via mindful/mystical communion with nature, lying down in the grass alone, just looking, listening, being), some not at all. Lacks the drive and blatant high stakes of the other EMR novels I’ve read (I’m on a completist quest, FYI, and have five or six others on a shelf in order of publication ready to go this year). Almost started skimming midway but right when I started to think three-stars could devolve to two it picked-up and ended tremendously. As always with EMR, what’s triggered completism, there are moments of extreme vividness, up there with Prince Andrei on his back looking at blue sky, Proust’s elevating airplane, Leopold Bloom’s kidney sliding in his frying pan, Bartlebooth’s watercolors returning to the ocean, etc: in this, it’s a war veteran sheep dog named Wolf fighting with the farmer’s bulldog Pluto and then later doing what he’s been bred to do, excelling at herding sheep although he was raised on the battlefield (Wolf’s road back is hard-wired); or when the comrades run to the square with their “faces of the trench” as the military led by a former comrade threatens to turn a machine gun on a crowd of labor protestors led by a former Jewish comrade; or a scene at an official military-sanctioned brothel when Ernst the narrator loses his virginity; the classroom scene when the young veteran students revolt against the principal’s fine phrases of heroism and again at the end the courtroom scene when the comrades rise up against the judge and lawyer in defense of their friend’s murder of a man who’d been macking on a woman who’d been his only beacon through it all.
Was worried about this one and a little disappointed until page 180 or so but from now on I’ll be completely confident that EMR will deliver. He was dramatizing boredom and dissatisfaction, which always makes what follows all the better, although in this it felt like it went on a few dozen pages too long and wasn’t sufficiently concentrated?
But generally this is another great EMR novel — since it’s about PTSD (well before the term was coined), it lacks the sense that death could visit with every turned page, but a worthwhile way to spend two long sittings today at jury duty. Always stretches of top-notch translated prose, although in this the translation, especially in dialogue, occasionally seemed wonky thanks most likely to old German slang rendered as old British slang. Also interesting in that it was published in 1931, so before the rise of the forces that would wreck everything hundreds of times over in a decade or so (no lessons in this learned at all) — those young students of Ernst’s would grow up to be in their 30s during WWII and the teens at the end gleefully performing military exercises and calling WWI veterans cowards and traitors to The Fatherland foreshadow what’s to come. Hunger and inflation are only touched on.
Generally, I think I’m interested in this era for reasons related to rising fascism worldwide and Trumpism, seeing our own times through the perspective of 80 to 100 years ago in Europe, the general sense of HEFT that runs through these novels that always elevates the prose (translated German is probably my favorite flavor in the English language), but also because I’m searching for Bolano’s sources for the Hans Reiter section in 2666.
Here’s a quotation representative of theme and translation (although the language in this bit is a little elevated since Ernst is waxing significantly) from right before he decides he can’t be a schoolteacher:
“What am I able to teach you then? Should I tell you how to pull the string on a hand grenade, how best to throw it at a human being? . . . Should I mimic how a man with a stomach wound will groan, how one with a lung wound gurgles and one with a head wound whistles? More I do not know. More I have not learned.
Should I take you to the brown-and-green map there, move my finger across it and tell you that here love was murdered? Should I explain to you that the books you hold in your hands are but nets with which men design to snare your simple souls, to entangle you in the undergrowth of fine phrases, and in the barbed wire of falsified ideas?
I stand here before you, a polluted, a guilty man and can only implore you ever to remain as you are, never to suffer the bright light of your childhood to be misused as a blow flame of hate. About your brows still blows the breath of innocence. How then should I presume to teach you? Behind me, still pursuing, are the bloody years — How then can I venture among you? Must I not first become a man again myself?”
The Night in Lisbon (1962)
Translated by Ralph Manheim
Nazis, refugees, love worth risking it all for, fatal diseases, intense moments of sudden violence, mystical reflection, lyrical description, insight into the nature of humanity in general and humanity alternately debased and elevated by the pressure of war. As with All Quiet on the Western Front, I finished this and said something like whoa, great book, how the hell hadn’t I heard of this guy before — like Zwieg, he sold a million copies before WWII and then had his books banned. Really accessible story-telling, finely drawn characters, serious thematic heft, and a sense of relevance to the contemporary refugee crisis in Europe. A reason I love reading novels from the WWII era: it serves as a reminder of what went on not so long ago (right around the time my parents were born) and it serves as a warning that the gathering buds of fascism/state-sponsored intolerance need to be nipped real quick before they flower into thorny storms of blood.
Docked a so-called star because of the structure — a refugee tells most of the story to another refugee (the narrator) he’s just met, who he offers to help escape from Lisbon to the United States toward the beginning of WWII. For the most part I managed to distinguish between the present dialogue (double quotation marks – ie, “) and past dialogue (single quotation marks — ie ‘) but it tripped me up more than enough. Zweig and later Bernhard — and surely everyone else 80–100 years ago — relied on the same conceit of a stranger relaying an intense story, but usually things aren’t nearly as dramatized and scenes from the past therefore aren’t nearly as immediate — there’s usually way more exposition, with dialogue summarized instead of rendered with traditional quotations and descriptive attributions. Otherwise, thanks in part to the reliance on past dramatized scenes replete with dialogue, the past bits seem urgent and intense but of course the action’s also very much propelled by serious life/death significance.
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To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Neutral Evil ))) and/or JRZDVLZ. Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).