Friday, January 24, 2020

If we can't trust our memories, then what?

I had to read Peter Stamm's slim new novel The Sweet Indifference of the World twice to feel confident enough write about it cogently.

It starts straightforwardly enough: After an introductory chapter in which the narrator describes visits from a woman who may—or may not—be an old girlfriend (and may—or may not—be real), he tells us that he has arranged a meeting with a Magdalena (Lena) in Stockholm's Skogskyrkogården cemetery. Lena is in her late twenties; he is at least fifty, although in the first chapter he seems much older: "My wheezing alarms me, it's an old man's voice, a voice that's just as alien to me as the frail body that imprisons me . .  . In my haste I've forgotten my cane, and I'm torn between my fear of slipping on the ice and falling and my other fear of losing Magdalena from view . . ." But Lena he's meeting in Stockholm is not the one who visits him in chapter one (I don't think); it's another Magdalena.

In Stockholm the narrator introduces himself to Lena as Christopher. Lena tells him that coincidentally her boyfriend's name is Chris, and he would like to be a writer. Both Lena and Magdalena are actresses. In the cemetery Christopher tells Lena that he used to be a writer; he wrote a novel about a disillusioned author: "The book was a love story, it was supposed to be a portrait of my girlfriend, but while I was writing it, we broke up, and so it turned into an account of our breakup and the impossibility of love. For the first time in my writing, I had the feeling I was creating a living world. At the same time, I could feel reality slipping through my fingers, daily life was getting boring and shallow to me."

So we have Christopher and Magdalena (Christ and Mary Magdalen?) interacting the past and Chris and Lena interacting in the present as the narrator tells his story. His novel's sales had provided a respectable income but more importantly justified the narrator's efforts to write it. He never admitting at readings or in interviews how much of the story was about himself. Asked about that, "I dismissed the idea, and insisted on the separation between author and narrator."

Which of course immediately makes the reader wonder how much of The Sweet Indifference of the World is about Peter Stamm. According to Wikipedia, Stamm books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013 for his entire body of work and his accomplishments in fiction. Stamm grew up in Weinfelden in the canton of Thurgau, the son of an accountant. He spent three years as an apprentice accountant and then five as an accountant. He then went to the University of Zurich, taking courses in English studies, business informatics, psychology, and psychopathology while he also worked as an intern at a psychiatric clinic. After living for a time in New York, Paris, and Scandinavia he settled down as a writer and freelance journalist in Zurich in 1990. He's written prose, radio drama, and plays. I was impressed by his last novel To the Back of Beyondwhich I reviewed in 2017. He's known for his cool and sparse writing style, all of which are represented in The Sweet Indifference of the World.

Which grows more murky. At the end of Chapter Three, the narrator is late returning to the hotel in the Swiss village in which he grew up. For a time he'd been the hotel's night porter himself. Because it's late he has to wait to be admitted. "Finally, I heard a door bang, and shortly afterwards saw movement in the corridor, the inner glass door opened, and a young man approached me. While he fiddled around with the lock, I saw his face next to the reflection of my own, but not until he held the door open for me did I realize that he was me."

When Lena in Stockholm questions the narrator, he says that looking at the night porter was like looking into a mirror. "Amazingly, he seemed to have no sense of the resemblance, of the identity. He gave me a perfectly ordinary greeting, and walked ahead of me to the reception desk, handed me my key, and said good night." The narrator sees his doppelgänger—who says his name is Chris—at least twice more over the years. Indeed, several years after the hotel meeting they visit the beach together in Barcelona where Christopher has been teaching German.

Stamm is playing with memory, reader expectations, and ideas about reality. In Barcelona doppelgänger Chris searches for Christopher's novel on his cell phone; it does not exist. Chris does a Google search for Magdalena's name and "actor." There is one entry on a drama school home page; nothing to confirm Christopher's memory of  Magdalena's successful career in a variety of productions. "Suddenly I felt an indescribable fury . . . There he was, imagining a quick Internet search was enough to rub out the whole of my life, as if only what was online existed."

As I said at the beginning, this is a slim novel, almost a novella (and when does a novella cross the line and become a novel? that's the kind of question reading Stamm provokes). It's not a difficult read; as Wikipedia says and as my quotations indicate the prose is cool and sparse  (the Michael Hofmann translation is impeccable). It evokes a profound question: If we can't trust our memories, what can we trust? Perhaps, as the publisher's promotional material says, Stamm is suggesting that our stories are not only already planned out, but wholly unoriginal as well, endlessly repeating themselves through different people. The Sweet Indifference of the World is a novel to read more than once for the pleasure it offers and the thought it stimulates.

Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Tragedy, love, family in a small Southern town

We meet Adeline (Delia) Green in August 1975 as she visits the Green Branch Town Cemetery where she meets the town historian who is leading a group of DAR ladies. Delia's family were founding members of Green Branch, the small South Carolina town in which Delia, 19, grew up. She is seven months older than her first cousin Ellison (Eli) Winfield who lives right across the street. Bells for Eli is the story of Delia and Eli's childhood and youth in Green Branch.

The author, Susan Beckham Zurenda, taught literature, composition, and creative writing to high school students for 33 years, which may explain the polish and authority of her first novel. During her years of teaching at Spartanburg Community College and then as an AP English teacher at Spartanburg High School, Susan published short stories and won numerous regional awards such as the South Carolina Fiction Prize (twice), the Porter Fleming Competition, The Southern Writers Symposium Emerging Writers Fiction Contest, The Hub City Hardegree Contest in Fiction, Alabama Conclave First Novel Chapter Contest, and The Jubilee Writing Competition (twice). She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees in English from Converse College and now works as a book publicist managing media relations for Magic Time Literary Publicity.

Bells for Eli really begins when three-year-old Eli spots a Coke bottle in which his father has stored Red Devil Liquid Lye and drinks from it. The family's black gardener saves Eli's life, but Eli's throat and esophagus are horribly burned. He spends six months in a Boston hospital and when he comes home he has a hole in his neck so he can breath and a port to his stomach so he can be fed pureed mush.

Delia tells the story of growing up with Eli who, though terribly scarred internally, is eventually able to breath and eat normally. The author conveys what it was like to grow up in small town South Carolina during the 1960s and early 1970s given the the characters and their situation: Delia's uncle Gene, Eli's father, a Southern good-old-boy who wants a manly son . . . her aunt Mary Lily, who comes from the side of the family that kept their money . . . Eli's grandmother Mary Margaret who lives in a mansion Sherman's troops tried to burn down but was saved . . . plus Delia's parents, neighborhood bullies, boy friends, and more.

And running through the book is the love between Delia and Eli, an attraction that evolves from childhood playmate to something more adult. As first cousins, however, they know they cannot marry, and the author convincingly relates how the tension between desire and inhibition affects (distorts?) the decisions—choices—Delia and Eli make.

I was struck by how well Zurenda writes without drawing attention to the language. Here's Delia watching Eli being dragged into the house by his father after sassing his mother: "I had no concept of the beating that awaited Eli. the most I ever got was a couple of pops on the bottom with Mama's green hairbrush. My father's hand had spanked me only once. When I lied to him about emptying green peas from my plate—I detested them—being the kitchen door next to my seat at the dining table. I insisted Helen had pitched the peas. I was spanked for lying, for blaming my sister, not for hating peas." Five sentences that say volumes about the family dynamics.

And here is Delia's description of Mary Margaret's pre-war (pre-Civil War) house: "We stepped inside the entry hall, wider than any room in my house. I inhaled the rich, sweet, old wood smell. A leaded glass fixture overhead dimly illuminated dark furniture: the mahogany table, its ever-present candy dish filled to the top, the Regency side chairs and the hall tree. People long dead inside golden frames peered out straight-faced from the right wall—flanking the family shield and crossed swords—following us with their eyes. The stairs rose along the other side."

Bells for Eli is indeed, as one early reader says, "a memorable, atmospheric novel of love, friendship, and bonds that surpass all reason." I couldn't have said it better myself, so I won't.