Ottoman

The Siege by Ismail Kadare

Little did I know that when I read Roger Crowley’s Empires of the Sea several years ago which recounted in excruciating details the siege of Malta by the Ottomans, I was preparing myself for this book. The action in Crowley’s history takes place in the early 16th century while the fictional action in Kadare’s is set less than a century before. In both, the violence is unimaginable.

Actually I also knew a little about Kadare’s setting because The Traitor’s Niche had me running over repeatedly to Wikipedia to find out about Albania and its greatest medieval leader. Skanderbeg lurks in the shadows throughout The Siege as a mighty Ottoman force attempts to take an unnamed Albanian castle. The action unfolds through the eyes of the Pasha, various members of the Ottoman war council, members of the harem, ordinary foot soldiers and most especially a middle-rank official charged with recording the events for posterity.

The latter is a somewhat comic character who is terrified of all he finds out because he’d rather not know any uncomfortable truths. It’s easy to imagine that Kadare was actually writing about modern (1969) communist Albania and how dangerous it was to express your opinion or associate with dissidents.

I’ve been trying to find out more about Kadare. Apparently he’s seen by many as a Nobel prize candidate but is opposed by many more for what they see as his failure to openly oppose the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. I’m a fan.

Robert Rauschenberg’s Jester

Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann

I’m on a roll. Practically every book I picked up this month pleased me immensely. Either I’ve become very discerning or not at all. This was one that gave me one of those overwhelming feelings of loss as I read the last sentence.

I’ve read Kehlmann before (Measuring the World) and he’s a very fine writer. This book is an episodic meander around the world which was the Thirty Years War, a world I knew nothing about but which I now intend to explore some more. It’s a world of horror, populated by peasants who believe in a fickle and brutal God, in the Devil (or various incarnations of both) and in magic and witchcraft.

Everyone is afraid, everyone is a threat, save yourself at all costs. It certainly made me reflect that growing up in Western Europe right now is sheer heaven compared to the lot of just about all humanity whoever walked the Earth. Think Hieronymus Bosch (see image).

Tyll Eulenspiegel is a character out of German mythology. Here he becomes a flesh and blood traveling entertainer, sometime court jester who by his profession is permitted to speak the truth about his masters. The result is both brutal and hilarious. My headline refers to a wonderful trick he plays on the nobles with a blank canvas.

 

Cromwell goes to Tirana

The Traitor’s Niche by Ismail Kadare

I’ve been meaning to but never actually sat down to read this renowned writer and winner of the inaugural Man Booker Prize. I picked this one when at a loss for anything I might enjoy and it was a delight. When you google Kadare, this book doesn’t even make it to the first page of results so I’m impatient to read some of the others and have just added The Siege to the stack by my bed.

The Traitor’s Niche is what I think of as the universal literary book. When I’d finished I’d felt that I’d read its kind twenty times before. You know, a very erudite book by an author steeped in the history of his nation and full of love for it. All those books are different but they have the same fingerprint – an immersive cultural experience. As I read it I kept googling Albanian history and planning a visit there. But when I try to write out a list of those twenty books, I stall. They’re not the same as each other; they just stimulate the same emotions. I think of Siegfried Lenz, Orhan Pamuk, José Saramago, Kader Abdolah to name a few.

This book is set at the end of the 18th or early 19th century when Albania, an influential part of the Ottoman Empire has just fallen out of favour following the revolt of its leader the most powerful Ottoman Pasha Ali Tepelena. His head is dispatched to Istanbul where it will be exhibited in the the Traitor’s Niche as an example to all. Over several chapters, we meet some of the dramatis personae of this episode: the courier, the niche guard, the wife, the general sent to capture him and, most strikingly, the team sent out to eradicate any residual sense of Albanian identity. Echoes of British attempts to eradicate Irish culture and, dare I say it, even more vicious.

Supreme artistry.

Sand, Riddles of … ?

Sand by Wolfgang Herrendorf

Set somewhere in North Africa, we encounter policemen, crooks, spies, miners, children, schoolteachers, tourists, a rock band and just about anything you can think of. You’re left guessing what relates them to each other until the last few chapters. If you’re confused, so is the main protagonist who seems to be running from them all as he tries to figure out why everybody is trying to get him. He’s suffering from memory loss which takes in identity loss.

This is a fabulous read. Apparently the author offered reviewers a reward if they found any loose ends and it was not claimed. Every thing comes together neatly in the end with nothing contrived, just a shocking dose of reality. Best of all, it’s done with verve and humour making it a thriller in the real sense of the word.

A strong candidate for my best read this year.

Nobody is to be Trusted

The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

When I heard that Jorge Luis Borges declared that this book was a masterpiece of plotting, I had to try it. What a disappointment! The plot is fine, a decent example of its genre. But the writing!! I’d class it is a good Leaving Certificate level (the Irish Baccalaureate), solid and pedestrian. I was bored to tears but persevered in the light of Jorge Luis’ recommendation. Fortunately it all fits into 100 pages. I just popped into Goodreads and the praise for it there is also effusive. I must be missing something.

‘Nuf said.

 

Nihil est quod esse videtur*

Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes

What a weird book! This is a difficult book to recommend to anybody because it is surreal and, I think, quite impossible to classify. Purporting to belong to the mystery/detective genre, it quickly undermines this, taking the reader inside the madness of the investigator. I think that it is really a philosophy book, about what is real in the world (just about nothing) and what is pretend (everything else). The interrogees are actors. The corporation has no name and its employees are frequently actors too and what it actually does is impossible to decipher. Our experiences are shown to be set up and pre-scripted to make them feel more authentic. And still I recognised this as the world I live in!

Now that you definitely don’t want to read it, let me say that it is exhilarating, unputdownable and by possibly one of the most original writers I have ever read. I’d have to say that it fades somewhat in the final 50 pages, but remains top class in my opinion – I went straight out and bought his second novel.

The cover refers us to work by the likes of Julio Cortazar (who I found impenetrable). Though very different, it belongs on your bookshelf alongside another Scot, the very original Alasdair Gray and the excellent New York Trilogy by Paul Auster (with another faux-detective theme).

For some reason, I also pictured the inspector as the introverted and troubled Gene Hackman in The Conversation from 1974. I raced through it and will definitely have to read it again to do it justice.

*Nothing is what it seems to be

A Life in the Day

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

So lockdown has been relaxed but it doesn’t feel that way. I needed to get out of the house so I checked out the Lexicon on the net and then called them to be sure they’d be open.

Went along and spent an hour browsing in Fiction. That’s when I discovered I no longer know how to choose a book. Nevertheless, I chose four, which included this little 116 page gem.

Train Dreams is a biography of a man on the American frontier at the turn of the 20th century. A hard life lived plainly. I read it cover to cover today. It reminded me of a visit I made to a National Park in Ohio where a settler’s cabin is preserved as a museum piece and I marvelled at how anybody could have lived that life. I still marvel at how uneducated men could survive in that place, building their homes from scratch and rebuilding them when nature destroys them. Me, I have difficulty hanging a picture frame.

Still, looks like I can choose a book!!

Post-Modering Bewek

Sloot by Ian Macpherson

Dubling noir, wrote in the stoile of Flann O’Brien. Hil-feckin-larious.

I wonder if you can even understand this book if you’re not from Dubling. The author (Een), a stand-up comic, wonders in and out of the text, notices things the sloot (sleuth), also a stand-up comic, overlooks. Three dementia-infested aged aunts pepper the book with malapropisms. Other characters possibly include a cross-dressing ganglord, a garda pimping for a brothel in leafy-suburban Clontarf, a drunken Joycean pathologist, a faux-academic (guru to Een) on a bicycle and an AA stalker.

Thanks, Richard. A good recommendation.

Mega Consumer

Days by James Lovegrove

Days is a megastore owned and run by the 7 days brothers in a mega-consumerist world not unlike our own.  Everything that can be sold (from wild animals to prostitution passing via the more mundane is sold there). We follow a member of Strategic Security and a newly admitted store-card-holder through a single day.

The first three-quarters of the book is slow but mildly amusing as the scaffolding is put in place to administer a resounding dénouement. Store security begins its day with a Hills Street Blues style roll-call, warning plain-clothes store detectives the current scams to look out for. Customers are credit-rated and get card types reflecting their purchasing power. Even the trolleys have to be rented for use. A Days card is the ultimate status symbol and the author has great fun mocking consumerism, not least during flash-sales when customers have 5 minutes to obtain bargains in some department which lead to stampedes and fist fights.

Everything builds to quite a dramatic but unconvincing and rather silly climax. A grand disappointment.

Westward Ho!

Warlock by Oakley Hall

Westerns are, I think, a rather despised genre. I can’t think what would possess me to read one but, in fact, I’ve read two from NYRB‘s Modern Classics listing. (The other, equally good, is Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams which I will write up when I refresh my memory of it).

Warlock is not pulp. It’s literature. Reading it is easy because we know the setting well, having seen it in countless films when westerns were the-thing. Now they were pulp, but somehow, Warlock seems to rise above it without changing it. The dialogue is marvellous with the archaic preacher-y kind of biblical phrases but it feels authentic. I especially liked the occasional first-person narrative in the form of a journal kept by a shopkeeper who is probably an honest God-fearing man. It’s revealing to see how his judgement and his take on events is a reflection of what he knows and doesn’t know about the motivations of the characters involved.Above all, however, it is the philosophical tone of the novel that lifts it above the ordinary.

It’s populated with uneducated men who are half-good, half-bad; who worry about what others think of them; who have their own code of honour; who have their personal ethics; who change their minds and their allegiances easily; who are simultaneously cowardly and brave. It is no place for the meek or the weak.

They live in the 1880’s just beyond the reach of civilisation where there are no laws to protect them. As I read, I thought a lot about how this very recent history might be what makes America so different to Europe. It’s just a few hundred years behind us but presumably we were just the same; only the weapons are different.

A very fine read which may just make you change any preconceptions about other genres. A masterpiece, IMHO.