Creative Writing Critique (Satis Shroff): Fire in the Blood

Creative Writing Critique (Satis Shroff): FIRE IN THE BLOOD

Review: Irene Nemirovsky Fire in the Blood, Vintage Books, London 2008,

153 pages, 7,99 Sterling Pounds (ISBN: 978-0-099-51609-5)

Denise Epstein was 13 when her mother Irene Nemirovsky was deported to Auschwitz, where she eventually died in 1942. The daughter is now an octogenarian and was instrumental in helping her mother attain her place in the world literature. Irene Nemirovsky was a writer who could look into the souls of humans and make music with words. Her masterpiece Suite francaise was published in France in 2004 and was immediately awarded the Prix Renaudot.

The characters of Fire in Blood are  drawn from a rural French town in Burgundy, a wine-growing area where people are simple and stick together, want to retain their ‘peace’ and don’t like the police and the authorities. A place where all people show conformity and keep their mouths shut. Peace is a synonym for not wanting to be involved in the affairs of other people. The author’s attitude towards the characters has a universal appeal, for it could happen anywhere in the world in a closed-circuit society where outsiders are shunned and not generally accepted. Nemirovsky shows not only what people do to others but also what the passage of time does to us all. The characters aren’t flat and every character bounds into life and you an imagine the world that she creates in her 153 page novel still goes on with its own pace without much changes. The community itself shows a predatory behaviour of extreme cunning.

The major theme of Fire in Blood is love, poverty, arranged marriages and extra-marital affairs that lead to complications and new story developments. The protagonist Sylvestre also called Silvio tells the story in the first person singular and recalls stories in front of the fireplace about his beautiful, graceful cousin Helene and her daughter Colette, Brigitte Delos and Francoise, their marriages, happiness and boredom and the seasonal changes of the Burgundy countryside. Silvio speaks about impatient young people and the perfectly balanced older people at peace with themselves and the world, despite the creeping fear of death. The book is replete with the truths, deaths, marriages, children, houses, mills, dowry, haves and have-nots, stinginess, love-affairs, hatred, deception and betrayal.  Nemirovsky is an excellent story-teller and reveals her tale of flaws and cruelties of the human heart in an intricately woven story. She builds up suspense and you feel the catharsis when an innocent-looking protagonist tells her version of how a man was murdered.

The theme is traditional and familiar and is psychologically and socially interesting in intent.

Silvio tells about his childhood and about children asking their parents how they met, fell in love and married. He also mentions past loves, former grudges, inheritances, law suits and who-married-whom and why in the French provincial setting. The story plot is slow at the beginning but gathers momentum, and the climax is not the murder but how the author unfurls the story of the confession. In the end Silvio confides to the reader how much he still loves his dear cousin Helene, who’s married to Francoise.

The intellectual qualities of writing of Nemirovsky are her cheerfulness, sudden twists and power of observation which flow into the story making it a delightful read. She gives you the impression that her tale is linear, only to show you that there’s a twist that takes narration in another direction. Silvio, the Ich-Erzähler, says to Colette, who wants to involve him in her family drama: ‘Tell them you have a lover and that he killed your husband.. What exactly did happen?’

wit and humour and there’s rhythm in the tale.

Nemirovsky employs the stylistic device of symbolism to characterise the farmers and their hypocritical nature, how they mob people they don’t prefer to have around them and how they indulge in backbiting. A stingy 60 year old farmer marries  a lovely 20 year old woman and the gossips begin. Silvio remembers how Colette had once told him he resembled a faun: ‘an old faun, now, who has stopped chasing nymphs and who huddles near the fireplace.’

This is the confession of a man who had once fire in blood, and a meditation on the various stages of life, the passing of time, in which youth and age are at odds. A recurring theme is the seed from which problems grow: ‘Imagine a field being saved and all the promise that’s contained in a grain of wheat, all the future harvests…well, it’s exactly the same in life.’

Nemirovsky’s use of dialogue is very effective and takes the story forward.

Her literary oeuvre ranges from an extraordinary collection of papers,  Fire in the Blood, Suite francaise, David Golder, Le Bal, the Courilof Affair, All Our Worldly Goods.

The Germany titles are: Die Hunde und die Wölfe, Feuer im Herbst, Herbstfliege, Leidenschaft, Die Familie Hardelot, Der Fall Kurilow and Irene Nemirovsky: Die Biographie.

* * *

Irene Nemirovsky: COLD BLOOD (Satis Shroff)

Subtitle: Moaning in All Eternity

Six decades ago,

My life came to an end,

In Auschwitz.

I, Irene Nemirovsky, a writer

Of Jewish-Russian descent,

Died in Auschwitz.

I live now in my books,

In my daughter’s memories,

Who’s already an octogenarian,

Still full of love and fighting spirit:

For she fights against

The injustice of those gruesome days.

I was thirty-nine,

Had asthma,

Died shortly after I landed in Auschwitz.

I died of inflammation of my lungs,

In the month of October.

That very year the Nazis deported

Michael Epstein, dear my husband,

Who’d pleaded to have me,

His wife, freed from the clutches

Of the Gestapo.

They also killed him.

My daughters Denise 13,

And Elizabeth 5,

Were saved by friends

Of the French Resistance,

Tucked away in a cloister for nuns,

Hidden in damp cellars.

They had  my suitcase with them,

Where ever they hid,

Guarding it like the Crown Jewels.

To them it was not only a book,

But my last words,

That I’d penned in Issy-l’Eveque.

I wanted to put together five manuscripts

In one: Suite Francaise,

That was my writer’s dream.

I could put only

‘Storm in July’ and ‚Dolche’

Together.

I passed away early in August 1942.

Too early.

In my two books I’ve written

About the flight of the Parisians

From the victorious Germans,

The awful situation in an occupied hamlet.

Small people and collaborators,

Who’d go to extremes

To save their skins,

Like ants in a destroyed ant-hill.

It’s sixty years hence,

But my work hasn’t lost its glow,

Like the lava from an erupting volcano.

You can feel its intensity,

When an entire nation

Was humiliated and had to capitulate,

Losing its grace, dignity and life.

I was born in Kiew,

Fled to Paris via Finnland and Sweden,

After the Russian Revolution.

I was a maniac,

When it came to reading,

Had a French governess,

Went often to the Cote d’ Azure and Biarritz.

I studied literature in Sorbonne in 1919.

Shortly thereafter,

I began to write:

About my Russian past,

My wandering years.

The colour of the literature I wrote

Is blood from an old wound.

From this wound I’ve drawn

The maladies of the society,

Human folley.

I was influenced by writers,

From Leo Tolstoi to Henrik Ibsen.

An unhappy childhood,

Is like when your soul has died,

Without a funeral:

Moaning in all eternity.

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Darjeeling Limited: A Journey to India and Within (Satis Shroff, Freiburg)

 Darjeeling Limited: A Journey to India and Within (Satis Shroff)

Film review: USA 2007, Director: Wes Anderson.

 

Darjeeling Limited is a road movie with three different protagonists, Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman, who we are told are brothers. One looks like a Hawk-nosed Italian (Adrien Brody) with fine features and a heavily pregnant wife he’s left behind, the other a heavily bandaged German (Owen Wilson) on a spiritual trip to chaotic India and the other like a horny Tom Cruise (Jason Schwartzman) with a moustache and ever on the lookout for a quickie, whether it’s in a hotel or a train.

 

If you want to do a bit of sight-seeing in Darjeeling with its Chowrasta, the former Governer’s House, Birch Hill, Windemere Hotel, the Mall, the Austrian-built ropeway ride to Singla tea estate, Tiger Hill and the Batasia Loop, you’ve boarded the wrong train. It’s definitely not the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway with its toy train, and there’s no Kanchenjunga in the background.

 

Darjeeling Limited is a train that takes the three brothers to the dunes of Rajasthan, its colourful villages and towns and Punjab, with a lot of Sardarjis making their appearences but certainly not in the foothills of the Himalayas. The brothers are on their way to find their mother, who lives with Christians nuns who run a school somewhere in north-west India on top of a white-was-like building, reminiscent of the Moghul times. In other words the family structure is destroyed. The mother hadn’t attended the funeral of her husband Mr. Whitman of Whitman Industries, who’d died two years ago. There’s a lot of action and scenes that remind you of a melange of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot reels and Ian Flemings’s protagonist and ye olde India from the days of the of the Raj, where the train conductor is a lean Sikh, with a long black beard and a penchant for hypnotising a snake that belongs to one of the Whitman brothers.

 

The film begins to an old tune I remember by Leonard Cohen ‘Where do you do my lovely.’ Pure nostalgia for people approaching their fifties and beyond. The song and the scenes with Jason Schwartzman have been cut well to illustrate the text of the song. A wonderful, sensuous prelude to the film with an attractive female, Anjelica Huston. She has blue bruises all over on her body, and says she loves him in a Parisian hotel-room, and he replies in a couldn’t-care-less manner.

 

The three brothers jump in and out of the same train, with their 11-piece luggage, throughout the film but what unfurls is a fascinating landscape of rural India and typical characters that you might have read in Rudyard Kipling’s books on the Raj. The bigger brother Owen collects his brother’ passports and tells them to trust him and other spiritual things associated with Indian philosophy. He also pleads to his two brothers that they should be honest and tell him everything. No secrets. But as soon as one of them goes for a few minutes, there’s backbiting and inquisitiveness in the air. It’s also the story of three sahibs out to discover spiritual India. What might be funny to a Brit or European may seem almost arrogant and forced comedy to viewers in the Indian subcontinent, with its clichés.: a shoe stealing boy runs away with one of the sahib’s shoe, a female service lady gets laid willingly by Casanova Schwartzman. Perhaps it was the sweltering Indian summer that made the protagonists do such things.

 

The journey is a pilgrimage to a Sikh and Hindu temple with a lot of tikas and bhajans thrown in. A dramatic river rescue in which an Indian boy drowns and the three sahibs bring the limp body to the villagers is touching. A Hindu funeral ceremony with the father of the dead child washing his son’s body, mourning neighbours. Hindu rituals, vedic chants, humble villagers. Then a Hindu village farewell with namastes. Then it’s back into the train, like in Michael Ende’s “Jim Knopf and Lukas,” towards India’s daily subcontinental chaos and normal madness.

 

The wiedersehen with the meditating mother, a grey-haired energetic lady who feels that she must help the nuns with their charges, than live in London in affluence, turns into a therapeutic séance for family Whitman. The mother suggests to her sons that they should learn to speak without words. It reminds my of Paul Waczlawick saying: you can not not communicate. In German we say: Man kann nicht nicht kommunizieren, meaning thereby that you do communicate, even if don’t do it verbally. One communicates non-verbally. Your gesture, your mimic muscles speak volumes.

 

Towards the end the director (West Anderson) works with metaphors by showing each protagonist in a separate train-compartment as it moves on. There are tears in the eyes of the Indian sari-clad train lady, the Sardarji train-conductor plays affectionately with the snakes, which he’d declared dead, the sensual lover from Paris is also in the train, as is also the dead Mr. Whitman, alive and kicking. I thanked Anderson for the old melody “Oh, Champs Elysees” quietly as the film ended and the credits were shown. The songs of the sixties and seventies were a delight indeed. It was 91 minutes of family conflict, a lesson in Family Therapy, carried out in India’s fantastic backdrop, snakes and all. It was a declaration of love to India.

 

Life is a long journey, one is given to understand, and when we want to reach our destination, it’s easier to get rid of the cumbersome excess baggage. Simplify your life. All those expensive worldly belongings and destructive emotions make our lives difficult because we tend to clutch on them. You can’t take your traveller’s cheques and plastic cards when you leave this world, for this world is but a maya. An illusion. One thing is sure: the trip is limited to a life-span.

 

I must admit, I watched Darjeeling Limited in German and a lot of English humour was lost in translation, when dubbing. The humour was dry and the situations absurd. I’ll get a DVD and watch it in English when I have time.

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Review by Satis Shroff, Freiburg:YAKS & YETIS

Grünfelder, Alice (Editor), Himalaya: Menschen und Mythen, Zürich Unionsverlag, 314 pages, EURO 19, 80 (ISBN 3-293-00298-6).

Alice Grünfelder has studied Sinology and German literature, lived two years in China and works in the publishing branch in Berlin. This book is comparable to a bouquet of the choicest Himalayan flowers picked by the editor in a hurry, because a lot of authors have been left out, and deals with the trials and tribulations of a cross-section of the people in the 450 km long Abode of the Snows—the Himalayas. The book orients, as expected, on the English translations of Himalayan literature. The chances of having Nepali literature translated into foreign languages depends upon the Nepalis themselves, because foreigners mostly loath to learn Nepali. If a translation is published in English the success of the book is used as a yardstick to decide whether it is going to be profitable to bring it out in European or in other languages. Nevertheless, there are some Nepalese authors who have made it in the international publishing market. When I visited the International Frankfurter Book Fair and BookBasel, like every year, I was surprised that at least one poet from Nepal had made it, with a German self-publisher and photograph.

 

Nepal is conspicuous with contributions by the anthropologist Dor Bahadur Bista, the climber Tenzing Norgay, the Kathmandu-based journalists Kanak Dixit and Deepak Thapa, the tourist-guide Shankar Lamichane, the poet Pallav Ranjan and the development-specialist Harka Gurung. For regular readers of Himal Asia, The Rising Nepal and GEO some of these stories are perhaps not new but this book is aimed at the German speaking readers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In addition to the seven Nepali authors, there are also stories by seven Indian, three Tibetan, two Chinese authors and two Bhutanese authors.

 

Some of the themes that have been dealt with in this collection are: the pros and cons of westernisation as told by Kanak Dixit in “Which Himalaya would you like?” and an endearing story of a journey through Nepal as a Nepali frog named Bhaktaprasad. K.C. Bhanja, the ecology-conscious climber writes about the spiritual meaning of our fragile heritage—the Himalayas. “The Himalayan Ballads” by the Chinese author Ma Yuan, “The Eternal Mountains” by the Han-Chinese Jin Zhiguo, the Indian climber H. P. S. Ahluwalia in “Higher than Everest” und Swami Pranavanadas in his Pilgrim journey to Kailash and the Manasovar Lake” have presented the mountains from different perspectives. Tenzing Norgay, the first Nepali who reached the top of Mount Everest with Edmund Hillary, says that he was a happy person.

 

The Nepali journalist Deepak Thapa portrays the famous Sherpa climber Ang Rita as a social “Upwardly Mobile” person. Whereas in Kunzang Choden’s story (In the Tracks of the Migoi) we learn that the Bhutanese, as a Buddhist folk, are not capable of harming even a small animal, in another story Kanak Dixit tells us about the 100 000 Lhotshampas (Bhutanese citizens of Nepali origin) who were thrown out by the Bhutanese government and live in refugee-camps in Jhapa. The curio art-trader Shanker Lamichane’s “The Half Closed Eyes of the Buddha and the Slowly Setting Sun” is a poignant tale of a paralysed boy’s karma, related as a dialogue between a Nepali guide and a tourist. The helpless child makes us think in his mute way about the joys in everyday life that we don’t see and feel, because the world is too much with us. Whereas Harka Gurung has gathered facts and fiction“ and tells us about the different aspects of the Snowman, another author who is a psychologist from Bhutan, tells us about yaks, yak-keepers and the Yeti and we come to know through an old yak-keeper named Mimi Khandola, how the friendly creature called the Migoi, alias Yeti, gets chased and killed by a group of wild-dogs. In “Not Even a Corpse to Cremate” we learn about the traumatic shock and tragic fate of a girl named Pem Doikar, who was kidnapped by a Migoi.

 

This anthology does not profess to represent Himalayan literature as a whole, but lays emphasis on the people and myths centred around the Himalayas. For instance, the Nepali world that the poets and writers describe and create is a different one, compared to the western one. It is true that trekking-tourism, modern technology, the aid-industry, NGOs, aids and globalisation have reached Nepal, Bhutan, India, but the areas not frequented by the trekking and climbing tourists still remain rural, tradition-bound and untouched by modernity.

 

There are hardly any books written by writers from the Himalayas at the Frankfurter Book Fair. It’s always the travelling tourist, geologist, geographer, biologist, climber and ethnologist who writes about Nepal, Tibet, Zanskar, Mustang, Bhutan, Sikkim, Ladakh and its people, culture, religion, environment, flora and fauna. The Himalayan people have always been statists in the visit-the-Himalaya-scenarios published in New York, Paris, Munich and Sydney and they are described through western eyes.

 

But there have been generations of thinking and writing Nepalis, Indians, Bhutanese and Tibetans who have written and published hundreds of books and magazines in their own languages in Nepal, Benaras (Varanasi), Kalimpong, Kurseong, Darjeeling. In Patan’s Madan Puraskar Library alone, which Mr. Kamal Mani Dixit, Patan’s Man of Letters, describes as the “Temple of Nepali language”, there are 15,000 Nepali books and 3500 different magazines and periodicals about which the western world hasn’t heard or read. A start was made by Michael Hutt of the School of Oriental Studies London, in his English translation of contemporary Nepali prose and verse in Himalayan Voices and Modern Nepali Literature. It took him eight years to write his book and he took the trouble to meet most of the Nepali authors in Nepal and Darjeeling. In the meantime, there are a handful of websites that cater to the demands of creative writers in Nepal and the Nepalese diaspora, and more and more Nepalese from Nepal, India and abroad are using these websites to write about Nepalese literature and let their own creative juices flow in the web. Some of these sites are: sonog.com, nepal.com, kantipur.com, mos.com.np, hknepal.com, wnso.com, geocities.com. The Nepalese living in the USA have their own International Nepalese Literary Society with prizes for publishing, in good olde Germany they have Nepal Information (where you can have your dissertations published, otherwise it’s very Royal Family centred), which is closely related to the Nepalese Embassy and, of course, Boloji.com. Nepalese literature describes also the situation of Nepalese in the diaspora in other Himalayan states. Nepalese literature exists in Kathmandu, but also in Darjeeling, Kurseong, Kalimpong, Assam, Nagaland und Gangtok (Sikkim). There are literary societies and annual literary awards for Nepalese authors and poets. The most renowned prizes are: Royal Nepal Akademie Prize, Tribhuvan Puraskar, Madan Puraskar, Sajha Preis, Nepali Literatur Society Prize (Darjeeling), Nepali Academy Prize (West Bengal) und National Literature Academy Prize (Delhi).

 

The readers in the western world will know more about Himalayan literature as more and more original literary works are translated from Nepali, Tibetan, Hindi, Bhutanese, Lepcha, Bengali into English, German, French and other languages of the EU. The first foreign language, however, will remain English because the East India Company got there first.

 

This book compiled by Ms. Grünfelder creates sympathy and understanding for the Nepali, Indian, Bhutanese, Tibetan, Chinese psyche, culture, religion, living conditions and human problems in the urban and rural Himalayan environment, and is a welcome addition to the slowly growing translated collection of Himalayan literature penned by writers living in the Himalayas.

Satis Shroff is a journalist & poet. He did his schooling in Darjeeling, studied Zoologie und Botanik at the Tribhuvan University (Kathmandu). After that he worked as a science teacher in an English school in Kathmandu and later as a journalist in the features section of The Rising Nepal. He has written two books on the Nepali language for German readers „Sprachkunde Nepals“ (Horlemann Verlag) and published in: The Christian Science Monitor, epd-Entwicklungspolitik, Nepal Information (Cologne), Himal Asia, The Rising Nepal, The Independent, Nelles „Nepal“, Nepal: Myths & Realities (Book Faith India). He studied Creative Writing (under Associate Prof. Bruce Dobler, MFA, Universität of Iowa, und Writers Bureau Manchester), and writes for The American Chronicle, Blog.ch and WordPress.com. He was awarded the German Academic Prize, and works as a lecturer in Basle (Switzerland).

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