Hello Gentle Reader
Poets often make the best prose writers. They have a distinct understanding of language. They know how well placed words and precise diction, can enforce the narrative. They have an ear for musical scale of vowels. They know how to use rhyme and a sense of metre in sentences. They are also capable of using original and precise metaphors and association of words, to create images that reinforce the narrative itself. Poets have an acute sense of image and emotion. Yet poetry itself is often deemed difficult, and that poets often write poetry for other poets. That being said there are some amazing poets in this world, who understand simplicity and inclusiveness in their work. Many poets often branch out of the poetic sphere, and show that their poetic work is more than just mere lines on a page. Poems can be performed. Dancers interpret the words, sounds, and images into cohesive movements putting the poem into a more physical sphere. Yet it is when they turn to prose, that their talents shine the most. Such authors like Herta Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, Ersi Sotiropoulos, and Bei Dao; and even though she has not written poetry, her work carries the same air to it: Amy Hempel. Each of these authors knows constraint. They know what words will deliver a more effective impact. They understand that less truly is more. They know that writing should be compact and air tight. Herta Müller’s short sentences are so precise. The sentences have an economy of words. They build up and up. They are individual brush strokes, which paint an often bleak and dour picture. Yet with beautiful language, the melancholy often becomes crystallised. With surreal imagery and often Kafkaesque situations, Herta Müller often is able to depict life under Communism in Romania, from the perspective of an alienated person, whose naturalised language is foreign. It is the duality of language that Herta Müller has admitted that has helped gather an often appreciative understanding of the power of words, and her often uniquely comparative use of association. One of the greatest examples is the rose. In Germany the rose is of female association. Whereas in the Romanian language, the rose is of male association. Herta Müller straddles both languages equally. The German of her childhood, and the Romanian of the city, come together in often surprising ways. In the case of the rose – Herta Müller simply puts the man in a dress.
Elfriede Jelinek on the other hand, deals with language as a musician deals with sounds of varying instruments. It is no surprise that Jelinek who trained from a young age in the acts of musical composition, by studying the piano, recorder, viola and guitar. Yet it is often funny that Jelinek abandoned her prestigious and prodigious musical talents in favour of a more abstract world of words and definitions. Yet Jelinek tackles linguistic ingenuity with often surprisingly and very intimate writing. Though the content is rough, and very grotesque to the point of being deliberately obscene; it is written in such a high culture and refined way that it is no more pornographic as the statute of David. Yet it is certainly more scathing and vicious. Elfriede Jelinek uses, very fragmented language, dual meaning of words, and a steady stream of puns, word plays, and often references to both high and low cultures, to present a society and a world that continually undermines the individuals, in its own use of refined sense of language. From commercials and marketing to the poetics of the mundane and the downright obscene. She presents a world fractured and fighting with in itself.
Sotiropoulos is the most deceiving. She is a poet by nature. Yet her language is not ornamental. It is bare bones. Yet her prose is image driven. It’s vivid and detailed. With sudden use of free association of words, Sotiropoulos turns the everyday into the abstract and the ambiguous. It is transformed and renewed in a far scarier and often scrutinizing light. Violence is dark shadows, which flicker around the edges. Yet her writing is compact. Everything is sketched only as far as it needs to be. Allowing for a lot to hide and left to be discovered. It is these unrealized moments, and stories that have neither a beginning nor an ending that gives the prose an often inconclusive ending. When I read Bei Dao’s short story collection “The Waves,” the first thing that comes to mind, is just how deceptively simple it is. Yet how much the works are full of wisdom. Yet what is surprising is how Bei Dao does not look toward a grand political or ideological, villain. He presents the worlds of the characters and their lives, as pieces of a shipwreck that happened after the Cultural Revolution. How they drift along, and are still recovering and recollecting their now shattered lives. Yet once again it is how much is shown; rather than spoken that gives it, its unique air, and vitality.
Admittedly I think some of the greatest authors, who are poets, could and would have written some of the most beautiful stories. Wisława Szymborska already had a sense of narrative in her poetry. With a light touch of the ironic, and a gentleness that is compassionately human and incredibly empathetic person that would surely shine in her prose. I could picture those stories as small little gems – like fables, that speak of the quiet beauty and the necessities of life.
Elisabeth Rynell is both a poet and a prose writer. She has a beautiful command of language. At times lyrical and airy, but also incredibly visceral. “To Mervas,” is her first book translated into English. It was shortlisted for Sweden’s August Prize. To describe Rynell’s writing is to call it what it is: emotional. “To Mervas,” deals with some extreme emotions; and as the reader, we mine and make our way through the troubled landscape of Marta’s very extreme inner self. Beauty and terror are one in the same for Rynell.
“Somewhere in my life is a city shrouded in darkness. It’s a big city, probably a capital. All roads lead to it, into the dark, where they dissolve. I know the this city exists, that like all cities it has houses and streets, that a kind of living takes place there, stories are formed, meetings and scenes.”
The internal dreamscapes of Marta at times become grounded in the everyday. Memories follow Marta like a guilty shadow. A ball and chain. A reminder of her penance. Rynell handles the melodramatics’ very well. She understands the nature of the work, and the interest on focusing on a characters psychology of being both victim and perpetrator, will have pit falls. Some avoidable; and others one cannot help but fall into. Yet it is the ease and poetic beauty of the language that is always the saving grace. Observations are abounding, and the format of the writing is very intimate and personal. As a reader one comes to understand Marta, and her search identity as she herself slowly reveals and begins to face the past, that walks behind her, and the present and future to which she walks towards. That being said Rynell also uses a limited third person narrative to make observations and pass judgements. Marta is human. Flawed by design. Mistakes are made as by her nature.
In this narrative, though, there is a lot mysticism and myth making. When Marta’s son is taken away from her, she describes herself as a mother bear, a tigress, and a lioness. A hissing spirited animal. Her motherly instincts kick in, and she immediately fights back. Though this is all in vain. She latter describes herself as being declawed. Weak and defeated; she can do nothing. She accepts it.
“Back then, no other world existed except for the one contained inside the hospital red bricks. I had to subscribe to that world and its routine, routines that made the day so similar they eventually like one, like a simple, rhythmic pattern repeated again and again, a ticking without variation that kept the world going. No suffering or can resist being swallowed by a hospitals regulations and stubborn reasoning. An ingenious protective net of cleanliness and restraint is perpetually suspended over the abyss. It wasn’t until I was locked up inside this alien order that I began to understand what the pedantic rhyme in my own life had been about.”
In the end Marta’s world revolves around her handicapped son. Though everything in this novel is in some way the after events. The outcome of the past and the decisions made. Marta was obviously emotionally troubled before her handicapped son, entered her life. her father was abusive and well-rounded in the pervasive tactics of all forms of abuse and torture. The carpet beater is his favourite impellent, in his degraded form of discipline. Yet Marta exhibits the years of this relationships effect on her. Marta reflects on the first time Kosti and her had met. He was warm towards her, and she only occupied a seat. She thoroughly cared only for her studies not for the human companionship that he had offered. Yet persistence changed Marta. She grew out of her isolation and her exile away from others, and yet in turn had to depart once again. Enter her handicapped son, the product of a one night stand, and both her reason to live, and the very strenuous cause of her own emotional failure; as both a mother and an individual. In the end this is the greatest sin she committed to herself. This is where it unfortunately gets very tense, and often feels a bit forced. Whenever one deals with lovers or motherhood and parental love, there is always a certain sentimental act involved. Fortunately Rynell handles this well. Yet it still left me feeling very cold. It left a deep emptiness inside of me. It felt like it was too easily, wrapped up. That the journey that Marta undertakes, both physically and emotionally was never fully realized to the full potential. Yet getting past that, the prose is beautiful. Harrowing one moment, and the next a luscious understanding of the natural world, and human kinds own place within it:
“It takes time to discover that the forest is a place where the space between things matters more than the trees, that it is a swaying in-between world where light and shadow rule. Someone is playing an instrument in there, sometimes low and gliding, other times jerky and bouncy, a bow of light and shadow slides across the strings of all the tree trunks and branches and twigs.”
I think the greatest observation though comes from the beginning of this novel, in which Rynell proclaims, with grace and poetic philosophy that “Life must be a story, or else it will crush you.” And so it could be said about this novel. It’s a story that Marta tells in order for the weight of her own life not to crush her. Though there are at times, flaws, and the extremity is not handled so carefully (somehow it is different than Jelinek) and it did leave me feeling slightly empty; the lyrical precision on its own, makes this novel so wonderful and certainly worth a second reading.
Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
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M. Mary
