Alone by Tomaž Šalamun

Alone

One finger is the tundra,
one finger is the Bodhisattva,
one finger is mother Slovenia.
Two fingers still remain, beckoning
and with awful force feeding me
seventeen hands with this arrangement.
Alone,
I'm alone on the roof of the world and drawing
so stars are created.
I'm spurting through the nose so the Milky Way is created
and I'm eating
so shit is created, and falling on you
and it is music.
I am God.
I am God and I'm dancing.
This table is a gift, this house is a gift,
this garden is a gift, these squirrels are a gift.
These human legs are murmuring mantras.
Alone,
alone.
Glug glug glug I drink gulps of light
and I brush.
So I shower and put myself back, alone.
I alone am the center of the world's light, the Lord's lamb.
I alone am all animals: a tiger, an ant, a deer,
a rabbit, a porcupine (a hedgehog), a butterfly, an insect,
a piranha, a baby rabbit, a daddy rabbit,
the god of ferrets, the straw hat of a sketched
puppy and his paws.
I alone am all plants: strawberries, birch, hazel,
pumpkin, fern, dandelion, juves (juves is a plant
with thin roots, resembling the roots
of parsley, but it has a nose and head like
a porcini cap and one birch's hand,
sitting all day in a race car like a liana),
maple, oak, corn, alone.
I alone am all the people named in this book
and all the others: Joe, Janet, Agatha, Veronika,
Boris, Ivan, Italo, Pierre, alone.
I alone am the air, smoothly, the lining, two parallel tracks,
pot (to sweat), pot (the road),
the cause, the forceps, Lope de Vega, the streak,
the dot on the forehead, the dot in the air, alone.
Alone,
I alone am the air and the golden butter,
linden bark, the king, the sickle and hammer,
the Dalmatian, the saw, Armenia, the key,
alone.

-  Tomaž Šalamun (Translated from the Slovenian)

Drago Jančar's The Galley Slave

One of the best parts of traveling is getting to know writers and books that I might not discover otherwise. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I had been in Slovenia earlier this summer and how a few people had recommended Slovenian writer Drago Jančar to me. So I picked up his The Tree with No Name and was blown away by it.

I read several other Slovenian novels and other books in the Slovenian Series that Dalkey Archive has been doing. I enjoyed them but there is something about the voice and pre-occupation of Jančar that speaks to me. The Galley Slave tells the story of Johann Ot who in the late middle ages travels as a kind of spiritual renegade from village to village in the midst of a country-wide religious revival.

Suspicion is everywhere: villagers are suspicious of newcomers, the corrupt government is suspicious of any kind of underclass stoking revolution and uprising, and the criminal class is suspicious of the new religious temperature which sees witches and devils in every unknown action, face or mystery. Johann Ot's aim is merely to survive without being burned at the stake or being installed on one of the many torture devices he hears about.

Published in 1978 behind the Iron Curtain, many saw this as an allegorical portrait of life under the brutal Communist occupation (even if Yugoslavia, which Slovenia had been swallowed up by, had a more benign and less oppressive version compared with much of the Eastern Bloc and USSR). I think this simplifies the tale in a certain way and largely detracts from it: it may well have intended to be an  allegory but I found it alive in its portrayal of society in the Middle Ages where dogma had no basis in any kind of rational thought. And as is often the case in these kinds of tales (oddly, I kept thinking about Mad Men and how it portrayed the 60s and 70s), it attempts to tell us more about our own era than some time in the past we can never experience first-hand.

The novel starts out a bit slow and it takes a few dozen pages to really get into the story but once I was hooked, man, I raced through this book (read most of it this weekend). It's got long funny passages and moments when you have to stop and think for a while about how so much of what we worry about day to day is pointless since only the broad brushstrokes of life will be accessible at some distant point in the future. It made me wonder what people will think about life in early 21st century North America in 500 years and our religious devotion to scientific reason.

I have become a full-fledged Drago Jančar fan after this book. I still found The Tree With No Name more compelling (that one is set in WWII and in contemporary Ljubljana) but The Galley Slave was an excellent weekend read and when Jančar's latest is released in English in January, I'll definitely be adding that to my must-read list.

Watermelon, Dickinson's coconut cake, #TenThingsNotToSayToAWriter, Slovenian novel, American paintings: Cultural digest for July 31

Can you spot the differences?

• This 17th century painting by Giovanni Stanchi shows the extent to which selective breeding has transformed the watermelon. This apparently isn't a novel approach: horticulturists often look at Renaissance-era paintings of fruit or veg to determine the precise ways that breeding has changed them.
• Want to cook a favorite recipe of Emily Dickinson's? This hand-written recipe for coconut cake (it looks quite simple to bake) contains starting lines to the poem "The things that can never come back, are several - " on the other side. It seems Dickinson used cooking to find inspiration.
• CBC Books picks up a Twitter hashtag trend on the things writers hate hearing people say about their chosen profession. "That's a cool hobby."?? Seriously?! Other gems include "I'm not really interested in books but I like your work on Twitter" and "Have you met J.K. Rowling?" #TenThingsNotToSayToAWriter
• Really enjoying this Dalkey Archive book Minuet for Guitar by Slovenian writer Vitomil Zupan. Written and published in 1975, the book recounts the experience of Slovenian guerillas fighting against the Germans and Italians in WWII. The semi-autobiographical novel is moving, funny and, at times, terrifying. "War was cruel and innocent at the same time...It is a dance, accompanied by a 25-shot guitar."
• Gorgeous paintings by American painter Charmagne Coe. That's it.

Minuet for Guitar by Vitomil Zupan

from The Succubus by Vlado Žabot

Mainly, all this stuff in his head just made him feel restless, with a nightmarish feeling of being in a hurry, like flashes and sparks crackling above an unseen fire someone kept poking at, that flare up and down and mean absolutely nothing, nothing you could grasp or understand, since it was simply impossible for a person to find his way under such circumstances, since life and the city and everything else seemed both cheap and harrowing at the same time, since he didn't know how or with what or to what end he might sense of anything, since all of it was making him tremble, making him wish it would just over, one way or another. He had the feeling that all of it - bit by bit and at times distorted beyond recognition, from the street to the buildings to the people - was taking him over, all this rushing about, all these sounds from the television set, all this pointlessness, insignificance, worthlessness, which nevertheless demanded its daily meal every single day; all these appearances and guises, which were in fact forms of despair and bewilderment and confusion; and meanwhile maybe someone jumps or falls or screams, and of course it hardly mattered if one or another person died, if one or another person missed somebody or killed somebody, since all the while on television they just kept on doing what they do and no one was the wiser, neither here nor there nor anywhere. At that point, perhaps, it hardly mattered if you were this or that thing, if for instance you were a goat, or maybe an ant; it hardly mattered if you believed this thing or that thing or didn't believe it; what was important was that the daily meal was served and that nothing got muddled, that for instance all the cars and streetcars and trains didn't collide in one big pile-up, and that everything somehow seemed to run smoothly, so your wife could take her daily dose of tranquillizers and watch the different actors on television chase each other, cheat on each other, stab each other, or discuss healthy and unhealthy diets and diet supplements, which were part of the whole thing and had a positive influence on one's sense of well-being. And at the same time you begin to suspect that you are, in a little way, part of the whole thing and that in fact there is nothing else.

                                        - from The Succubus by Vlado Žabot

Drago Jančar: The Tree With No Name

I was in Slovenia for work recently and a few people recommended Slovenian writer Drago Jančar to me. As we were heading out of Ljubljana and back to Trieste where we were staying, I picked up his novel, The Three With No Name along with a few other books.

I read the novel last week and found it wonderful: it's an interesting play on form but in a very readable and relatable way. The book starts in the thick of WWII when a man wakes up and isn't sure where he is or how he got there. He seems to have no past, or at least not one he shares with the reader, and he knocks on a window for help.

The story starts there, unrequited love for the village teacher, a soldier (her lover) shows up and threatens our narrator, but later befriends him. Then a battle ensues miles from the village.

But suddenly we are transported to the year 2000 in Ljubljana as an archivist sees a bike being pulled out of the river, obviously a very old bike. He thinks it could be the bike which belonged to the teacher in the village and it's here that we learn that this narrator, too, is the same character who 55 years earlier opens the book. Yet he's not the same narrator, too, as he hasn't aged.

Time shifts are slightly confusing but give us a real glimpse into how the past influences the present. The author, too, is fascinated with objects and the values that they are charged with, the ways in which they represent the people who used or loved them.

The book meanders between the past and the present (the year 2000) and as the archivist's marriage collapses under the weight of his discoveries and the ways it influences his mental state, we see a man, a nation, in crisis.

There are great riffs on everything from history to "truth," to the ugliness of base consumerism:

Bloated with dissatisfaction, with endless, relentless inner dissatisfaction that at one minute it tries to fill by racing from store to store, or that it stuffs into shopping bags and carts, that it shoves into the abyss of its own emptiness, amid this noise, in this over-stimulated, superficial shopping center life, where nothing remains, only the dissatisfaction that's been stuffed into bags, stuffed down gullets and bellies, into closets and drawers.

It's a really fascinating book and why Drago Jančar isn't better known in the West is a mystery to me.

The novel is part of an entire series that Dalkey Archive Press has been doing on Slovenian fiction, including poetry by Tomaž Šalamun, Marko Sosič and Andrej Blatnik, among many others.

I've ordered two more of Jančar's novels and he has a new one coming out in January. Got my summer reading lined up!