August begins with a Czech Republic special: Franz Kafka, The Burrow; I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal and Not Up the Ass Today! by Jana Cerna. Russia: The Original by Laura / It's Rather Funny to Die by Vladimir Nobokov. And finally, Canada with Garbage! Diary of a Sewer Cleaner by Simon Paré-Poupart. ---- "Ladybug: A Little Turtle That Suddenly Takes Flight" ---- Jules Renard ---- Exhibition at the Rouen Photo Gallery, photo by Patrick Schindler ---- Franz Kafka: The Burrow ---- Franz Kafka, born in 1883 in Prague, is considered one of the major writers of the 20th century. He is as famous for his novels, such as The Trial, as for his short stories, such as The Metamorphosis. His work is characterized by a nightmarish, sinister atmosphere, where bureaucracy and impersonal society have an increasing hold on the individual. Hendrik Marsman describes this atmosphere as one of "extremely strange objectivity." Kafka's work,
which highlights "the problem of language in naming things precisely," is sometimes seen as a symbol of the uprooted man of modern times. Some, however, believe it is simply an attempt, in an apparent struggle with "superior forces," to return the initiative to the individual who makes their own choices and is responsible for them. Kafka frequented Prague anarchist circles for a time and was also passionate about ancient Hebrew texts. "The Burrow," Franz Kafka's penultimate unfinished work (published by 1001 Nights, translated by Dominique Miermont), was preserved, thanks to his close friend Max Brod, along with all his other works, despite Kafka's express request that everything be destroyed after his death. His short story "The Burrow" begins: "I've made my burrow, and the result seems successful. From the outside, you only see a big hole, but in reality, it leads nowhere." This stratagem is simply the remnant of one of my many failed attempts. I live peacefully in the heart of my home, and meanwhile, somewhere, the enemy is slowly and silently digging its way closer to me."
Who is speaking like this? A creature like a mole? Clearly, a mole wouldn't express itself as eloquently as this mysterious narrator who will keep us in suspense until the very end of this short story. Could it be a paranoid man seeking refuge in total solitude? Or perhaps a hybrid being, half-beast, half-man?
Whoever the author of this burrow may be, Jacques Miermont explains in his afterword, "they have built a curious underground fortress and describe its features with a mixture of great precision and no less great ambiguity." In other words, the hallmark of Kafkaesque genius. The further we delve into the story, the less we can identify the nature of this strange storyteller who goes into every detail of the construction of his work, its strengths (including a labyrinth) and its weaknesses. In passing, he confides that he doesn't regret his former life outside, "devoid of all serenity, an uninterrupted series of perils," and also shares his doubts about the future: "When I want to, and I'm weary of this life, someone will somehow invite me to join them, and I won't be able to resist." A more enigmatic passage than this one? We're dying! Many analysts have tried to decipher
who was hiding behind this "someone of sorts." The reader himself? Or simply death? How can we know, since Kafka leaves us hanging on these questions, having never finished this absolutely fascinating short story...
Bohumil Hrabal: I Who Served the King of England.
Bohumil Hrabal was born in 1914 in Brno (Czech Republic). The adopted son of a master brewer, he discovered literature during his student years at Charles University in Prague. But he had to interrupt his studies from 1939 onwards, due to the German Occupation and the closure of the universities. He then worked various jobs. His first collection of short stories, Pearls in the Water, published in 1963, made him one of the most popular writers in his country. After the Soviet invasion of the summer of 1968, which ended the Prague Spring, Hrabal ran into serious trouble with the censors for "vulgarity and pornography." He was banned from publishing from 1970 to 1976, and two of his books-Homework and The Buds-were pulped. It was during this period, however, that he wrote his major masterpieces, imbued with a dark humor bordering on the grotesque and an irony not devoid of tenderness. This led to his being banned again between
1982 and 1985. He spent the last years of his life in a chalet in the village of Kersko, surrounded by his many cats, and died in 1997 falling or jumping - a typically Czech "specialty" in the country's history!...
I Who Served the King of England (Pocket edition, translated from the Czech Milena Braud) "initially resembles," according to Linda Lê, the preface writer, "an expertise in abjection to the confession of a modern stag which quickly reveals itself to be a lesson in wisdom."
It was in the 1920s that our narrator arrived at the Golden City Hotel in Prague. At just 15 years old, he was hired as a bellhop, and his boss-a man of strict discipline-confided in him, "Now that you're a bellhop, remember this: you saw nothing, you heard nothing. But you must see and hear everything. Repeat!" The lesson quickly bore fruit, and armed with this advice, we will experience, alongside our antihero, his many misadventures, serving the most improbable clients, and sneaking out to visit the brothel in this small town near Prague. Quickly dismissed for various reasons, his boundless ambition leads him to be hired at the Hotel of Silence, another establishment in the region. His new boss: a large man weighing 160 kg who, "from his wheelchair, has eyes everywhere at once," and relentlessly spies on his team of waiters, who are far from overworked and serve more
as decoration in this curious establishment. Let's not say any more about this one, except that once again, for some reason, our hero, ever the cunning and opportunist, is fired and finds himself hired at the prestigious Hotel de Paris in Prague where, after scenes worthy of a Louis de Funès film, he is finally promoted to head waiter. We've already reached the halfway point of this humor-filled novel.
In the second part, the young man's life will suddenly take a dramatic turn after Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland, but especially when he falls in love with Miss Lisa, a young German-speaking and Germanophile woman who hates Czechs and has strong Nazi leanings! It's not giving away too much of the story to say that he will follow his beloved to the borderlands of Saxony and the Sudetenland, where Czech patriots are being persecuted, and that he will get a job at a hotel with clearly eugenic practices. In a hilarious scene, we see our hero succumbing to Nazi sirens, undergoing a test that will make him "fit to marry Lisa, a pure Aryan"... Will the Nazi option transform our antihero, in the eyes of others, into something other than a small-minded Czech dwarf? Far from certain. And what will happen after the war? The narrative then accelerates into a frenetic whirlwind, brimming with a ferocious irony best taken with a grain of salt, or even two. At times, one might get the impression that events are overtaking the narrator himself: "I, who had seen the inconceivable become reality," he tells us. A fine lesson indeed!
Beneath the caricature presented by Bohumil Hrabal lies a profound reflection on the meaning of life. Doesn't his character confide in us at one point, "to put it all down on paper so that others can not just read it, but rather, as my story unfolds, reconstruct in turn these scenes strung together like pearls or rosary beads on the tenuous chain of my life"? A life where the inconceivable becomes reality?... Let's not forget to add that Hrabal's very particular style doesn't prevent him from gifting us with beautiful poetic images, such as this one: "One had to climb a hill as light as a sigh from the earth."
It is therefore not surprising that Milan Kundera considered him "one of the major Czech writers, along with Franz Kafka, both so representative of Prague humor."
Jana Cerna: Not up the ass today!
Jana Cerná was born in Prague in 1928. A prominent figure in Czech underground circles of the 1960s, she was the daughter of journalist and writer Milena Jesenská. Her mother, a feminist writer and communist resistance fighter, was the recipient of Franz Kafka's most beautiful love letters, which she translated. Arrested in 1939 and deported to Ravensbrück, she was murdered in 1944. Jana was taken in by her grandfather at the age of 11. She dedicated a book to her deceased mother. Her relationship with Egon Bondy, a Prague philosopher who frequented underground circles, inspired her most famous book, *Not Up the Ass Today!* She married four times and had five children. She died at the age of 52 in a car accident.
Before discovering *Not Up the Ass Today!* (Published by La contre Allée, translated from the Czech by Barbora Faure), it is worth recalling the Czech context during the post-war years of Stalinist terror. We will then better understand the significance of the title of one of Jana Cerna's very provocative poems, which began: "Not up the ass today / I'm in pain / And besides, I'd like to talk to you first / Because I respect your intellect"... These words are all the more provocative as this little bombshell exploded in the midst of "those years of terror and fundamentalism, like a metaphor for feminism," says Anna Rizello, the author of the preface, who continues: "Jana Cerna's feminism, closely linked to her anarchist rejection of any established order, seems to attack the patriarchal order and machismo more than the male himself. It is a search for new possibilities, for a space where sexuality and intellectual activity are not
opposed."
An argument we will examine by reading her long love letter, which forms part of this narrative "that has neither rhyme nor reason," as Jana described it when she wrote it just before the Prague Spring to her lover, Egon Bondy, a prominent figure in the Prague underground. It would be futile to attempt to summarize the letter presented in this new publication, so saturated is it with meaning and striking phrases, a small selection of which we offer here.
For example, when discussing the great Marxist concepts that glorify work, Jana remarks, with no small amount of humor and common sense: "I don't know how this Marx can consider work a constructive activity; perhaps it's thanks to his wife's factory?" Jana likes to emphasize her libertarian convictions to her lover: "I refuse to impose limits on myself. I know I am unreasonable because everything that is healthy and reasonable repulses me," and then goes on to justify this assertion. Regarding her relationship with Egon, she tells him, "You think I dislike your sentimental side? How wrong you are, darling, I like it very much and I need it." This doesn't stop Jana from launching into what could be called a rather crude erotic compendium where "sperm and pussy" reign supreme and where longing and satiety compete in a mad dash "for pleasure through words."
After a more restful, romantic, and peaceful interlude, Jana discusses what the fusion of philosophy and poetry means to her. But, "a useless poetry that doesn't resemble a well-bred young lady transformed into a proletarian to get a good grade in her personnel file." The image is striking! At the end of her letter to her lover, Jana Cerna, having reread it, claims it "in its total and catastrophic disorder" and signs it. Impressive!
A stowaway: François Béranger, in his song "Une ville" (1969), revisits the Prague Spring, the entry of the Soviet troops, and the unrestrained repression.
Vladimir Nobokov: The original Laura
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born in 1899 in Saint Petersburg. Born into a cultured and liberal family of the Saint Petersburg aristocracy, forced to flee the Russian Revolution, the Nabokovs first lived in Europe between the two world wars, then settled permanently in the United States in 1940. To support his family, Vladimir taught European literature at several universities before achieving international success with Lolita. At the height of his fame, the writer spent his final years in a luxury hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva, continuing to write and publish. He is considered one of the most important authors of 20th-century literature. Praised by both critics and the public during his lifetime, his books have been translated worldwide and have sold tens of millions of copies.
In the introduction to *The Original of Laura* (Gallimard, translated from the English by Maurice Couturier), Dmitri Nabokov recounts the circumstances under which his father began writing what should have been his last book, as his health declined following an accident in 1975, two years before his death. "He began to lose his physical splendor, but he never stopped writing a masterpiece in its embryonic stage, the cocoons of genius beginning to molt into pupae here and there on his ever-present index cards." It is these original drafts that the publisher reproduces at the top of each page of the book, translated below by his son. His father had wished for them to be destroyed before they became a novel, but he died before that could happen. Dmitri will explain the long process that led him to finally publish them, after sharing a few carefully chosen memories of his father.
So, obviously, one shouldn't expect to read a novel, but rather imagine, starting from this embryonic form, what it could have been. The same is true for the initial sketches of the characters, such as Flora, the story's heroine, about whom Nabokov tells us that "everything concerning her is destined to remain vague." We learn, however, that Flora had read, at the age of eleven, *What Children Dream Of* by a certain Dr. Freud, and, after graduating, met Philip Wild, a doctor of science who would marry her, "having everything going for him except good looks"...
So, what will become of this marriage after three years? Flora, a young woman "capricious, fickle, always between two trains, two planes, and two lovers," quickly tires of her husband's wealth! It is with this mindset that Flora meets a writer on the French Riviera who is writing Ma Laura, a book in which she will be the subject. A kind of novel within a novel, then. Yet, against all expectations, it seems that her husband Philip plays the leading role. But a Philip who speaks in the first person and says very little about his relationship with Laura, yet who, despite hating her body, focuses on his bisexual fantasies with young men of both sexes, "different but erotically identical"! Philippe dwells at length on his illnesses, which he personifies, evoking, for example, "the pleasure one experiences in slipping sharp scissors under an ingrown toenail"... Particularly interesting are the drafts of theories
he develops on death, and more specifically on "the process of dying by self-dissolution, the greatest ecstasy a man can know."
Hence the subtitle of Nabokov's volume, It's Rather Funny to Die. In these preparatory notes, Nabokov doesn't spare us some striking phrases, such as this one about Buddhism, "which blends religious cretinism and the mysticism of Eastern wisdom," and never misses an opportunity to refer to Franz Kafka and Max Brod. It is only after reading this draft novel that one better understands why Dmitri Nobokov, after much hesitation, finally decided to publish them in 2009, years after his father's death. Much to our delight.
The second stowaway is Pete Seeger with his song "Garbage." It deals with overconsumption, waste, and tons of garbage.
Simon Paré-Poupart: Garbage! Diary of a Garbage Collector.
Simon Paré-Poupart has been collecting garbage for twenty years. His university studies in sociology and international administration, as well as his experience as a social worker, have not diminished his calling as a garbage collector. Garbage! is his first book.
Garbage! Diary of a Garbage Collector (published by Lux) begins with this confession from the author: "I have a very particular experience of life. I spend my days surrounded by garbage. For twenty years, I've hauled nearly 70,000 tons of waste. In the eyes of passersby, I sometimes see that they mistake me for one of them. Yet I love this job. By telling my story, I want to share my passion for bringing garbage collectors out of oblivion, these Sisypheans of consumer society, situated at the bottom of the social ladder. Above all, I want you to stop believing that your garbage magically disappears. And if it didn't disappear, it would be a rat infestation, guaranteed stench, plague, and cholera!"...
Okay, but then, are garbage collectors born or do they become one by chance? Before answering this question, Simon Paré-Poupart will give us a first glimpse into his daily life. He teaches us, for example, how not to injure ourselves when handling a 50 kg bag of construction waste. Or how to keep our cool when a particularly difficult landlord is monitoring our every move, ready to file a complaint for non-compliance at the slightest pretext. To get back to the origins of his attraction to his profession, Simon takes us back to his childhood. He explains how, at eighteen, after trying his hand at several jobs, notably in the social sector, he finally fulfilled his stepfather's dearest wish: "to make a man of him by running on the back of a garbage truck!"
But how did one learn the trade on the job before multinationals monopolized the market? Later, he tells us that garbage collection is a "man's world," which he sums up as a majority of outcasts (over-indebted "helpers"), toothless men, tattooed men, and drug addicts.
We will gradually meet Pandex, who talked to the garbage, and so many other atypical characters (like Ti-Chris, "hooked on coke"). This mass of dissimilar individuals shares the common trait of performing a high-turnover activity: "the one you don't want to see, done by men you don't want to see, to make things you no longer want to see disappear!" This doesn't preclude the garbage collectors from having a few rare admirers (whom we'll discover).
After treating us to a very informative history lesson and highlighting the differences between French garbage collectors and Quebec sewer workers, the author examines the consumer society that produces 2 billion tons of waste (10,000 tons of which are in orbit!), as well as the contradictions surrounding composting (carried out by underpaid immigrants in Montreal's upscale neighborhoods) and recycling. It quickly becomes apparent that Simon is a veritable encyclopedia of knowledge about the job, its working conditions during harsh winters and summer heat waves that "reek of the beginnings of decay." Extreme situations in which "we often speak to each other with crude, stupid, mean words, most of the time without really thinking about it"...
After this overview of a neglected world, before leaving us, Simon Paré-Poupart will explain his philosophy and his passion for "Friganism," or the art of living off the waste products of consumer society.
Masterful. The few snapshots that illustrate his points are very telling, and his typically Quebecois expressions are absolutely delightful...
Patrick Schindler, group from Rouen, FA.
One last stowaway: Anne Vanderlove performing a song by Bernard Lavilliers.
https://monde-libertaire.net/?articlen=9129
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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