Fugitive Pieces
Just finished Fugitive Pieces, by Anne Michaels. I should like it more than I do. Memory, regret, second chances, language as it shapes the world -- my ruling cards. And the Holocaust, the War, has such a hold on my imagination. So this book should be a key that unlocks me.
It doesn't. I'm not sure why. It's beautiful and horrible and true. (The ending is tack-on, but that's another story.)
No gestures - perhaps that's it. The narrator seems to have no body. Of course it's an interior book; it starts inside a wall, moves into the ground. But maybe my love of gesture is the tumbler the book doesn't turn.
Or maybe -- harder to admit -- I'm on the wrong side. Not Nazi, but ...
Short Talk on Waterproofing
(from Anne Carson's book Short Talks)Franz Kafka was Jewish. He had a sister, Ottla, Jewish. Ottla married a jurist, Josef David, not Jewish. When the Nuremburg laws where introduced to Bohemia-Moravia in 1942, quiet Ottla suggested to Josef David that they divorce. He at first refused. She spoke about sleep shapes and property and their two daughters and a rational approach. She did not mention, because she did not yet know the word, Auschwitz where she would die in October 1943. After putting the apartment in order she packed a rucksack and was given a good shoeshine by Josef David. He applied a coat of grease. Now they are waterproof, he said.
It's him that haunts me. Him I imagine. Turning back from the window.
Or maybe -- what I like about "Short Talk on Waterproofing" is the unspoken, the sense that the most powerful -- the awful in either sense -- cannot be addressed directly. Like God's name, which cannot be written. (Was writing Ghost Maps the right thing to do? I'm still not sure....) To the Holocaust, silence seems the only human response. On the other hand, silence can be complicitious. Does silence make evil easier? If we speak of these things, is it healing, or is a dark sun, does it draw us into orbit?
But enough. I don't like the book. I think I'm the only person in the country who doesn't, but there you go.
3 Comments
Does silence make evil easier?”
Before the fact, definitely, but I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about.
The standard theory is that it does, even after the fact, because it “makes it easier the next time.”
I guess that assumes that drawing attention to evil deeds makes evil deeds harder. Again, definitely true of work-in-progress. I’m not so sure about history. Cynics say that what we learn from history is that no one learns from history. Given that tyrants keep right on doing genocide, I’m afraid that might be true.
Meanwhile, I confess to a little impatience with the idea that the Holocaust, or 9-11, or, or, or…ought to hang like a cloud over everything we say, think, or do.
In the words of the philosopher William Joel*, “We didn’t start the fire.”
I really enjoyed the poetry of the prose in Michaels’ book, as I recall it - it’s now at least four years since I read it. I do recall being a bit disappointed by the ending but can’t recall specifically why that was so.
As you mention the things that shape your world are the things that initially drew me to the book.
Still on vacation (stretching it out by a number of days - I just love the topography of this area too much).
O