December 6, 2007
Teacups with stories
“The vast waterfall of history pours down, and a few obituarists fill teacups with the stories.” –Marilyn Johnson, The Dead Beat
December 6, 2007
Parentbooks Contest
Though I’m not a parent, the Toronto bookshop Parentbooks still has much to offer. In addition to their specialty books, they’ve got a lovely little kids book section (Corduroy! Be still my heart!) and they’re running an Olivia promotion. Stop in (on Harbord, just west of Bathurst) to enter to win a marvelous basket of Olivia tricks. Contest closes December 14th.
December 5, 2007
Villa Air-Bel by Rosemary Sullivan
Full disclosure requires a note that I know Rosemary Sullivan, and like and admire her very much. But it is just as essential to point out also that no amount of affection and admiration alone could have sustained my interest as indeed it was sustained as I read Villa Air-Bel.
Of course the subject matter only helped. Human nature at its most base and then such courage in contrast. And set in France during the early 1940s, which other books like Suite Francaise and April in Paris have so recently brought to life for me. I had never managed to get a real handle on occupied France until encountering these books, which showed that France during WW2 was more than a place on a map upon whose coasts boys died in droves. That there was life going on there all the while, however bizarrely and this France had the very same Paris we know so well from 1920s’ lore– just one example of incongruity. This France, that France; how can we be expected to reconcile this?
Which was just the trouble as Fascism’s grip took hold during the 1930s. It was perhaps the reason why Fascism took hold at all and nobody noticed, because it certainly couldn’t happen there. The very same reason Soviet dissidents flocked to France under Stalin, and others escaped there from the Nazis in the 1930s. France was an oasis of freedom on a continent where totalitarianism was steadily creeping. That the creeping could pervade France as well seemed unfathomable.
All of this leads to the fact that when northern France fell to the Germans in 1940 and Petain et al took up their puppet regime in the south, the country was full of people who would be persecuted under the new regime. Socialists, former Communists, anti-Nazis, intellectuals, bohemians, artists of a leftist sort (ie most), and Jews as anti-semitism became more blatant (the first round-up of French and foreign Jewish residents of Marseille, Sullivan writes, took place in April1941).
The villa itself– that “house in Marseille”– is not as central to the book as the title would suggest. For in order to tell the story of this house which provided refuge for those looking to escape France (the escape no easy trick, by the way, requiring exit visas, transit visas, a country willing to receive them) Sullivan must go back to the early 1930s to explain how these people got to France at all, how France got to France at all, and where the nerve of their rescuers had come from.
At the centre of the story as much as the house is Varian Fry, an American inspired to anti-Fascism after seeing 2 Nazi stormtroopers impale a man’s hand upon a table in a Berlin cafe in 1935. He is sent to Merseille by an American relief organization to facilitate the removal of refugees from France, but soon finds that he is quite powerless under the law. American authorities are willing to do very little to assist his efforts, eager to comply with the Vichy government instead. Fry must resort to illegal means, obtaining fraudulent visas, smuggling refugees over mountains, black market dealings. With his committee he rents Villa Air-Bel, which becomes home to refugees awaiting their departures– artists and writers including Victor Serge, Andre Breton, Max Ernst and Wilfredo Lam.
Truly the idea of these people living together in a French villa while hell was creeping on all sides around them is compelling. Stories of the surrealist games they played to pass the time, the outdoor art shows they held to raise funds, the dinner party upon which the whole book hinges–this is fascinating stuff, particularly when one acknowledges that these people were perpetually under threat. But as the house was a stopgap, of course, there is so much more to the story.
All of this Sullivan, a poet and a skilled and experienced biographer, is well aware of, as she traces the trajectory of these artists’ lives once they’ve left Villa Air-Bel, following their meandering routes towards safe haven. With suspense and such fine detail, she also illustrates the risks Fry and his associates take to help these refugees, eventually, it is said, enabling the escape of 1500 of them.
December 5, 2007
Links
What is it– this weird thing where one book leads to another. Would The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasure of Obituaries be the same book had I not just finished Villa Air-Bel? Two books which, you would think, would not be so blatantly linked, but aren’t books surprising?
Villa Air-Bel opens with Lisa Fittko (who I’d never heard of before) guiding Walter Benjamin out of France, over the mountains into Spain. And then she turns up again in The Dead Beat page 50: “Douglas Martin’s vivid obit on Lisa Fittko, a World War II heroine who smuggled numerous people out of Europe, appeared nine days after her death because… “You can’t know all this stuff. That whole period is extremely vague. There are people who will tell you they did this, that, and the other thing, and Doug took days to separate the wheat from the chaff. The Chicago Tribune ran an obit that then had to be corrected extensively because it was all “ucked fup,” as they say in the business.” Though Fittko’s obit weaves together multiple stories and locations and mentions more than a dozen names, one peripheral name had to be correct the next day; an s had been mistakenly tacked onto a French surname.”
What are the odds, I wonder?
December 5, 2007
Their glasses are lying
They’ve heard me coming and now they’re sitting on either end of the L-shaped couch. Watching The Weather Channel, but their glasses are lying on the coffee table, arms entwined. Both of them keep blinking.
December 4, 2007
Library Page
Okay, I don’t know that it’s my favourite song but I am very impressed that Guelph band The BarMitzvah Brothers have a song called “Library Page”. Which is, naturally, about the plight of the library page.
“I first saw this job in grade ten, I really wanted it then.”
December 3, 2007
Lists
The Globe 100 was published this weekend. Such lists, I believe, are valuable, but not worth a knicker-twist. Perhaps if you haven’t read a book this year, or have been living in a cave, these lists could be worth following to the letter. But if you are a moderate book lover who has read many books this year that you’ve enjoyed, then shouldn’t such a list just be a very mild point of reference? As a voracious reader I approach year-end lists as follows: “Hmm, yes. The books I read and liked, the books I still have no intention of reading no matter that they say, and look! One or two I may have overlooked. All right then.” So it goes.
And we all know that the only list that matters is the Pickle Me This Picks anyway. To come…
December 3, 2007
Too much totalitarianism
This weekend was Christmas parties and bridal showers, the wonderful Bite Noodles and Rice, snow falling outside, and then some rain. Christmas cards sent, decs up, The History Boys, corn muffins and wine. I am very distracted by a variety of things, and wish the days were longer.
Book trauma again– I have been way too immersed of late in totalitarian regimes. Now reading Villa Air Bel by Rosemary Sullivan, and I keep spouting totalitarian tidbits when I’m out in public, which is a good way to kill a mood (or at least a good one). My next non-fic pick is The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasure of Obituaries, which, though it is about death, hopefully will be lighter? Villa Bel Air is really fascinating though, and look for a review maybe Tuesday.
November 30, 2007
Beijing Confidential by Jan Wong
A dizzying force of a book, Jan Wong’s Beijing Confidential. I picked it up based on Heather Mallick’s recommendation and was not disappointed. Perhaps the least self-serving memoir ever, Beijing Confidential serves instead to tell the story of China during the last thirty-five years, as an attempt to right wrongs, and as a stunning picture of Beijing today. It didn’t so much make me want to go there, no, but I feel like I was there, which is something.
Throughout her career Wong has discussed her experiences as a third-generation Chinese Canadian studying in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. An ardent Maoist, she was eager to conform to the society she found there, to renounce her bourgeois origins. She describes her young self as “that very dangerous combination: fanatic, ignorant and adolescent.” The extent of her devotion she demonstrated by reporting on a classmate who dared to ask her how she could get to America. In the chaos of the time, such a counterrevolutionary act could have brought forth any range of punishments– even death. And it is this experience which Wong revisits during her trip to Beijing.
Her husband and sons travel with her. She writes, “I am not only planning to chronicle the future of this great city; I also need to come to terms with my own past. For this I need moral support. I need my family to reassure me that I’m not a horrible human being. Or that, if I am, they love me anyway.” Her edges are softened in this context; she displays vulnerability, dares to admit she has made mistakes in her past. This is brave, I think. She has come to Beijing to find her former classmate– a seemingly impossible task in a city of millions– and it is through this quest that we come to discover the city.
Of course for Jan Wong vulnerability only extends so far– she remains gutsy, unsentimental and pulls no punches. Her approach gives us a fascinating perspective on Beijing– what is it to search for your own past in a city so eager to bulldoze its own? For, as Wong finds, Beijing is a bustle of construction. Particularly with the 2008 Olympics ahead, she is aware that this trip maybe her last chance to see that traditional Beijing she remembers from her time there as a student. Already the city is exploding with condo towers, new roads, mammoth shopping malls and uber-development. In this place she once knew so well, she is perpetually disoriented, and so is her reader, though fittingly and not for any lack of control on Wong’s part.
Her story is so deftly woven with past and present, the personal and the political, with the local and the universal. Beijing Confidential is an education as much as a story– fact: Mao banned pets!, for example– but all propelled by her quest for reconciliation. The quest is resolved in storied fashion, involving chance, understanding and some putrid fruit. Such a marvelously constructed narrative, and a memoir with so much worth telling.
