Book Review: 'Chaos and Night' by Henry de Monterlant

Chaos and Night (1963)
Henry de Montherlant (1896-1972)

236 pages

Celestino Marcilla, the central character in Henry de Montherlant's novel Chaos and Night, lives in Paris, an exile of twenty years from his native Spain. After fighting as an anarchist with the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, he crossed the border into France with tens of thousands of his countrymen in early 1939, in panicked retreat from Franco's Nationalist army. (For more on the history of the war, see The Spanish Civil War.)   In Paris he shares an apartment with his daughter --- his wife having died in childbirth soon after the end of the civil war.

Not having to work, due to an inheritance skillfully retrieved from Spain for him by a lawyer, Don Celestino also has never learned to speak French, though he can read it competently. He spends his days reading French and Spanish newspapers, and writing anonymous editorials to the newspapers, deriding the political and social situation in the world, in particular in Spain and France, from his anarchist slant. Few of these end up in print; most, in fact, he never even sends out, carefully filing them for a book he never actually gets around to writing. Filled with melancholy for Spain, but disgusted by the fascist regime and his former countrymen who support it, he also has little love for France or the rest of the world.

As the years have passed in France, he remains consumed with his memories of fighting both the nationalists as well as his non-anarchist compatriots --- socialists and communists --- in the Republican militia. With nothing in his life of exile to match the thrill of fighting for his beliefs in the civil war, Don Celestino's anarchism becomes a hardened dogma that defines his life, and begins to warp his perception of reality. He observes and challenges the world around him and finds it in most ways wanting based on his social and political viewpoint. Friend and foe, relation and stranger, all are judged --- and generally condemned --- for their failure to meet his strict standards. He attempts to recapture the excitement of the civil war years by creating conflicts with both friends and strangers, though instead of the physical violence of the war he settles for verbal tirades on the ills of society and mischievous pranks to disrupt what he considers the blind and complacent bourgeois. Having finally rejected the few friends he has made in France over the years, the story finds him sinking into a self-imposed morass of loneliness and isolation, and he feels death drawing near.

This spell is broken by a note from Madrid informing him that his sister has died and he needs to come to settle matters related to the inheritance. Overcoming fears that he will be found out as a former left-wing militia member, he travels to Madrid with his daughter. As he wanders the streets of Madrid for the first time in over 20 years, his senses heightened by his fear of being recognized as an anarchist and former Republican fighter, he feels a new excitement to his life, but also experiences a deepening disconnect from reality, as he interprets every smile or frown from a stranger as connected to his involvement in the long past civil war. The story reaches its climax at a bullfight he attends, which for Don Celestino takes on the dimensions of a representation of the human condition, and speaks directly to his own past and present; his political views and his approach to life become filtered through the lens of the battle between the bull on the one side, and the bullfighter and his helpers on the other. (For a look at bullfighting, see the review for Or I'll Dress You in Mourning.)

In Don Celestino, Montherlant portrays the perilous ends of allowing one's principles and convictions to overrule empathy and sympathy for others, and the insanity that lies at the end of allowing dogma to rule one's life and relationships. Don Celestino replays in miniature the internal strife between political parties that tore apart the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War even as it was losing the larger battle to the Nationalists. Montherlant does, however, manage to walk a fine line in the story: there is humor in what Don Celestino says and does, but he never seems a clown; he creates a sad life for himself, but his strength in facing it holds us back from finding him pitiful.

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Other reviews / information:
The back cover review, from The New York Review Books

Book Review: 'The Crazed' by Ha Jin

Ha Jin (1956- )
The Crazed (2002)

323 pages

In the spring of 1989, during the months of growing unrest leading up to the eventual crackdown in Tiananmen Square, Jian, a graduate student of literature at a university in a small city in China, finds his world turned upside down when his professor has a stroke and Jian must attend to him at the hospital every afternoon.

Jian reveres his professor, almost as a father figure, has planned to emulate his career, and is even engaged to his daughter. Jian had been preparing for imminent exams, hoping that a strong showing would lead to a position for him at a university in Beijing, where his finance is already studying. A successful result on the exams is the only chance for Jian to be able to work in Beijing --- and join his finance to build their lives there together. Now suddenly, his study time is cut short by his daily afternoons sitting with and helping his professor at the hospital.

His professor slips in and out awareness of his surroundings, often rambling for hours on end, holding (one-sided) conversations with people from his past, and recalling songs he was forced to sing during the Cultural Revolution when he was a known as a 'Demon-Monster' for being an intellectual. Over the weeks of sitting by his professor's side, Jian begins to piece together parts of his professor's personal and professional lives of which he had been unaware. The professor, who Jian had only seen as a happy and successful scholar and teacher, has in reality spent his married life longing for an unrequited love and his professional life struggling in a system where success has more to do with playing the game of the party and university systems, than with scholarly capability.

In his more lucid moments, the professor tells Jian that he regrets not having lived a simpler, peasant life, where he could work with his hands and live his own life distant from the complexity of urban and university life. He tells Jian that his life as a scholar and intellectual is in reality little more than that of a glorified clerk, able to do only officially acceptable scholarly research, unable to challenge the ruling dogma (from the party or the university, which are shown here to be two peas in the same pod). Jian begins to question his chosen future as a scholar, instead wanting to live a life that allows him to feel useful by helping the people of China who have been stifled by the social and political systems.

At the same time, students around Jian, and throughout China, grow increasingly restless as the events in Beijing and in particular in and around Tiananmen Square heat up; they begin to question their government, and also themselves for living the easy life of the university student, instead of participating in the demonstrations.

The story lines merge as both Jian, as he re-thinks his future, and the students who decide to join in the demonstrations for the future of China, must confront the power of complex and entrenched structures that are not interested in ceding power and control.

The novel works on several levels in showing Chinese society toward the end of the 20^th century. It demonstrates the conflict between an individual's desire to live a meaningful life and the rigid social and political network that can stifle that desire. More generally, it shows the excitement of the students and their hopes for pushing China to a more democratic future in the early months of 1989, and the sudden, harsh collapse of support from the general population and subsequent crushing of the demonstrations by the government in early June, 1989. Finally, more simply, the novel provides a fascinating window into parts of the day-to-day life of Chinese society at this time.

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Other reviews / information:
Sophie Pinkham, in The Yale Review of Books

Sarah A Smith, in The Guardian

A short editorial by Ha Jin on why he writes in English in The New York Times

Book Review: 'Seeing' by Jose Saramago

José Saramago (1922- )
Seeing (2004)

307 pages

In the local elections of the capital city in an unnamed country, 70% of the ballots cast turn out to be blank. The people have gone to the polls and voted, but a significant majority of them have shown they support none of the political parties. By making themselves counted, but not for any version of the establishment, these voters make clear their dissatisfaction with all of the political parties. In particular though, this leaves the ruling party adrift, rejected by a majority of the people, but left in power since no other party has gained support in their place.

The politicians, unnerved by the sudden vacuum in support, begin grasping for ways to force this newly developed majority of "blankers" to return to the old social order. After a quickly called second election results in over 80% of the ballots cast being blank, the politicians in the ruling party transform the threat that the vote means to their political existence, into a view of the vote as a threat to the nation as a whole --- as an attack on the nation which must be defended at any cost.

Using this premise to initiate his story, José Saramago writes a political satire that savages the seemingly innate tendency of people to transform a threat to their position into a threat to the larger structure they are a part of, and the absurd depths they will reach trying to defend their position in the pretence of defending the larger structure. In Seeing, it's the politicians of the ruling party who feel under siege, and who lash out with escalating force to defend their power in the name of defending the nation and it's system of government, only to find each new and more aggressive measure they take not only failing to bring society back to it's normal course, but in fact reinforcing the powerlessness of the politicians and their lack of understanding of situation. Those voices of reason that do exist among the politicians and functionaries of the government are swept aside in the frenzy to answer this "depth charge launched against the system," as one politician puts it, leaving an increasingly paranoid and extremist group of leaders designing ever more dramatic measures to re-gain their control over the situation.

The novel links back in a direct way to Saramago's earlier novel Blindness, in which the population of this same country, four years before the current novel opens, all suddenly go blind, save for one woman. In Blindness Saramago portrayed the quick decay of societal norms and behavior when the existing structures are left powerless by the lack of vision; in Seeing there is also a kind of decay, this time in the reasoned behavior of the politicians left powerless by lack of support from their constituents. In both novels, Saramago follows a similar style: no one has a name, people being distinguished by their titles or descriptive traits.   Even the political parties in Seeing, are simply differentiated as the party of the right, the party in the middle and the party of the left.

At times the novel plays almost as a comedy, with the stubborn, prideful, almost willfully ignorant statements and choices of the politicians as they try to hold onto the power they feel slipping away. That smile is tempered though, by Saramago's demonstration of the slow but inexorable rise in the aggressiveness of the
politicians in their attempt to regain the support of the people --- of their right to rule in other words. They are able to justify in their own minds each new and more violent action as the necessary next step in the defense of the country, and they have control over the legal and military means to execute these actions. It is hard not to see the same trends in the real political world around us.

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Other reviews / information:
Ursula K. Le Guin, in The Guardian

Michael Wood, in Slate

Book Review: 'The Last Summer of Reason' by Tahar Djaout

Tahar Djaout (1954-1993 )
The Last Summer of Reason (1999)

145 pages

A short, dark novel of a country (unnamed, but understood to be Algeria) that has slipped into the grip of fanaticism. The transcript was found among the papers of Tahar Djaout, an Algerian writer, after he was assassinated by an Islamic fundamentalist group.

The narrator of the story is a bookseller, Boualem Yekker, in the capital city of a country that has been taken over by a radical conservative party known as the Vigilant Brothers (VB). His wife, son and daughter have succumbed to the safety of the crowd, abandoning him for not joining them as the embrace the new order. No one even comes to his bookstore anymore, save for one like-minded friend --- his past customers now fearing the stigma of being seen as preferring man-made literature to the works of the VB's god.

Boualem lives in constant fear, that his bookstore will be shutdown --- it surprises him that it has not long ago been closed --- and that he will be jailed by the VB or even killed on the street. He tries to use his books as a kind of shield against the insanity that he finds has risen up around him. But, as he drifts between his quiet apartment and unvisited bookstore, he alternates between nightmares born out of his fear that he stands essentially alone among a population that hates him, even the children throwing stones at him when he steps for a moment out of his shop, and happier memories of the time before the VB took control of the country, remembering vacations with his family and the natural inquisitiveness of his young children.

When finally his bookstore is shutdown, and he is forced to confront that his books can no longer help him, and in fact that they never could, he settles on a bench looking down over the capital city to its port, and wonders "Will there be another spring?"

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Other reviews / information:
Dana De Zoysa


Djaout wrote in one of his poems the well-known lines:

Silence is death
And you, if you speak, you die
If you remain silent, you die
So speak out and die

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: 'A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers' by Xiaolu Guo

Xiaolu Guo (1973- )
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers (2007)

283 pages

A 23 year old Chinese woman, Zhuang, leaves her home country for the first time and travels to London, sent by her parents to learn English. Lost in a culture and language she barely understands, she casts about for something solid to hold on to.   Eventually she meets and moves in with an Englishman who becomes her life raft in this strange new world --- but who unfortunately for her is lost in his own way.   He is an artist, 20 years her senior, and unwilling to commit himself to anything, afraid of relationships that become too demanding, of selling out as an artist (which ultimately leaves him unable to support himself from his work), and unwilling to become part of the corporate, working world he despises.

As the title indicates, the core of the story is the role of language in relationships; words have definitions that one can find in the dictionary, but the definitions can be fluid in reality, leading to misunderstandings.  Each chapter in the novel is headed by a word and its definitions, and the chapter then evolves, directly or indirectly, around this word. The multiple meanings these words often have, meanings at times only tangentially related to one another and often critically dependent on understanding the context and culture in which they are used, confront the reader with the confusion Zhuang (or any new English speaker) feels as she tries to understand both the society around her and also her new lover.

Zhuang simplifies her name to Z for the benefit of the English speakers she meets, and her thoughts and dialogue are expressed in the English of a foreigner who is still early on the path to learning English, and who approaches her study of English from a mother tongue with a significantly different grammar. (The epigraph is a simple "sorry of my english".) For example, she has difficulty understanding why verbs need to be conjugated in English since 'time' is expressed explicitly or by context in Chinese and so verbs are always used in their infinitive form. This approach of allowing Z to speak and think in her broken English, forces the reader to feel more deeply Z's struggles, because along with the characters she meets, we sometimes find ourselves struggling to understand her intent.

The story is at times funny, as Z describes her occasional misadventures brought on by a lack of understanding of the new culture around her or when she describes an aspect of the culture that as a reader we are aware of but had never considered consciously, and now realize seems odd when pointed out.   But at a deeper level the story is a tragedy; Z and her boyfriend are in love, but the tie they share is that they are both lost souls surrounded by a culture that is foreign to both of them but in different ways. As the story progresses, it becomes painfully clear that a fundamental misunderstanding pulls down their relationship: they are drawn to each other and fall in love with each other because each sees in the other someone to hold on to in an otherwise strange world, but each brings an expectation to the relationship based on their personal and cultural histories. Z looks to find the solid, family-centered household that she is familiar with from China, while her boyfriend expects an almost open relationship (psychologically) in which they share a house and a bed, but have the freedom to be alone and on their own at times. The result is that they struggle as they each try to learn to be happy with the other's approach to life and their relationship, and at the same time change the other to fit their radically different images of the ideal couple.

In the end, the book provides no easy answers to resolve this conflict in expectation and understanding, much as a dictionary often cannot finally answer the questions of a reader who does not know the context for the word they look up.

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Other reviews / information:
by Scarlett Thomas at The Independent

by Nancy Baker at Suite101.com

by Niall at wordpress.com

Book Review: 'The Cost of Living' by Mavis Gallant

Mavis Gallant (1949- )
The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories (2007)

340 pages

A 16 year old city girl feels trapped in the Connecticut countryside, forced to spend the summer with family friends, after her newly divorced mother goes off to Europe on her own. A maid realizes she's pregnant, and struggles to know where to turn, as the couple she works for remains blind to her situation even as they pride themselves on the friendly way they treat her and try to help her better herself.   A couple whose daughter has been expelled from boarding school for having disappeared for a weekend of fun with a boy awaits her return home, wondering how to deal with this child that they suddenly feel they hardly know.


These and over a dozen more short stories make up this collection. The stories center around families whose delicately balanced lives are disturbed by the presence of someone who refuses to fit into their view of the world, or by a new situation or a move to another country that makes their view of the world difficult to sustain.   Women struggle with absent or effectively absent husbands, couples suffer miscommunication and misunderstandings that make them strangers under the same roof, and children resist being molded to their parent's image of the ideal.

...their daughters [were] in boarding school. Private schools were out of line with the Knight's social beliefs, but in the case of their own children they had judged a private school essential.
from the story 'Bernadette'

He thought it wrong of [his little girl] to show so plainly she was sick to death
of his voice; she ought to have learned a few of the social dishonesties by now.
from the story "The Rejection"

In these stories, conversations are often little more than people talking past each other, with assumptions and unshared expectations leading to misunderstandings and frustration. The characters are left feeling isolated and trapped, uncertain how to move forward, or even get back to the safe, careful lives they had built for themselves, but that are coming apart in the face of some unexpected event. The relative lack of explicit action in the stories allows the frustrations and often barely concealed tensions between the characters to take center stage.

Despite the fact that these are not generally happy stories, they are a wonderful collection of mini-dramas of people trying to fit in to and make sense of an often incomprehensible world.

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Other reviews / information:
by Padma Viswanathan on The Rumpus website

by Adam Mars Jones in The Guardian

Book Review: 'The Heretic' by Miguel Delibes

Miguel Delibes (1920- )

The Heretic (1998)

350 pages

This novel follows the life of a well-to-do land-owner and merchant in 16th century Valladolid, Spain, from his birth to parents who had thought they were infertile, to his growing participation in the underground Protestant reformation in the deeply Catholic Spanish society of the time.

Cipriano Salcedo is born in 1517, his mother dying of complications a few days later. His father, Bernardo, hires a young woman from the countryside to feed and care for Cipriano, and beyond that largely ignores him as he is growing up, sending him off to a religious orphanage as soon as possible. Cipriano eventually grows to take over his father's business, raising sheep for wool that is shipped to central Europe, and even expand it as he begins to make coats from the wool, instead of shipping it overseas. He recognizes the advantage of producing and selling a product as opposed to simply selling the raw material, though he looked down upon by his peers as having taken up a lower occupation. His inner doubts about the Catholic society of the time, already developing during his youth in the religious school, lead him to join an underground group of intellectuals and free-thinking Catholics who discuss the Protestant reformation happening in Europe, and how it can be brought to Spain. The group which eventually comes to the attention of the religious authorities, who are sensitive of the risk to their power and react swiftly and with political backing to any perceived threat.

Although Cipriano's life forms the central thread to the story, the details of Spanish society of the 1500's are in many ways the real star of the novel. Delibes describes how the growing town of Valladolid looks in it's architecture and layout, the different social classes and how they interact, or don't, and the connection to the smaller surrounding towns and large land estates. From details like the shearing of sheep, or the transportation of the wool to the coast for export, are given in fascinating detail. They are woven tightly into the story, not feeling like add-ons, but rather critical elements to understand Cipriano's growth and choices. Delibes also describes the structure of Catholic society of the time, and the internal debates dividing the church and their effect on the general population.

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Other reviews / information:
Samantha Schnee, Word Without Borders