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Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz - The Passenger

Yan Lianke - Hard Like Water

Harald Voetmann - Awake

Dominique Barbéris - A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray

The New Criterion, November 1, 2021

With countless Afghans trapped by an extremist regime in a country where they no longer fit, the recent release of a new English edition of Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s powerful, angry, and unsettling The Passenger (Der Reisende) was undeniably timely.

Boschwitz was a German in a period when it was necessary to have parents who passed a malign muster. His mother was a Protestant, as was his late father, Salomon, a successful businessman who had fought in the trenches. In the Third Reich this was not enough. Salomon had been born Jewish. Under the Nazi Nuremberg laws, that meant that Ulrich was “mixed race” (a Mischling, in the insulting terminology of the time). He was still entitled to German citizenship, but for how long? Realizing where things were going and facing the perverse prospect of being drafted into the Wehrmacht, Boschwitz quit Germany and, after stints elsewhere in Europe, made it to the United Kingdom shortly before the outbreak of war.

Horrified by Kristallnacht, he wrote the first draft of The Passenger, his second novel, in four weeks. It was published first in Britain in 1939 (as The Man Who Took Trains). Interned as an “enemy alien,” an ironic fate he shared with many other refugees from Hitler, first on the Isle of Man and then in Australia, Boschwitz was eventually reclassified as a “friendly alien.” He headed back for England on a troopship. It was sunk by a U-boat en route. He did not survive.

This edition of The Passenger boasts both an excellent preface (by the CUNY professor and novelist André Aciman) and the fascinating afterword to its German counterpart by its publisher, Peter Graf. It took nearly eighty years for The Passenger to be published in the language in which it was written. In his last letter to his mother, Boschwitz told her he had revised the earlier sections of the book (more changes were planned) and that his emendations would be delivered to her. In the event of his death, he wanted her to find someone with literary experience to incorporate the revisions into the text. It appears his mother never received them, and that, it seemed, was that.

Tellingly, the book couldn’t find a publisher in post-war West Germany. The original German typescript languished in an archive until, prompted by an interview that Graf had given to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz about a Weimar-era novel he had rediscovered, Boschwitz’s niece got in touch. Graf was “riveted” by the typescript but believed it obvious that it had “never been edited.” Noting that Boschwitz himself had been revising the book, Graf started editing the manuscript just as he “would any other text . . . the only difference being that no exchange with the author would be possible.” That’s quite some “only.” Then again, Boschwitz had himself accepted that the book could be worked on after his death. Graf’s edited version was then translated into English by Philip Boehm and came out here this year.

The increasingly desperate individual taking trains in The Passenger is Otto Silbermann, Jewish, a veteran of the Great War and an affluent businessman, married to an “Aryan”—a character surely partly inspired by the father Boschwitz had never known (Salomon died a few weeks after his son’s birth in 1915). The Passenger opens with a conversation between Silbermann and Gustav Becker, an old wartime comrade who has, clearly as a defensive measure, recently been made a partner in Silbermann’s business, a real partner, with real financial implications. Becker, previously an employee, is more, as he himself puts it, than “the goy of record.” But Becker, it is made clear, had little money beforehand. Now he effectively has some of Silbermann’s, something he relishes rather too much.

Thieves are at the helm, and expropriations, some subtler than others, are underway. Theo Findler, like Becker a Nazi Party member, shows up to buy some of Silbermann’s property at a ridiculous discount, but it is Kristallnachtand the extortionist is confused for his victim by some thugs on “a little Jew-hunt” who arrive at Silbermann’s door and beat Findler up. Silbermann gets away, but even before then he has been living with fear. Thus, earlier he was worried about remarks he made to Becker, a friend: “ ‘Have I offended you?’ asked Silbermann. His tone was part gentle irony and part mild fright.”

Silbermann has been left—physically—untouched, largely (this is a thread that runs through the book) because he can pass as an “Aryan.” He has “none of the features that marked him as a Jew, according to the tenets of the racial scientists,” even if his “passport is stamped with a big red “J” and his surname is . . . unfortunate. But what is he really? “A swear word on two legs, one that people mistake for something else,” and for how much longer? A waiter, unaware, tells him that Jews should wear yellow armbands to avoid “confusion” (the yellow star was introduced in the Reich in 1941).

The corrosive, corrupting effect of going along with totalitarianism is evident, as are the contradictions that attend. The manager of a hotel who knows and likes Silbermann asks him to leave (“It isn’t my fault”). Becker has a “kind, broad face” and denies that he is an anti-Semite while drawing a distinction between Silbermann, “a German man,” and those “others,” “real Jew[s].” It’s not much of a spoiler to disclose that Becker ends up treating his old friend badly. A neighbor tells Silbermann that these are “terrible times,” but “great times too.” He needs, she explains, to be understanding.

Silbermann is not immune from the infection. He is uneasy to be seen in the company of acquaintances who look, you know, like that. His first response to the plea by one of them that the two should stick together is to complain that this would be too dangerous. Grasping the moral significance of what he has done, Silbermann recants (sort of), but too late: “I watch him go, and despite everything I’m glad to be rid of him.”

On one of the to-and-fro train trips that come to define his life—and his attempt to preserve it—he decides that there are “too many Jews” on board, Jews he believes that he can identify because they “looked Jewish,” something he resents, albeit somewhat guiltily (it’s “undignified”):

I’m not one of you. Indeed, if it weren’t for you, they wouldn’t be persecuting me. I could remain a normal citizen. But because you exist, I will be annihilated along with you. And yet we really have nothing to do with another!

Note that word “annihilated.” Boschwitz vividly describes the racial hysteria of that time and place—the bullying, the brutality, the arrests, the constant fixation on the bogeyman conjured up by the Nazis (for instance, someone is suspected of being Jewish but turns out to be South American). He had little doubt where all this was leading. Silbermann wonders whether “they’ll carefully undress us first and then kill us, so our clothes won’t get bloody and our banknotes won’t get damaged. These days murder is performed economically.”

His neighbor may have told Silbermann “they’ll never do anything” to him, but after Kristallnacht he has no doubt that “war has just been declared on me once and for all and right now I’m completely on my own—in enemy territory.” He has, he recognizes, left it “too long, far too long.” He “also never thought they’d push things to the extreme,” and he sees no way of escape: “To make it out of here you have to leave your money behind, and to be let in elsewhere you have to show you still have it.” “For a Jew,” he concludes, “the entire Reich is one big concentration camp.” He crosses through some woods into Belgium but is turned back.

Silbermann’s existence degenerates into train journey after train journey, as he goes hither and thither across Germany in search of an answer to his predicament, an answer that remains elusive. But just being on the train, is almost—almost—comforting (“I have already emigrated . . . to the Deutsche Reichsbahn”).

[H]e listened to the wheels rumbling over the rails, the music of travel.

I am safe, he thought, I am in motion.

And on top of that I feel practically cozy.

Wheels rattle, doors open, it could almost be pleasant, if it weren’t for the fact that I think too much.

As descriptions of hell or, maybe, a descent into hell—in the Third Reich these frontiers at least were porous—must perhaps inevitably be, Boschwitz’s writing is ragged, at moments close to hallucinatory. The sense of disorientation it conveys is only increased by the way that he repeatedly switches the narrative from the first to the third person. And it is at its most intense chronicling Silbermann’s trek on the trains, a mobile refuge, however illusory. As I read on, it was impossible not to think of the trains—different trains, to borrow the title of a remarkable, relentless Steve Reich composition inspired by the Holocaust—that shortly transported so many Silbermanns to their end.

“I am,” muses Silbermann, “no longer in Germany. I am in trains that run through Germany. That’s a big difference.”

But it was no difference at all, as he understood perfectly well.

Hell has many mansions, a good number built in the twentieth century, including some in Communist China of often radically divergent designs: the latest has distinctly fascist touches. In the strange, enthralling, and crazed Hard Like Water (published in 2001, but translated by Carlos Rojas into English for an edition released this year), the Chinese writer Yan Lianke returns to the Cultural Revolution, a delirious, murderous paroxysm that owed more to John of Leiden’s Münster or the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom than is normally acknowledged in standard analyses of Marxism’s Maoist offshoot.

One of China’s best-known writers, Yan is said to have been born into rural poverty in China’s Henan province in (perhaps: no one is quite sure) 1958, a time when Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” one of the most devastating of all central planning’s lethal experiments, was getting started, wreaking havoc in the countryside. By the time it was over, fifteen million or more were dead (other estimates are much, much higher).

Yan’s break came from enlisting in the army, where he rose to the rank of colonel, thanks to his work for the propaganda department (he had, in the interim, joined the Communist Party), which must have taught him a bit about the malleability of literary reality. On the side, he began writing books that were—shall we say—unillusioned about contemporary China, something that eventually put an end to his military career.

That said, the censorship with which he has had to contend is oddly confusing, which, of course, may be the idea. Interviewing Yan in 2020, the Financial Times’sYuan Yang noted that some of Yan’s most well-known novels “are banned, but others can be bought online, reflecting how his rudely satirical writing is warily tolerated.”

As the events described in Hard Like Water unfold during the Cultural Revolution, it is appropriate to indulge in some self-criticism. I have only read one other of Yan’s novels, the more concise and, in my view, slightly better Serve the People! (2005), which, like Hard Like Water, is a novel of erotic obsession set during the Cultural Revolution. In Serve the People!, but certainly not Hard Like Water, sex subverts politics: thus the signal that the former’s two lovers should meet is a small sign reading “Serve the People!,” a famous slogan derived from a speech by Mao designed to encourage revolutionary sacrifice rather than, well, this:

As the affair went on, the Serve the People! Sign seemed to grow legs. An instant after she decided she wanted him, it would lodge itself in a blossoming shrub as he weeded a flower bed. Or as he pruned the vines, it would suddenly appear, nudging at his shoulder.

Whatever else can be said about Serve the People!, it can boast the greatest review of any novel since Goebbels was burning books, in this case from China’s central propaganda bureau: “This novel slanders Mao Zedong, the Army, and is overflowing with sex. . . . Do not distribute, pass around, comment on, excerpt from it, or report on it.”

In a 2021 interview, Yan claimed that he did not possess “much talent” (untrue), but said that he was a “barbaric writer” who writes fiction “that does not follow the rules” (true). Savage, funny, and terrifying, Hard Like Water is, superficially anyway, a tale of the intertwining of revolutionary and sexual ecstasy, so much so that Maoist fervor occasionally has to act as, so to speak, a red flag to a bull. If the twentysomething Gao Aijun is having problems in fulfilling his, uh, quota with the lovely Xia Hongmei, they are resolved whenever the speakers he has installed in their trysting spot relays the “bright red music”—songs, marching slogans, “an important revolutionary leader’s speech and the newest, highest directives.”

Yan mimics the language of the revolutionary past and, one way or another, also appropriates it. In the course of a postscript that is likely to be an essential guide for most readers outside China to some aspects of Hard Like Water’s plot, Rojas, the book’s translator, explains how Yan weaves allusion and (often distorted) quotation into the book’s text. Left unsaid is that this turns the words of the Cultural Revolution—and, indeed, Maoism more generally—against their creators, both by shining a light on the absurdity of this language and as a demonstration of how it had deliberately been reduced to slogans and newspeak.

One result of this approach is that it’s not always easy to divine which portions of the dialogue in Hard Like Water parody what the faithful might have said (or, more critically, thought) and which might plausibly have been the real thing. The difficulty in working this out serves, however, to underline the way that China had been transformed into a land filled with people who either believed (or had to pretend to believe) in the unreal. There was nothing imaginary about the consequences of breaking the rules, though. It doesn’t give much away to reveal this about a book set in those times, but Hard Like Water begins with Aijun awaiting his execution: “Revolution must be like this.”

And the depiction of the peculiarity of this era is only enhanced by Aijun’s occasional descents into synesthetic frenzy:

[T]he easternmost loudspeaker was playing the black-iron and white-steel song “Carry Revolution to the End”; the westernmost loudspeaker was playing the clattering strong song “Overthrow the Reactionary American Imperialist and Soviet Revisionist Party”; the southernmost loudspeaker was playing the song “Dragons and Tigers Race to the Top,” while the northernmost loudspeaker was playing the red-filled-with-green-fragrance song “Please Drink a Cup of Buttermilk Tea” and the salty-sweat-and-tears song “Denouncing the Evil Old Society.” Coming down from above was the earthy-smelling song “Not Even Heaven or Earth are as Vast as the Kindness of the Party,” while coming from underground was the silken jumping-and-laughing sound of “The Sky of the Liberated Areas is Bright.”

Some, perhaps all, of these songs exist. Turning to Google, I discovered that the last of them is one not to miss, whether for its (repeated) last lines or a rather jolly tune:

The goodness of the Communist Party is boundless.

Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!

Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!

Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!

It’s a point of view.

There is another way to read Hard Like Water.Just open its pages and go along for the ride. It features forbidden love, ambition, horror, conspiracy, murder, weird—and on at least two occasions ovine—sexual metaphors (“To my surprise, I found that her breasts were as large and white as a pair of sheep heads”; “her voluptuous breasts, like a pair of sheep on a mountain top”), unhinged eroticism, an “anti-revolutionary suicide,” torture, iconoclasm, revolutionary fanaticism (“I spent the entire summer sitting at home contemplating the great and profound phrase, We must rely on the masses”), a tunnel to (unlike Yan, let’s be coy) romance that extends over five hundred yards beneath a town, and (here I am quoting Aijun again—the novel is told in the first person) wild lyricism:

The sky was full of red banners, the streets were filled with red scent, and the ground was covered with red blossoms. There were red seas and red lakes, red mountains and red fields, red thoughts and red hearts, red mouths and red words.

But, for all the fun that Yan has with Aijun, a stupendously vain, power-hungry schemer, who is also the truest of all true believers (Hongmei is marginally harder to decipher, if no less fanatical), the story returns again and again to the darkness that ran through the society that Aijun and Hongmei were helping build. For the most part, atrocity is offstage, referred to secondhand, but it serves its purpose. The encroachment of totalitarianism has so eroded the notion of private space that the inhabitants of the town where Hard Like Water is set are expected to display the same posters and banners in the same places in their homes. Aijun and Hongmei report a mayor who has quietly reversed collectivization in a remote village, with the result that there was food where there had been starvation: the mayor is sentenced to twenty years imprisonment, which, rejoices a proud, triumphant Aijun, “proved the forceful and irreconcilable nature of class struggle. . . . Heavens, to think Wang was exposed by me!” Even by the dismal standards of many anti-heroes, Aijun is as appalling as he is pathetic—and his girlfriend is no better.

Hard Like Water (the title, Rojas relates, alludes to an ancient Daoist saying about the way that seemingly formless water can undermine the strongest substances, and to Aijun’s “bouts of impotence”) veers wildly between maintaining some sort of connection—however distant and however unlikely—with the possible, and, at other times, abandoning it altogether with an exuberance that stands out, even allowing for the games with reality that are part of the satirist’s toolkit (Yan has dubbed some of his writing mythorealism: make of that what you will). Sometimes his embrace of the fantastic is to illustrate a deeper truth, but on other occasions, I reckon, he does so just because he can. To have Aijun describe his and Hongmei’s execution (oddly moving under the circumstances) is one thing, but then to have what are presumably their ghosts return to see that “people everywhere were reading a novel called Hard Like Water,” well . . .

Finding similarities between the two hells on earth that were the Third Reich and the China of the Cultural Revolution is not too demanding a task. Putting early imperial Rome into the same grim class is a stretch that should not be attempted, but to read Awake—the first English translation (which is by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen) of Vågen (2010), a curious, earthy (that’s a euphemism), not infrequently unpleasant, and occasionally darkly amusing novel about Pliny the Elder by the Danish writer Harald Voetmann—is to be given a cleverly crafted window into a civilization that was, for all its achievements, an early warning that sophistication and astounding cruelty are by no means incompatible.

Awake’s back cover offers the promise or the threat that the book is “the first . . . in a trilogy about mankind’s drive to understand and conquer nature,” words that could suggest that a green sermon is on the way, but any preaching (there’s just a hint of it in a line or two towards the end) is drowned out by the remarkably compelling picture of Roman culture painted in scarcely more than one hundred pages. It is not a pretty picture.

Pliny attends a play “in celebration of the double Diana” (it’s not clear why he goes, as he has seen it before, and it “wasn’t any good”):

A fat, ruddy savage stomps around in the sand in the costume of the goddess Diana with an amber wig and a woman’s breast stitched onto the left side of his saffron tunic. He slices open the belly of a pregnant sow with a spear. She’s howling and trying to flee. The contents flop out and trail after her in the sand, and yes, I can make out the young; a tiny bloody squirming clump that will be alive for a few more moments. Diana has appeared to the sow in both her guises: the huntress and the deliverer. . . .

The scene is repeated: a pregnant goat, a pregnant doe, a pregnant heifer, a pregnant mare, a pregnant wolf . . .

It doesn’t take much imagination to guess the nature of the killing that is the climax of this show. Nor is it particularly reassuring to learn that Voetmann is a translator of classical Latin literature, notably Petronius and Juvenal (a lively combination): he knows what he is writing about.

Awake barely merits the label of a novel (or even novella), and not just because of its brevity; it is more a collection of fragments, not the worst format for a book centered on a man only some of whose writings have survived from antiquity. Of those that have, the most renowned are his last, the Naturalis Historia. These ten volumes were divided into thirty-seven books, and they explain why Voetmann began his trilogy with Pliny. The Naturalis Historia, a kind of encyclopedia, although not laid out like one,was intended as a comprehensive guide to everything that was then known—or thought to be known. It is both invaluable and a cornucopia of unreliable information (not necessarily mutually exclusive categories), its unreliability compounded by Pliny’s own unreliability, at least as it appears from Awake. A thoroughly disgusting story Pliny tells in the novel about an encounter he had in a tavern in Ostia would have been scientifically impossible then and, indeed, now, something for which we should give thanks. No further details will be supplied at this time.

Pliny’s definition of “nature” was wider than the one we use today. “Nature,” he wrote, “which is to say life, is my subject” (natura, hoc est vita, narratur). A creature of his time, Pliny believed that nature had a purpose, but not, in Voetmann’s (perhaps a little too dour) interpretation, one we can celebrate:

She created man solely so he could suffer, the only animal who cries, the only animal who knows death and understands the scope of its suffering. The only animal who understands that it is made to suffer for nature’s amusement.

Pliny’s nature is no benign “mother nature.” In Book 7 of the Naturalis Historia he warns that “we cannot confidently say whether she is a good parent to mankind or a harsh stepmother.” Yes we can. Pliny died in the immediate aftermath of the volcanic eruption that destroyed Pompeii, either through breathing in toxic fumes or from a heart attack.

Awake opens with an entertainingly bilious monologue by Pliny, before dividing into a story (of sorts) told by a narrator not inclined to accentuate the positive and through four “voices”: quotes from Naturalis Historia; Pliny; Pliny’s slave, Diocles; and Pliny’s nephew, Pliny the Younger, his heir.

Prone to nosebleeds, short of breath, and overweight, Pliny is working on the final volumes of Naturalis Historia,which he is dictating to Diocles at night: “The final syllable of each sentence is extracted and rounded perfectly as it slowly transforms into a moan. Painfully and peepingly, the world is wrung from Plinius’ fat neck in the dark.”

Much of what we read in Awake is the marvelously misanthropic Pliny’s account of himself, his past, and his present. His nephew’s comments, meanwhile, are not as loyal as they could be. Beneath a section from the Naturalis Historia in which Pliny talks of seeing stars on earth, in one instance “forming a halo around the javelins of soldiers who guard the camp at night,” the younger Pliny jeers that his uncle was “confusing stars with fireflies or something.”

As for Diocles, forced to write so much that he has sores on his hands, he grumbles that “the master’s mapping of the world doesn’t amount to anything, it only steeps the world in doubt and hesitation and tedious references to other authors’ doubts and hesitations.”

Things don’t end well for Diocles.

After all that, it’s something of a relief to travel to the Paris suburbs in Dominique Barbéris’ melancholy and softly off-kilter A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray, which was first published in 2019 as Un dimanche à Ville-d’Avray and is now available in an English translation by John Cullen. The book’s title is taken (more or less) from a classic French film about which one of its protagonists reminisces in a way that underpins the uneasiness permeating this later Sunday in Ville-d’Avray.

This is a beautifully written, extraordinarily atmospheric novel, a gorgeous jewel with something not right about the reflections it catches. The story revolves around the relationship between two sisters, who, since their childhood, have been searching for something else and still have not found it. One sister, these days a Parisian, goes on a rare visit to the other, Claire Marie, rare because her (possibly unfaithful) husband doesn’t think very much of Claire Marie or the suburbs (in this case Ville-d’Avray) where Claire Marie now lives. To her sister’s surprise, Claire Marie admits to “an . . . encounter, years ago,” an uncertain affair with someone who almost certainly was not quite who he said he was, an affair which was almost certainly not quite as Claire Marie describes it.

Her confession reinforces the impression that all is not so orderly in this suburb as its neat appearance might suggest, an appearance evocatively summoned up by Barbéris, a poetess of seasons, soft rains, streetlights, Sunday gloom, and, even, a suburban house as dusk draws nearer: “Now the façade of the house was divided into two sections. The bottom part was black—the shadows had reached the upper floor—but the top half still shone in the sun.”

The metaphor is difficult to miss. To be sure, trouble below the suburban surface is not the most original of themes, but here it is given force by the way that the disorder is nearly always just out of sight—footsteps in the park, rumors of a “suspicious man”—and, for the most part, appears in glimpses. The perennial fear that all is not as it should be, or, worse still, that all is as it should be, persists:

Those neatly aligned gardens, each with its number . . . those numbered lives that go on, once the house is in place . . . until the little hitch—which is, after all inevitable—occurs: the day when the doctor comes in with the “bad results,” when the doctor says further tests will have to be performed; when time, which has been slowly flowing along . . . suddenly seems to tip over into the void yawning just behind it.