Balkan mistrust

Summer seems to have dawned at last – with 40 expected in the plains of Bucharest and 31 here in Sofia rising to 33 Monday. I should then be in the rarely explored North-Western mountain area – first of Varshets then, from Tuesday evening, in the old fortress area of Belogradchik. In the meantime, I have my spreading fig tree to protect me from the sun in the garden.
Amos Oz has been keeping me company these last few days – first with Black Box mapping ruthlessly the relations a woman has with her present (faithful and loving if rather eccentric) husband; her tight-arsed and rich ex; and their delinquent boy. Great stuff – with the powerful outporings of emotion I have now come to expect of this writer who should have got the Nobel prize a decade ago. Now I’ve started on his story of the strained relations between a 60 year old nomadic planning/engineering consultant back home and living with a younger woman with a mission – Don’t Call it Night. Oz seems to have a happy 40 year old marriage himself but he really gets into the painful crevices of relationships! Here's a long interview with him from Paris Review.
During the night I was reminded what an insightful writer Michael Lewis (of Vanity fair) is on current financial matters – the best things I have ever read on the Irish meltdown (his story reads like a modern version of The Emperor's New Clothesand the Greek crisis.In the classic journalistic (if not Detective Colombo) tradition, he approaches the issues from a common-sense point of view.
And here is an interesting article which was inspired by Lewis's exposure of Greek corruption to dig deeper and to try to explain why the Greeks have the political and ethical problems they do.
He reimnds us that, until the late 19th century, Greece was part of the Ottoman system (as were BUlgaria and Romania) - with all this means about clientilism and antipathy to authority. "Greeks are naturally distrustful of their leaders, and extremely quarrelsome among themselves" - as one can certainly say also about the Romanians. Here it's worth going back to the Ionitsa article I excerpted from on June 13. There is little doubt that officials have major difficulties talking and cooperating with one another (let alone with citizens!)in this part of the world (an ex-Deputy Minister here who is one of the trainers on our programme was talking to me recently about this). And yet this is never really picked up in the needs assessment which supposedly precedes all the training which EC programmes fund here. All the emphasis is on transferring knowledge - not altering attitudes and behaviour.
Finally an excerpt from a longer piece -

The present financial conundrum is a result and not a cause. It is the result of decades of rule by incompetent politicians, certainly in the case of Greece.( It doesn't need a Marshall plan it needs a regime change. Count on the evil undemocratic EU to take over much of the decision making behind the scenes, and a good thing too.)
The problem with present-day politicians in general is that they aspire to power and once they have it they don't know what to do with it. Consequently they're easily influenced by lobbyists and public opinion. The result is - predictably - indecision and procrastination or hysteria and panic. Being so unfocused our dear leaders get lost in petty detail, always a sign of people not getting the big picture. The founding fathers of the EU had a clear concept: no more war in Europe. The present lot just looks after the shop, and not very well

Two musical bonuses – first, from Romania (but only for the next few days), the pianist and composer Dinu Lapatti (1917-1950)
and from the English mining community The aquarelle is a Stamatov

Fragility and frugality

The last few days have been cool, overcast and windy here in Sofia. An early morning cycle this Saturday to the old market’s arab shops for basmati rice and other cooking delicacies showed central Sofia at its best – the great low urban skyline; Vitosha mountain edged sharply against the skye; the coffee-carriers and smokers; the small shops with people happy to open the shop early for me and to chat and. Ali (from Lebanon) from the butcher’s next door wanted to know where I was from and what I was doing here. The shop with the rice seems to be Syrian - certainly the jar of fig jam and hugely chunky orange jam were from there - and the beautifully elegant but simple grey cardboard box of olive and laurel oil soap I bought was from Aleppo. The supermarket chains just don't care that they drive out such gems of experience from our lives. And we fail to appeciate the significance of such loss. Except those covered in the pages of Paul Kingsnorth's (unfortunately entitled) book Real England - the battle against the bland.
Because I’m so impractical, I’ve always had a sense of wonder about things other people seem to take for granted – electricity, running water, These days, more people perhaps are feeling a sense of fragility and beginning to rediscover the values of frugality. I don’t think this is a bad thing. What is unacceptable is that those who have saved honest money and put in what they regarded as the safest place (banks) are having to worry now where they should put it. I don’t have anything sensible to offer on the Greek crisis - but John Lanchester is one of the few journalists who offer us clear insights into the global financial crisis when it first revealed itself in 2007 and has a good piece in the current London Review of Books. Real World Economics also had a good post recently on the subject.
And somewhere in the last couple of days I read something interesting about Estonian people (I think) not being as addicted to credit cards as some other countries I might mention (France is another honourable exception I understand?)
I’ve just finished reading what I consider is one of the best novels I have ever read – A Perfect Peace by Amos Oz written some 25 years ago but one of several of his writings available at half price in a nearby bookstore. I've slightly amended the only review I could find -

it's 1965, and the children of the first settlers of an Israeli kibbutz are grown-ups. Here is the way one character sees them: "Neither Asiatics nor Europeans. Neither Gentiles nor Jews. Neither idealists nor on the make. What can their lives mean to them, raised in this whirlwind of history, this place-in-progress, this experiment-under-construction, this merest blueprint of a country..." This is a good example of some of his writing - the way he piles up expressions and descriptions. The main plot centres around a young man, Yonatan, who has a quiet wife, Rimona. His father (Yokel) is a former cabinet minister who now heads up the kibbutz. Yonatan's mother (Hava) is an energy-packed harridan. Yonatan works as a mechanic in the tractor shed, but he longs for a different life. One rainy winter night a miserable little fink (he calls himself that) shows up, talks incessantly (mostly quoting Spinoza) and gradually makes a place for himself. He becomes Yonatan's friend and (ultimately, with Yonotan’s encouragement) Rimona's lover after Yonatan fulfils his threat to flee. Oz provides brilliant portraits of a handful of characters. Oz is an interesting, original writer. Several of his characters serve as narrators of this story, taking turns, adding thoughtful layers of depth and meaning – and there are 3 of the most powerful outporings of emotions I have ever read – 2 of then in draft letters, the other in mean and savage outburst from Hava.The result is a suspenseful and moving novel that never glosses over the harsh truths about a "mob of the strangest individuals who ever pretended to be a people."

a powerful autobiography

One of the Sofia Booktrader books I had casually picked up was Amos Oz's - A Tale of Love and Darkness - which turned out to be an autobiography and a really stunning one. All I knew about this Israeli writer was that he has played an important reconciliation role with Palestinians. The annals of a website Complete Review gave me these paras
Oz grew up in an incredibly bookish household, with two very bookish parents, and this reading-passion grabbed hold of him as well (and wouldn't let him go, no matter how hard he tried). The focus of the book is his childhood, leading up to the decisive moment in his life, when his mother committed suicide, Amos not yet even a teenager. That it happened is revealed early on, and mentioned repeatedly, but for most of the long book Oz only takes jabs at it: it's only at the very end that he can describe in any detail what happened.
The suicide led also to his break with his father, as Oz moved to a kibbutz (and changed his name; he was born Amos Klausner), while his father soon remarried. There's some description of Oz kibbutz years, but it is the earlier years that Oz sees as the formative ones.
Books were a central feature in the Klausner household, and Amos' early ambition was not to become a writer but rather a book: books, he saw, seemed to stand a much better chance of survival than people. Taking to reading early on, books always played a central role in Amos' life. Already as a six year-old, it was a great day for him when his father set aside some bookshelf space for his books:
"It was an initiation rite, a coming of age.: anyone whose books are standing upright is no longer a child, he is a man".
Amos' childhood is typical of the hyper-literate: an only child, with no real friends, stuck in a gloomy urban setting with few opportunities for playing outside the home, -- and parents who constantly lost themselves in books as well (and who "had come to Jerusalem straight from the nineteenth century") -- so:
What surrounded me did not count. All that counted was made of words.
There's lots of talking around him, but often little listening -- as well as many secrets. Amos' parents switch languages when there are things they don't want him to understand, and there is a good deal that passes in silence too. The significance of Amos' mother's suicide is truly made clear when he admits:
"From the day of my mother's death to the day of my father's death, twenty years later, we did not talk about her once. Not a word. As if she had never lived. As if her life was just a censured page torn from a Soviet encyclopedia".
This memoir rectifies that situation somewhat, a coming to terms by Oz with his parents. Loving but difficult, they gave him a great deal -- but also both let him down, his mother by her illness and suicide, his father by having the affair that he saw as contributing to his mother's problem, and by failing to be able to communicate and explain so much to his son, despite being such a word-person..
His father was a polyglot scholar, but one who never achieved true academic success, his career complicated and overshadowed by a famous and important uncle. Amos seemed clearly destined to follow on this bookish path, but his adolescent rebellion was an attempt to go in a different direction. As he learned immediately, it wasn't that easy:
"I had tried to turn my back once and for all on the world of scholarship and debate from which I had come, and I had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire"
It turned out that even the kibbutz was filled with those who read a great deal and constantly debated and even wrote. And true to his roots, Oz couldn't let be either, inevitably becoming if not a scholar at least a writer.
A Tale of Love and Darkness ambles along, wordy -- but necessarily so, gaining from its easy pace and bulk. Oz circles around topics, gets apparently sidetracked in detailed descriptions of small (and large) events, slowly opens up in a very introspective work that also tries to constantly relate to the world around him. From small memories -- the feel of a pebble in his mouth -- to his meetings with the famous (Agnon, Ben-Gurion), it's a mix of the everyday and the extraordinary. That constant shadow of all the dead relatives, and the lost world the generations before him had left behind, and the contrast to the new, often ugly world being shaped around him as he grew up is well presented
This book mourns the death of the socialist-Zionist dream of a just society and a strange new nationalism, predicated on research universities and string quartets, on comparative literature and experimental agriculture, that turned instead into an acid reflux of checkpoints, demolitions, transit camps, penal colonies and strategic hamlets.
And yet, determined to remember every minute leading up to his mother's suicide, he also sees through a child's eye the prelude to statehood in a Promised Land: the gabby idealisms, vatic visions and rich, combustible mix of poet-worker-revolutionaries, vegetarian world reformers, pioneer readers of Marx, Freud and Jabotinsky, nihilists, Yemenites, Frenchified Levantines and Kurds; the dusty cypresses, pale geraniums and pickled gherkins; the lace curtains, boiled fish, Lysol and paraffin; the youth movements, curfews and Stern Gang; the scorpions, witches and snails, Shakespeare and Chopin, the blunt razor blades, cheap sardines, smelly cigarettes, barbed wire and snipers; leopards in a garden on a Sabbath afternoon and mosques turning gold when the sun sets.


His language (and the translation by Nicholas de Lange) evokes the smells and characters so powerfully. This is a book to savour slowly - and to comeback to again and again. And, already, I have ordered some of his novels.