A window to Romania's past

I’m at the fine-tuning stage of the guide – giving me the freedom to surf some of the links I had added to the text which lead to others I had not had the chance to explore. For example some of the book references in a discussion thread about Romanian literature .

But it was the back issues of the francophone bimonthly Regard which led me via an interview to what seems (probably wrongly) to be a typically surreal bit of recent writing by a young historian Choosing your Ancestors - an imaginary genealogical journey to Romanian Boyars.(2013) If you scroll further down the link(and have automatic translate) you will see that the launch (last August) was kicked off by Romania’s two greatest historians - Lucian Boia (whose family name google automatic magnificently and variously translates as “pulveriser” or “paprika”!) and Neagu Djuvara

It was author Filip Lucian-Iorga’s well-connected website which led to me the tremendous photo archives Costica Acsinte Archive celebrating the work of a man born in 1897 who was a war photographer in the First World War and then set up shop in the town of Slobozia about 70 kms east of Bucharest.

The site is a unique record of life in those times – and encourages readers to write stories around particular photos!!

Mutuality

Amazing how silent it is when the mist is shrouding the valley….neither birds, cars, planes nor cicadas make any noise in this damp, dreich weather. Even the dog barks are faint!

My neighbour’s new pig is ailing – so had the vet on Saturday. His 2 new lambs are already attached to him and squawk at the gate for attention.

Maritsa has once again to go to hospital on Wednesday – a 100 km round trip – for some more checks. She has not been sleeping or eating well this past couple of years. She will be 81 in a month. Viciu is hale and hearty  and will be 88 on 22 June.

Apart from Daniela - and Vlad in Bucharest’s English bookshop -  they are my only link with Romania. Little wonder that some people wonder why I am here…..Not easy to explain what meaning a special house and special valley can give a life!

Here I am totally myself – devoting almost every minute to contemplation. 

I don’t want to sound religious  - but the books, music  and views do invite deep thought - and the scribbles which, for me, go with that. 

I generally walk into my neighbours’ uninvited and sometimes catch them reading the bible….. Earlier today my old next-door neighbor came with a couple of eggs for me – in return I give her coffee and the mobile to talk to Daniela with.  She then selects whatever delicacies appeal to her – today it was a couple of kiwis. But I had a surprise package of small ocean fish for her – which is her favourite.

Of such is mutuality made

Fantasy

If I were asked about an unfulfilled dream – it would probably be a radio station on which I could play my choice of music (a specific blend of mid-East and classic); read from texts which have caught my eye; pay tribute to those who in different ways have inspired me; have conversations…. A much more modest version of Clive James’ famous site

Only trouble is that I would have to erect a radio mast – my Vodafone internet stick hardly allows me enough capacity for routine uploading and downloading….

I loved the measured tones in which Alistair Cooke delivered his Letter from America (I always used to scurry to the radio when I heard his piece begin); the maverick selections of John Peel's midnight jazz; and the global reach and elegance of BBC From Our Own Correspondents… 

A radio station, of course, does not allow images – perhaps just as well given how we are swamped by visuals in our everyday lives….But it means that I couldn’t really share my love of Bulgarian paintings or the caricatures I’m so fond of

For the past 24 hours the house has been fog-bound – remember I’m 1,400 metres up! And it’s only 4 degrees out on the verandah!

It’s been a dreich May and I’ve just been consulting the local records – they seem to confirm my feeling with temperature yesterday being just half that of 31 May 2011. But then I look at rainfall and am amazed at what I see. Contrary to what I had imagined, the wettest month for this part of the Carpathian mountains is apparently……July! ( 68mm); then June with 54; May and October tie for 3^rd wettest (43). The driest months are actually November and February (13) and January (17)!!

Meanwhile....

A busy week down in the plains – rather book-focused with an initial compulsory pit-stop at the English bookshop where Vlad was able to take a few minutes off to talk with us over coffee. I left with 2-3 ordered books and several recommendations. The Brecht biography (beautiful edition); what looks a masterly Journey to Portugal published in 1979 by Nobel prize-winner Jose Saramago; and Daunderlust –dispatches from Unreported Scotland were in the former category – The Hall of Uselessness – collected essays by one, Simon Leys from Belgium/Australia/China looks very much my sort of book; Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s The Time Regulation Institute;  and a book on Ghenhis Khan were three casual purchases recommended by Vlad.

I had been busy the previous week with my short, smart guide to Romania which has, at the moment, the title “Encountering Romania” and can be read (hopefully) on the link in its present form – and duly printed it out to see what is looks like in that form. Always a test!

The remaindered bookshop yielded a couple of superb productions about William Morris and Tiffany – to inspire Daniela in her glass painting.

Mid-week gave the opportunity to visit the 2014 Bookfest. The opening day was quiet – and yielded only 2 books – a nice edition of Deletant’s "Ceaucesu and the Securitate" for 4 euros and a doorstopper of a book which I bought (for 6 euros) simply for what it might reveal about the Romanian intellectual mind – "The Destiny of Europe" is just an extensive series of booknotes masquerading as a book by Andrei Marga whose 10 page CV should carry a health warning. "Nonsense on stilts" the best review.....

William McIlvanney joins the Olympians

Today sees my highest monthly viewing figure ever – and there’s still another full week to go before the end of the month. I’ve been rather focused on Romania and Scotland in the last month – so I’m grateful to those readers who don’t necessarily share these interests for their patience.

You can see the 7 top posts for this month (from hits) at the right-hand side – 1 about Europe; 4 about Scotland, 1 on travel – those 6 are all recent. But top billing is still this strange “backbone” one – more than 3 years old – whose title refers to an EC document about aid assistance which I was critiquing then. I have tried to suggest to readers that there are better things to read – but people just keep on punching that button. I don’t understand why!

  

Paul Mason, one of the BBC economics correspondent (all of whom do excellent blogs), ran a lovely Christmas challenge in 2010 – the 50 books which your library has to have. The challenge was apparently first made in 1930 by an American journalist who received a letter from a friend who wrote: 

"I want no more than fifty books. And none of them modern; that is, no novels that are coming off the presses these last ten years. Are there fifty intelligent books in the world? If you have time send along a list of fifty books, I promise to buy them and have them beautifully bound. I am consulting you as I would my lawyer. I have not time to develop a literary consciousness at my age. So if you were cutting your own library down to fifty books, which books would you keep?"

Mason made the challenge more difficult by preventing us from consulting our shelves or the internet – so I just managed to get my suggestions in before the discussion thread closed (It’s number 81). I then took time to reflect more and consult some booklists and then posted on this blog.

A library should be for consulting – the glories of novels, short stories, poetry, essays should be available there but also art and human knowledge. With only 50 books allowed, novels (of any sort) will have to be excluded - which means no “Buddenbrooks” (Thomas Mann) or “Candide” (Voltaire) let alone any of the powerful South Americans (Jorge Amado's "Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon", Allende’s “Eva Luna”, Marquez’s , “Love in the Time of Cholera” , Llosa ‘s “The War of the End of the World”) or Yehoshuova’s “The Liberated Bride” from Israel.

However, some books come in multi-volume collections eg Lewis Crassic Gibbon’s “Sunset Song”; Lawrence Durrell’s “The Alexandrian Quartet”; Olivia Manning’s “Balkan Trilogy”; and Naguib Mahfouz’s “Children of the Alley” and therefore give good bangs for bucks. Perhaps they might be allowed to stay.
And remember what Nassim Taleb calls Umberto Eco's "antilibrary" concept - that read books are less valuable than unread ones - a library should be a research tool. Collections of essays, poetry and short stories also give much more reading per book (unless it’s War and Peace) - so the collected poetry of Brecht, TS Eliot, Norman McCaig and WS Graham would be the first four books; as well as the Collected Short Stories of Nabokov, William Trevor, Carol Shields, Heinrich Boell and Alice Munro; and the essays of Montaigne.

If allowed, I would also have a few collections of painters eg the Russian Itinerants. Chuck in an Etymology and a couple of overviews of intellectual endeavours of recent times such as Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” and Peter Watson’s “A Terrible Beauty” - and I would then have space for 35 individual titles.

About 30 non-fiction titles then followed – interesting that less than 10 were by British writers. Now I would probably question only the inclusion of Taleb..... 

Thanks to cheating (selecting collections), I was actually left with 6 empty spots – which I never got round to filling. 

Obviously, in the light of yesterday’s post about William McIlvanny, least a couple of his titles would go in to fill those empty spots.

MacIntosh Art School in Glasgow on fire

Just as I shot my latest blogpost into the ether, I discovered that the amazing Glasgow School of Art built by Rene MacIntosh more than 100 years ago was on fire. I feel my soul freeze – this is such a place of beauty. 

Pics here.

My eldest daughter had her education here. 

My partner in Romania uses his designs for her glass paintings.... 

I pray for it................. 

And, forgive me, I'm waiting to see who is the first idiot to draw a parallel with the burning of the Reichstag.......such is the state of feeling.....

Sublime writing

These last few days I have been doing something I rarely do – I have been “savouring” a book – word by word as distinct from my usual habit of flicking. …..laughing out loud in delight at the language; marking sections every few pages with a pencil. And this is a novel – not my usual fare! A detective novel to boot – "Strange Loyalties" (1991) - the last of a trilogy. I hinted a few posts back that the technical aspects of the great Scottish debate were decreasingly to my liking - and the rare taste of William McIlvanney – one of the most underrated writers not only of the British Isles but perhaps in the English-speaking world! - perhaps shows how words can better be used. I wrote about him last September. 
I start therefore with a few of the phrases I marked  on this novel of his – 

The thought was my funeral for him. Who needs possessions and career and official achievements? Life was only in the living of it. How you act and what you are and what you do….  are the only substance. They didn’t last either. But while you were here, they made what light there was – the wick that threads the candle-grease of time. His light was out but here I felt I could almost smell the smoke still drifting from its snuffing….(p80). 

It was one of her partners who answered (the phone). When she knew it was me, her voice – always distant – more or less emigrated…..(p112) 

Attractiveness facilitates acquaintance, like a courier predisposing strangers to goodwill, and my mother had acquired early an innocent vanity that let her enjoy being who she was. But the kindness of other people towards her made her as idealistic as my father in her own way. She tended to think the way people treated her was how they treated everybody. She thought the best of them was all there was (p 128). 

Why do the best of us go to waste while the worst flourish? Maybe I had found a clue….Those who love life take risks, those who don’t take insurance. But that was all right, I decided. Life repays its lovers by letting them spend themselves on it. Those who fail to love it, it cunningly allows very carefully to accrue their own hoarded emptiness. In living, you won by losing big; you lost by winning small (p 134).   

Where I had come into what I took for manhood….meant much to me, not just as a geography but as a landscape of the heart, a quintessential Scotland where good people were my landmarks and the common currency was a mutual caring. Why did it feel so different to me today, a little seedy and withdrawn? p 183 

(Some might have thought her mad). But she wasn’t mad, just too sane to play along with the rest of us. She had awakened from her sleep-walk long enough to recognize the minefield we call normality. She had found a way to admit to herself the prolonged terror of living. Some people never do. p 206 

The invention of truth, no matter how desperately you wish it to be or how sincerely you believe in the benefits it will bring, is the denial of our nature, the first rule of which is the inevitability of doubt. We must doubt not only others but ourselves. (p 210) 

You offer him a vague perception and he takes it from you, cleans off the gunge and gives it back, having shown you how it works. He clarifies you to yourself. (p258)

McIlvanney is still going strong in his mid-70s but generous tribute was paid last year to him by another great Scottish writer - Allan Massie – a writer mainly of historical novels

McIlvanney, born in 1936 in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, established himself some time ago as the best Scottish novelist of his generation. Docherty (1975), a social-political family novel set in a declining mining community, won the Whitbread award for fiction.

Long before any but a handful of people had heard of Alasdair Gray, and before James Kelman had published anything, McIlvanney was recognised as the man who spoke authentically for the Scottish working class, out of which he had, like so many, been educated, being a graduate of Glasgow University and then a schoolteacher. So perhaps he wasn’t surprised when another teacher, encountered in a Glasgow bar, told him he had disgraced himself by stooping to write a crime novel – namely “Laidlaw”. 
The charge was ridiculous; crime is a serious matter. Of course, most crime fiction is ordinary fare, read for amusement only. It may trivialise what is not, and should not be, trivial. But crime is at the heart of many great novels. Bleak House, which is a crime novel, is not trivial; Simenon’s novels are not trivial or mere entertainment; nor are McIlvanney’s three Laidlaw books.

Their subject is the ruin of the body, the distortion of the soul, and the corruption of society.McIlvanney never allows us to forget that the damage crime does is not merely physical. Murder is always a form of betrayal, a denial of the respect with which we should treat each other. It infects everything around it. 

Laidlaw, an intellectual policeman, is damaged by what he experiences. He believes in communities; interviewing an elderly, loyal, but saddened mother in "Strange Loyalties", he reflects that there is nothing he wouldn’t do for the working-class women of that generation who held families together. But he himself is driven into isolation.

McIlvanney is an existentialist writer, like Camus, whom he admires, has learnt from, and matches.He has never been prolific. If he had taken the advice he was given – to write an annual Laidlaw novel – he might be a rich man in his old age; but he has always gone his own way.
The republication of these novels now will revive interest, and perhaps lead him to write another, as he has sometimes talked of doing. But his reputation, not only as the father of tartan noir, is assured.

 “Docherty”, almost 40 years on, is established as a modern Scottish classic, and I have no doubt that “The Kiln” (1996), which is, in one sense, a two-generations-later sequel, is a masterpiece. It confirmed him, to my mind, as the finest Scottish novelist of our time. It is one of those rare books that does what Ford Madox Ford thought imaginative literature could do better than any other art, making you think and feel at the same time.

The “Kiln” is a novel of a hard-won maturity. Its hero, a novelist lost in the dark wood of middle age, sits, looking out at a cemetery, in a rented flat – in Edinburgh, not Glasgow (a sign of his displacement) – and gazes back on the summer when he was 17, in limbo between school and university, a magic summer which saw his passage to adult life.The evocation of that time is beautiful, but now, behind him, is a broken marriage, memories of erratic social behaviour, and he is perplexed, as we all must sometimes be, by the question of what he has made of his life. He broods on the problem which is perhaps central to all experience: how to reconcile his sense of what he owes to himself with his knowledge of what he owes to others.

There is then a vein of melancholy in the novel, but this is relieved by the often joyous vitality with which that summer is recalled, and enlivened by the acute social observation and darting shafts of wit. It’s a novel that tells you how it is, and therefore enriches your imaginative experience.

As a novelist myself (Allan Massie), I admire its craft. As a reader I can only be grateful. Almost 2,000 years ago, the younger Pliny wrote that “a man’s life contains hidden depths and large secret areas”. The thought is common. In Faust Goethe says: “Die Menschen sind im ganzen Leben blind” – men are blind throughout their life. True enough, but the best novelists offer us a means of opening our eyes, peering into these depths, and exploring these secret places, and they do so whatever their subject. 

William McIlvanney is one of the rare novelists who help us to know both the social world and our innermost selves. He is both moralist and artist, and a writer to be cherished.

There was a great interview with him in a 2010 issue of the Scottish Review of Books