Veracity
Love, hate, and the whole damn thing
By Nancy Weber
Even in Venice, November may be dreary, especially with the discovery that the Venice Guggenheim Museum has closed for the week — oh no! The year was 1973; my younger brother and I were on a celebratory jaunt, showing each other the monuments and minutiae we’d most passionately loved on previous separate trips to France and Italy. Confronted by the unhappy-making sign on the gate at the museum, my brother went off for a walk in the chilly rain while I read Rilke over too many coffees. Because he has always known what to do with a lucky happening, Nick returned an hour later bearing amazing news: He’d recognized Peggy Guggenheim’s imperious profile as she walked her dogs through the puddles; he’d boldly struck up a conversation, and now we were invited to her place that evening for drinks and a private tour.
We were joined at the palazzo by Mrs. Guggenheim’s son, a tall, haunted-looking man in his 40s. “Sebastian,” she said to him, as he walked into her library with a guilty look on his narrow face, “don’t forget to sign my guestbook. You should sign it: ‘To Mother, with love and hate.’ ” “No,” he said, with an odd sad gallantry, “I shall sign it: ‘To Mother, with love and no hate.’ ”
It’s a commonplace that love and hate are flip sides of the coin called passion. In paperback romances (of which I authored eight under the name Jennifer Rose), the male and female protagonists always loathe each other on first sight. As expressions of distrust and disgust punctuate the opening scenes, the clueful reader heats up, knowing that true recognition and breathless kisses lie ahead.
If there is such a thing as the opposite of a romance writer, Eva Mekler is it. In her first novel, Sunrise Shows Late, set in Poland after World War II, the sun rises not only late but pale, and there is no happy sunset at all. She tells a tender love story, among other things, but the protagonists cannot be true both to themselves and each other. In romances, such a distinction doesn’t exist.
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The Polish Woman
A novel by Eva Mekler
Bridge Work |
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Now comes The Polish Woman, set in New York in the tumultuous Sixties, alternating with retrospective and contemporary scenes in Poland. Paced like a thriller, the story also comes to us in the chaste sentences of a literary master who wants to stay out of our way: There are no cute or clever turns of phrase, no look-at-me words. And it is very much a love story — with separate sunsets.
As if it were a romance, The Polish Woman opens in a cloud of antipathy between Karolina Staszek and Philip Landau. No wonder. Karolina, raised a Catholic in Lublin, Poland, has suddenly come to believe she is actually the daughter of the recently deceased Jacob Landau, a Jew who hid his only child with neighboring farmers just before the Germans stormed in. Jake survived the death camps but believed his daughter dead. Philip, one of his Uncle Jake’s two heirs and a tough-minded lawyer, can think only that Karolina is a money-hungry imposter. The drama is immeasurably enriched by Karolina’s own doubts. She can remember some things it would seem that only Jake’s daughter would know — a certain dog, a car, some names. But a nightmarish fog hangs over her recollection of life at age 4 — or was it 6, a crucial difference? She may be an imposter, but she believes her own story. Maybe. As her certainty grows, the reader roots for her to find proof positive and endear herself to her reluctant relatives.
A kind of desperate, intensely sexual, clearly doomed romance blooms between Karolina and Philip. Mekler offers more than romantic love; the love of parents for children shimmers in glorious complexity. Perhaps the most touching relationship exists between Jake’s American widow, Rosalind, who wanted to have a baby with him but couldn’t — and had to live with the knowledge that Jake didn’t really want to have another child and risk devastating loss again. Now, mourning him, Rosalind embraces Karolina as a gift from heaven.
There’s more. In this spectacular mosaic, black tiles of pure hate bring the various love stories into sharp relief. This is the hate that may or may not have been bred in Karolina’s bones but was fed to her from day one: unquestioning detestation of Jews, the killers of Christ. The reader raised on tolerance may cherish a fancy that he or should would have rejected such prejudice from the get-go; Mekler blows away the comforting and dangerous illusion.
Full disclosure: The author and I are dear friends, and she kindly mentions me in her acknowledgments. I trust I would have recognized the value of a moral masterpiece cum page-turner, published this month, if discovered by chance.
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In the Heart of the Country
A novel by J.M. Coetzee
Penguin |
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In the Heart of the Country, Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee’s second novel, now 30 years old, interweaves forbidden, frustrated sexual love and murderous hate in a voice like no one else’s. As clinical, lurid, libidinous, and magical as the nudes of the Belgian Surrealist painter Delvaux, this short work is told in numbered paragraphs from the point of view of a South African land-owner’s spinster daughter whose mother died giving birth to a son, who also died.
Is that really what happened? One is never quite sure whether the narrator is reporting fact or tortured dream. From paragraph 18: “In the cloister of my room, I am the mad hag I am destined to be. My clothes cake dribble, I hunch and twist, my feet blossom with horny calluses, this prim voice, spinning out sentences without occasion, gaping with boredom because nothing ever happens on the farm, cracks and oozes the peevish loony sentiments that belong to the dead of night when the censor snores, to the crazy hornpipe I dance with myself.”
Perhaps her father brings home a new wife, and the narrator, aroused beyond endurance by the sounds and smells of their lovemaking, appears naked in their doorway, with a hatchet. Or perhaps she only provokes and lulls herself with a fantasy of killing, told in detached but exquisite detail. She commits bloody and lethal violence again — or does she? — when her father claims for himself the young bride brought home by the farmhand Hendrik.
The sex, the landscape, the murders, the dailiness of life: All murmur together darkly. No analyst could be presented with a grimmer, more wrenching map of the human mind. Coetzee’s genius is that, like every humanist, he forces us to see ourselves in the terrible mirror. Happy Valentine’s Day.
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Please, Mr. Einstein
A novel by
Jean-Claude Carrière
Harcourt |
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No book round-up (or holiday) is complete without disappointment. A devout non-scientist, I have a weakness for fiction that might break down the massive door locking me out of a grasp of physics. The title, cover art, and subject matter made me fall in love with Please, Mr. Einstein. And then I read the book.
Jean-Claude Carrière, who collaborated on the screenplays for Belle du Jour and The Tim Drum, proposes a conversation between Albert Einstein and a young woman seeking him out 60 years after his death. Newton makes a cameo appearance. Perhaps translator John Brownjohn must take some of the blame, but Carrière gives us neither convincing dialogue nor a new handle on the mysteries of time. He seems to promise frissons between the woman-loving Einstein and his comely young interlocutor, at least a delicious collision of consciousnesses, but it is never realized. The nonscientific reader is alternately babied and left out.
Yet in its moral inquiry, the book has value, posing essential questions. Einstein wonders of Hiroshima: “We can also ask ourselves this: Should responsibility for any particular action, real or fictitious, endure to the end of time? Do we continue to labor under our sins and crimes throughout the ages, even when no intention to inflict harm can be attributed to us?”
These two sentences serve perfectly as a coda for The Polish Woman and In the Heart of the Country.
Nancy Weber’s The Life Swap, riginally published by Dial, has been reissued by iuniverse and is widely available online. Ms. Weber’s new novel The Gift of Evil is being serialized on Amazon Shorts (www.amazon.com).
