Miroslav Krleza and his cycle on Glembay family

Miroslav Krleza is a Croatian writer of XX ct., loved and hated by Croatians, for his rather unsympathetic and unflattering picture of his fellow citizens. His politycal posture, strenghtened by a veiled friendship with a Yugoslavian dictator Tito from the times before the WWII, enabled him to survive turbulent times and become an Editor in chief of the Yugoslavian encyclopedia, his pet project for more than 30 years. Today the fruit of this effort is called Krleziana, and is one of the monuments of this great man from another epoch.

His works encompass novels, essays, drama, poetry,... It is Krleza, from the former Yugoslavia, who should obtain Nobel prize for literature, not Ivo Andric (a Bosnian Croat shfting voluntarily into being a Serbian writer, hardly there could be a more politycally correct writer for former YU)- but this would be too much for Serbs, so Krleza never made even to being an official candidate from the Yugoslavian side. Something similar to a case of Zbigniew Herbert in Poland (where he definitely would be a logical pick instead of Wislawa Szymborska, after Milosz was already awarded it). Award itself here is not important, but it brings wider knowledge of a writer, and it is indeed a cultural crime to rob the wider world audience of writers like Herbert or Krleza.

In his large opus, Krleza is today most often present in theatre and TV with a cycle of three drama works on a North-Croatian family of Glembay, notorious petty-bourgeois post-feudal capitalists. It is a violent drama cycle, with corpses of lovers and ruined existences falling at the floor in the finals. As Krleza was pre-cursor of existentialism (writing such works well in advance, 10 years before Sartre), his heroes mainly theatrically kill themselves, after a vicious and ruthless self-questioning, tortured by the equally vicious and ruthless reality of their doings and shortcomings.

A drama cycle "The Glembays", "In agony" and "Leda" are three works where Krleza gave a tomography of rotten patrician bourgeouis world of Zagreb at the beginning of the XX ct. Nothing is real here, everything is rotten and false, guided by lowest instincts and money. Honesty is virtually non-existant, even-or especially in-emotional relationships.

Mixed with Krlezian existentialist observations of the world, this work lucidly shows an agony of the falling society. While local in its scope, it is of a general austro-hungarian spirit, and could be well understood all through the lands of the old Empire even today. In this sense it is definitely defining a wider Central-European experience.

Peter Nadas: "Love"

This short novel by the author of immense "A book of memories" and short "The end of a family story" is a report on madness. Madness of love? No. Madness in a lover himself.

Maybe this should be at the obligatory list of school readings, now when marihuana is to become legally allowed in many countries? Namely, the novel is about a night of madness which the main character lives through after smoking a joint. It must be it was a bad one, (or/and the character himself was bad), since it produced a fly-away for the night, a kind which can easily happen after a stronger variety known as skunk.

What was to be a relaxed night spent with the lover became a paranoic nightmare. Maybe it was triggered by a strong contradiction in him: he actually came to tell to the woman that he will not be coming the next time... but he knows he is not able to tell it to her, as it would be too much off beat. So he skips into paranoia.

Nadas gave here a different relation than in his aforementioned books, as it involves only one person, which is separated from the world. We follow his paranoiac visions-very good and thorough description is telling; author probably just gave a relation from his own experience.

Advisable for anyone who would like to know how it is when one gets a slight overdose of a psychotic drug, without actually trying it in vivo. Soft, thoroughly true Nadas' writing.

Che the motorcyclist

For quite some time I wanted to read "The motorcycle diaries" by Ernesto "Che" Guevara. I am not a fan of Che, too many people were killed around him and by him, that I would like anything about him, but by an old Marxist maxime, it is good to know the enemy.

To be just, Che, or what he was involved in, I would not think the worst thing in the world, at his time. It was definitely more moral doing than what his opponents were doing. And, also, I respect the fact that he died the way he lived. He did not dodge, become worthless politycal shit-mouth only, but actually died doing what he considered right thing to do.

The book itself is a short text worth reading, as a first-hand raport from the places which at the time he visited them, were not exactly the touristic attraction.

The title is a bit misguiding, as he and Alberto made in fact less than half of the trip by motorcycle, the rest was ship, boats, a raft, lorries which they hitch-hiked...the title should be "A tramp's diary".

Thanks to the fact that they travelled with minimum finances, the trip became a school of life-there is no better school than getting to know the bottom of the ladder. Keen observer, Ernesto noticed things which would not be noticed by some fatty brain of some ordinary tourist.

He lived only 15 years after the trip, then he was killed.

Obviously what he saw, what he learned on this trip was important to him... important enough to go and invest his life (and lives of others) into the idea.

Who are we to judge? South America, Africa, were batttlefields at those days, battlefields of ideologies, visions... I am not certain that the taken course brought us closer to happiness for the peoples of both those continents, but my uncertainty is that of an armchair observer. Che was a participant and a creator of one viable option. Which, eventually, lost, and we got a rabies of rabbis, priests, imams and mullahs instead. In package with suicide bombers at age 7-77, refugee crises and USA becoming a 3rd world country. Russia becoming an agressor in wish to make others even poorer capitalists than they already are. China becoming the wealthiest communist party in the world, leading the largest rampant capitalistic economy in the world.

Really an advance?

In this book one can also see a child, like there is one in every of us. What becomes of a child, depends on so many things. But one is admirable: this child went for an adventure, lived it, learned from it. Parents of today should remember to relax their love-ties a bit, not to cripple the new generation.

Recommendable read, indeed.

A Small Courtyard

I wrote in http://mikidkolan.blogspot.com/2007/12/literature-without-borders-milan.html about a Serbian writer Milan Jovanović.

His recent book, from 2012, "Malo dvorište" ("A small courtyard") is an interesting historical detective story. Located on the mountainous Balkans, Serbia proper, at 13th century. Story happens in a small monastery in which are placed, in fact detained, daughters, wives or widows of Serbian royal families, which are for some reason unconvenient or dangerous for the family or the kingdom.

Jovanovic tells of escape of some of the detainees, and unexpected plots around seemingly static places and situations.

In the narrative method Jovanovic returned to the method of his debut, the novel with the similar topic, "Monk". In both novels the story is told through relations of the participants, building the story that way. Very successful, probably because such a narrative corresponds to the historical context, and evokes something of the slowness with which the information was transmitted in the Medieval times.

In an anthology edition, which Jovanovic's works will surely once obtain, "Monk" and "A small courtyard" will form a couple that would not shame any literature.

One does not often find stories told with so much genuine feeling ... it seems as if the writer spent decades in Hilandar, Serbian monastery at the Greek Holy mountain, Atos, that he would be able to tell the story in such a way.

Shortness - both novels are only about 100 pages - adds brevity resembling rather the Zen Buddhism than Orthodox eloquence and lavishness - but wisdom is transmitted in a short, not overflowing form, and Jovanovic knows this very well.

Je suis Charlie

"Will you please be quiet, please?" - more Carver

It is perfectly clear why this first of Carver's collection of short stories attracted attention. It is as mind-gripping as I described two posts back, when writing about "Cathedral", maybe even a bit more.

The titular story, which is the last in the collection, is really a masterpiece. It is a story about an ordinary couple. Everything was going maybe too smooth for them, and there is a problem with one outing of the wife few yeaars ago, which was an infidelity. It is obviously a thorn in the body of otherwise happy marriage, and it is revealed in a seemingly unnecessary manner, during a relaxed family day at home. Is it a call to sobriety, reminder that nothing in the world is as it seems? Or just a sign of rotting human flesh, which eats human happiness? I would not opt for this, as I think that such happiness is not real at all, that it is more often just a blindness, voluntary or involuntary. And I would not think what happened immoral or anything, rather a natural thing. But definitely not something what should happen, or be revealed, in a happy marriage.

Small scenes from life of ordinary people, which held me more tense than any chainsaw-massacre movie (I would leave such a performance, anyway) makes that I will probably not go deeper into Carver's writing soon. But I hail him as, indeed, a novel voice in American writing of the 2nd part of the XX ct. Almost every paragraph holds a screenplay for some Lynch' movie.

Through the writing I see, however, the writer being not only a spectator, but a participant of the show he is writing about: in his meek writing I find he is often humiliated, frightened, not at ease with the surrounding world. Also with the inside world of his heroes-no, characters, they are not possible to be described as heroes.

Carver taught me another dimension of writing. It still has to settle in me, but it is to stay, definitely. Thanks!

Henry Miller as a Technician of the Beautiful

In "The air-conditioned nightmare" Miller is giving us a disarray of his emotions and impressions when he returned to USA from Europe at the start of the WWII. From the very beginning he gives to know that the return was not an easy venture; he had to re-learn his own country.

Having made a similar comeback myself recently, from Asia to Europe, I could sympathize with this keen observer of a world. It is somewhat ironical fact that I did a shift an ocean eastwards, having in mind his idolatry of the Chinese and the East, but feelings are compatible. Not in content, but in reflections they awoke.

Most Millerian treat is that the book is NOT what it promised to be: he could not find anything worth recording during his trip. Everything disgusted him-and more so as he was ready to enjoy, feast on the Return, discovery...there was nothing to discover, only a vasteland of Humanity.

Yet, he produced a memorable tome of memories of America Lost, which is a pleasure to read, an agreeable companion to the Hemingway and Orwell impressions from Paris and London, which it followed in my readings.

I love his start with a citation from Vivekananda, which is setting the stage for the anonimity of his heros. Artists are the only recognizable patterns on the soil of America, and they are like rare birds, in danger of extinction. Others are regulars, tramps, or just an illusion: "The fat, puffy, wattle-faced man of forty-five who has turned assexual is the greatest monument to futility that America has created. He's a nymphomaniac of energy accomplishing nothing. He's a hallucination of the Paleolithic man." Or: "Most of the young men of talent whom I have met in this country give one the impression of being somewhat demented. Why shouldn't they? They are living amidst spiritual gorillas, living with food and drink maniacs, success-mongers, gadget innovators, publicity hounds."

Sounds familiar? What would Henry Miller say about celebrity culture we suffer today? I think he would say nothing, he would follow Hemingway, and right so.

"The american way is to seduce a man by bribery and make a prostitute of him. Or else to ignore him, starve him into submission and make a hack of him."

There is a hope: only yesterday I heard from an American expat that maybe it is not so bad that USA is turning the 3rd world country, as maybe it will put the people there back to senses, turn them away from the utilitarian paradigm in which they are living. A refreshing thought, but it is painful to see it has to go through such transformations from the very times described by Miller.

The worse is that Europe is trotting, as usual, 10 years behind America. We still think digital watches (or, today, iWatches) are a good idea...