Found in Translation
Bridge, indeed the word even inspired a somewhat racy programme of the same name. Its presenter, Antoine de Caunes, here gained a reputation of being a pedlar of mildly pornographic television. Yet in France he was something of an intellectual, as well as being an actor and a part-time philosopher.
It is strange that European literature in Britain has a similar reputation with the success of books like the Nobel Prize Winner Elfriede Jenelik’s The Piano Teacher or Michel Houellebecq’s controversial Atomised, suggesting that European literature is just made up of the odd naughty succès de scandale. The true test of the European literature aficionado is how many Estonian novelists can you name? I can think of two.
Few read the works of Anton Hansen Tammsaare, and for good reason, however the work of Jaan Kross, and particularly The Czar’s Madman has won him a deserved following in Germany and France. His novels, generally mediations on the interplay between the individual and the state, are carefully plotted and written in a style that subtly plays with the conventions of the Russian nineteenth-century novel, a theme that is far more light heartedly and wittily dealt with by Goncharov’s Oblomov.
Goncharov was not alone in exploring societies on the brink of dissolution and change, some of the most potent books of Austro-Hungarian literature being concerned with similar themes.
From Joseph Roth’s allegory of the decline of Austria-Hungary through the Trotta family in The Radetzky March to Miklós Bànffy’s Writing on the Wall (The Transylvanian Trilogy) a searing account of the dissolute and the frivolous actions of a pair of Hungarian cousins, and Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity, a chronicle of the traps laid by honour and the false facades of society, this brilliantly talented generation of writers showed themselves to be masters of the exploration not only of so
ety but also of the inner life of the individual. Yet few books are as melancholic, magical and moving as Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a portrait of a rich Italian Jewish family in Mussolini’s Italy where foreboding is mixed with hedonism. For emotionally eviscerating, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger cannot be bettered: a book that recounts in painful detail the loves and struggles of a journalist who is slowly starving to death.
It sounds fun, non? At least next time you get stuck with someone with literary pretensions you can top their two Estonians with a Portuguese, several Hungarians and a Czech humorist.
11th May 2006