I mean to write shorter, but I usually don’t.
***
Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to
Berlin (1939) by Christopher Isherwood.
Character portraits, just one at novel length in Mr Norris, many
in Goodbye, against the background of the Nazi takeover of Germany, background
noise but suddenly the only thing that matters.
Charming, funny, elegant, all the nice words that go with a light, even
simple, version of the British prose “house style” of the 1920s and 1930s, the
most immediately appealing English house style I know.
The atmosphere of the novels is homosexual. The ethos, even. Armistead Maupin writes, in the introduction
to the New Directions edition, that he was at first frustrated by the passive “camera
eye” side of Isherwood – “his own life, particularly his sex life, was a blank”
(p. ix), but these are novels where the absences are highly visible. I mean, if I had read these as a naïve 14-year-old,
I would have missed a lot, but not this:
The little American simply couldn’t believe it. “Men dressed as women? As women, hey? Do you mean they’re queer?”
“Eventually we’re all queer,” drawled Fritz solemnly, in lugubrious tones…
“You queer, too, hey? demanded the little American, turning suddenly on me.
“Yes,” I said, “very queer indeed.” (p. 396)
***
Family Lexicon (1963) by Natalia Ginzburg. A memoir, a novel, I don’t know. It’s another book about creeping, and then
open, fascism, this time in Turin, beginning as a portrait of Ginzburg’s goofball
parents but turning into something else.
A resistance memoir. “Leone was
arrested in a clandestine printer’s shop” (154 of the NYRB edition).
Curiously, though, the bulk of the novel is described
exactly in the title. Ginzburg catalogues
all the strange phrases and inside jokes that every family has, the endless
repetitions.
“How I do love cheese,” my mother invariably would say whenever cheese was served.
And my father would say, “How monotonous you are! All you do is repeat yourself!” (29)
Irony there, outstanding irony. In the book’s extraordinary conclusion, the
parents old, the fascists defeated, Ginzburg constructs an extended
semi-dialogue consisting of nothing but decades of old stories and lines, all
ending with exclamation marks, a high-level babble that only the family
members, and the people who read Family Lexicon, can understand.
Jenny McPhee did the translation. Admirably, she was not afraid of keeping all
sorts of Italian obscurities, explaining them in notes. Readers for some reason often praise a book for
not sounding like a translation. This
translation sounds like a translation, thank goodness.
***
So, two books that are fascinating enough for their historical
setting – Isherwood’s, especially, must have seemed like news from the front –
but that also have more complex literary conceptions at their core. And both have terrific characters with big
personalities, observed and enjoyed by the narrator, and by me.
