In short – it only confuses one. - Arthur Schnitzler seizes the day

And I thought Spring Awakening was sex-crazed!  Arthur Schnitzler’s Der Reigen (in the Carl Mueller version I read, La Ronde) is about nothing but.  Pairs of characters approach sex via dialogue and groping, engage (concealed by three small dots), and gather up their things.  One member of the pair advances to the next round, men and women alternating

In scene I, for example,  The Prostitute and The Soldier dally under a Viennese bridge, and then in scene II The Soldier seduces The Parlor Maid, who subsequently topples upon The Young Gentleman, who is up to no good with The Young Wife, and on like this to scene X, when The Count is surprised to find himself with The Prostitute of scene I.

What a director does with the actual sex, hidden by Schnitzler, I do not know.  Kill the lights for three seconds, perhaps.  These days, probably not.

The scenes, and lines, expand as the play proceeds.  The Prostitute is efficient with her Soldier:

PROSTITUTE:  Shh!  Police.  Imagine.  The middle of Vienna.
SOLDIER:  Over here.  Come on.
PROSTITUTE:  Watch it.  You want to fall in the water!
SOLDIER:  (Takes hold of her.)  You little –
PROSTITUTE:  Hold tight.
SOLDIER:  Don’t worry.
[Now, the modest dots]
PROSTITUTE:  We should’ve used the bench.
SOLDIER:  Who cares.  Get up.

And then just a few more lines finish this indecorous scene.  Later seducers have to work harder, and philosophize more:

COUNT:  But there’s no such thing as happiness.  The things people talk about most don’t really exist.  Love, for example.  It’s the same with happiness.
ACTRESS:  You’re right.
COUNT:  Pleasure.  Intoxication.  Fine.  No complaints.  You can depend on them.  If I take pleasure in something, fine, at least I know I take pleasure in it.  Or if I feel intoxicated.  Wonderful.  That’s something you can depend on, too.  And when it’s over – well, then, it’s over.
ACTRESS: (Grandly.)  Over!
COUNT:  But as soon as you fail to live for the moment, and begin thinking about the future or the past – well then, the pleasure’s as good as dead.  The future is – sad – the past uncertain.  In short – it only confuses one.
ACTRESS: (nods, her eyes large with wonder.)  I think you may have hit on something there.

That (Grandly) direction is pretty good.  I would not want to argue strongly for the author’s view.  Everyone gets his say, or hers, and everyone is undercut.  The most common refrain is to seize the day, but the context is always pathetic, or ridiculous.  The day, however, is always seized, in some crude sense, which may well be better than the alternative.  The ennobled lemurs are doing what they can.

Austrian literature, concentrated in turn of the century Vienna, was the leading alternative to the Portuguese Literary Challenge.  Maybe next time.

The grass, the graves and the cold mists; the essence of city life - the sublime endings of The Crime of Father Amaro

The ending, or endings, of The Crime of Father Amaro.

Near the middle of the novel, a minor character dies; Amaro is her attending priest.  Eça de Queirós uses the episode to give us a look at the genuine spiritual power of even a bad priest like Amaro.  His delivery of the last rites is a serious and meaningful responsibility, meaningful to the dying and those around her, even if Amaro himself sees the duty only as a burden, and even though he uses the incident to chase women.

The early scene foreshadows two later deaths, one where Amaro fails in his ordinary priestly duties, and another where his failure is considerably worse than ordinary.  Whatever Eça may mock, he takes death seriously enough.

This last death leads to a funeral scene, too, although a curious one, since the author mostly does not show us the funeral – he is using the limited third person for all it is worth.  We follow the funeral procession to a chapel but do not enter it; we instead join a pair of servants who take the opportunity to “wander” into a tavern and gossip.  The chapel door is a threshold Eça does not want to cross, the genuine religious service something he does not want us to see.  It exists outside of this novel.  The servants rejoin the procession for the burial, so we do get to see that.  The scene ends with the point of view leaving the servants, the camera “pulling back”:

‘Amen,’ came the deep voice of the sacristan and the shrill voice of the choirboy.

‘Amen,’ said the others in a sighing murmur that was lost amongst the cypresses, the grass, the graves and the cold mists of that sad December day. (461)

This is not Father Amaro’s ending.  We need a few pages more for him.  A “man of state and two men of religion,” Amaro one of them, accidentally meet at the foot of the statue of Camões (see wiki for photo - when visiting Lisbon, you can recreate the scene!), author of The Lusiads, hero of Portuguese culture, representative of empire and glory.  An ironic contrast might be on its way.

‘Well, just look around you!  What peace, what vigour, what prosperity!’

And he made a sweeping gesture that took in the whole of the Largo do Loreto, which, at that hour, at the close of a serene afternoon, contained the essence of city life.  Empty carriages rode slowly by; women in twos tottered past, wearing false hair and high heels and displaying the anaemic pallor of a degenerate race… (470)

More: a hungover nobleman, people sprawling in “idle torpor,” pimps, an ox cart (“the symbol of an antiquated agricultural system dating back centuries”), lottery-peddling urchins.  The laying on, it is thick.  The geography of the square, and the nature of Portugal, is finally summarized as “two gloomy church façades… three pawnshop signs… four taverns.”  It’s a sublimely savage passage, worthy of one of Victor Hugo’s great explosions.  In the last words of the novel, our bad priest and his worse superiors congratulate themselves, under the gaze of their great poet, for the marvelous achievements of their civilization, the very thing that the reader of the novel has spent the previous 470 pages watching them destroy.

It proves their true devotion to the priesthood - the mechanics of power in Father Amaro

Many readers, although people of boundless curiosity, non-insular and anti-parochial, true citizens of the world, might be unsure if The Crime of Father Amaro, a novel about  the misdeeds of mid-19th century Portuguese priests, has any continuing interest.  The Catholic priesthood is now, just to pick one of the book’s sticky points, entirely voluntary and vocational.  Fair point.

The abuse of power by the novel’s priests is just a specific example of a universal theme, though, and Eça de Queirós is a true artist, meaning that the only path to the large is through the small.  An abuse of power can be reformed, but we need a novelist like Eça to see how it works.

I'm in the middle of the novel.  Father Amaro and Amélia are in love but restraining themselves, and Amélia’s now-former fiancé is behaving, completely understandably, like a jackass, culminating in a pathetically ineffectual physical attack on the priest.  A group of priests and devout ladies gather every evening at the house of Amélia’s mother, so here they are together after the attack.  Father Amaro has turned the other cheek, and why not, since he is the victor:

Such saintliness drove the women wild.  What an angel!  They gazed on him adoringly, their hands almost raised in prayer.  His presence, like that of a St Vincent de Paul, exuding charity, gave the room a chapel-like sweetness… (264)

So far, so satirical.  Just a little vicious towards these women, fools, admittedly.  But they are not Eça’s true targets.  The most combative of the priests declares the fiancé has been automatically excommunicated and that having in the house any of the excommunicant’s possessions is a threat to the soul, for example, this magazine, and that cigarette case, and this stray glove:

‘We must destroy them!’ exclaimed Dona Maria da Assunção.  ‘We must burn them, burn them!’

The room echoed now with the shrill cries of the women, in the grip of a holy fury. (268)

Eça and I are still mocking the superstitious biddies, it seems, but here is the punchline:

The clamouring women raced into the kitchen.  Even São Joaneira followed them, as a good hostess, to watch over the bonfire.

Left alone, the three priests looked at each other and laughed.

‘Women are the very devil,’ said the Canon philosophically.

‘No, Father,’ said Natário, growing suddenly serious.  ‘I’m laughing because although, seen from outside, it may look ridiculous, the sentiment behind it is good.  It proves their true devotion to the priesthood, their horror of impiety.  And that, after all, is an admirable sentiment.’

‘Oh, admirable,’ agreed Amaro, equally seriously. (269)

All of this nonsense is just an arbitrary demonstration of power, a prank.  Eça, in scenes like this, shows how the older priests corrupt the younger, not by openly advocating for vice, but for their own power and privilege.  Poor Amélia’s not going to have a chance against Amaro.

Tomorrow I think I will move to the end, to the two ends, of the novel.

Ah, a priest could have enjoyed himself then - beginning The Crime of Father Amaro

Three readers have joined me to read The Crime of Father Amaro, the first (1875) or second (1876) or fourth (1880) novel of Eça de Queirós.  I finished the book last, after Richard (Caravana de Recuerdos), litlove (Tales from the Reading Room), and ombhurbhuva.  I believe this was the first Eça de Queirós for everyone but me, and I understand that everyone thought it was a good place to start with this fine novelist.

A young, worldly priest, Father Amaro, obtains a position in a provincial cathedral town, where he finds that the priestly class is venal, sexually active, gluttonous and domineering, especially of the city’s more pious and superstitious women.  Amaro , who never wanted to be a priest and who has a purely instrumental ethical sense, soon seduces the beautiful and all-too-susceptible Amélia, the daughter of his landlady.  Consequences ensue, mostly of the predictable variety.   See the links above for better summaries, please.

I was nervous that the novel, which is brutally anti-clerical, would be a topical period piece, but the version we all read, at least, is like Eça’s other novels: humanist Zola, or Flaubert with a heart.  Litlove called the novel “a study in how to keep a book engaging despite having a cast of unsympathetic characters”; Eça’s secret is that he allows us to understand everyone, no matter how stupidly they behave (and they can be awfully stupid), and cold understanding can sometimes melt into warm sympathy.  Another way to say the same thing: Eça de Queirós is, more than anything else, brilliant with characters.

For example, Amaro, our hero, a less intelligent Julien Sorel, the center of The Red and the Black, begins the novel with my sympathy but squanders it as he becomes increasingly corrupted.  His inner life, after a romantic setback:

And then the old despair returned that he was not living in the times of the Inquisition and could not therefore pack them off to prison on some accusation of irreligion or black magic.  Ah, a priest could have enjoyed himself then.  But now, with the liberals in power, he was forced to watch as that wretched clerk earning six vinténs a day made off with the girl, whilst he, an educated priest, who might become a bishop or even Pope, had to bow his shoulders and ponder his grief alone.  If God’s curses had any value, then let them be cursed. (176-7)

And an external view, after romantic success:

For [Amélia], at least, [Amaro] was handsome and better than any count or duke, and as worthy of a mitre as the wisest of men.  She herself had once said to him, after thinking for a moment:

‘You could become Pope!’

‘I am certainly the stuff Popes are made of,’ he replied gravely. (313)

Amaro’s vanity, humorlessness, and, worst of all, his sense of power is clear enough.  A potential monster.  One of the tragedies of this comic novel is that his potential is realized.

What else should I write about?  The ending, the last page, certainly.  Eça’s party scenes?  Dona Maria da Assunçao’s museum of arsenal of saints?  So many possibilities.

Margaret Jull Costa was, unsurprisingly, the translator of the New Directions edition I read.

The tormenting doubt of everything - Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening - I warm myself in my rotting decay and smile

Once upon a time, perhaps earlier this year, when I was reading Alfred Jarry’s Ubu nightmares, I wondered, amidst the adolescent violence and adolescent scatology, why there was no adolescent sex.  It turns out that the topic had already been covered in Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening: A Children’s Tragedy (published 1891, performed 1906), along with other pressing subjects like over-competitive schools and test anxiety, as if the theatrical avant-gardists of the 1890s had planned out an efficient division of labor.  To be clear, they did not, and Jarry could hardly have known Wedekind’s work, but the plays are kin, in subject, in audacity, and in their destruction of the clichés of the theater.

Melchior and Moritz (not Max and Moritz) cram for exams and ponder the mysteries of their pubescence,  while innocent but curious Wendla is protected from sex by her timid mother.  The children are all fourteen years old, but they are all played by adult actors.*  The result is pregnancy due to inadequate sex education, teen suicide, pornography (prints of famous paintings!), a botched abortion, homosexual exploration, nude modeling, and headless ghosts.  Much of this actually takes place off-stage.

Strangely, this hormonally over-heated tragedy is actually a black comedy, or could be.  In Act III, Scene One, Melchior is interrogated by his professors, accused of the crime of disseminating accurate information about sex.  His professors are Thickstick, Flyswatter, Sunstroke, and so on, and they spend much of their time debating whether and which window should be opened.  Conclusion:

FLYSWATTER:  Should it appear to our respected colleague that our room is not sufficiently ventilated, might I propose that he has a ventilator bored in the top of his head?

And then Harpo pulls a hand drill from one of his enormous pockets and Chico says “Atsa no good!”  The Ubu-like madness of the play comes from this lurch from Naturalistic “social issues” to surrealist nonsense to almost abstract pure theater, aided by the play’s short, fragmented scenes.  In the climax, Melchior escapes from prison to confront his ghosts, or something like that, but is rescued, or damned, by the intervention of The Masked Man (“In the end everyone has his part – you the comforting knowledge of having nothing – you the tormenting doubt of everything”).

To reduce this play to an attack on the complacent German bourgeoisie or poor sex ed does it an injustice.  Wedekind’s real concerns are existential.

Here’s the end, which is as likely as anything to spark curiosity about the beginning – the first line is meant literally:

MORITZ (alone):  I sit here with my head in my arm.  The moon covers its face, the veil falls away, and it doesn’t look any wiser.  So I go back to my place.  I straighten my cross after that clumsy idiot’s kicked it over, and when everything’s in order I lie down on my back again, warm myself in my rotting decay and smile.

* I am reading the Edward Bond translation, performed in 1974 – Moritz was played by a young Michael Kitchen, Detective Chief Superintendent Foyle himself.

Look at the disgraceful pair - looking at Max and Moritz

I have been rummaging around in a peculiar book, The Genius of Wilhelm Busch edited and translated by Walter Arndt, who I know as a translator of Pushkin.  Busch was an artist who inadvertently invented the comic strip, or at least a plausible prototype, particularly with the 1865 Max and Moritz, which Arndt calls “possibly the most universally cherished and quoted work of art in the German language,” which explains a lot.

Ah, the wickedness one sees
Or is told of such as these,
Namely Max and Moritz; there!
Look at the disgraceful pair!

Max and Moritz are a pair of hideous children who play seven hideous tricks which culminate in a hideous punishment, which they either deserve or do not, depending on whether Max and Moritz are actual children or kobolds, evil spirits.

The woodcuts are always accompanied by rhyming children’s’ verse.  The text is integral to the images.  Busch never tells a story with nothing but images – or Arndt does not include any examples where he does.  I am drawn to the images that do stand on their own, like this unusually complex heist:

I need the text, though, to know what the woman in the basement is doing:

With a ladle to scoop out
Just a dab of sauerkraut,
Which she has a passion for
When it is warmed up once more.

Ah, so that is the cellar sauerkraut bucket.  Mmmm.  Those chickens were murdered by Max and Moritz as their first trick, stolen and eaten in the second.   At least gluttony and greed is a motive here, but the little monsters mostly spread chaos among complacent working people – a tailor, a baker, a miller.  There is also a teacher, but as an educated person he presumably deserves to have his pipe filled with gunpowder.

Master Lampel’s gentle powers
Failed with rascals such as ours;
For the evilly inclined
Pay preceptors little mind.

Max and Moritz are destructive chaos agents, gleefully destructive, with no independent existence, meaning Busch never made a panel with just one of the pair.  They are sinister critters.  They can be baked in an oven with no lasting consequences.  The barnyard fowl get their revenge in the end, though.

Well, this has not been much besides “Look, ain’t that something.”  I’ll keep looking.  More Busch later, maybe.  “Painter Squirtle” or “Jack Crook, Bird of Evil,” Max and Moritz rolled into one ugly, drunken crow.

I borrowed the color images from this Gutenberg.org file.  The book was published by the  University of California Press in 1982.

Are you happy? No. - acting in Uncle Vanya

Does this look like much?  It’s from Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (1897), and is part of a reconciliation scene between Sonya and her young step-mother Elena:

SONYA:  Come, peace, peace!  Let’s forget it.

ELENA:  You mustn’t look like that – it’s not becoming.  You must believe in everyone, otherwise it’s impossible to live. (Pause)

SONYA:  Tell me honestly, as a friend – are you happy?

ELENA:  No.

SONYA:  I knew that.

The question is: what to do with that “No”?  Is Elena earnest, sad, defeated, defensive?  How about Sonya, in her answer?

I have seen two stage productions of Uncle Vanya,  a flawless actor’s holiday at the Steppenwolf Theatre (2001), the other a cluttered and mis-paced 2007 Court Theatre version (no complaints about the acting, though).  In both productions, the actresses played this scene in exactly the same way.  They replicated what Julianne Moore and Brooke Smith did in Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), which can be seen here at about 2:40, although the whole seven minutes is choice.  Excuse me – I am going to watch it again.

For most of the above dialogue the camera is over Sonya’s shoulder, so we only see Elena’s face, and her reaction to Sonya’s fumbling question, her genuine curiosity.  “Are you happy?” – and Moore breaks into an enormous smile.  She might even be about to laugh, but exercises restraint.  Sonya – now the camera moves to her face – also smiles, broadly, happily.  “I knew you weren’t,” matter of fact.  Both actresses laugh, shaking their shoulders.

Sonya was genuinely anxious that her step-mother was happy, and is genuinely relieved that she is not.  Elena has already moved beyond happiness.  Her admission is old news, perhaps upsetting at some point in the past, but now something that can be treated ironically.  Now the two women can be unhappy together, which makes them happy.  Happier.

Vanya on 42nd Street is a showcase of interpretation via acting, full of actorly surprises, but for some reason this one stands out as a favorite, perhaps just because I have now seen live actors duplicate it twice, as if it is the standard interpretation of the lines, as if there is no other real choice.  Or perhaps I am just enjoyably amazed at seeing how much an actress can do with the word "No."

Sometime I would like to write about Sonya’s monologue at the end of Uncle Vanya, the “We shall rest” speech, with its “life that is bright, beautiful, and fine.”  It looks like it should ruin the play, just upend everything.  I think of it as an Alpine challenge for the actress, but every time I have seen the play it turns out to be a triumph.  Brooke Smith’s version is on Youtube here.

When reading a play, I have the book and my imagination, but I also have a lot of other people helping me out.

The translation is by Ann Dunnigan, found in an old Signet Classics paperback titled Chekhov: The Major Plays.  The Vanya on 42nd Street version is by David Mamet.

Your Schillers and your Goethes & all the stupid bastards who don't give you nothing but lies - Gerhart Hauptmann's characters

A weakness, or limit, of the German novella tradition is character, the lack of well-rounded, plumped up, lifelike characters.  I can think of exceptions, but what I typically remember from an E. T. A. Hoffmann story is some brilliantly inventive piece of weirdness or ingenious dissociation – the moments when the story suddenly shifts from one plane to another – rather than telling details about the characters, who are often interchangeable from story to story.  That cat in Tomcat Murr has a lot of personality – I said there are exceptions.

Some of this is the result of a complex exploration of the Ideal and the Real that begins with Kant, and Goethe’s response to Kant.  Characters are often three-dimensional but made of porcelain, not flesh.  Please see this marvelous example from Elective Affinities that nicole enjoyed.

The search for the uncanny is part of the story, too.  The external world is just as important as the internal, and much of the best German fiction from the 19th century is about the interaction between the two.  The forest and railroad in “Flagman Thiel” are at least as full and “real” as the title character, and have to be for Hauptmann to construct the sense of uncanniness that fills the last half of the story.  In English and French fiction, the intense interiority and limited third person view of writers like Flaubert and Woolf has become a standard mode.  German-language writers, before Fontane, were exploring a different method, one no less psychological or subjective, but different, maybe a little more mysterious, more willing to leave a character’s actions unexplained, and therefore distancing.

A playwright has the advantage that his characters, no matter how flat and empty, will be inhabited by actual humans with their own voices and gestures.  The “real” becomes real, occurring right in front of me.  As a reader, I have to imaginatively simulate all of this, as best I can.

Hauptmann’s characters in Before Daybreak are easy to imagine as genuine people.  Horrible people, but plausibly horrible.  The step-mother / mother-in-law, Mrs. Krause.  See her fear and belittle her step-daughter’s education (ellipses in original):

MRS. KRAUSE. (With increasing fury.)  ‘Stead o’ such a female lendin’ a hand on th’ farm… oooh, no!  God forbid!  Jus’ th’ thought o’ that makes ‘er turn green…  Buuuut – ya take y’r Schillers ‘n y’r Goethes, ‘n all them stupid bastards who don’t give ya nothin’ but lies; thaaat gets to ‘er – thaaat she likes.  It’s enough to drive ya crazy.  (She stops, trembling with rage.)

I should note that mom has been hitting the Veuve Clicquot pretty hard, and that in the original she speaks a Silesian dialect, and that this is mostly not a dialect play:  Mrs. Krause is special.

I would like to keep quoting her, because she is the most vivid, or most loud, character.  Many other characters are just as good:  Loth, the principled prig of an idealist; Helen, the only truly sympathetic character, whose intelligence and virtue are undercut by her entirely understandable emotional neediness; Hoffmann, who first seems like a decent enough guy in a bad marriage, but has been corrupted, hollowed out, by wealth.  When I say “good” characters, I mean interesting artistic creations.  I have some doubts about the “reality” of the story of Before Daybreak, which lays the wretchedness on pretty thick, but the characters, although a trying bunch, are pleasantly full of sap and vigor, and by themselves a reason for me to read more Gerhart Hauptmann.

It is exemplary, sets us an ideal which we may emulate - Gerhart Hauptmann's nightmarish Before Daybreak

My translator* insists on Before Daybreak for the title of Gerhart Hauptmann’s 1889 shocker of a debut play; I think it is more commonly called Before Sunrise (Vor Sonnenaufgang is the German).  The play has a subtitle, too: A Social Drama.  We are once again in the world of Naturalism, heaven help us.  The translator has a nice dig at the term, calling it, at its worst, the melodrama of the wretched.  Fortunately, Before Daybreak is Naturalism at its best, so I can ignore the entire issue forevermore.

The second line of dialogue will set the tone (ellipses in original):

MRS. KRAUSE:  (Screams)  You sluts!!... Honest to God, I never seen scum the like o’ you girls!... (To Loth).  Shove off!  You don’t get nothin’ here!... (Half to Miele, half to Loth.)  He got arms, he can work.  Get out!  Nobody gets no handouts!

Now that’s the way to start a play.  Her face is “bluish red with rage,” “hard, sensual, malevolent.”  She is in her early forties, so just imagine your favorite actress of that age chewing through this part.  Jennifer Aniston, say.

The joke of the whole thing is that the abused Loth, a rationalist and idealist, is just there to visit his old but newly wealthy college pal, Mrs. Krause’s son-in-law.  Coal has been discovered in Silesia; the riche are all nouveau, like the nightmarish former peasant Mrs. Krause; and Loth is there to reform the conditions of the workers.  In the meantime, he becomes romantically entangled with the only not-entirely-horrible member of the family, the stepdaughter Helen, who is not vicious but merely hysterical and neurotic.  Disaster comes crashing down in Act V.  Hereditary alcoholism is in some sense the cause, but this is not really a “social issue” play.  If t’weren’t t’one thing, t’would be t’other.

I’m just leafing through the play now, thinking about what I might quote.  The post’s title is from a discussion about reading.  Helen is reading, what else, The Sorrows of Young Werther, which earnest Loth calls “a book for weaklings.”  He recommends a historical novel about virtuous, self-denying Romans which he calls “rational and reasonable,” “an ideal which we may emulate” (Act II, p. 35).  The irony is that it is Loth who causes the final catastrophe by following his unreasonable ideals.

I might write more about the characters tomorrow.  The success of the play is the mix of people, awful and otherwise.  Hauptmann emulated Ibsen, but he reminds me a bit more of the slightly later Chekhov, if I imagine a Chekhov play with only two or three sympathetic characters, which is of course not Chekhov at all, since his great gift was to make us pity or understand or even indulge the follies of his puppets.  Before Daybreak is dingy Chekhov, Chekhov where everything goes horribly wrong.  I mean, you know, even worse.

*  Peter Bauland, Gerhart Hauptmann’s Before daybreak, 1978, University of North Carolina Press.  He argues, that the 1912 translation, the one available at Gutenberg.org, is a disaster: “substantially accurate, guts the play.”

The semblance of fiery snakes - Gerhart Hauptmann's grim and depressing "Flagman Thiel"

I guess I have done my share of raving about the great tradition of the Romantic German novella, that shadowy, uneasy alternative to the overstuffed Victorian and ponderous Russian and elegant French books that define 19th century literature for so many readers.  Because of its use by expert practitioners like Theodor Storm and Adalbert Stifter, among others, I associate the form with a mood of bittersweet weirdness.  Not that the form required a particular atmosphere: Eduard Mörike’s Mozart’s Journey to Prague (1856), to pick one example of many, is positively joyful.

So I can think of plenty of early melancholy novellas, but none so unrelentingly grim* as Gerhart Hauptmann’s 1888 story “Flagman Thiel.”  I am skeptical of the tastes of readers who do not like "depressing books", but I also doubt that any of us need too much “Flagman Thiel” in our reading diet.

Thiel is a stolid railroad signalman.  He marries but loses his wife in childbirth, and remarries for the sake of his son.  The first marriage is a sort of love match; the second a disaster.  The story, after the first few pages, is the unfolding of the disaster, misery turning into tragedy, tragedy into nightmare.  Hauptmann is labeled a “naturalist,” a word I never find helpful, but one possible use is to associate him with the intensely pessimistic stance of some of his contemporaries.  I am told that they were all under the spell of Schopenhauer.

Aesthetically, though, Hauptmann’s method is identifiably within the tradition of Storm and Stifter, with the world around the characters knocking the unpleasant story off kilter.  The railroad tracks “looked like the strands of a huge iron net drawn together to a point on the horizon,” and the telegraph lines are “spun by a huge spider,” but all of this is unnoticed by Thiel, who at this point in the story is merely depressed, for good reason:

The pillared arcades of the pine trunks on the yon side of the embankment took fire as from within and glowed like metal.  The tracks, too, began to glow, turning into the semblance of fiery snakes…  For a while a reddish sheen lingered on the extreme crowns [of the pines].

Then the train, “a snorting monster” blasts by in “a mad uproar.”  Odd, odd, odd.  Hauptmann’s “realistic” fiction can be as intensely uncanny as Storm or Hoffmann, especially in a series of hallucinations that foreshadow and follow the story’s tragic center.  A plain “realism” to describe ordinary life, a peculiar lyricism to describe the natural world, and a disturbing bizarreness to describe Thiel’s extreme mental state: Hauptmann’s story does not merely contrast these fictional tones, but smashes them against each other, leaving nothing but wreckage.

I read an old translation of “Flagman Thiel” – the story has been translated many times, under many titles, all trying to be precise about Thiel’s railroad job.  Adele S. Seltzer was my translator; the story is in the 1933 Modern Library Great German Short Novels and Stories.  Hauptmann was still alive when this collection was published, a contemporary writer, his Nobel Prize twenty years in the past.  German Literature Month – mustn’t forget that.

* Update: How could I forget Kleist's unflinchingly grim "The Earthquake in Chile" (1807)?

It was so dreadfully cold - the puzzling Little Match Girl Passion

This post is holiday-inappropriate.

It was so dreadfully cold.  It was snowing, and the evening was beginning to grow dark.  It was also the last evening of the year – New Year’s Eve.  In this cold and in this darkness a poor little girl was walking in the street, bareheaded and barefooted.

So begins Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” as translated by Reginald Spink in the attractive Everyman’s Library edition.  I have not been reading Andersen lately, but rather listening to a peculiar oratorio, The Little Match Girl Passion (2007) by David Lang.  The 35-minute piece, written for four voices and a smattering of percussion, intermingles the thousand-word text of the Andersen story with fragments of the text of Johannes Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion (1727).

The Andersen story carries a weight of Christian symbolism, although as soon as I try to be specific I become muddled.  The indifference of passersby, the cruelty of her father, and the transcendent promise of Heaven as personified by a hallucination of her Granny leads to the death by freezing of the little match girl.

Granny had never before been so beautiful and so big.  Lifting the little girl on to her arm, she flew with her in radiance and glory so high, so very, very high.  And there was no cold, no hunger, no fear: they were with God.

Come to think of it, this story is terrifying - forget what I said about its appropriateness for Halloween.  Still, the direct identification of the match girl with Christ puzzles me.  Lang’s most audacious stroke – the most audacious I could understand – is a little switch in Matthew 26:46 (King James version, which is not what Lang uses):

And about the ninth hour she cried with a loud voice, saying Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?  That is to say, My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?

“She” of course replaces “Jesus.”  If there is anything the little match girl does not do, it is loudly cry out.  So, I get it and I don’t.

Although the text of The Little Match Girl Passion is organized along the lines of the St. Matthew’s Passion, the music is another thing entirely.  It is minimalist and subdued, quiet yet bracing.  Short musical phrases repeat and shift.  The effect Lang achieves, as is often the case with contemporary composers of choral music, resembles “early music” – plainchant or madrigals – far more than Bach’s powerful masses of sound.  As is often the case with me, I understood none of the words without consulting the underlying texts, so I mostly listen to the oratorio to enjoy the singing.  Listeners with an allergy to minimalism will, I do not doubt, find The Little Match Girl to be exceedingly tedious.

I have been listening to the 2009 Harmonia Mundi recording of Paul Hillier, who commissioned the piece, conducting the Theatre of Voices.  I can point the curious to YouTube samples:  the Theatre of Voice perform the beginning here (skip the first minute and a half), and an excerpt from the middle, including the bit from Matthew, is here.  Finally, this is David Lang failing to answer my question.

bird or rose or sea - learning Portuguese the Eugénio de Andrade way

Who wants to help me learn Portuguese?  So kind, thank you.  My textbook is, as usual, Forbidden Words: Selected Poetry of Eugénio de Andrade (New Directions, 2003, tr. Alexis Levitin).

I picked an easy one (pp. 54-5).

Despertar

É um pássaro, é uma rosa,
é o mar que me acorda?
Pássaro ou rosa ou mar,
tudo é ardor, tudo é amor.
Acordar é ser rosa na rosa,
canto na ave, água no mar.

A little Spanish goes a long way here – it may help to know that “é” = “it is \ is it?” and “na” and “no” = “of the”.  I am not joking when I claim to use Andrade as a study aid.  The title of the poem is a vocabulary word by itself, and the nouns are all good basic ones – rose, sea, water, love, desire, song, and two words for bird, some repeated two or three or four times.

Some of Andrade’s poems are genuine lyrics, the words to an imaginary song.  They perhaps create their own music, this one, for example, with all of its soft, rolling “r”s.

To Waken

Is it a bird, is it a rose,
is it the sea that wakens me?
Bird or rose or sea,
all is fire, all desire.
To awake is to be rose of the rose,
song of the bird, water of the sea.

The one little bend the translator has to make is in the sonorous fourth line.  “Ardor” and “amor” are related but distinct, while “desire” and “fire” are much the same thing, one just a metaphor of the other.  But Levitin is able to shadow  the rhythm, keep the internal rhyme, and even mimic the soft “r” sounds.  His melody is at least an audible variation of Andrade’s.

As for the content of the poem, I wish I woke up feeling like that.  Not before coffee; rarely after.  But I suppose the waking is metaphorical, the surprise of the bird or rose or sea (or, who knows, a poem) lifting us out of our sleepy ordinary life once in a while.

Philosophers, Hegelian and zombie, in the short fiction of Eça de Queirós

A couple more Eça de Queirós stories, then I will set him aside for a little while.  I mean, not write about him, since I am reading two of his novels simultaneously, each quite different, thank goodness.

The Mandarin and Other Stories, tr. Margaret Jull Costa.  Yesterday, The Mandarin; today, the other stories.

“The Idiosyncrasies of a Young Blonde Woman” is early (1873) and not as painstakingly written as Eça de Queirós’s best work, although the anti-Romantic plot of obsessive love is fine.  Costa tells me that it was the author’s “first largely realist story”; Portugal’s first “realist” novel, The Crime of Father Amaro, followed two years later.  But this is all Portuguese literary history.  A film version was released just two years ago; when the director, Manoel de Oliveira, made the film he was one hundred years old.

“The Hanged Man” (written 1895) is a largely unrealist(?) story, a medieval ghost story.  Or, wait, the haunt is a hanged corpse, so I guess that makes it a zombie story!  How of our moment!:

Don Ruy revealed neither terror nor disgust.  Casually sheathing his sword he asked:

‘Are you dead or alive?’

The man slowly shrugged his shoulders.

‘I don’t know, sir.  Who knows what life is?  Who knows what death is?’ (136)

The zombie appears to be a philosopher.  A Christian one, I should add (“it is from the Cross alone that I seek mercy”), animated by the Virgin Mary to – well, let me abandon the story right there.

“José Matias” (written 1897) is narrated by another philosopher, not a zombie but something worse, a Hegelian.  He is at the funeral of the title character, and tells the poor fellow’s story, how Matias devoted his life, energy, and fortune to a perfectly idealized love affair.  He falls in love with the married beauty next door, and she with him, but they conduct their affair in an entirely spiritual manner.  Matias lives as if he is married to Elisa, furnishing his house as if she lived in it, giving up smoking “even when out riding alone” because she dislikes the smoke.  The twists of the plot refine this perfect, or mad, affair; pure devotion is never pure enough.

Looking at the story now, I see a continual mix of the material and the spiritual.  It is a kind of anti-Romantic Romanticism, or a Romantic anti-Romanticism.  I do not know what either of those would be, but words like “naturalism” or “realism” are not helpful.

José Matias is buried; the story ends; the narrator, the philosopher who “proved beyond doubt the illusion of sensation,” ends the story with “Still, it is a lovely afternoon."

Dear reader, creature improvised by God, a poor creation shaped out of poor clay, my fellow and my brother - satirical Eça de Queirós

More review-like recommendation-like Eça de Queirós writing today.

I direct the attention of the reader curious about Eça de Queirós but unwilling to commit to a thick novel, however juicy, to The Mandarin and Other Stories, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, a mere 160 pages of fictional text.

The novella that leads the collection is a Voltaire-like fantasy, told with gleeful zest.  The premise is an old moral dilemma:  if you could murder a distant Chinese mandarin and inherit his fortune with no consequences, would you do it?  The clerk who narrates the story can and does  (the devil is brought in as a mechanical aid, although the narrator does not believe in the devil), but amidst his new wealth and decadent hedonism, he becomes tormented by visions of the mandarin, not just of the man himself but of his family, his position:

I felt doubly guilty for having deprived a whole society of an important personage, an experienced man of letters, a pillar of the Social Order, a mainstay of public institutions.  You can’t just remove a man worth one hundred and six thousand contos from a country without upsetting the balance.

This absurd imaginative specificity is what makes the novella work.  The clerk actually travels to China to try to right his wrong.  Eça de Queirós can indulge, like his characters in fantasies of China, presenting heights of elegance and horrors of poverty, beauty and disgust, wisdom and incompetence, all of which has about as much to do with the actual China as Voltaire’s Lisbon and Brazil related to the real ones.  The invented exoticism paradoxically makes the themes of the novel universal.  Everything the clerk wanted to escape or experience exists in China as well as Lisbon.  Perhaps we bring it with us, whatever it might be.

The wealthy man ends his account with a cry of despair: "And now the world seems to me a huge mound of ruins where my soul cries out ceaselessly, in exile among the fallen columns."  His only consolation is that “not one Mandarin would remain alive if you, dear reader, creature improvised by God, a poor creation shaped out of poor clay, my fellow and my brother, if you could snuff him out as easily as I did and thus inherit all his millions!”

What, no, not me.  Plus, this could never happen.

Anyway, 68 pages of amusing reading.

A vast sunshade bristling with toothpicks - the meaningful monkey knickknacks of Eça de Queirós

The only part of Cousin Bazilio that I must – must! – write about (we are in the home of a young, middle-class couple; some friends have come over; Juliana is the servant I mentioned yesterday):

The Councillor intervened gravely:

‘No,’ he said, ‘I cannot believe that our Jorge is serious.  He’s too educated to have ideas which are so…’

He hesitated, searching for the right adjective.  Juliana appeared in front of him bearing a tray on which a silver monkey was crouched in comical fashion beneath a vast sunshade bristling with toothpicks.  He took one, bowed and concluded:

‘… so uncivilized.’ (40)

As usual, Eça de Queirós is right about everything.  Jorge is only pretending to have such uncivilized ideas (I will omit the plot-relevant foreshadowing of the idea itself), and the silver monkey is comical!

Ha ha ha – well, slightly comical, but due to a critical failure of internet-based technology the only silver monkey with a toothpick parasol that I could find is mounted on an elephant, and I assume that the crouching of the unmounted monkey is much funnier, and that the sunshade is much vaster.  I politely borrowed the picture from silverplateflatware.net, a place I bet you do not want to visit.

Anyway, that’s the sort of thing the novel’s heroine has in her house.  It stands out.  Eça de Queirós presumably had seen this delightful item somewhere, and perhaps even owned it himself.  Within the novel, the toothpick monkey tells us something about the bourgeois taste of its owners, and introduces a silly taste of colonial exoticism.

No novelist worthy of Flaubert will stop at that point – there is a second monkey connected to the first.  We move to a “domestic employment agency,” run by a working-class con-woman who will assist Juliana with her blackmail scheme:

Above the sofa [it pains me to omit the details of the repulsive sofa] hung a lithograph of Senhor Dom Pedro IV.  Between the two windows stood a tall dresser and, on it, flanked by a statue of St Anthony and a box made of shells, was a small stuffed monkey with glass eyes, balanced on the branch of a tree. (237)

I did not try to find an image of this hideous object.   We see why Eça de Queirós had Juliana handle the silver monkey in the first passage, since the monkeys are links between the servant’s two worlds.  Whatever was in marginal or even good taste is sordidly parodied at the crooked employment agency.  The crouching of this monkey, between Church and State, is also comical.

Whenever I go on about the method or technique of Flaubert, I usually mean devices like these matching monkeys.  They can be awfully hard to detect on a first reading of a novel, but the toothpick monkey happened to be odd enough that I was able to remember it.  I was not in the least surprised by its grotesque reprise - that's how this sort of book works.  I am sure there are more monkey-like goodies in Cousin Bazilio that I missed.

Somehow I forgot to mention yesterday that the translator of Cousin Bazilio is the unsurpassable Margaret Jull Costa.

This is like something out of Eugénie Grandet! - recommending Cousin Bazilio by Eça de Queirós

Cousin Bazilio, the 1878 second novel of José Maria Eça de Queirós, would make a good Portuguese Literature Challenge choice.  It is well-plotted, with a lot of forward motion; the central characters are excellent; the novel is enjoyably thick (435 pages in the Dedalus paperback I read) without becoming an unwieldy tome like The Maias (1888). If I think The Maias is the stronger book, larger in reach, more carefully constructed, the distinction is trivial, especially for a reader new to the author, as I am.

I have described the novel so baldly because I do not want to write too much about it, in part to encourage Challengists who have not otherwise committed to think about reading the book.  The books I typically read are so rich and complex that my usual five post, three thousand word  approach barely blows the dust off the cover, but I fear that it can sometimes seem like I am beating the stuffing out of the poor book.  Wuthering Expectations is far from exhaustive, but is often exhausting.  I would prefer that Cousin Bazilio, or the idea of reading it, remains fresh and lively for a while longer, so I will not do much more with it, although tomorrow I will have to write about the bric-a-brac monkeys.  I do not see how I have any choice.

‘This is like something out of Eugénie Grandet, Sebastião!  What you’re telling me is straight out of a Balzac novel.  It is, it’s Eugénie Grandet!’

Sebastião looked at him, horrified.

Balzac’s 1833 masterpiece shares a returning Brazilian relative with Cousin Bazilio – he’s the title character, this time.  Bazilio, a male of the species known as “a dog,” arrives in Lisbon just as his married cousin, also at one time his fiancée, is feeling bored, lonely, and listless, her husband off on a long business trip.  But the invocation of Balzac is misdirection:  as The Maias is a theme-and-variations on A Sentimental Education, this novel is a recasting of Madame Bovary.  A great difference, and the reason the novel is so easy to recommend, is that the author is not contemptuous of his characters, or even of their stupid mistakes.  Eça de Queirós  is more humane than Flaubert, or the Zola of Thérèse Raquin.  Readers  will be more likely to sympathize with his characters, as they say.  I did.

The other difference is that the Portuguese Emma Bovary is cursed with an enemy, an amazing character, her maid Juliana.  The war between the two women is the real story of the book, not Luiza’s adultery.  This is Juliana:

She envied everything in the house: the desserts that the master and mistress ate, and even their underwear.  Soirées and visits to the theatre infuriated her.  If it rained on a day when a walk had been planned, she was over-joyed.  The sight of the ladies all dressed up and with their hats on, staring miserably out of the windows, delighted her and made her almost loquacious:

‘Oh dear, madam!  What a downpour!  It’s absolutely pelting.  It looks set in for the day too.  What a shame!’  (72)

Luiza, the wife, is a first-rate creation, but her struggle with Juliana, the Old Prune makes the book.

Coming up: weird German playwrights for German Literature Month

German Literature Month, so designated by Lizzy’s Literary Life and Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat, approaches.  At either link, you will find an orderly, well-defined schedule for the month.  My understanding is that it is should be followed only in spirit, although the schedules for the readalongs of Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest and Heinrich Böll’s The Silent Angel might have more meaning.

I have written before, if I am not imagining it as the result of a wine and tobacco induced E. T. A. Hoffmann-style dream, about my bewilderment and irritation at the poor status in the English-reading world of pre-20th century German-language literature.  Goethe, a titan, the equivalent, in English terms, of Shakespeare, Johnson, and Wordsworth combined in a single person, shrivels down to the author of Faust (part I only) and the “autobiographical” Sorrows of Young Werther.  German poetry is hopeless, despite numerous fine translations; German fiction, the rich line of novellas, is too weird.  Theodor Fontane can be credited with bringing Flaubert into German, Frenchifying German fiction, so I hope many readers in the “too weird” crowd will enjoy Effi Briest a lot. The business with the crocodile and Chinese servant is still a little weird.

Weirdest of all, though, is the startling German dramatic tradition.  The strange and wonderful things one found on the German stage.  That stage might well be imaginary – I am thinking of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, “finished” (by his death) in 1837, published in 1879, performed in 1913.  Large parts of Faust seem unstageable, too, although they have all been staged.

My point here is actually to pin up my German Literature Month reading list, except that I have not really decided yet.  I will mess around with some of the late 19th century playwrights, that’s all I know, the three almost exact contemporaries – Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, and Frank Wedekind.  (Sorry – Wedekind’s first name must be Franz, not Frank.  Let me look that up.  Ah, his full name is Benjamin Franklin Wedekind.  Of course.)

Wedekind is most famous, I think, for Spring Awakening, which was recently bent into a Broadway musical, and the two Lulu plays.  Schnitzler’s best known play is Der Reigen / La Ronde.  Hauptmann won the Nobel Prize in 1912, but seems to now be the least known in English, meaning: the titles of his plays do not ring bells for me.

I am tempted, too, by some younger playwrights, like Hugo von Hofmannsthal, lively poet, librettist for the dreary Richard Strauss – someday I hope to be able to spell Hofmannsthal’s name correctly without looking it up.  Or I might try the Expressionist Georg Kaiser, author of Gas and also Gas II.  The titles alone attract my interest.  I’m not going to read all or even much of this in November, though.

This piece must be among the most ignorant I have ever written for Wuthering Expectations.  Speculative might be a kinder word.  Corrections, admonitions, and recommendations are most welcome.

Oh, there will also be some of this in November:

That’ll be fun, right?

Your manly body so brown - The rest is literature - the Songs of António Botto

António Botto was a Portuguese poet, his poems collected, Whitman-like, in a series of continually revised books titled Songs, the first published in 1920.  The 1932 version is available in English, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2010, but actually translated long ago by, I am amazed to say, Portugal’s greatest poet, Fernando Pessoa.

Botto is a fine example of the French-styled decadent aesthete:

The most important thing in life
Is to create – to create beauty. (“Curiosity” 1)

In your last letter
You called me decadent
How funny!
Your letter
Made me laugh.  (“Dandyism” 10)

I’m always glad to make people laugh.  Botto’s great distinction is a series of poems about a sexual relationship with another man.  They lead the collection:

No, let us kiss, only kiss
In this evening’s agony.
Keep
For some better moment
Your manly body so brown.  (“Boy” 1)

Who is it that clasps me to him
In the half-light of my bed?
Who is it that kisses me
And bit my breast till it bled?  (“Boy” 6)

And so on like that, the poet overwrought perhaps – or convincingly passionate – but straightforward in his desire, jealousy, and regret.  Other than a poem about Salomé the placement of which I did not understand, the clusters of openly homosexual poems – the sequences “Boy,” “Curiosity,” and “Olympiads” – do not strike me as decadent at all, actually, but earthily romantic, or even realistic.  The decadent pose is reserved for other parts of the poet’s life.

I am informed that the open homosexuality of the poems was scandalous, but that can mean anything.  Pessoa wrote an obfuscatory defense of them, emphasizing the artifice of Botto's persona, in other words transforming Botto into another heteronym of Pessoa's, another imaginary poet.

Because I am so often befuddled by the way people use the word “beauty,” I found this amusing:

Beauty
Was always
Just a secondary thing
In the body that we love.
There is no beauty at all.
Anyhow, it can’t endure.
Beauty
Is no more than the desire
That makes our weary heart move.
The rest is literature.  (“Boy” 10)

That’s just what I have been saying!  Or maybe not.  Now I am not sure.  The contradictions within the passage give it whatever interest it might have.

Botto’s poems, or Pessoa’s version of them, do occasionally rhyme or employ a more formal structure or bounce off of a more complex image, but the excerpts I have given here are typical – the stance of the poet, the intensity of the voice, is what Botto has to offer.  My favorite poem is told by an ostrich who endures being plucked for ladies’ hats:

They tear off my feathers
But no complaint of mine is heard.
I am a very
Well-bred bird.

“The Gray Ostrich” is not remotely typical of Botto.

I seem to have assembled a little Minor Portuguese Literature week.  Let’s do something else tomorrow.

Everything Eça de Queirós wrote was enjoyable - The Yellow Sofa

We talked about Eça de Queirós; we said that we wished there were more of Eça's books; that everything he wrote was enjoyable…

I am again poaching from the enormous Borges diary of Adolfo Bioy Casares that Richard of Caravan de Recuerdos has been reading (the translation is his).  I have only begun Book #5 of Eça de Queirós, but that is enough to think that the claim of Borges and Bioy Casares is plausible.  Likely, even.

Consider The Yellow Sofa (1925), also translated, more accurately, as Alves & Co.  The publication date is twenty-five years after the death of Eça de Queirós; the date of composition is presumably sometime in the late 1870s or 1880s.

One might suspect – I suspected – that this 106 page novella is inferior for some reason, unfinished or inadequate.  But no, the story is complete, the characters fleshy, the action meaningful, the insights real.  And enjoyable, highly enjoyable.   By the end, my question was why Eça de Queirós had left the manuscript in his trunk.

The Yellow Sofa begins in tranquility.  Alves is in his office; business is good; his partner reliable; it is his fourth wedding anniversary.  He knocks off work early – always a terrible idea in a novel – only to discover, well, you can guess:

On the yellow damask sofa, fronting a little table on which there stood a bottle of port, Lulu, in a white negligee, was leaning in abandon on the shoulder of a man whose arm was around her waist, and smiled as she gazed languorously at him. (19)

Lulu is his wife; the man is of course Alves’s business partner.  The first 80 pages of the novel contain only two days of action – the discovery and aftermath, including the farcical arrangement of a duel.  For example, the friends Alves picks as seconds cannot stop talking – the subject is in the air, after all – about their own and others’ “conquests”:

Medeiros knew of a case much worse than that: a friend of his, Pinheiro, not the thin one but the other pock-marked one, had hidden in a pigsty for six hours.  He had nearly died!  And now, when he saw a pig, he turned as white as chalk.

Then, between Carvalho and Medeiros there was a whole string of anecdotes about infidelities.  Only Alves, a faithful married man, had none of these stories. (78)

The final twenty-five pages of the story accelerate.  Days and decades pass.  I wonder if this imbalanced structure is a clue to why Eça de Queirós abandoned the novel.  Perhaps he wrote a complete version of the story but never chose or figured out how to turn it into a novel.  Despite the presence, in the quotations above, of the pock-marked Pinheiro and the yellow damask sofa, the novel is less filled out, less thickly imagined, than the other Eça de Queirós novels I have read.  As a story, The Yellow Sofa is complete and satisfying, but it lacks the connective details that give a novel an extra level of artistic structure and meaning.

Still, however minor the book may be compared to The Maias, at the end, and also in the middle, and also near the beginning, I thought “This is the quality of stuff Eça de Queirós threw away!”

Some Brazilian Tales, useful and otherwise

A neat little discovery by mel u of The Reading Life: the 1921 Brazilian Tales, a pocket collection of six curious-to-good short stories.  The link goes to Google Books, where the PDF scan is available; mel has links to the Gutenberg version.  The book has three stories by the great Machado de Assis and three stories by writers new to me (these links go to mel's posts):

“The Vengeance of Felix” by José de Medeiros e Albuquerque, a rough tale of rough folk and rough revenge.
“The Pigeons” by Coelho Netto, terribly sad, a father’s angry response to the death of his child.
“Aunt Zeze’s Tears” by Carmen Dolores, also sad, in which an old maid gets her hopes up.

Hey, look at that, a woman writer!  You won’t find any of them on the lists I made for the Portuguese Challenge, because I did not know of any.

Netto’s story is about indigenous laborers; the Medeiros e Albuquerque story is about urban working class characters.  The description of the title character has a lot of energy:

Old Felix had followed his trade of digger in all the quarries that Rio de Janeiro possessed.  He was a sort of Hercules with huge limbs, but otherwise stupid as a post.  His companions had nicknamed him Hardhead because of his obstinate character. (opening lines)

I rarely emphasize the point, but these good post-Maupassant short stories have another use for me:  they fill in some more of the background of turn of the century Brazil.  What was life like there, what were people like?  This is fiction, so watch your step, but maybe something like what these writers show me.  For this purpose they are more useful than the stories of the more original writer, Machado de Assis.

“The Attendant’s Confession” is by the Machado de Assis I recognize, a cynical, dodging and weaving first-person story.  A murderous act of anger is rewarded.  The narrator is confessing to the murder, but why – and when?  Similarly, “The Fortune-Teller” is as much concerned with its own structure as the world outside the story.  And then there is “Life,” a hallucinatory dialogue between the Wandering Jew and Prometheus about the value of life and mankind which I did not really get, at least not until the punchline.

None of these Machado de Assis stories are in The Psychiatrist and Other Stories, the one collection I have read, but they may well be in The Devil’s Church and Other Stories or A Chapter of Hats: Selected Stories.  I am amazed that there are three collections of Machado de Assis stories in English.

A good find by mel – thanks for that.