Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass

by Lewis Carroll

(aka Charles Dodgson)

Photo by Владимир Васильев from Pexels

It’s no use pretending: Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and Through the looking glass are stories embedded in their time, place, and social class. In mid-nineteenth century Oxford, I’m sure Lewis Carroll and his academic colleagues went to afternoon teas. No doubt some of the tea-goers were mad as hatters, and some of the tea parties were endless. Presenting hookah smoking as a humorous and acceptable affectation of the worldly wise may have provoked giggles in 1865. Today we know smoking is downright dangerous, even for a caterpillar. We rightly forbid smoking characters wfrom appearing in contemporary children’s fiction, printed or filmed.

I was seventeen when I first read the Alice stories, 107 years after Wonderland was first published. In search of an antidote to boredom, I browsed my cousin’s haphazardly organised bookshelves, running my hand over dozens of spines. I can’t be sure at a distance of fifty years why I slid from its itinerant slot in her randomly serried ranks a volume containing Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and Through the looking glass. Perhaps any distraction would suffice from first year university study on the law of torts. Perhaps the volume’s brevity was its own outstanding recommendation. Memory’s story is that I smiled over the illustrations and it was those etched images that convinced me Alice’s adventures would be a good way to while the afternoon’s wintry tedium. Another recollection, also possibly awry, is of finishing the book before the day shuffled into evening shadows. Familiarity may have played a part: like most children of the 1950s and 1960s, I’d seen the Disney film.

Whatever the prompt to read the stories, they served a restorative purpose: that slow, gray Sunday afternoon of despond was captured by the advance of Carroll’s enchanting characters, his dextrous imagination, and his boundless whimsy. I have been enchanted ever since. Snippets from Alice’s adventures have taken up permanent residence in my mind, entering trains of thought unbid like pop-in friends. As I navigated passages through my vulnerabilities, the plenitude of absurdities in workplaces, personal errors great and small, I found I had company in Alice and the Cheshire Cat, the Mock Turtle and the White Knight, Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

For several years around the time I turned 30 I often reached for Carroll’s stories. I can’t say why exactly. Perhaps they corresponded with my time and place. Perhaps they were an antidote to consistently draining aspects of my world of work. Perhaps Alice and company began popping in more often during that time and I felt impelled to reconnect through the book. What is not perhapsing is that I have read the stories at least a dozen times since – once every two or three years I’d wager – along with many snippets read or recounted to many children.

Photo by Fraser, C J (1900), from State Library of Victoria

There is also no perhapsing in saying that at that time, at the beginning of my fourth decade, I realised, almost as an ache, how much I would have valued listening to or reading Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and Through the looking glass during my childhood and early adolescence. That awareness has led me to loan and lose many copies of the Alice stories. I have bought a cartload of copies to distribute to a throng of first-born children, deliberately infiltrating home libraries with grumpy Duchesses and Sheep who run retail outlets. I keenly hope for children to enjoy the freedom of imagining, and to imagine in safety – the freedom and safety that pervade the Alice stories line upon line upon line. It was that measure of freedom and safety I could not access as a child or adolescent, crumpled as my imagination was by the fierce anticipation of every school day’s further depletion of hope. I want to engender imagination that brings wings rather than nightsweats. Hope is the thing with feathers only when storms pass overnight and days are bright. Hope is easy, bedraggled prey in a tempest that blows all the years of childhood. I so wish Alice and company had been me with me then.

Winged imagination is not all unjessed pleasure of course. Alice’s imaginings are miscellaneously amusing, disorienting, frightening, sad, gentle, joyful. That diversity is much to the point. Imagination is a place to play with responses to life’s opportunities and threats, perplexities and farces. It is practice for living. The more practice you get, the better. How the diversity of imaginings is managed matters as much what must be managed. Imagination is a place for testing what works with different hows and whats. We all need to imagine and to know there is a secure return from imagination. For children the task is more enveloping: they need the time and security both to imagine and to learn the skills of imagining. At the end of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland, Alice wakes with a start from a courtroom drama in which she has just challenged the Queen of Hearts’ declaration that a sentence should precede the verdict, upon which the whole pack of cards fell upon Alice:

… she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face.

‘Wake up, Alice dear!’ said her sister. ‘Why that’s a long sleep you’ve had!’

‘Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!’ said Alice. And she told her sister, as well as she could remember them, all these strange Adventures of hers… and when she had finished, her sister kissed her and said, ‘It was a curious dream, dear, certainly, but now run in to your tea; it’s getting late.’ (pp.108-109)

Photo by Elina Sazonova, on Pexels

There is sanctity in the way Alice’s sister allows Alice’s imagination to run, and offers Alice arms to run to. Opening up the time and place for children to imagine with freedom and safety is an act of virtue. The encouragement to imagine is handed by relay from older to younger. Carroll recognises that, I think, in the last paragraph of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland when Alice’s sister

… pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman… and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days. (p. 111)

Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and Through the looking glass are embedded in their time and place in many ways, but that does not deter Alice from daring to judge the conventions of her time and place. Seemly children of the Victorian era were seen but not heard, and often there was an understanding they would be neither seen nor heard. Alice disputes this openly as she goes toe to toe with, say, Humpty Dumpty or the March Hare. Deference paid to the powerful also comes at too high a price for Alice; she is not convinced there is any sense in bowing before a king and queen like their subjects did:

Alice was rather doubtful whether she ought not lie down on her face like the three gardeners, but she could not remember ever having heard of such a rule at processions; ‘and besides, what would be the use of a procession,’ thought she, ‘if people had all to lie down on their faces, so that they couldn’t see it?’ So she stood where she was and waited. (p.68)

It is a truth that imagination insubordinately perturbs convention.

The Alice stories gift wrap excellent messages. Speak up for yourself and others. Be curious, always (but never offensively so). Take thoughtful risks to solve problems. Everyone is interesting and surprising. Absurdity abounds – you can live with it and fiddle with it. Be open to delight. Be kind. Rudeness is sometimes fair enough, as long as you know that’s what you’re doing. Take your time.

‘There’s no use trying,’ [Alice] said: ‘one ca’n’t believe impossible things.’

‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’ (p.175)

So yes, imagine impossible things too.

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‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’

In response to Alice’s question about which way to go from here, the Cheshire Cat observed with discerning composure, ‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to’ (p. 54). And so it does if you decide to investigate where writers, poets, illustrators, and readers have taken Alice and her entourage since Wonderland was published in 1865. There has been a wealth of wondering about what Wonderland could be like. Let me suggest a couple of well-wandered paths to follow, aware there is a festival of curiosities waiting you. My shortlist here is a partial demonstration of how Carroll’s tales of Alice have merged into Australian byways.

In the late 1950s Charles Blackman completed a series of paintings that animated his discovery of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland. Like me, Blackman was late was to discover Alice: he was 26 or 27 when his wife, Barbara, played him a recording of the book. He had no images to look at and so he conjured them. You can view thirty of his Alice works on Wikiart. 

In 1993 Alice’s adventures in Wonderland became Alitji in Dreamland / Alitjinya Ngura Tjukurmankuntjala – a reimagining of the familiar story in both English and Pitjantjatjara, a First Nations language spoken in Australia’s Central Desert region. Alitji was Nancy Shepherd’s inventive revision of the text, fabulously illustrated by Indigenous artist Donna Leslie. So fabulously illustrated was Alitji that Leslie won the 1993 Crichton Award for Children's Book Illustration, an award judged by the Children’s Book Council of Australia.

(A quick side-step beyond Australia’s Alice devotions: I recommend reading this overview of John Tenniel’s terrific woodblock illustrations for the original editions of both Wonderland and Looking glass. Vivid, eccentric, eye-fetching illustrations for a multitude of editions have extended the imaginative scaffolding of Carroll’s fantastical text.)

The State Library of Victoria (SLV), a Wunderkammer institution in itself, has an online research guide titled ‘Lewis Carroll and his “Alice” books’ which is a register of so much of what has happened for Alice across the world since 1865. The research guide offers a peek of Alice versions in the SLV’s collection. There’s also a brief blog post about a 2013 SLV exhibition of those volumes.

It depends a good deal on where you want to get to. Nowhere in particular might be a good destination for a Wonderland excursion – as long as you get somewhere, Alice might add.

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Alice’s adventures in wonderland was first published in 1865. Through the looking glass was brought to book in 1872.

For this post I have referred to the Penguin English Library’s edition, 2012, which includes both books (though for reasons unknown carries only one title on the cover; that of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland).

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Marcovaldo

by Italo Calvino

With gratitude to William Weaver whose translation gifted me Calvino’s stories.

Agrigento: Photo by Casey Lovegrove on Unsplash

Italo Calvino is one of three authors who score more than one entry in my long list of books that moved me. When I get to Virginia Woolf I might put three on the list, but alphabetically speaking that’s a long way off. Let me share the giddy seriousness of this second Calvino joy.

The eponymous protagonist of Marcovaldo is a serially disappointed proletarian paladin. In the writerly hands of Italo Calvino, Marcovaldo is guided into, and rarely through, eternal bemusement and poignant disappointment. In these stories Calvino pulls down the fairytale engine and rebuilds it with innovative twists that leave Marcovaldo without public accolade or recognised personal triumph.

But let’s acknowledge before setting fire to new paragraphs that Marcovaldo is well-protected by irrepressible springs of optimism and persistence. He grasps opportunities, though they slip and break. He savours fleeting delights, even as they quickly sour. It really is a matter of time. Marcovaldo, his wife Domitilla, and their four children, live in squalid, crowded, rented rooms – sometimes attics, sometimes basements – in the middle of an Italian city’s protracted revival from the shatterings of the Second World War. Under victory’s pall Marcovaldo left the rural world known to his ancestors, and hence to him, by rote; his future is, can only be, in a city, any city. And so he lives and works in the city. Yet he never comes to an understanding with it, though he steps up to meet every Calvinist twist he encounters.

The city’s rhythms wrongfoot him. He falls often.

This Marcovaldo possessed an eye ill-suited to city life: billboards, traffic lights, shop windows, neon signs, posters, no matter how carefully devised to catch the attention, never arrested his gaze. Which might have been running over the desert sands. Instead, he would never miss a leaf yellowing on a branch, a feather trapped by a roof-tile; there was no horse-fly on a horse’s back, no worm-hole in a plank, or fig-peel squashed on the sidewalk that Marcovaldo didn’t remark and ponder over, discovering the changes of season, the yearnings of his heart, and the woes of his existence. (From ‘Mushrooms in the city,’ the first story in Marcovaldo, p.1.)

Photo by chisato tanaka on flickr

Calvino and Marcovaldo share line of sight on post-war Italy. What they see is hard. Poverty is a fair price for industrialisation. Work’s utility is confined to economic value. Consumption is substituted for community. To have is to be.

Photo by G.J. Coles & Co., photographer, from State Library of Victoria collection

At six in the evening the city fell into the hands of the consumers. All during the day the big occupation of the productive public was to produce: they produced consumer goods. At a certain hour, as if a switch had been thrown, they stopped production, and, away!, they were all off, to consume. (From ‘Marcovaldo at the supermarket,’ the sixteenth story in Marcovaldo, p.84.)

This is not the recovered Italy Calvino had hoped for when at age 20 he joined the Italian Resistance. Whether as a means of securing his hopes, or as a means of salvaging them, Calvino was an active member of the Italian Communist Party for a decade after the war, until the USSR’s 1956 invasion of Hungary turned him away from direct political activism. He turned more diligently to indirect literary activism: through Marcovaldo he carried on without demagoguery or sermonising. He offered stories, not dialectic. Marcovaldo is an exemplar of Calvino’s own self-reflection that ‘[t]he conflict between the world’s choices and man’s obsession with making sense of them is a recurrent pattern in what I’ve written.’[1]

There are recurrent patterns, but there is no recurrent formula. Marcovaldo is a collection of twenty folktales Calvino wrote progressively from the early 1950s until the mid-1960s. It’s no surprise he dreamed up folktales during this period: in 1954 the Einaudi publishing house in Turin, for which Calvino worked, commissioned him to research and then write Fiabe italiane (Italian folktales), published in 1956.[2] He understood folkloric structure, and how its architecture animated moral suasion:

If we take a close look at fairy stories, we find that they present two types of social transformation… in the second type there is a young man impoverished from birth, a shepherd or a peasant, and maybe simple-minded into the bargain, who by his own courage or with the help of magic powers succeeds in marrying the princess and becoming king.[3]

Calvino tweaks the familiar folktale structure, such that Marcovaldo never succeeds to the throne. Why he does not succeed is left for the reader to weigh. There are clues, and tugs to attention. Clearly Marcovaldo does not know the rules of the city, of this post-war, urban economy. His heart, his know-what, his know-how, are aligned to seasons beyond city limits. One morning he is woken by what, to his ear, can only be a herd of cows clambering along asphalted streets. Marcovaldo jumps to the thrill of it. He runs to watch them. In truth, his instincts are akin to theirs:

Photo by motiseid on flickr

Cautiously extending their hoofs from the step at the intersections, their muzzles never betraying a jolt of curiosity, pressed against the loins of those ahead of them, the cows brought with them the odor of dung, wild flowers, milk and the languid sound of their bells, and the city seemed not to touch them, already absorbed as they were into their world of damp meadows, mountain mists and the fords of streams. (From ‘A journey with the cows,’ the tenth story in Marcovaldo, pp.46-47.)

Over the ten-year period during which they were written, two changes in the interiors of these stories caught my notice. First, Marcovaldo graduates from walking everywhere to riding a Vespa. I am glad for him. Second, false promises of economic fairness are presented with slicker puff and cant. In one of the later stories, Marcovaldo and his family visit a self-service supermarket. They have no spare cash to spend there. For them it is an exhibition. They can look at what they want and see who they want to be. On entering the supermarket, Marcovaldo takes a trolley, as does Domitilla, as do each of the children. Despite instructing the children not to put anything in their carts, for fear of having to pay, Marcovaldo cannot stop himself. After making his own selectively acquisitive way through the store he steers to a halt where his wife and children gather. His trolley is filled with merchandise. As are theirs. They have become willing participants in, rather than disenfranchised onlookers of, a bonding experience made possible by wiles and aisles of consumerism. Architect Peter Corrigan renders this economic space like so:

We recognise ‘people like us’ through the fact that they consume the same sorts of things the same sorts of ways as we do… Our similar consuming practices allow us to recognise and communicate with our ‘own kind’.[4]

Marcovaldo’s ambitions are winnowed to this: to consume in a manner that betokens his preferred place in community. What matters is not social exchange but the exchange of money for signifying goods. This is a tough call for Marcovaldo because the cultural and practical metiers he is attuned to are in another place, another time. He understands their value, and he has a loose appreciation of how they might be turned to productive use, even entrepreneurial use. in the city. But he can’t get the tweaks right enough. He is trapped.

Lurking unresolved at the tail of the stories is who is accountable for the economic and social constructs that trap Marcovaldo. Calvino leaves moral reckonings to his readers. We are encouraged to make judgements, but we are not made to judge, nor left to judge in despond. In every story there are sentences and plotlines to laugh through. Marcovaldo offers fantasy and folly, silly decisions, rueful endings. Calvino makes me read with a furrowed brow and an affectionate smile for the hero and his family:

I hope to have shown that there is such a thing as a lightness of thoughtfulness, just as we all know there is a lightness of frivolity. In fact, thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.[5]

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[1] William Weaver and Damien Pettigrew, ‘Italo Calvino, The Art of Fiction No. 130,’ The Paris Review, Issue 124, Fall 1992.

[2] ‘Italo Calvino,’ Wikipedia.

[3] Italo Calvino, ‘The Odyssey within Odysseys’, The Literature Machine, Vintage Classics, 1986, p.139.

[4] Peter Corrigan, ‘The elementary forms of the consumerist life: A sociological perspective.’ In Urban consumption, edited by Peter Newton, CSIRO Publishing, 2011, p.79.

[5] Italo Calvino, ‘Lightness’, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Penguin Modern Classics, 2009, p.10.

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This story collection was published in 1963 as Marcovaldo ovvero Le stagioni in città (Marcovaldo, or The Seasons in the City).

I am reading from William Weaver’s translation for (I think) the first English publication of the stories by Secker and Warburg in 1983.

The collection is available today in a Vintage Classics edition.

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller

by Italo Calvino

With thanks to William Weaver whose translation enabled me to read Calvino’s wonderful work.

Let’s play a writing and reading game. I’ll write, says Calvino. You read. We’ll check in with each other from time to time to see how it’s going. While I, Calvino, ask you to observe the rules in every paragraph, it is freely acknowledged this game is a set up: if You read If on a winter’s night a traveller please note that You are both the novel’s Reader and its main character. Yes You, dear Reader, are the personaggio through whom our story progresses by turn of page and twist of plot.

It is an intriguing game Calvino plays with us, and especially with You who compasses the novel’s lines with determination and doubt. You have the gleeful and perplexing task of mustering sense and senses from diverting encounters (or chapters if You will) in this engrossing 254-page novel of detours. Calvino wins the race as do You, dear Reader.

Calvino explains who You are in the middle of the novel, once again inflecting the rules by drawing attention to himself as author, and to You as Reader and as Protagonist. ‘This book,’ Calvino writes (p.137),

so far has been careful to leave open to the Reader who is reading the possibility of identifying himself with the Reader who is read: this is why he was not given a name, which would automatically have made him the equivalent of a Third Person, of a character… and so he has been kept a pronoun, in the abstract condition of pronouns, suitable for any attribute and any action.

That’s why You, dear Reader and Protagonist, are both ready and unready for anything in this novel. Despite knowing nothing as Protagonist, as a well-practiced Reader you adeptly shift the shapes in this peculiar game, enabling Calvino to perform his vital understandings of how stories work, and how to write stories. He delights in sharing this know-how which strikes me as remarkable in two ways. First, he calls very direct attention to how the writing works on You, the Reader, passage by revealing passage. Second, he reveals, gleefully and fluently, an uncanny ability to write in diverse genres. Reflecting in these genre mirrors, one after the other in one novel, illuminates for me how similar the genres are in purpose, though different in design.

Photo by Cyrus Crossan on Unsplash

If on a winter’s night a traveller offers us the first chapters of ten different novels, written in genres ranging from Arabian nights folk tales to a courtly love story translated from Japanese. Let me pluck two sentences (p.219) in magic realism mode to illustrate:

The old man raised his red eyelids, gnarled as a turkey’s. One finger – a finger as thin as the twigs they use to light the fire – emerged from beneath the poncho and pointed toward the palace of the Alvarado family, the only palace in that heap of clotted mud that is the village of Oquedal: a baroque façade that seems to have happened there by mistake, like a piece of scenery in an abandoned theatre.

One way of looking at If on a winter’s night a traveller is that a novel and ten short stories are offered in just 254 pages, and for good measure You fall in love. Calvino manages this compendious feat through an imaginative structure which he shared with a friend at the beginning of 1978, while he was writing the novel:

… the protagonist is the reader, addressed in the second person, and the reader is trying to read a novel which enthuses him but his reading is always interrupted for some reason or another and when he goes back to his reading he finds another novel which engages him even more, and the book contains N beginnings of novels (maybe 12 or 10) representing so many types of novel styles or rather ways in which novels are read. It will also include reflections on reading... [1] 

It might all seem elliptically, didactically, opaquely, self-referentially postmodernist – rattling around the empty caverns of Theory. It isn’t any of that. You know from get-go that the novel is about reading and writing stories. You become more familiar with Yourself as the attentive Reader (though You may be surprised by what you haven’t previously noticed about who You are). If on a winter’s night a traveller is abundantly funny and ironic. There is no dreary postmodernist navel-gazing. Indeed, he cautions us about linking celebrity, wisdom and authorship with reference to ‘that anachronistic personage, the bearer of messages, the director of consciences, the giver of lectures to cultural bodies.’ [2]

The fun is everywhere. If on a winter’s night a traveller takes You to the university with Ludmilla. (It is Ludmilla, a student at the university, with whom you have fallen in love). Together you intend to consult scholars about the provenance of what You are reading. Instead of the generously open-minded, intelligent space You anticipated, You find Yourself harried in the corridors, crimped into a mean academic rabbit warren. You witness a take-no-prisoners argument, that no one can win, about who has cultural rights over the work of fiction You are reading (or trying to read). In a corridor Ludmilla chances across a fellow student, Lotaria, with whom she opens discussion on one of the novels You and Ludmilla started to read. Ludmilla is delighted to learn that Lotaria has also come upon the very same work. ‘Leaning from the steep slope,’ Ludmilla enthuses on page 71 , ‘the unfinished novel of Ukko Ahti, the Cimmerian writer!’ Lotaria perfunctorily demurs from Ludmilla’s attribution of authorship.

‘You are misinformed, Ludmilla. That is the novel, but it isn’t unfinished, and it isn’t written in Cimmerian but in Cimbrian; the title was later changed to Without fear of wind or vertigo, and the author signed it with a different pseudonym, Vorts Viljandi.’

‘It’s a fake!’ Professor Uzzi-Tuzii cries. ‘It’s a well-known case of forgery! The material is apocryphal, disseminated by the Cimbrian nationalists during the anti-Cimmerian propaganda campaign at the end of the First World War!’

Calvino does not try to fix this political mess of his own creation. He seems unfazed by obstacles to resolving authorial messes. On the inside of If on a winter’s night a traveller, an author (speaking on Calvino’s playful behalf) advises leaving messes for later:

If I think I must write one book, all the problems of how this book should be and how it should not be block me and keep me from going forward. If, on the contrary, I think I am writing a whole library, I feel suddenly lightened: I know that whatever I write will be integrated, contradicted, balanced, amplified, buried by the hundreds of volumes that remain for me to write. (p. 177)

You might perhaps write ten stories and a novel at the same time.

Book keepers are among the personas of readers played with during If on a winter’s night a traveller. Consider the bloodrush some readers feel when they cross into shelfed aisles via a bookshop door. While browsing therein, blood is surreptitiously let by the sucking truth that they must not buy another book. Calvino reminds them, reminds us all, in declarative capital letters that already on the shelves at home slumber ‘the Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now Time To Reread and The Books You’ve Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It’s Time to Really Sit Down And Read Them’ (p.6).

Photo by Ying Ge on Unsplash

I recognise the sadness that saps Mr Cavedagna, a long-suffering editor whom Mr Calvino arranges for Ludmilla and You to meet. Mr Cavedagna works at the publishing house where the star-crossed readers go in an attempt to defuse their exasperations with the disconnected parade of books they have started, at Mr Calvino’s invitation, but cannot finish, due to Mr Calvino’s distractions. Mr Cavedagna reminds us about books we have long planned to read; but reading plans rely on plots that do not hold for a lifetime, or a long time, or even a month. ‘I keep thinking,’ says Mr Cavedagna,

that when I retire I’ll go back to my village and take up reading again, as before. Every now and then I set a book aside, I’ll read this when I retire, I tell myself, but then I think that it won’t be the same thing anymore. (p.94)

A book finished is never the book begun. Everything is liminal, in-between, known and unknown, seen and unforeseen. Alexander Lee offers a good insight into why Calvino wrote stories as he did. Lee suggests that after the Second World War (in which Calvino fought with the Italian Resistance, in the ranks of the Communist aligned Garibaldi Brigades), deep pessimism infected Italy’s literary and philosophy communities. For some, no words could cogently represent collective experience; a writer could enlist only personal, introverted experience. Some thought of language as all we have. Others thought language was meaningless, conveying nothing of the real world. In Lee’s eye, Calvino cast off the pessimism and

… came to feel that it was his duty to try bridging the gap, no matter how difficult or implausible it might be. The key, he realised, lay in the uncertainty — or rather, its ubiquity… he saw that the unreliability of our perceptions is what unites us — not the objects of our experiences. So, if his writing was to speak to his readers, he would have to take this uncertainty as his subject.[3]

Earlier I mentioned Calvino’s whimsical slight about linking celebrity, wisdom and authorship. I do not throw that caution to the night, but I am comfortable in asserting that Calvino is a mage on the page. He turns familiar ways of telling into the spell of If on a winter’s night a traveller. It is a joy to be his dear Reader during this fabulous writing and reading masterclass. He wastes no words. The fun starts with the novel’s first sentences:

Transferred from it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Italo-Calvino.jpg; transfer was stated to be made by User:Daehan.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.

Let the fun, the game, begin.

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[1] From pp. 482-483 of Italo Calvino: Letters – 1941-85, edited by Michael Wood, translated by Martin McLaughlin, and published in 2013 by Princeton University Press. (Reading If on a winter’s night a traveller prompted me to find out more about Calvino. I rarely read authors’ biographies; I prefer their stories to their story. But Calvino beckoned me and I have since tracked down a fund of essays, lectures, and letters.)

[2] The literature machine, Italo Calvino, translated by Patrick Creagh, Vintage Classics, 1997, p. 16.

[3] Alexander Lee. 2023. ‘The infinite delight of Italo Calvino.’ Engelsberg Ideas.

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Calvino’s novel was published in Italy in 1980 as Se una note d’inverno un viaggiatore.

In 1983 it graced English as If on a winter’s night a traveller.

In this post I refer to Penguin’s Everyman edition, translated by William Weaver.

Eucalyptus

by Murray Bail

Gum trees in the early Morning mist at Sheepyard flat – John Englart: https://www.flickr.com/photos/takver/6127021798/

A certain Mr Holland came into a large grazing property in western New South Wales. His coming in was a matter of chance. Holland had made a deliberate bet against the odds, taking out an insurance policy against his wife giving birth to twins. Transforming the riches with which unreliable emotions surround us into reliable terms of mathematics and science is a transactional alchemy to which Holland cleaves despite all signs it is not worth a wizard’s spent wand. True, the odds were beaten. Twins there were. Yet one died and their mother pined her way in loss to an early death.

E. quarenda, via Euclid

Eucalyptus merits a place among the books that have moved me most because it so often wafts into my mind. My recollections are as much of the story and its telling, as about the aroma of a eucalypt stand, the taste of eucalypt oil in the air, the thud of boots on a farmhouse verandah. Eucalyptus is a sensation. Eucalyptus quarenda – a tree that is searched for, one that is desired. Enough now. What of the surviving family members?

Holland and the surviving twin, Ellen, came into the grand property through the gate opened by the insurance company payout. While Ellen grows into her childhood and through her teenage years, Holland studiously, furiously curates his newfound land as an eucalyptus arboretum, planting it with every gum tree known to stand within Australia’s extensive bounds. There’s a low patch of mallee hither, an imperious cluster of alpine gums on yon rise, and:

E. syderoxylon, via Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre

Parallel to one side of the house, he planted 110 seedlings in scientific formation. Chosen were species renowned as windbreaks: the fast-growing Steadman’s Gum, and the Mugga Ironbark – its specific name E. sideroxylon points more to the blast furnace than to pretty flowers and leaves. In the midst of this elongated geometry Holland placed an intruder, a single Grey Ironbark. Only many years later would it begin to be visible, with consequences for Ellen almost too horrible to bear. (p.39)

Bail maintains across his unhurried pages the telling ring of fairytale. There is magic, but it is incidental and, in each case, entirely possible. Unlike Grimm fairytales, there is no menace or mendacity. The people at the heart of Eucalyptus deal fairly, honestly, and respectfully with each other. They do nothing that deliberately or inadvertently summons surprise. Predictably it is chance that unsettles certainties. It is gently welling desire that proves disorderly and disruptive. Fairytales leave us not with fairies but with flinty observations about what works and what does not. The morals of the story. You can collect a pocketful of flints from a slow wander through Eucalyptus. The sharpest of them are that you can’t plan a life; that it is best to follow your heart; and that imagination and logic can both furnish useful answers, but imagination is the better tool for fashioning wellbeing and happiness. Holland does not ascribe to these morals.

Eucalyptus is a love story. Holland is wary of love. Its untidy mix of personal affection and physical attraction is a threat to his beautiful daughter. And to be fair, it is Ellen’s beauty that has attracted local and national notoriety, not her character.

Venwardo @sukmavenwardo

‘Beware,’ Holland told his daughter, ‘beware of any man who deliberately tells a story. You’re going to come across men like that… it’s worth asking, when a man starts concocting a story in front of you. Why is he telling it? What does he want?’ (p.53)

To protect his daughter from lascivious suitors, Holland devises a plan. Ellen will marry the first man who can name, on sight and without error, every eucalypt planted on the property. To Holland, it seems, sedulously applying Linnaean conventions bestows libido antibodies. Fifteen-year-old Ellen accepts her father’s plan with apparent diffidence. Marriage is for later, and anyway, is someone really likely to list her father’s trees with such adept accuracy?

It is later, after the challenge is launched, and a eucalyptically talented suitor is ready to claim his prize, that Ellen is felled by lassitude and filled with doubt. Mr Cave, her suitor, wearied her, and she hardly knew him. He seemed not to know the art and soul of the Grey Ironbark, E. paniculata, which arranges its flowers randomly, beautifully. Mr Cave could not, it seems, divine any narrative that explained this discomposed spray efflorescing among her father’s meticulously catalogued timbers. He waned her energy.

She wondered if it was her own tiredness which made her father just then look… not exactly elderly, decidedly worn and settled. His ears had grown larger. And bits of his chin missed while shaving suggested somehow a lack of judgement in all other things. (p.164)

Ellen slowly, surely fell in love with another suitor who at first sight surely, categorically fell in love with her. A man who inexplicably turned up time and again among the gums as Ellen wandered the property. He did not follow the strict rules of the challenge, but he is as knowledgeable as any about the taxonomy of eucalypts. In their early acquaintance, Ellen thought this reticently passionate young man was like all the others who could not see the eucalypts for the forest:

Anyone who entered the world of eucalypts came out narrowed and reduced, was her opinion. And now this one standing beside her, pulling off a leaf, he was surely another one. Although he didn’t exactly come out with the special name, the Narrow-leafed Mallee (E. foecunda) he seemed to know, for he glanced at it and cleared his throat. (p119)

Eucalyptus foecunda, from the Latin foecundus, fecund; via Euclid

And so they grew towards each other. Not least because,

His roundabout way of telling one story after another depended on imagination, and a breadth of experience, and meant he was spending hours with her and her alone, revealing a little of himself at a time – only to disappear whenever he felt like it, sometimes with just a brief wave. To be then left surrounded by nothing but grey trunks, and a near absence of anything stirring, added a scratchy, unsatisfied quality to the silence. (p.159)

His stories were carefully arranged bouquets given with deepening tenderness, attentiveness, love. His stories were mostly about ‘women who followed the idea of hope. It seemed to be their greatest obedience. These women, one by one, moved about with a form of lightness, and obeyed their ideas of truth to feelings.’ Each story finds its spark in the scientific or common name of the gum tree under which they met. The name serves imagination, or helps illuminate its moral. Ellen comes to know more of herself through her suitor’s stories. She begins to imagine her futures. Her admirer in the woods is moved by the Ellen that is and will be. He is smitten by her beauty. They are both charmed by physical closeness and the possibilities of sexual and emotional intimacy. Being smitten and charmed seems to both of them more grounded in lived reality than choosing a lover by applying the principles of logic.

‘It’s a mystery how an attraction can spring up in one person for another. Who can say why? It should be amazing, except it happens all the time… It can’t be explained, a real mystery. There’s no logic to it.’ (p.190)

There is a logic to it, of course, embedded in the sciences of evolution, of biology, of psychology; the logic of assortative mating and mates, cooperation and competition, survival, personal history. That logic does not illuminate the love that blossoms just between us, we two, and just us alone. Ellen is aware that Mr Cave, the man who matches her father’s challenge, has a good heart. She knows too that his gentility is not sufficient to conjure love. He is a match, but not a mate. ‘All Mr Cave could offer,’ she observes to herself, ‘was patience, which is a variety of kindness.’ Admirable and comforting, but not enough for Ellen. The winning suit is worn lightly by a man who also matched the challenge but wanted to story it rather than stow it away. In the beginning, and not the end, what must be in evidence is intimacy and companionship well-tailored to a well-suited couple ready and willing to journey together:

A story never ends, she could see. In any life, the neat finish cannot be. It is only the beginning. (p.107)

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Eucalyptus was first published in 1998 by Text Publishing, based in Melbourne, Australia. That’s the edition I read again.

Text’s promo page for Eucalyptus is here.

Eyewitness

by Seno Gumira Adjidarma

Eyewitness is an anthology of sixteen stories. I thank Jan Lingard and John H McGlynn whose translations have enabled me to read Adjidarma’s wonderful stories.

Premediated violence is always uncomfortable to read about. In novels the flinch it provokes in me is usually eased, at least a little, because intentional violence occurs as an episode in a wider narrative. As a reader I get some relief. Not in Eyewitness. There are sixteen stories in just 95 pages, and there is no respite. Brutality and its aftermath are ever present. Paragraph upon paragraph smites with a purposeful clout almost powerful enough to deflect my eyes from the page, except the narrative holds my disturbed line of sight.

Some background

Scartol, via Wikimedia Commons

Seno Adjidarma offers some background in an introduction (which mysteriously for an introduction appears after the final story in Eyewitness). A bare bones account goes like this. In November 1991 about 2500 people attended a funeral service for an East Timorese pro-independence activist assassinated by Indonesian forces. Activists among the mourners unfurled the flag of FRETILIN, the guerrilla force that had long pursued independence and had freed the colony from Portugal in 1975. Unfurling the flag in 1991 was enough to trip the triggers of watching Indonesian troops: more than 250 people were gunned down in and around Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, now the capital of Timor-Leste. One in ten mourners dead.

Australia’s relationship with Indonesia is an enduring interest of mine, as is the social, cultural and historical mosaic that is the extraordinary archipelago of what has come to be Indonesia. The Santa Cruz murders bit hard into my sense of amiability with Indonesia. The wound broke time and again as killings and horrors were incessantly visited on the people of East Timor over the following decade. Despite the shocking intimidation of Indonesia’s armed forces, and the militias to which they gave a free hand for terror, the East Timorese pressed their case for independence throughout the 1990s.

The crescendo of Indonesian sponsored violence swelled in the weeks before 30 August 1999, the date set for an independence referendum organised and overseen by the United Nations. The Indonesian government and its agents persistently and aggressively sought to undermine the will of the population and the credibility of the referendum. Nonetheless, four in five East Timorese voted for independence. Retribution came swiftly, overnight and during the first weeks of September. Indonesia’s agents upscaled their aggression. They killed and injured thousands. They relocated East Timorese over the provincial border to West Timor and held them there in camps. They destroyed East Timor’s infrastructure. They wrecked and burned family homes. The retribution was yoked to fear. Some in Indonesia’s elite, it seems, feared East Timor’s exit from the unitary state of Indonesia would give independence activists in the provinces of Aceh and West Irian cause to believe they too could successfully pursue statehood.

Good won out and Timor Leste became itself. Australia contributed, messily but eventually. It was a long ‘eventually’ given Australia’s egregious decision to support incorporation of East Timor into Indonesia once Portugal was sent packing in 1975. Soon after the violence in 1999, the Australian government made some hubristic propositions to the Indonesian government, straight out of a colonial mindset, about holding a referendum like France was doing in New Caledonia. (I kid you not.) So messily, and evenutally, in mid-September 1999 Australia was nominated lead nation in the United Nations’ International Force East Timor (InterFET) which called on personnel and defence assets from Australia, Canada, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Thailand, and the USA. A few days after InterFET was formed I joined a protest outside Victoria’s Parliament House in Spring Street, Melbourne. I was surprised, and heartened, to find another 30,000 people had the passion and time to be there. The protestors sought more than UN peacekeeping: they wanted Indonesia’s intolerable behaviour held to moral account, and prodded our government to pursue justice.

Image via Takver

Unsurprisingly, Australia and Indonesia took some years to return to the same page, diplomatically and geopolitically. It took me some time to rebuild my confidence in the prospect for a settled Indonesian state. It seemed the long years of Suharto’s dictatorship – a generation of years, from 1967 to 1998 – may have ingrained in state agencies habits of repression that might take a generation to displace. I have returned to a place of confidence about Indonesia’s future and about the relationship between Indonesia and Australia. That’s optimism holds notwithstanding Australia’s cackhanded inability during the last decade to put see the world from a regional perspective, the lack of dash during Yudhoyono’s presidency, and Jokowi’s dismissive vacillations over democratic principles and human rights protections. As to the future of those nations’ relationships with East Timor, my optimism is less willing, more qualified. Indonesia deliberately inflicted unforgivable anguish on the East Timorese, as Adjidarma records in the Eyewitness stories. Australia betrayed the new nation with an unprincipled capture of financial flows, via a dodgy 2006 treaty, that gave Australian resource companies the lion’s share of more than AU$40 billion of oil and gas deposits. It was a steal and East Timor rightly exited the treaty in 2017.

Back to Adjidarma’s stories

After the Santa Cruz massacre in 1991, Indonesia’s government faced withering international criticism. The government’s attempts to manage the fallout included increasing pressure on private media outlets to avoid bad news from East Timor. Adjidarma was a casualty of this assault on truth: he and several colleagues were removed from the editorial team of Jakarta-Jakarta magazine which had run a story about the funeral, the protest, and the shooting. What is a journalist to do in these circumstances? Adjidarma’s answer is simple and brave: ‘When journalism is gagged, literature must speak.’ So a muffled Adjidarma wrote stories, and those in Eyewitness speak loudly. They disclose silent soliloquies and snatched dialogues that fill the hearts, minds and voices of those who cannot run free. Maria waits, day upon long day, for her missing son to come home:

She prayed and dreamed that her missing son, Antonio, would return to her. When he returned … she wouldn’t ask him to tell about the blood and tears. Sad stories like that were no longer interesting because they’d become part of everyday life. Maria didn’t want to hear any more about feelings of being oppressed, despised and humiliated. Those feelings had for too long only given rise to resistance … which was always paid for with pain and lives. Oh, how great was the price that had to be paid so that they could walk with their heads held high.

- From the fourth story in the anthology, ‘Maria,’ p. 19

Many stories in the collection, like Eyewitness itself, are wrapped in magical realist madness. Others, says Adjidarma, faithfully record real events conveyed to him by East Timorese, like the story Manuel in which empathy is a double agent. Adjidarma reports to us through these stories of violence as a form of degraded performance. Violence is not always serious business. Soldiers had laughed and larked about as they ineptly balance Rosalina’s head on the fence to better attract her father’s attention. Other villagers were the first to see the cause of their mufffled amusement:

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Nothing Ahead via Pexels

‘It’s Rosalina.’

‘My God, Rosalina!’

Now two pairs of frightened eyes stared through the darkness.

‘Rosalina… Why did they kill Rosalina?’

‘Why did they cut off her head?’

‘And stick [it] on the fence of her father’s house?’

- From the anthology’s penultimate story, ‘The Head on Da Silva’s Fence,’ p. 82

Political violence is sometimes inept on its own terms. In The mute’s soliloquy,¹ Pramoedya Ananta Toer wrote about Sugeng, the first person he knew to die on Indonesia’s Buru island where they were both exiled political prisoners. Toer recalls Sugeng was ‘[c]onsummately polite and forever easygoing,’ and ‘carried on his shoulders a wealth of experiences valuable to mankind. Yet he was tortured to death.’ Toer then poses a plain question: ‘Strange isn’t it, in this day and age, to think of torture as a form of persuasion?’ It’s a question that might flicker behind the lines of ‘Electricity,’ one of Adjidarma’s stories. The interrogator stops flicking the switch that sends electric shocks through his prisoner’s armpits only because it is time for a break:

Januario convulsed with pain. With each question, he was given an electric shock that made his body thrash about like a fish in a basket.

The clock struck twelve. Moonlight shone brightly through the bars.

‘Wakijan!’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Clear up in here and tell someone to rustle up some food. None of us have had anything to eat for a while.’

- From the anthology’s seventh story, ‘Electricity’, p. 36

Every East Timorese can list relatives lost to violent incidents they know will continue to play in their homes and villages, fields and cemeteries, sometimes as set pieces, sometimes as improvisations on brutal themes. They do not forget their tortured, lost, disappeared, murdered loved ones. Memories accumulate. They rapidly outnumber fatalities. They are more solid than headstones, more substantial than vanished faces. They are vivid, alive, immediate, wistful, sorrowful. Soulfull.

I counted everyone in the house. There were seven occupants.

‘So there are seven of you altogether, are there lady?’

‘There’s really eight of us.’

‘I see. One of you died, is that right?’

‘No, he’s not dead. He was actually killed. But he’s not dead yet.’

‘Where is he?’

‘He’s here with us.’

- From the ninth story, ‘The mystery of the town of Ningi (or the invisible

Christmas),’ p. 47.)

Photo by Mariana Montrazi

The stories in Eyewitness, first published between 1992 and 1997, put on trial stage-managed, punch-card, business-as-usual violence. They are stories about East Timor. Their protagonists are East Timorese. Their realities are universal, not limited by their historical genesis. In his introduction (p.120), Adjidarma writes of his stories:

The context of their birth which I note here will neither enhance nor detract from their worth as short stories. What I mean is, these stories don’t need to be connected to the Dili incident – they are open to be read just as stories, if in fact anyone wants to.

In my edition of Eyewitness there are occasional errors in the text that fumble meanings, and a few that are simply annoying distractions. But these errors are of little consequence in an anthology that throws telling sentences at the blunt force of laisse-faire violence. Eyewitness is a testament to a people whose original sin is to grow their own apple tree, to cultivate their own Eden, rather than eat from blighted trees planted by colonial and post-colonial invaders. The stories depict harsh truths about how paradise was won.

I regard history teachers with reverence (perhaps because for a short while I was one of them!). My reverence is contingent on their determination to reflect on what actually happened. When they do they give us the wondrous ability to faithfully recall events we did not observe, to search in the shadows for why. History teachers can offer young people guidance in grasping what led to them being right here, right now. Alfonso was a history teacher. Sometimes he took his primary schoolers to the cemetery in Dili:

Alfonso had learnt for very many years that their hopes rested on the children, but he realised those hopes could only become reality if the children could understand history… The fact was that it wasn’t all that easy to reach an understanding of the meaning of spraying bullets.

- From the collection’s eighth story, ‘The history lesson,’ p. 43

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Emile Victor via Flickr

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Nomad Tales via flickr

Eyewitness was published in 2015 by The Lontar Foundation. ‘Eyewitness’ is the anthology’s title story, first published in 1992.

The Lontar Foundation describes itself as ‘an independent, not-for-profit organization based in Jakarta, Indonesia, promoting Indonesian literature and culture through the translation of its literary works.’

You can read more about Lontar, and sift through its publication lists, here.

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1 The mute’s soliloquy, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, translated by Willem Samuels. Another example of the work of The Lontar Foundation which cooperated with Hasta Mitra to publish Toer’s book. The passages quoted in the post are on page 66.

The House of the Mosque

by Kadir Abdolah

With thanks to Susan Masotty whose translation enabled me to read Abdolah’s wonderful work.

The House of the Mosque heralds the triumph of generosity, gentleness and decency which persists despite intense encounters with dismissive savagery, institutional deception, and the discordant mayhem of public protest. Faithfully, courteously Kadir Abdolah calls us to praise Aqa Jaan and Fakhri Sadat, the couple who tend the hearth of the 800-year-old house of the mosque, a stone’s throw from the central bazaar in Senejan, a city in Iran’s mid-west.

Mostafa Meraji

Abdolah charts the demise of the house and the mosque, from civic prominence to marginal relevance, during the years before, and the early years of, Iran’s 1979 revolution. I don’t know if Abdolah adhered to an historically accurate selection and description of events and forces leading to the Shah’s fall and Khomeini’s rise. I suspect he is as loose about details as he needs to be for his story to ring true in the realms of sense and sensation. I’m not moved to research the revolution’s arc so I can judge the storyline’s serialisation of incidents and accidents. I am rarely engaged by historical fiction straight-jacketed by the ties of ‘one damned thing after another.’ The House of the Mosque is not that kind of historical novel.

Abdolah writes about how people feel as they are forced to trade one mix of good and bad for another, how their feelings ravel and unravel over time, how their feelings shed light and shadow on their shared lives. He recounts grim purposes behind the shenanigans and ineptitudes of the Shah’s state apparatus, and the attempts of the Ayatollah’s bludgeoning theocracy to hollow the Iranian soul. He recounts these life and death absurdities in ways that clear spaces for reflecting on the emotional logic of kindness, especially under duress. Abdolah presents us with a panorama showing how familiar patterns of family, community, and social interactions and hierarchies, accreted and cemented over decades and centuries, swiftly lose definition.

Then the threads are gathered up by knowing hands and woven again into known tesselations. This act of retrieval is always to be expected, whether the preceding disruption flows from theological or ideological zealotry. George Eliot reproached one Dr Cummings for his outrageous casuistry in the chauvinistic service of evangelical Protestantism. In the midst of a scathing demolition job, she wrote:

Fatally powerful as religious systems have been, human nature is stronger and wiser than religious systems, and though dogmas may hamper, they cannot absolutely repress its growth: build walls round the living tree as you will, the bricks and mortar have by and by to give way before the slow and sure operation of the sap.[1]

- George Eliot

Exquisitely handcrafted carpets with designs meticulously drawn from nature – the long-revered craft that has sustained Aqa Jaan’s inherited family business – no longer attract buyers. The guiding hand of Aqa Jaan’s family in Senejan’s public sphere is thrown off as imams take hold of the bazaar. The mosque and the house are sundered. All that was is now in tatters. All except for Aqa Jaan’s and Fakhri Sadat’s intuitive summoning of fairness and respect into their encounters with a family, community, and society that have lost intimate connection and civic coherence.

mohamadjavad yavarinaman on Unsplash

This instinctive cast of mind and heart they share with others who invest the present with hope rather than corral it with slogans and falsehoods. Aqa Jaan and Fakhri Sadat’s son, Jawad, is charged with riflefire and socialism. He is executed by order of a kangaroo court operating with the arrogant sanction of Iran’s revolutionary government. Aqa Jaan rescues Jawad’s body from the executioners, then desperately searches for a cemetery that will give ground to his dead child. But Senejan offers nothing. He travels to the nearby mountains, his son’s shroud sliding and bumping in the back of the station wagon, to Jirya where he is well-known. He is recognised immediately by the village’s carpet weavers. They turn him away, too fervid in or too frightened by the advent of religious intemperance to respond to his need and distress. But word reaches Khan, an old friend who lives in a sequestered valley further up the mountain. Khan chases Aqa Jaan’s car to a halt. Khan’s kindness is done quickly. He promises to bury the dead boy on his estate. It is almost dawn. They have time only to embrace and transfer the body.

Retributive justice too is alive in The House of the Mosque. Abdolah follows the deadly trail of violent political upheaval, with children of the house seeking out wrongdoers and visiting loss and death on them. Shabal, the son of the mosque’s blind muezzin, traces Jawad’s judge from Senejan to Kabul and there assassinates him. Violence begets violence. That one kind of violence is misbegotten and the other is just retribution does nothing to mitigate its horror. Abdolah leaves an open invitation to believe a course negotiated among untethered minds is bound, always, to be more equitable and inclusive than anything an authoritarian mob can ever devise.

That may be idealistic, but what is realistic for Abdolah is that kindness will reassert itself, and always be more universally venerated, than political violence or mind-numbing recitation of creeds. In The House of the Mosque kindness prevails. Kindness begets kindness, and recompense and reconciliation are more assertive than revenge. Years after Jawad’s death, and after Shabal has taken refuge in The Netherlands (as Abdolah himself did), Aqa Jaan and Fakhri Sadat take a break from broken Senejan. They travel to Jirya, planning to stay a day or so. To their surprise the villagers bring them gifts of cloth and tender apologies for refusing to bury Jawad in their village graveyard.

Their gifts are intended as a counter to the disregard and slights that wayward times excuse, and which consciously shared humanity eventually calls to account. There is barely a declamatory sentence in this novel. I recall but one, when Aqa Jaan accepts from his visitors a new shirt and an apology for their behaviour on that darkest of nights:

‘God is all-knowing and all-forgiving,’ Aqa Jaan said soothingly. ‘I’ve never blamed you. You have eased my pain. I have always believed in human goodness.’

Ehsan Eslami on Unsplash

One of the joys for me in reading The House of the Mosque is the tone of the telling. It is fabulous realism, related to its magical cousin but with a brace of measures drawn from fable. It is the real world made charming by grace notes heard in the Arabian Nights. Two grandmothers sweeping their way from Senejan to Mecca. A crow on constant alert for deviation. Ayatollah Khomeini furtively watching television. Adbolah rewards his readers by coddling us with fable and riffs on history.

Yet this fabulous tenor does not detract from the real world Abdolah portrays. The House of the Mosque unfolds much like a life. The predictable and the unpredictable commingle. They calm and startle our days. We are challenged to find and keep companions who will journey with us through the cheer and the despond, the order and the hubbub.

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[1] George Eliot. ‘Evangelical teaching: Dr Cumming’. The essay had its first outing in the Westminster Review, October 1855. It is reproduced in George Eliot: Selected essays, poems and other writings, a Penguin Classics publication – mine is a 1990 edition. The publisher’s promo page is here. The collection (edited by A.S Byatt no less, along with Nicholas Warren) reveals the breadth of Eliot’s knowledge, the depth of her thought, and her downright cheekiness.

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The House of the Mosque was first published in The Netherlands in 2005 by De Geus BV. First published in English, and translated by Susan Masotty, in 2010 by Canongate Books.

Cannongate’s promo page for The House of the Mosque is here.