In writing this post it sounds rather as if I didn’t enjoy this book.  However I did.  It’s always interesting to see the specific craziness of someone else’s family.  And I’m always amazed by memoirs: who even remembers their past that clearly?  My theory is, nobody does; but I always admire the boldness of someone willing to write up their fantasy of what happened

And if Bjartur heard them complaining about the damp he would reply that it was pretty miserable wretches that minded at all whether they were wet or dry.  He could not understand why such people had been born.  “It’s nothing but damned eccentricity to want to be dry,” he would say.  “I’ve been wet more than half my life and never been a whit the worse for it.”

They have one piece of luck: the First World War!  It drives up prices for Icelandic lamb. 

 “Oh let them squabble, damn them,” said Bjartur.  “I only hope they keep it up as long as they can. . . . I only hope they go on blasting one another’s brains out as long as other folk can get some good out of it.  There ought to be plenty of people abroad.  And no one misses them

He made no further attempt to talk his son over; it is a mark of weakness to try to talk anyone over.  An independent man thinks only of himself and lets others do as they please.  He himself had never allowed anyone to talk him over.

Now the Bailiff’s nature was such that had he been accused of theft or even of murder he would have preserved an unruffled exterior and have seemed, indeed, to be quite gratified.  But with one crime he would not have his name connected: if anyone insinuated that he was making money the ice was broken and his tongue was loosened, such a slander was more than he could stand. 

 But the first days are always the worst, and there is much comfort in the thought that time effaces everything, crime and sorrow no less than love. 

Poor old Bartjur.  He loses everything anyway, not in the end because of the worms, or the storms, or even the ghosts, but because of the debts.  The tagline of the novel might as well be: You can’t fight city hall.

I had to give up on this one.   Let me give you a sample: 

After parking the department’s speedy beefed-up hovercar on the roof of the San Francisco Hall of Justice on Lombard street, bounty hunter Rick Deckard, briefcase in hand, descended to Harry Bryant’s office.  

I mean, snore. Let me tell you he even uses the term ‘beefed-up hovercar’ more than once.  The book is all about trying to tell who is human and who is cyborg, and focuses much on tests to tell who is which.  I propose one additional test: 100% of humans will be able to identify that the above sentence is written by a man.  And indeed the book is full of things men, particularly middle aged men, are interested in: looking tough, ignoring your wife, making tough choices where you may not be a good guy but we understand why, etc.

 . . . the soups, one made of beer, sugar and eggs, one of rose-hips and onions, one of bread and cabbage water, one of cows’ udders flavoured with nutmeg.

It sounds like a hipster restaurant in Haringey.  Or here is whats on offer at a fair they have been looking forward to – “Kesselfleish – the ears, snout and strips of fat from a pig’s neck boiled with peppermint schnapps.”  One young lady has no one to take her to the fair, and is commiserated with:   

A fine young woman still, what a pity she had no affianced to treat her to a pig’s nostril!

Or here is a mother and her daughter, talking about a guest’s room: 

“And there is no chair in the room where he might put his clothes at night.”  “His clothes! I have not undressed myself at night, even in summer, for I think twelve years.” “And yet you’ve given birth to eight of us!” cried Sidonie.  “God in heaven spare me a marriage like yours!”

In the midst of all this domesticity is the protagonist’s (Fritz) idealistic young desire to be free of earthly things and to find a logic that unites all things. He is inspired at university by the philosopher Fichte:

Fichte was speaking of the philosophy of Kant, which, fortunately, he had been able to improve upon greatly.  Kant believed in the external world.  Even though it is only known to use through our senses and our own experience, still, it is there.  This, Fichte was saying, was nothing but an old man’s weakness

He is a talker and a dreamer, who thinks he can see beyond the everyday reality of things.  Here he is talking away to a busy young woman:

…all though he could live without love, he told her, he could not live without friendship.  All was confessed, he talked perpetually.  Neither the sewing nor the forewinter sausage-chopping deterred him. 

So extreme an idealist is he that somehow when he falls in love with this twelve year old, who is not very pretty nor very bright, you somehow believe in his sincerity.  It is gross, but to be fair he does not attempt to sleep with her and in any case most women were married at fourteen.  It makes no odds, in any case, because she is dead of TB before she is fifteen, after some operations without anaesthetic that are almost as horrifying as the soups above.  Fritz marries someone else, but is dead himself in under three years, also of TB; and so are almost all his siblings. 

I mean, thank god for BCG.  I have not done a good job of explaining this novel, but that is I think because I cannot.  I need to re-read it to try and understand it.

I decided I needed to re-read this wonderful book.  Reading it this second time I am struck less by the immediate story – the painful first love – as by the background story: the many years there were to mourn that first love.  I am surprised the first time I did not get that so clearly.  Here Elio is, for example, at the war memorial where he first (sort of) told Oliver he was interested in him: 

I wondered how many people here still remembered the young men they’d lost on the Piave River.  You’d have to be at least eighty years old today to have known them.  And at least one hundred, if not more, to have been older than they were then.  At one hundred, surely you must learn to overcome loss and grief – or do they hound you till the bitter end? At one hundred, siblings forget, sons forget, loved ones forget, no one remembers everything, even the most devastated forget to remember.  . .  In thirty or forty years, I’ll come back here and think back on a conversation I knew I’d never forget, much as I might want to someday.  I’d come here with my wife, my children, show them the sights, point to the bay, the local caffes, Le Danzig, the Grand Hotel.  Then I’d stand here and ask the statue and the straw-backed chairs and shaky wooden tables to remind me of someone called Oliver. 

What I found especially interesting was how explicit it was, for a book written in 1934.  Try this, the opening paragraph:

 OUR STORY opens in the mind of Luther L. (L for LeRoy) Fliegler, who is lying in his bed, not thinking of anything, but just aware of sounds, conscious of his own breathing, and sensitive to his own heartbeats. Lying beside him is his wife, lying on her right side and enjoying her sleep. She has earned her sleep, for it is Christmas morning, strictly speaking, and all the day before she has worked like a dog, cleaning the turkey and baking things, and, until a few hours ago, trimming the tree. The awful proximity of his heartbeats makes Luther Fliegler begin to want his wife a little, but Irma can say no when she is tired. It is too much trouble, she says when she is tired, and she won’t take any chances. Three children is enough; three children in ten years. So Luther Fliegler does not reach out for her. It is Christmas morning, and he will do her the favor of letting her enjoy her sleep; a favor which she will never know he did for her. And it is a favor, all right, because Irma likes Christmas too, and on this one morning she might not mind the trouble, might be willing to take a chance. Luther Fliegler more actively stifled the little temptation and thought the hell with it, and then turned and put his hands around his wife’s waist and caressed the little rubber tire of flesh across her diaphragm. She began to stir and then she opened her eyes and said: “My God, Lute, what are you doing?” “Merry Christmas,” he said.

Grandfather’s skirts would flap in the wind along the churchyard path and I would hang on.  He often found things to do in the vestry, excuses for getting out of the vicarage (kicking the swollen door, cursing) and so long as he took me he couldn’t get up to much. I was a sort of hobble, he was my minder and I was his. He’d have liked to get further away, but petrol was rationed. The church was at least safe. My grandmother never went near it – except feet first in her coffin, but that was years later, when she was buried in the same grave with him.Rotting together for eternity, one flesh at the last after a lifetime’s mutual loathing. In life, though, she never invaded his patch; once inside the churchyard gate he was on his own ground, in his element. He was good at funerals, being gaunt and lined, marked with mortality. He had a scar down his hollow cheek, too, which Grandma had done with the carving knife one of the many times when he came home pissed and incapable.

He and Nurse Burgess, now MB for short in the diary, pedal to paradise every day of the week, including Sunday. Trailing a cloud of midges, they’d hump their bikes off the road, through some muddy gateway and, behind the hedge, hug and knead each other among the mallows and Queen Anne’s lace and nettles dusty with pollen.

This is another aspect of rural life that’s lost now that the middle-class diaspora has populated the countryside with property-owning vagrants: the peculiar hell of having to live with such substantial ghosts from your past. 

Farming life seemed a perpetual-motion machine, or an effect of gravity, something cyclic and unstoppable.  Actually, it was because this kind of small-scale tenant farming was vanishing that the impression was so strong.  Ways of life have been dying out in rural England time out of mind, at least for two hundred and fifty years since the great wave of eighteenth century enclosures.  It’s the sense of an ending that’s timeless.  The best symbol of this version of pastoral is a rusting and discarded piece of farm machinery in the corner of a field. 

The grandparents weren’t grateful.  They both felt so cheated by life, they have their histories of grievances so well worked out, that they were owed service, handouts, anything that was going . . . . Did they love me?  The question is beside the point, somehow.  Certainly they each spoiled me, mainly by giving me the false impression that I was entitled to attention nearly all the time.  They played.  Theywere like children, if you consider one of the things about being a child is that you are a parasite of sorts and have to brazen it out self-righteously. 

My parents’ plan was that I should go to a Church Home for Unmarried Mothers, where you repented on your knees (scrubbed floors, said prayers), had your baby (which was promptly adopted by proper married people) and returned home humble and hollow eyed.  Everyone would magnanimously pretend that nothing had happened, so long as you never seemed to be having a good time or  developing too high an opinion of yourself – from now on you could count yourself lucky if they let you learn shorthand and typing.  . . My father was appalled and also triumphant.  Just as in the old days he’d done his best to beat vicarage corruption out of me, now he righteously denounced me for my scandalous offence against decency, monogamy, and my mother.  He galloped off on his high horse, chivalrously saving her once again from the horrible past. . . .