February 2020: South Africa, Czech Republic and Hungary

Read: Jock of the Bushveld by J Percy FitzPatrick (South Africa), The Good Soldier, Sveyk by Jaroslav Hasek (Czech Republic), Embers by Sandor Marai (Hungary)

As 2019 drew to a close, I took a walk with my family along Hove seafront. It’s an annual post-Christmas get-together of my siblings, parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces and brothers-in-law. There’s a big old crowd of us walking into the bitter wind towards the rusty remnants of the West Pier. The appetite for walking varies hugely and usually, after a mere half mile or so, the call to turn round and head for the pub is given and we about-turn and shuffle back to our starting position. As I walked, I chatted with my brother-in-law, Tim, about my reading challenge and Jock of the Bushveld - book number three of my international challenge. He chose a book for me from his childhood, one he reckoned he’d read in 1995. I picture him sitting in his bedroom with a battered paperback while up in Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela dons a green Springbok rugby shirt in a deeply symbolic moment in South African history.  

This pairing of events is clearly an imaginative leap, but Tim did live through these dramatic moments in South Africa’s recent history and is part of a generation that sees things very differently to his the generation and generations that came before him. Jock of the Bushveld jumps back much further into South Africa’s path - it’s an autobiographical account of James Percy FitzPatrick’s experiences in the Bushveld in the 1880s. The Bushveld is a woodland area that encompasses an area in the north of South Africa, overlapping some of Botswana and Zimbabwe. Jock is a FitzPatrick’s dog and much of the book celebrates the special relationship that man and dog share. 

Despite the fact that the anecdotes that make up this book are largely hunting ones, the bond that is described through tales of evading crocodiles and hunting antelope refreshed my own desire for a dog. However, a dog deserves more of me than being left moping around the house all day and so, for the present, my family has had to make do with a hamster. Evenings watching football while she runs repetitively across my rotating hands is special, but it doesn’t feel quite the same unifying experience as hunting buffalo in the Bushveld (not that I actually want to wander through the woods of South Africa shooting animals).

The book is an uncomfortable read at some points - the brutality of a chained baboon fighting a dog to the death was one instance. I found myself rooting for Jock in this battle as I’d been led by FitzPatrick’s narration to see the baboon as an evil menace who tempted weaker animals into the circle that marked the limits of his chain, but then as I read the grim violence, I stopped myself and considered that this was a wild animal forced and encouraged to fight just to survive and get fed again. What was this baboon to do but do as his master demanded? The other uncomfortable stuff was the racism which when writing of this era in South African history is always going to linger in the background and at times, charge aggressively into the foreground. When I talked to Tim about this, he spoke about the ignorance and indoctrination of racism that still leaves him feeling queasy when it is discussed. We are products, to a large degree, of our cultures. What kind of person would I have been in apartheid South Africa or Nazi Germany and what kind of person am I in Boris’ Britain? The most common place I discuss these kind of issues is in the classroom with teenagers and at times they are remarkably perceptive and honest? I remember discussing An Inspector Calls with a fourteen-year old and he honestly assessed himself, saying that if he’d been indoctrinated, to use Tim’s word, in the Nazi ideology then he would probably have accepted it unquestioningly. At other times, when I’m frustrated by narrow-minded teenage responses, I remind myself to take a step back and recognise that the teenager is likely, echoing views that have been fed to him by the media - we have a truly horrible print media - or their parents. I’m grateful for the freedom with which I am allowed to think, but does everyone everywhere think they have the same freedom to think and make their own ethical choices? 

South Africa is the first nation that I have visited from the nations I have read books from so far. I travelled there twelve years ago for my sister’s wedding. The visit was largely taken up with wedding preparations and the freedom of living off the land in the Bushveld was not really anything like the experience I had. However, two details link my experience to the book. Firstly, Tim, who I was meeting for the first time, had a big cuddly Rottweiler called Zeek. Jock was a Staffordshire Bull Terrier cross and both dogs are known for their ferocity - Jock was certainly ferocious, but only in a  controlled, obedient manner. Zeek, in general, seemed relaxed and friendly, but every time my mum got up from the sofa, he would gambol around behind her and once took a nip of her backside which I found hilarious: she did not. The second link was the night before the wedding when the male members of the wedding party camped at the side of a river. We were nowhere near any wildlife, but the idea of sleeping under the stars in South Africa exhilarated me. I let my imagination wander and imagined lions prowled outside. In the morning, I washed in the river, ignoring the non-existent crocodiles, before heading up to the church to walk my sister down the aisle.

The second novel of the month also took me back in time, this time to the First World War. I went to school with triplets. Two were identical and one wasn’t and I spent much of the latter-years of secondary school in their company. School for me was an uncomfortable social experience as I got into my teenage years. I was unprepared for how to fit into the cruel, shallow, paranoid world where minor social infringements were punished with exclusion from the cultural elite. I’m grateful for the small cluster of friendships I had and Bryan and Ben Wood, two thirds of the Wood triplets, were two of those. Our conversations were largely about football and the hugely complicated Fantasy Football game that I ran for members of the school, but I also recall conversations about faith: my Christianity and their Judaism and the terrible quality of our art projects - mine, at least was utterly bereft of artistic merit: a cardboard box replica of Brighton and Hove Albion’s Goldstone Ground that gained me an E grade for my Art GCSE. 

The last time I saw either Bryan or Ben, I think, was when we met up in the summer of 1996 after our GCSEs to play cricket. I had no real interest in cricket, but was glad to see the boys and had no idea that it would be the last time we would ever meet. I think I saw Ben on the other side of the road a few years later: I think I could still tell the difference between them, but I had not seen Bryan and it wasn’t until thirteen years later, when he sent me a message through Facebook, congratulating me on the birth of twins, that we made contact again. He told me that he’d moved to Prague in the Czech Republic and was doing a bit of singing and bit of film animation: a pleasant way to spend your time. Another four years on, he made contact again, this time with the simple refrain from a football chant we used to love to sing: “Nayim from the half-way line.” It gave me great pleasure when ex-Tottenham footballer, Nayim, robbed Arsenal of the Cup Winners’ Cup by smashing the ball skyward from the halfway line in a desperate and unlikely attempt at scoring. The back-pedalling goal-keeper David Seaman calamitously fumbled it as it dropped out of the sky and the cup went to Nayim’s Real Zaragoza instead of Arsenal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gktEEs61q_E I don’t think Bryan was much of a football fan really but he loved to sing this song; it became a kind of greeting and did the double-job of winding up any Arsenal fans that happened to be in the vicinity. 

The next time that Bryan made contact was when he saw my post about this reading challenge and suggested a book that he said was much-discussed in the Czech Republic. I was interested in his description. Occasionally, a book becomes a hot topic of conversation in England: the Harry Potter phenomena gripped the nation for a while and Fifty Shades of Grey and its place in our culture seemed to be a regular conversation at one point, but they have drifted and faded from regular conversation whereas apparently, the Czech Republic allow a novel written one-hundred years ago to remain a topic a conversation. The novel wasn’t even finished and when I went to order it, I saw that it was 784 pages long and so, I swerved the bulky novel and went for the audiobook instead. Is that cheating? I don’t think so, but it is a very different experience, listening to a novel read to you than reading it yourself.

The novel is The Good Soldier, Sveyk, three and a half volumes of what seems to be the first ever anti-war novel in response to the First World War. It came pretty quickly after the War with the first novel published in 1921 and in reality, the world was not really ready for the war to be satirised. It is not a novel in a conventional way, but more of a collection of anecdotes about the comical and hapless soldier, Sveyk. Sveyk is basically a vehicle for Jaroslav Hasek to criticise everything he deems ridiculous about the war. At times, his criticism is biting, at other times, Sveyk’s errors are comical and a couple of times, I laughed out loud, a rarity for me, when driving home from work while listening to his story unfold. To give you a feel for some of the mistakes, here are a few: trying on a Russian soldier’s abandoned uniform and being arrested as a Russian spy as a result, trying to bring peace between his lieutenant’s cat and budgie by holding the budgie up to the cat’s face only for the cat to bite its head off and stealing a senior officer’s dog and giving it to his own lieutenant who got sent to the front in punishment for the dog theft. I genuinely enjoyed lots of the moments in the novel, but also found it excessively waffly and after listening to it for twenty-eight hours, I was quite glad to have got to the end. Hasek died halfway through volume four of the epic and had intended for there to be six in total, so it was a slightly odd way to finish, but its episodic quality meant that it didn’t matter too much and in some ways, it reflects war in that life was cruelly cut short for so many. 

I’ve done a little further investigation into the novel to see how true Bryan’s claim is that it is much-discussed. It seems that this novel is a definitive work in Czech culture, that its frustration at war, to some degree, mirrors the mood of the nation, so much so that Sveyk has embedded itself into Czech language with it becoming a word in itself to describe military absurdity or someone who is simple-minded but also resourceful when being oppressed and perhaps, this is where Bryan has heard it, that he has overheard people mockingly calling each other a Sveyk. Does English have any examples where a character has become so emblematic of an attitude that it has become a word? Initially, I couldn’t think of any, but when I researched it, the first person I came across was Scrooge and it seemed so obvious. Quixotic comes from Don Quixote; gargantuan comes from Gargantua and Pantagruel, a story about two giants; malapropism comes from a character called Mrs Malaprop from The Rivals - there are a few other examples, but they become increasingly obscure. 

The last detail that I’ll share about The Good Soldier, Sveyk was a bit that at the time of listening, I found pretty dull. It went on for absolutely ages and once you got the idea of what has happening, the amount of time that was spent on it seemed excessive. Basically, a character earned a living writing for a nature journal and instead of writing about real animals, he just made animals up. At the end of the novel, I listened to the introduction which gave lots of background information about Hasek and explained how he had found himself in many of the same settings that Sveyk did. He was a massive rebel and struggled to fit into society and one time he finally managed to get himself an income, writing for a nature journal and he did exactly what he described his character doing: made animals up and as a result, got the sack, but I love the idea that in the early twentieth century, there were people out there trying to expand their knowledge of the animal kingdom and what they were actually doing was reading about Hasek’s made-up animals. 

Across Europe to Hungary is where my travels took me next. I was sitting at my desk at school trying to mark a load of essays, the bane of a teacher’s life. I love getting up and being the showman-teacher; I love reading novels aloud to a class and taking thirty teenagers through a story, but marking is largely a misery. Sometimes, you read something beautiful and sometimes you read something hilarious, but mostly, it’s a task to grit your teeth and get through, so I was glad when I was interrupted, pleasantly interrupted, by the cleaner, a man called Subi. He asked if I knew anything about the eggs he saw people carrying about. I had limited knowledge but I thought a member of staff had a contact with a free range farmer and delivered eggs on their behalf. He had thought that was probably the case and started to tell me about his honey or a honey farmer he knew - I’m not entirely sure of the details. He told me how Hungarian honey from this particular distributor is of greater quality because the bees get nectar from trees that are high and therefore unsprayed by pesticides. I nodded along. I’m not sure if he wanted me to be the middle-man in a new honey enterprise, fulfilling the same role as whoever it is that brings eggs in. If this was the inference I was meant to pick up, I’m only realising it now. He certainly wasn’t pushy and I think he was probably just sharing his honey insights with me. 

Asking someone where they come from always feels an uncomfortable question, as if it suggests that I have picked up that they are not from England through my powers of deduction rather than them sharing that with me. I don’t know if I am being overly-sensitive - I think I’m just being courteous, waiting to be invited to discuss nationality and the discussion of the Hungarian honey felt like it wouldn’t be a massive leap to discuss Hungarian literature, so I told him of my challenge and he said he’d have a think for me. He’d only read novels in Hungarian and I think he wanted to check to see which authors had been translated in English. The next day he returned with the name of three authors on a post-it note. He told me that Sandor Marai was his favourite of the three, but warned me that there is a bitterness about Hungarian liteature: “We’re laughing when we’re weeping,” he told me as he walked out of my classroom and that evening I ordered Marai’s best-seller Embers.

During the cold February half-term, I had plenty of time to read and I charged through Embers in two days. It is a beautifully-written book and despite being a translated book, it felt so lyrical in its description. The premise is that two men - one rich, one poor - who used to be best friends are meeting up after forty-one years to discuss the thing that drove them apart all those years ago. The whole novel is basically the conversation they have and the truth is slowly unveiled to the reader. It sounds so simple, yet the slow unwrapping of the truth was gripping. I read a lot of books and there are lots of different ways in which I enjoy them, but it is a rare and wonderful thing when you feel compelled to just keep turning the page and this is what this book did for me. 

I saw Subi again this week and told him that I’d read Embers. We had a brief chat and it felt special. We talked about the author who wrote the book in the 1940s and that his work didn’t become popular until the 1990s. Subi said that Hungary has a troubled past and art and literature has been something that has been controlled at a political level and Marai’s newfound popularity is a result of Hungary’s democratic revival. If I hadn’t read this book, our conversations would have been far more trivial, I’m sure, but the sharing of the book meant that I got to share a little of his life. All the other book recommendations have come from people I know and reading them has helped me to know them better, but this book was the first block in getting to know someone new and I’m excited to see where reading the world will take me.