April 2020: Italy, France and Poland
Books find their way into my consciousness, hand and eye-line in all sorts of different ways and the journey of those books from the writer’s pen to their being absorbed by me is both interesting and mysterious. I think that the most common reason I read a book is because of a recommendation, but often one recommendation is like a tree trunk with branches, leaves and fruit spiralling from the trunk in all directions, whether it be other books by the same author, references to other books within the book I’m reading or other books with the same theme. This process of reading books from every nation in the world is one that is all about recommendation, largely from people that have never recommended me a book before, but this month I went back to my friend, Ed, who has recommended a handful of books to me in the past.
It was the weekend before the Coronavirus lockdown properly started. It was my fortieth birthday and I’d just worked my last day at school for who knows how long. Curry and beer were to be consumed to mark the occasion, replacing a bigger party that had been postponed. Whenever in someone else’s house, I am drawn to their book-shelf, scanning their shelves for inspiration, nosiness and comfort. Ed has one long shelf in his dining room about seven foot up in the air and as I scanned, he joined me, commenting and recommending, but his Englishness and the Englishness of many of the books made me feel like it would be foolish to borrow anything as he might not get it back for a decade, but then he pulled down If This is a Man by Primo Levi, telling me it was an incredible book. A quick scan told me that Primo was Italian and I wrestled with whether I could accept a recommendation from Ed of an Italian book. Didn’t the recommender need to be from the nation that the book was from? Was it cheating or should I just recognise that it was always going to get complicated? Halfway through reading the Dutch book, The Letter for the King, last month, I had found out that author Tonke Dragt had been born in Indonesia and had only moved to the Netherlands at thirteen and I’d wondered whether the book should be disqualified from the process. This was getting a silly. I like a system, neat boxes and organisation, but some fluidity in this journey is fine, essential perhaps. I took If This is a Man from Ed’s shelf and a couple of weeks later, began reading it.
The book is Levi’s telling of his experiences as a prisoner at Auschwitz during the World War II. I don’t remember the time that I first became aware of the Holocaust, discovered the hideous torture humans have inflicted on each other. Maybe, I had a conversation with my parents at some point or perhaps a history lesson at school had unveiled the horror. It seems that I should remember this moment, but somehow, as a child, all sorts of grimness is revealed gradually to you and somehow, you absorb it and then go outside and play football - at least, that’s what I did.
As a child and as a young adult, I had a one-dimensional understanding of the Holocaust, knowing the headlines, but nothing about the day-to-day life of prisoners. In the past fifteen years or so, I’ve read these ten books, each one giving me a different angle, a different individual’s suffering.
Some were fiction: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, Two Brothers by Ben Elton
Some were aimed at children: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Boy at the Top of the Mountain by John Boyne, Once by Morris Gleitzmann
Some were biographical: Maus by Art Spiegelman, The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris, Heimat by Nora Krug
Some were written by survivors: The Choice by Edith Eger, The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom
If This is a Man fits into the last category and I’m so grateful that people who have experienced humanity at its lowest have not buried their experiences, but done what must have been incredibly painful and gone back to that place and written about it. For myself, writing about such harrowing suffering from a position of privilege feels slightly uncomfortable, but not to reflect on the atrocities of the past would mean I could easily fall into the trap of valuing my own moment in history as of the most importance, an easy trap I regularly fall back into.
Maus, The Choice and The Hiding Place had all gone into the small details of concentration camp life in a way that helped me to see the days, the hours and the minutes in the camps rather than just a broad sweep of time and Levi does this too, discussing the minutiae - details like where to stand in the soup queue to ensure that you didn’t get the first helpings that were virtually water, but to get something marginally substantial from the pot. When I spoke to Ed about why the book was so powerful to him, he spoke about the soup, how he’d been sat one day eating soup in the simple, easy, casual way we all do, taking for granted something that we barely value, but as he sat, spoon in hand, he thought back to Levi Primo and the daily hunger pangs, realising how fortunate he is.
For me, the moment in the book that was most memorable was when Levi made contact with a man outside the camp called Lorenzo. For six months, Lorenzo brought Levi a piece of bread and what was left of his rations. Lorenzo’s simple kindness has a powerful effect on Levi which he describes: “Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside the world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget I myself was a man.” Lorenzo was a man outside the suffering of Auschwitz and I found it inspiring that small gestures of kindness towards an individual were enough to remind Levi that he is a man, not an animal.
The journey of this book from Ed to me went back further. The book wasn’t even Ed’s, but one he’d borrowed from a mutual friend, Steve, a man I shared a flat with twenty years ago. I thought I’d follow this up, wondering if I could jump from person to person, following recommendations like a family tree. Steve was the grandfather, but who came before him? Who had handed this book to Steve? So, I sent him a text and thirteen days later, Steve came back to me. He’d spent some time at a university in Finland and without television, he devoured books from the public library in between saunas and it was when browsing the local library, he’d come across If This is a Man. Twenty years on, his selection meant that it ended up in my hands.
The next book I read took me to France. As lockdown closed in, I was sat in the staffroom at school with the trainee teachers who were wondering what would happen with their training year, whether the lesson they’d spent time planning would ever get taught. One of them was a French French teacher called Stephanie and I told her of my reading challenge and after giving over control of the book-choice over to her - she’d been keen to know what kind of things I liked - we narrowed the choice down to one of Emile Zola’s novels. Finally, the choice came down to a novel about prostitutes or miners. I chose miners and Germinal.
Germinal was such a good book telling the story of tensions between the mine-owners and the workers. It’s a hugely political book with different miners representing different approaches to challenging barbaric inequality. The characters are complicated: the heroes are flawed and occasionally, the aristocracy evoke sympathy. The suffering is brutal: there were moments where I just had to put the book down and steady myself and breathe. When I got to the end, lockdown was underway and Stephanie’s time at my school had come to a premature end and I didn’t have the chance to discuss it with her. However, the desire for social justice that courses through this novel reminded me of a friend and colleague I used to work with, the man who led the trade union at my last school. I sent him a text telling him about it and he replied saying that he’d read it in his late teens and found it inspiring. Had the desire for fairness, rightness, justice that was so evident in him been something that had been borne through this novel? Clearly, it’s not as simply as that, but it played a part.
The next stop was Poland and Antoni Libera’s Madame. My wife, Helen, came back from a meal out with friends to tell me that she had chatted to a Polish friend, Aga, and that she’d recommended Madame, a book she’d enjoyed in her younger years. Madame tells the story of a boy who becomes infatuated with and then starts stalking his French teacher. I enjoyed the introspective narration of the boy, particularly in his acts of artistic rebellion that the novel starts with, but once he starts stalking, it’s an uncomfortable read. I guess that’s the point though. I’ve seen other reviewers describe these details as comic and they are frequently farcical, but the darkness of these moments meant I couldn’t find the humour. The interest in the narrative lay, for me, more in what he found out about his head-teacher and how that fitted politically with France and Poland’s past. The head-teacher is desperate to escape to France and the longing of the students as well as the head-teacher to be free of the Soviet-controlled 1960s Poland creates a bleak atmosphere which is contrasted with the passion of the boy. Sometimes we think of the movement of people, particularly political refugees, in terms of the physical dangers they are in, but in this novel, there was no physical suffering but rather, a squashing of freedoms, a narrowing of horizons and if you lived in this claustrophobic atmosphere, then of course, you’d want out.
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