Thoughts on "A Life's Music" by Andrei Makine

A bit about Makine himself. Born in 1957 in Siberia, Soviet Union, he emigrated to France in 1987 and was permitted to stay there. He published in French but claimed his first three novels were translations from Russian. Since his third novel, he came out stating that they had been written in French though Makines written and spoken French are far apart. He studied French literature at university.

A Life's Music was published in 2001 and translated into english by Geoffrey Strachan. This text is 106 pages long and yet it tells a story spanning a good part of 1930s Russia until the post-Stalinist period. There are no markers or names to delineate the time periods (ie, Khrushchev? Brezhnev?) but there is no need. Because A Life's Music is here to show the reader that for homo soveticus, a phrase which is used encapsulate the depths of human suffering experienced under the Soviet Union. It speaks of the weight of history which can reduce diverse peoples to grey slush under a boot, or the weight of the great coats worn by hordes of men and women trekking through Russia from East to West or West to East. Makine reminds the reader that Russia is both Asiatic and Occidental. It is both "civilization" and "savagery", Moscow and the gulags, Siberia.

The main character is Alexei Berg and he has experienced both. A pianist by training, born into a family of reknowned musicians and the Moscovite intelligentsia, he is forced by 1941 to flee. He is 21 then, and due to give his first piano recital at the House of Culture. He enjoys moments of bliss with a girl named Lera. Her family will later betray him to the Soviet police.  Berg's family had by then survived the purges of '37-9 but at the end, the system squashes them. People ostracize and avoid the Bergs. Familiar faces assume new identity: "long-nosed masks", like the ones stuffed with herbs during the Plague to ward off the evil. The look askance at him in hallways and streets. Then, they are coming for him. Symbolic to all of this this - the first part of the narration, is his father's violin. The Bergs burn this incriminating evidence of their bourgeoisie in a desperate attempt to avoid their almost certain fate. But the strings are not loosened and so there is the sharp, resounding sound of strings snapping which resounds throughout the book and in Berg's memories decades later. That's is how his old life ends.

His new life as Sergei Maltev: he assumes a new identity. Not a musician, not an individual, but a soldier. He steals the identity from the corpse of the dead man. He takes clothes. He wrenches off a pair of boots. In this horrifying process, in a remains of a battle field and wounded bodies and human carcasses, he focuses his mind on gathering a new image. He enters the army and is careful to remain anonymous in terms of service and injuries. In the process of killing people and receiving wounds and scars, he feels his old self completely recede - it is barely remembered:

"And when he was finally able to relax the constantly taut string within him, he found himself in the skin of a veteran soldier, taciturn and respected for his nerve, a man among thousands like him, indistinguishable in the column as it trudged along a muddy road, heading towards the heart of the war." (55)

His appearance has changed. So there is both physical and mental reduction or shift, all for the survival of the individual. Makine  highlights these paradoxes, in the soldier's anonymity, there is also danger of being killed. But Sergei Maltev is a survivor. He falls in love for the second time, not the love of a young boy and an alluring, seductive girl but the love of a soldier during convalescence, with the woman who is nursing him. In "smell of iodine" and wounded, bruised bodies, the older women is a saviour. This experience will stay with him for a long time - the iodine stained hands, warm. Sunlight. (59) But no matter, he moves on. He is once more the inanimate soldier, "plywood" and "tin", not the pianist. He cannot even imagine how it was like to sit before a piano and caress the keys. The only consolation he has is a vague feeling of warmth which punctures his exhaustion as he marches, pretending to be visiting his home town. He will be warm one day.

He helps a women bury a small coffin - presumably her son. In turn, she takes him in briefly in return when he faints from exhaustion. Her village part of an effort to build a bridge. The "human ant-swarm" labour and labour, from an order given by Stalin himself. It is a tragic image; human suffering ("padded jackets covered in earth...faces gaunt with hunger" 67) seems boundless when the number of people is endless and not a soul is distinguishable. How far removed, Stalin is, from all of this! Maltev experiences again the warmth of a woman. It is "more substantial than any other truth in the world." Here, there it is obvious that there is a certain hot/cold imagery. Much of the war is set in the desperate Winter offensive of 1941-2 and the Third Reich slowly begins to buckle. Regardless, Soviet deaths are round about ten million. Pre-war life (warm) associated with brief moments of relief and bliss during the war (warm) resonate together, and contrast with the cold winter and war itself, which is hardly every described by Makine. In Berg's memory, it is the moments of warmth which really matter. (68)

A dead squirrel changes Berg/Maltev's life again. A group of soldiers are shaking some trees and pursing it. A branch recoils and hits the creature. It lands lifeless in the snow. Berg watches. Then picks it up. The receding warm from its small, fragile and limp body create an immediate reaction, like an arrow to its target, it wakens the "astonishingly sensitive presence beneath the armour of indifference and toughness he had forged for himself, day after day, in Battle. Before the war..."

The squirrel - warmth - tantalizing life "before the war..."

He saves a General who he as chauffeuring from the wreckage of a bomb. They trek towards Salzburg. Fighting under General Gavrilov's division continues for another two weeks before news of victory reaches them.

Disconnect from reality and victory - "he had the illusion of transit from Vienna to Moscow" (72). A man with one leg is comfortably playing chess - like before the war. He has lost something in the war. But he seems at peace. That is how it will be from now on. Juxtaposition between memories before the war, reality after the war creates difference and a feeling of being lost. Again, there are no details of what Maltev is doing, before General Gravrilov seeks him out again. There is a break in the text. (74-5)

Maltzev falls in love with Gavrilov's daughter, Stella. It is not the love of warmth or comfort but a love lived in the past, a "first love".  She is 17, the age he was, before the war. Makine never fails to highlight their age difference, their appearance (one youthful, frail, the other scarred and old):

He was 27 now. But the girl at the piano made this question of age irrelevant, for he felt he was outside the ordinary currency of days, in a parallel time, in which he could relive those three  years spent amid the masks.

 It would appear that the Soviet arm of coercion has pitilessly stripped Berg of his youth and changed it into a time of caution and terror, the time when the family burned the violin. Instead, he should have been growing and falling in love. And so it was for a whole generation of Russian people under the Soviet state.

shallow stream (1)

What is it like to look back from the other side of the river?

We cross this river only once in our lives. It marks the boundary between life and death. But every so often, a part of someone lingers, unable to make that crossing. As humans, we have mythologized the path to death. Great pharaohs built structures which would enable them to enter the afterlife with all their belongings. Their pyramids raised toward the sky. They told of the judgement which was passed on to those whose heart was heavier than the feather...fed to the crocodiles, abandoned in a labyrinth.

In other places, coffins were rigged into the sky. Wooden ones which were tucked tight into cliffs, overseen by foliage, facing the open.

In the ground, in a crypt or a grand mausoleum, either washed down river or hung up in the clouds, death is surrounded by mystery.

Why do humans do this? I pondered for a long time.

I came back, you see. It was so difficult for me to leave.

At the end, it was simply crossing that river, a shallow stream with flat, raised stones between the two shores. There was no Death to escort me. I held up a paper lantern, poised to stride across. But in the end, I turned back.

I still wanted to burn my diaries.

Review: Hotarubi no Mori e

I wanted to jot down some quick thoughts and maybe type this properly later. This is a 44 minute movie released in 2011. It won a few awards and is based on a manga publication by the same author of "Natsume no Yuujinchou". They have both been very successful in Japan and the animation was great.

The style of the artwork is obviously sacrificed a little when it becomes animated. (so pictures). But it got an emotional response out of me - sadness. In 44 minutes. So well done. I liked how I got the very Japanese-ness of it as well. The mangaka purportedly was worried international audiences would not understand.

But that does not detract at all. The concept of nostalgia is strong (and it sells!!) and adds to the allure of a very bittersweet story, which is also the mangaka's favourite area and similar Natsume.

Nostalgia in Japanese culture and the idealization of youth and romance, both closely associated.

Folklore and ghosts. Japanese animation has always discussed this in some way or another: Studio Ghibi, Mushishi and various other shorter series (though probably in the horror genre)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C5%8Dkai

250 words entry

When you look at my room, who do you see? Objects which sit on the windowsill, the table, the dresser. The bedspread's  texture and colour. Who do you see in the mirror? Who are you today?

Today is April 18^th. I have been locked in this room for eleven days. I cannot step outside. My only connection with the world beyond is through the window which opens by a few inches. In those eleven days, I have sat and stared at nothing. Pigeons landed on the opposite roof and took off into the empty sky.

There is no identity to assign. There is no tale to be told because a person in this particular trade is willing to forego the tale. There is no enjoyment to be had except in the grim reality of the cover. That is what the old, retired hands say.

But here I am in this room, exposed and cornered, waiting for my end. I think there is a limit to how much a person can take. Perhaps it was a desperate attempt to save my drowning subconscious which drove me to let my tail show.

I have used the pass eleven days to organize my thoughts. It was not something I relished but the final narrative is now firmly in my mind now. And I will commit it to paper in a way which only you will understand.

spy fiction.