Filip Florian's LITTLE FINGERS (Tr Alistair Ian Blyth)

An archaeological site near a small town in Romania proves to contain not only the expected Roman artifacts and building foundations, but also a mass grave of more recent provenance.  How recent is the main concern of Filip Florian's depressing yet charming -- and very, very ambiguous -- Little Fingers.

One possibility, the one immediately favored by locals, is that the grave is a 14th century plague pit, its contents all victims of a wave of the good old Black Death - historically as interesting as the Roman stuff that was originally the point of the site but not terribly controversial. The local police are directed immediately to treat it as the other possibility, though: that the human remains discovered as the book opens are from the terrible 1960s, when the forces of Romania's Communist dictatorship committed mass political murder to maintain its grip on power. 

Our narrator is part of the archaeological team, a man originally from the local area and staying with a relative in the town and already suffering from ulcers and other ailments before the shocking discovery, but he's really the least interesting of a parade of personalities that could grace, say, a cozy English mystery or a new season of something like Doc Martin. Aunt Eugenia, for instance, turns out to be a member of the British aristocracy by marriage but is locally known for an incident when she was moving to a new house and a member of the moving crew accidentally let her 50+ cats free en route, few of which were ever recovered, most of whom were never seen again - but this just gave her an excuse to start a new colony of cats in her otherwise tidy little house, where she gladly receives our narrator in for tea and gossip about the to-do in the village.

A local photographer, Mr. Sasha, who takes portraits of visitors who come to tour the Roman site does so with the aid of a camel named Aladdin that he has raised from a calf. The camel is perhaps the most charismatic figure in the village, munching away on whatever food Mr. Sasha gives him, including meat; Aladdin is even something of a nicotine fiend as he loves to eat the cigarettes that villagers and Mr. Sasha's clients like to feed it. The one rule is to keep him away from alcohol, which makes him amorous to the considerable distress of local cattle and their owners. 

Then there's local hermit-priest, a man of many names but now mostly called Onufrie, who was born on a riverbank and left behind by his unfortunate mother, taken in as a youth by a local monastery and became a devout and faithful brother there -- until the Communists came and arrested all of the monks. He becomes an important figure in all that follows. Once freed from prison, he becomes a mountain hermit for years and years, is visited by the Virgin Mary several times, and becomes a kind of confessor-by-mail of an unknown person sharing the forest with him, all while pulling a Pierre Menard with the Bible, which he writes on pieces of spruce bark, using berry juice for ink. 

It is he above all who changes the town's fate after he is moved to go perform (Catholic) funeral rites for the bodies in the grave and is observed doing so by a journalist hurting for a story. By novel's end Onufrie's act and his claims about the Virgin put the town on the map way more than the Roman ruins or the mass grave so, as the area becomes a destination for pilgrims.

As for the often mentioned Argentine forensic specialists, they never even get names and are at best figurants. Florian isn't here to tell a detective story, seems barely interested at all in giving us a solution as to the identities of those in the pit -- though he is happy to take a good chunk of the last fourth or so of the book to present their bona fides via a history of late 20th century Argentina through the lens of its national football/soccer team, with proper homage given to both Maradona and Batistuta, which I did appreciate, but having already read How Soccer Explains the World, I didn't feel like I'd learned much that is new. I reckon not a lot of Florian's original readership have read that bit of pop history, though, and as a way of understanding this group of figurants might go, it wasn't a bad choice. 

I still found the experience of reading Little Fingers, the very title of which makes no sense until the last 20 pages or so, a baffling, yet still enjoyable one. If you have a decent tolerance for ambiguity, you might, too.

Svetislav Basara's THE CYCLIST CONSPIRACY (Tr by Randall A. Major)

Did you know, Pavel Kuzmich," Vartolomeyich said to his neighbor, "that I got here on a bicycle and that one man prophesied that I would end up behind bars.

One of my favorite things in reading translated literature is little passages like the above in which a good English pun comes at me out of nowhere and I get to ask myself a question like, so is 'behind bars/handlebars' a pun in Serbian* like it is in English? And I disappear down a linguistic rabbit hole trying to find out if it's the original author or the translator who gave me a good belly laugh. 

Svetislav Basara's delightfully weird The Cyclist Conspiracy is also the second book I've read in this weird little translated literature project I've got going on this year to give me powerful Illuminatus! Trilogy vibes, though it gives even stronger Foucault's Pendulum vibes because Basara writes international literature where Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson wrote weird hippie pulp, by which I chiefly mean, there's not a lot of porn-y sex scenes in The Cyclist Conspiracy -- because it's got much weirder and more erudite stuff to show us.

The titular conspiracy, more properly called the Order of the Little Brothers of the Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross, is a secret society so esoteric and occult that you could be a lifelong member without knowing it until another member reaches out to you by oblique means (a random postcard from an exotic locale, for instance) and you are informed that henceforth your dreams at night will be used to instruct you in the goals and practices and lore of your new seekrit club. Which has some even stranger beliefs than communicating oenerically, but we'll get to that.

The novel presents as a kind of scrapbook (a form also taken by War of the Newts) or dossier on the conspiracy, meaning it contains a hodge-podge of points of view and styles, a centuries-old parchment here, a newspaper clipping there, a lesser-known Sherlock Holmes story somewhere in the middle... needless to say, Basara's and translator Randall A. Major's command of all of these forms is brilliant and usually darkly, drily funny, but if you're looking for well-drawn characters or a coherent story arc, look elsewhere than The Cyclist Conspiracy. 

The Little Brothers of the Evangelical Order of the Bicycle believe themselves to have been organized in the wake of the scrambling of tongues at the Tower of Babel, whose architects the Little Brothers believe still exist in a form like their own, and seek to once again build that mighty, God-bothering edifice. The Order opposes this, though in a way their goal is somewhat similar since their own occult program aims to establish, at the end of history, a giant "World Insane Asylum" in which mental illnesses are not treated or cured but given free reign to be expressed and enacted, i.e., if you think you're Napoleon, you're given a uniform and a battlefield and an army against which to fight the army of a guy who thinks he's Wellington. 

There is a complex and theological justification for why this establishment is the preferred end of human society that is difficult to summarize, partly because it only made sense to me while I was reading it and partly because it is extremely, extremely complex and theological. But fun, if you're the kind of reader who enjoys Umberto Eco, or wishes Shea and Wilson had taken themselves a little more seriously.

What keeps the book from becoming a boring theological tractate is the variety of storytelling devices employed, the eccentricities of the characters introduced, and the interesting locales in which their adventures take place, from an undiscovered island in the North Sea to a Soviet-era gulag to the mystical and holy city of Dharamshala. Oh, and the fact that the Little Brothers conspiracy is enacted backwards in time. For instance, for (again, complex and hard-to-explain here) reasons, the conspiracy really needs Franz Ferdinand to be assassinated in 1917 and they plan it from the future, communicating with members via the medium of dreams to pass on instructions to be given to the proper agents in the past, i.e. even Gavrilo Princep's visit to the sandwich shop was carefully coordinated and not the coincidental detail conventionally believed. And of course, since the rest of the world doesn't understand the Little Brothers or, mostly, even know they exist, none of the assassination's actual planners is ever caught!

The conspiracy's other activities include stunts like tearing around Victorian London on a velocipede shooting out public clocks and window displays of timepieces, thus inspiring the plot of Adrian Conan Doyle's and John Dickson Carr's latter-day Sherlock Holmes tale, "The Adventure of the Seven Clocks" and an organized group bicycle ride-cum-pilgrimage from Belgrade, Serbia to Dharamshala, India, as well as parchment messages in bottles sent from the aforementioned undiscovered North Sea island and the entire life stories of various eccentrics described in various fragments of text, including a selection of free verse poetry by one, and the accounts by another of how, during World War II, the Nazis almost managed, via a hastily assembled corps of dream warriors, to destroy the Dream Cathedral in which the Little Brothers meet outside of time and space.

It's a weird and funny read that demands a lot of its reader but rewards her richly, and someday I hope to see what other gifts this author has brought us. Am I 100% certain that I understood The Cyclist Conspiracy completely? Uh, no. But I enjoyed the hell out of it anyway, and I think you would, too.

My Radetzky March isn't quite over. I'm still hoping to squeeze in at least three more books! Will I succeed? Stay tuned, true believers. And meanwhile, if you know a hard-working literary translator in your actual life, buy them a drink for me. I met one on Mastodon while we were all watching the World Baseball Classic! And got tipped off to some new books I'll be reading, and telling you all about, in a different month later this year.

*It might be more correct to say Serbo-Croatian since I'm pretty sure that's what the language was still called in the mid-1980s when this book was first written and Serbia was still part of Yugoslavia and lots of linguistic hairs were still waiting to be split? But I'm already out of my depth on this subject. What matters to me is the language's word for "handlebars" (specifically those of a bicycle) is управљач ("upavlach") and for "bars" as in those of a prison cell is  решетке ("reshetke") so, no, it's not a Serbian pun but now I want to know what this passage said more literally in the original! Was it as good as the implied handlebars/behind bars that Randall A. Major gave us? Given the overall quality of the book and Basara's international reputation, I suspect it is. 

Kontakt: An Antholgy of Croatian SF (Ed Darko Macan & Tatjana Jambrišak; various translators)

I love a good speculative fiction anthology, especially one with a theme. Kontakt: An Anthology of Croatian SF wouldn't seem to have much of a unifying theme beyond the nationality of its authors, but  while it's a hodgepodge of sub-genres and styles, some interesting similarities emerge that make it hang together brilliantly. 

Originally printed as a sort of souvenir for the 2012 European Science Fiction Convention, which was held in Zagreb, Croatia that year, it's a great showcase of a single nation's best and brightest established and up and coming writers of speculative fiction -- only a handful of whom I had heard of before grabbing this book!

From weird alternate universe godpunk-cum-Christian eschatology (Katarina Brbora's "Avaleon and the Black Feather") to Kafka-esque military sci-fi (Darko Macan's "The Corridor") to accounts of the practical impact of mind-bending metaphysics that would do Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky proud (Goran Konvični's "Time Enough, and Space"), pretty much everything that speculative fiction lovers look for in an anthology. Unlike many that are more concerned with adhering to the conventions and restrictions of English language speculative fiction publishing, several of these stories express national and regional concerns that might alienate less careful or curious readers. A few minutes of research, or at least clicking on unfamiliar words or proper names in the ebook edition, will greatly enrich the experience of reading Kontakt. 

Nowhere is this more clear than in the aforementioned tale of Brbora's, "Avaleon and the Black Feather," which the anthology's editors describe as "a breezy treatment of that trinity of heavy topics: religion, patriotism and cheap jewelry," in which a young man of Italian heritage but Croatian birth, Santino, becomes low-end jewelry store clerk Tamara's new roommate and quickly establishes himself as even stranger than he already seemed. For one thing, he has a good-sized collection of Croatian editions of books that have not yet been published in Croatia. And his Bible turns out to have content that differs somewhat substantially from the one we and Tamara are familiar with. The famous Well to Hell hoax gets discussed as Tamara discovers that in Santino's Bible, "Sataniel" isn't the obnoxious boaster and tempter we know but is in fact the supreme authority on Earth, which he rules ruthlessly from a mighty fortress near the North Pole! Before we can say "portal fantasy" Tamara has followed Santino into an alternate universe where the city of Zagreb still looks a lot like her city of Zagreb but is in much better shape and is located near the Black Sea, where an ikavian dialect is the official language and the ugly blue stone in Tamara's janky ring (which her weird boss makes her wear around for marketing purposes) actually has vitally important supernatural properties. The story is plenty engaging as translated (by the author herself, as is generally the case in this anthology. Monolingual education is not a Slavic value!) but I suspect it resonates much more with Croatian readers. 

Kontakt also contains some first rate body horror. In Danilo Brozović's "Fingers" the protagonist discovers a unique affliction waiting in his DNA like a time bomb - but too late to do anything about it. At first he has a glimmer of hope when he learns that his father had the same grotesque problem at his age but doesn't now... until he realizes that his father, who has succumbed to dementia, might not remember how he got over their condition. Brozovć is more interested in letting us contemplate what life would be like suffering from such a condition than in explaining it, though, and the story takes off in an unexpected direction, leaving us with even more questions but still satisfied as the story ends. 

Less satisfying because perverse and icky if you are, as I am, on the prudish side, is the vividly imagined "De Cadenza" (Danjiel Bogdanović) in which a crew of bon vivants in space begin their list of perversions with using living human beings as furniture, with and upon which to have imaginatively perverse zero-gravity sex, and then develop even greater manias for acts the Marquis de Sade would balk at recording because they don't have any philosophy with which to dress up their indulgences. Eventually the story dispatches with them satisfyingly, though. But still, pass the brain bleach.

For my money, the most enjoyable of the lot is Tatjana Jambrišak's exciting and ultimately hopeful tale of a group marriage of space explorers who suddenly find themselves having to plan to re-start human society on a distant and newly discovered planet. "Give Me the Shuttle Key" is maybe the most conventional story in Kontakt but that doesn't make it dull or ordinary. The characters and their imperfectly fitting agendas are engaging enough and their situation compelling enough for me to long for a much longer work exploring their relationships and how they rise to meet their fates as maybe, but hopefully not solely, the founders of humanity's second chance.

Another standout, Aleksandar Žiljak's haunting "The Dead" plays off cultural memories of Nazi concentration camps* as it sees what might well be the site of one put to use for a new purpose: the economic exploitation of zombies, the cheapest and, if you have a willing bokor on the payroll, most easily managed labor force there is. The story has a whole camp full of them toiling day in, day out, assembling cell phones under the watchful eyes of Kevlar-clad overseers, armed to the teeth and well practiced at head-shots. Double tap to, uh, select. Good science fiction should afflict the comfortable; I was more uncomfortable reading this story (on my electronic device of choice) than I was any of the other stories except maybe "De Cadenza" (because I really am more than a little prudish). Your results may vary.

One way or the other, not a single story in Kontakt left me unmoved, and most drove me to look up their authors to see if anything else they've done is available to me. Many of the writers gathered here are associated with a Croatian speculative fiction magazine called Ubiq (hooray!) and I find myself wondering how hard it would be for language nerdish little me to just subscribe and bull on through with a dictionary (once I've figured out what dictionary to buy; the intricacies of language in this part of the world are beyond what I'm accustomed to)? But meanwhile, I know the gang at Apex have already discovered and shared Alexandr Žiljak, and that Dark Horse and Marvel gave Darko Macan a whole lot of work in the 90s that I haven't read yet, so maybe I'll start there. Regardless, next time you're hankering after some spec fic that's a little stranger than you've been getting lately, look to Croatia! Because wow! They are quite familiar with our stuff, but they're not by any means just producing more of the same. 

*One of which, Jasenovac, was located in Croatia back when it was part of occupied Yugoslavia. 

Karel Čapek's WAR WITH THE NEWTS (Tr Ewald Osers)

A reader might well think she's cracked into a heretofore unknown bit of Joseph Conrad in happy error when starting Karel Čapek's weird fiction classic War with the Newts, or maybe that she'd found an undiscovered H.P. Lovecraft story the old maniac actually allowed someone to edit down to ordinary English, but she'd be wrong either way, though she'd be very understandably wrong. Which is to say that our story begins with an "eccentric" merchant captain, Vantoch, rattling on about the impossibility of finding a pearl fishery that isn't fished out in a South Seas backwater of an archipelago he's been plying his trade around for years and also bitching about the inferiority of the native tribes thereabouts. 

But then the Devils those natives have been warning him about turn out to be real. 

Welcome to Karel Čapek not writing about robots, friends. 

Čapek, however, is not a 19th century social novelist/realist, but an early 20th century satirist. So we've hardly gotten to know our ship captain in the East Indies before we're swept along with him back home to Jevízčo, Bohemia-or-Czechoslovakia,* where sea captains are thin on the ground, and have met two beleaguered newspaper reporters who desperately hope to wring an interesting story out of him and who refer him to a local big-shot when he insists on trying to get them to invest in his pearl-fishing scheme. 

So far, so still kind-of Conrad, but then Čapek, by way of introducing us to the big-shot, tartly makes a pretty un-Conradian remark: "It is a well-known fact that the greater a man is the less he has on his door-plate" and then launches into a gentle lampoon on the lengthy and complex door-plates of others before telling us that this big-shot's simply has his last name, Bondy. And Bondy and Vantoch were at school together, where Vantoch bullied Bondy and I might as well get this out of the way, trigger warning for  some good old casual antisemitism; Vantoch bullied Bondy for being a "miserable little Jew" and continues that behavior in adulthood, even though he's hoping Bondy will finance his bizarre scheme: exploiting a strange, sentient and seagoing species of amphibians he found off an obscure island! Meaning this obnoxious bully was our first contact ambassador with non-human intelligence.

D'oh!

And before you can say "Prime Directive" Vantoch's crew have spread the news everywhere and Vantoch and Bondy have started an enterprise shipping starter populations of what Vantoch calls his "tapa-boys" -- soon generally referred to as Newts after much debate in the scientific community -- to pearl fisheries all over the place, arming them with steel tools to defend themselves from predators, and seeded lots of colonies of the beings to exploit for profit. Once those colonies are mature and incredibly productive (though they are human-sized and intelligent, these Newts still reproduce like ordinary amphibians, i.e. hundreds of children every year, almostall of which now survive to adulthood), the enterprise expands from pearl fishing to underwater engineering on an ever grander scale and the Newts are given and taught to use explosives, too. What could possibly go wrong?

Let's, just for fun,  ask the next cast of characters to interact with the Newts, a millionaire playboy, Abe Loeb, on a long-term pleasure cruise on his movie producer father's yacht with a gorgeous starlet named Lily Valley (but usually called by her sobriquet "Sweetiepie Li"), Abe's friend Baseball Fred and Fred's sensible girlfriend, Judy. This is not a major plot element but it might be my favorite interlude. Visiting an all but deserted island, the party have a bizarre encounter with the "tapa-boys" who by now are a full-blown cargo cult who believe that all humans like to be hissed at (Vantoch first communicated with them this way, summoning them with a "tst tst tst" that everybody is going to learn to fear when the Newts imitate it to get humans' attention) and will trade useful things like steel weapons for pearls. Sweetipie decides to accept their overtures as homage to her naked beauty (she's nude on the beach to taunt Abe and hold his attention while she pitches a movie script idea to him that will, of course, star her) and almost instantly weaves the Newt encounter into her movie ideas, fantasizing about being worshipped by the Newts as a goddess and not even beginning to entertain the idea that they might have been dangerous or meant her harm because look at all the pearls the Newts had scattered for her on the sand while Abe whisked her away to safety! The Newts, meanwhile,  only wanted knives, and then start parroting Abe's and Sweetiepie's exclamations. No, I'm not thinking "teke li-li, teke li-li" at all. You're thinking "teke li-li." 

All right, so am I.

I've got to get something off my chest now, for a moment. I realize Czechoslovakia was never drowning in resources and that life there was highly constrained in general for most if not all of the 20th century, but why, oh why, wasn't the great Vera "Daisies" Chytilová or Jaromil "Valerie and Her Week of Wonders" Jires given all of the resources to adapt War with the Newts into a wild-ass Czech New Wave film with Jitka Cerhová as Judy and Ivana Karbanová as Sweetiepie Li at the very least?** It's seriously a shame, and whoever actually events time travel someday had better get on it.

Just, you know, don't let Hollywood anywhere near it or we'll get motion captured Andy Serkis playing all the Newts and Scarlett Johanssen as Sweetiepie and it'll get twisted into some grotesque and po-faced Cold War/War on Terror analogy. Or a Q-flavored conspiracy nightmare in which the Newts turn out actually to have been Mole Children all along, or some shit.

I'm, not, I feel, conveying here how thigh-slappingly funny -- and prescient at the same time -- this book is, though. It is indeed often thigh-slappingly funny and incredibly prescient. No other passages convey this quite as well as a scene in a London zoo which turns out to have had one of these sentient sea-dwelling Newts in its care all along -- and it has more or less accidentally learned to talk from listening to the conversations of people gawking at it, and later to read by peering over a caretaker's shoulder while he reads the newspaper. When the higher-ups discover this and bring in some Learned Experts to converse with it, well, how could I not think of our current AI bugaboos like ChatGPT, or at least Eliza of old?

How old are you?
I don't know. Do you want to look young? Wear a Libella bra.
What is today's date?
A: Monday. Lovely weather, sir. Gibraltar will be running at Epsom this Saturday.
Who reigns over England?
A: King George. God bless him.
Well done... Who is the greatest English writer?
A: Kipling.
Very good. Have you read anything by him?
A: No. How do you like Mae west?
We will ask the questions... What do you know of English history?
A: Henry the 8th.
What do you know about him?
A: Best film in recent years. Marvelous decor. Terrific spectacle.
Have you seen it? .
A: I haven't. Want to see England? Buy a Baby Ford.
What would you most like to see...?
A: The Oxford-Cambridge boat race, sir.
How many continents are there?
A: Five.
Very good. Which are they?
A: England and the rest.
Which are the rest?
A: The Bolsheviks and the Germans. And Italy.

I mean, at least it's not discussing the Final Solution. Quite. Yet.

Meanwhile, allowing the scientific and popular sensation over the Newts to distract the world -- and the reader -- Bondy and Vantoch have founded the innocuously named Pacific Export Company to exploit the naive new labor force that they scattered all over that ocean to breed into thriving populations around every island possible. But alas, in doing so, they have flooded the pearl market and such threats to their bottom line Will Not Do. And fateful business decisions are made... really, this whole novel is an argument against letting laissez fair capitalism make first contact or any decisions that will ultimately affect the whole world. Where's my "Karel warned us" tee shirt?

Furthermore, Čapek is very much taking the current temperature of Europe circa 1936; as the Newt-based economy matures and ramifies, crack-pated German scientists who have noted a paler-colored variant of the Newts in the Baltic Sea immediately reason back to a dubious finding that the species originally evolved on German soil, that the species degenerated as it spread to other parts of the world, and that the Baltic Sea variant demonstrates measurable superiority over Newts in other parts of the world because it is the most like the original Newt Race and I did not see this coming but of course. And yes, the notion of living space does arise, but not in the way one is thinking. 

As for the titular War, which only takes up the last 10-15% of the novel, Čapek gives us suitably dumb and ridiculous inciting incidents that aren't entirely a slave uprising but certainly could have been, with the Newts turning humanity's own tools against us and yes of course I wound up rooting for the Newts because capitalism.

Onward in the Radetzky March! I've still got novels from Romania, Austria, Slovenia, a short story collection from Croatia and more! Stay tuned...

*As the nation was known in 1936 when War with the Newts was published; it's in the modern day Czech Republic.

**I would also accept an animated Jan Švankmajer puppet extravaganza. I'm not unreasonable. 

László Krasznahorkai's THE MELANCHOLY OF RESISTANCE (Tr George Szirtes)

... no one could really believe that thirty years after the Flowering of the Nation, with its high-sounding plans, there should still remain so large a rabble of frightening, villainous-looking, good-for-nothing, possibly threatening characters thirsting after the crudest and most vulgar of Miracles.

Is there anything prettier than a town under a blanket of freshly fallen snow, snow that covers everything in a blanket of white that sparkles in the sun and glows in the moonlight and softens sharp ugly edges and camouflages decaying machinery and junk under that softness? Winter snow hides a lot of sins, aesthetic ones and those of deferred maintenance. Without it, winter is simply miserable and hideous, cold and dry and windy, exposing and accentuating every junked car and overflowing trash can and shredded plastic bag caught on every bare-twigged tree.

László Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance explores the consequences of a snowless winter on a middling-sized Hungarian town when someone decides to by-god do something about the mess it reveals, but that something is far from a cheerful town-wide clean-up day on the first decently warm day of the spring -- and, perhaps, proof that everything that isn't a cheerful town-wide clean-up day with schoolchildren competing to fill their trash bags and business owners helping each other freshen the paint and wipe the windows on their store fronts and a band of juvenile delinquents set to work trimming the weeds in the ditches or repainting the curbs, is quite possibly someone's path to power, if they're dissatisfied and feel under-appreciated enough.

In this unspecified Hungarian town, one Tünde* Eszter is dissatisfied enough, and, estranged from her eccentric musicologist husband, who already thinks she's a monster, she's certainly feeling under-appreciated. 

Be careful when you choose your allies, though.

A long time ago (almost ten years!), back when most of us were still getting our foreign films through snail mail from this cool new company called Netflix,* I finally got my hands on an intriguing film by Bela Tarr called The Werckmeister Harmonies-- and fell completely in love. It still haunts me and I've gladly watched bad transfers of it on YouTube a few times since, and know the Vig Mihaly soundtrack all but note for note, but only now am I getting around to reading the novel, László Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance, the film was adapted from.

Better late than never. 

I said back in 2013 (remember 2013? When we still thought we had the luxury of believing that it would take more than one weird little guy traveling with a taxidermy whale to turn a group of bored people into a rampaging cudgel waving hate mob out to destroy something? But the Hungarians knew better, didn't they? Even back when the film was made [2000]? Maybe because they already had Viktor Orban on their hands in his first term as prime minister? Bela and Laszlo were trying to warn us, you guys!) that this film felt more like a music video than a traditional narrative film, and to this I still hold after a recent re-viewing, but how, then, is it based on a novel?

I know one way to find out!

By the way, *of course* I listened to Vig Mihaly's score for the film while I was reading this. You should, too, even if you're not reading it. It's freaking gorgeous, it and a lot of his other film music for Bela Tarr's films (I love how Krasznahorkai seems to translate to Bela Tarr the way Kobo Abe did to Hiroshi Teshigahara! Except Tarr/Krasanahorkai go one better with Vig! Who I've decided is to Tarr as Michael Nyman is to my beloved Peter Greenaway. I think about this stuff maybe too much, don't I? Anyway, one of these days I'm going to read and watch this team's book and movie Satantango, too. Though that film is not as easy to get my hands on, at present. Someone has the streaming rights tied up and Netflix's DVD service does not have it available to mail to me, so I'm going to have to go hunting.)

Speaking one last time about the film: famously it is constructed from 39 long tracking shots and right away I see an affinity between Béla Tarr and László Krasznahorkai in that Krasznahorkai (or at least translator George Szirtes, but I feel like Szirtes would have been discouraged by the publishering team from imposing this on us if it wasn't a trait of the original Hungarian text) indulges in some looooooong sentences, one after the other. Like this one from the prologue, in which an older lady is riding a rickety improvised train full of riff-raff through the outskirts of the town she is already dreading having to walk through to her house in the dark:

Although she continued to resist the force of circumstances which seemed to have been created expressly to challenge such resolution, in the complete absence of streetlight and the still oppressive silence she began to feel ever more like a victim cast to her fate, for wherever she looked, seeking the filtered lights of apartments, the place assumed the look of all cities under siege, where, regarding all further effort as pointless and superfluous, the inhabitants have surrendered even the last traces of endangered human presence in the belief that while the streets and squares have been lost, the thick walls of buildings behind which they cower afford shelter from any serious harm.

That's all one sentence. And I know I'm one to talk, but wow! And it's followed immediately by one just as long and then another almost as long and Vig Mihaly's slightly repetitive but beautiful soundtrack combined with either Tarr's long tracking shots or K's long sentences is kind of... hypnotic? Which is interesting, since this story is largely about how one bad actor can make a whole lot of people do bad things... and suddenly, lulled by many long sentences like this we're brought up short by a relatively short one with shocking and sudden violence: "Down in its depths, around the artesian well, she glimpsed a clotted mass of shadows, a dumb group who, it seemed to her, were silently beating someone."

YOWZA!

As I've already said, the novel takes place in a smallish Hungarian city -- actually, my idea of the size of the municipality involved is all out of whack because I come from a town with fewer than 2000 residents and did most of my teenaged hanging out in one with around 500, so my version of a Small Town is much, much smaller than most people's, as is my version of a remote town; Wyoming is famously described as a small town with some long streets -- and our "streets" aren't served by public transportation. Anyway, this unnamed Hungarian town has a train station and a lot of other amenities that I associate with big cities but that I know are more widely and evenly distributed around Europe, but it feels very small in that it is confined chiefly to the area that red herring protagonist and postal carrier János Valuska serves, which is its downtown and whatever residences most closely abut it.

And it's winter, a hard and bleak and unusually cold even for the season winter, in that blah period between Christmas and springtime -- but without any snowfall, which emphasizes the bleakness of it all.

Everybody is bored and listless with a few key exceptions, the main being the aforementioned Tünde Eszter, an incredible busybody even before she was elected president of some kind of women's council that exercises a certain degree of power within the town. She seems to answer only to the mayor, at any rate, and it is a project of hers that has set everything in ponderous and dangerous motion, though it'll be a while before we realize what she has done or its consequences, which will mostly fall on Valuska, though there will be plenty of other victims before the novel is through.

The most notable of these is her poor estranged husband, Gyorgy, a musicologist who until recently taught at the local music academy (see what I mean about how this sometimes sounds like a city of some size? Not only does it boast a symphony orchestra but also a music academy!), until he had a complicated, life-changing revelation while waiting for a piano tuner to finish his job and clear out for the night. It's a weird revelation that I'm not sure I've understood properly, but it seems to boil down to, music/mathematics might be real, as in the relationships between notes/frequencies actually matter, and they aren't just things that we made up?. Thus the Music of the Spheres is more than just a metaphor. 

In the process of having this revelation, Gyorgy also realized that the genetic/viral time bomb in his body (which is the same one that I, your humble blogger, have, as it turns out!) was starting to go off and that this meant he was no longer going to be able to handle life with his monstrous wife and he'd better get her to clear out of their home and his life. Which she surprised him at the time by agreeing to, mostly -- she still insists on doing his laundry, which she passes along to him via Valuska -- but has made it clear in all sorts of creepy and threatening ways that she considers their living apart to be a temporary arrangement. 

Alas, she has very recently decided that it's time for that arrangement to end, because the fucking patriarchy insists that if she is going to wield any real power in their world, she is going to need her husband to be the figurehead that appears to be exercising power while she does all the work and makes the actual decisions in obscurity. In this Mrs. Eszter reminds me a lot of Bettina, Harry Joy's bitter and thwarted wife in Peter Carey's Bliss (and Ray Lawrence's sadly underrated film adaptation of that wonderful novel). Her fulfillment requires his suffering, and she looks after herself first, thank you very much. 

Meanwhile, her Philip K. Dick character of a husband seems stuck in the Tomb World and, kind of like his wife, can't stop focusing on the kipple that everybody else seems to have (pardon the phrase) tuned out:

"Rubbish. Everywhere he looked the roads and pavements were covered with a seamless, chinkless armour of detritus and this supernaturally glimmering river of waste, trodden into pulp and frozen into a solid mass by the piercing cold, wound away into the distant twilight greyness."

This poor sap is supposed to head up his wife's "movement for moral re-armament?" And if that phrase gives you the willies, well, just wait. 

That Mrs. Eszter's initial slogan is "A TIDY YARD, AN ORDERLY HOUSE" is surely a mere detail, right?

Anyway, what Mrs. Eszter has done to prepare for his advent as a leader under her control is... arrange for a small traveling show to come to town, though perhaps the adjective should be something more like "miniscule" since it seems to consist of a single exhibit (though the exhibit itself is large): a taxidermy whale over 50 meters long, being hauled around the countryside in a giant corrugated metal trailer by a standard disreputable carny who charges a small fee for people to climb up into the trailer and look at the whale up close -- a rare opportunity in landlocked Hungary! Indeed, it seems to have attracted a bizarre following of thuggish wanderers who follow it from town to town, on foot, easily done since this thing moves very, very slowly.

Krasznahorkai -- and Tarr -- get a lot of mileage out of this show's slow and ominous entry into town. The truck and trailer take up a lot of room and move very slowly. The rig is so big and so slow that it would surely cause traffic problems by day. Fortunately it's late at night when the thing pulls into town, its entry witnessed chiefly by Valuska as he walks home, slightly drunk, from his usual night at the local inn, which he tried to liven up by rhapsodizing to his drinking... can I call them drinking buddies? Drinking acquaintances, surely, of many years, but buddies? Perhaps not. But more than acquaintances. They've known him and tolerated his eccentricities all of his life. Anyway, he spent the evening drinking a sweet liqueur because he doesn't like the taste of beer or the harder stuff, and rhapsodizing to his fellow drinkers about the wonders of the cosmos and especially of solar eclipses. He wound up getting several of the inn patrons to get unsteadily up from their chairs and act as a living orrery, one guy as the sun, one guy as the moon, one as earth, staggering through their proscribed orbits until the innkeeper finally gets everybody's attention so he can kick them out and close.

Cue the big rig with the whale, although when Valuska first sees it he doesn't know at all what's inside, just that it's big, though before he's reached home he's seen a bill posted (niftily mimicked for some of The Melancholy of Resistance's more interesting book covers, as I've shown here) announcing the whale and capturing his curiosity. Valuska looks forward to getting to see this whale; he doesn't just love the stars, though they're his favorite. He loves the universe!

But remember the scene the woman walking home from the train station that same night witnessed by the artesian well? And thought were just local drunks acting out? They could have been drunks but they were not local, and their appearance in town coincides with the advent of the whale.

The violence that ensues, in which poor Valuska is caught up and in which unbelievable destruction is wrought on the town, is masterfully depicted without resorting to blow by blow accounts of who does what. It's even more effectively depicted in the film, of course, but Krasnahorkai gave it its first hallucinatory treatment while never letting us lose track of the two most important threads: Mrs. Estzer's quest for power, and Gyorgy's belated realization that Valuska's friendship is actually the most important thing in his life. There are some truly haunting scenes as Valuska seeks shelter and Gyorgy seeks Valuska, never realizing the part that his wife has played in all of this -- because no one does.

Amusingly, this all wraps up with the pages-long metaphor detailing the biochemical breakdown of a human body as it decomposes after death, in which I kept waiting for Qfwfq, the eternal omniscient narrator of another book I'm reading now, Italo Calvino's The Complete Cosmicomics, to show up, either to turn out to be one of the Carbon atoms liberated in the process or to be the decaying body itself. This was nowhere near the point of this coda to the novel, of course, but as I read my way through a collection of translated literature from nations that were once part of the Austro-Hungarian empire in a month I'm calling Radetzky March, I couldn't not think of it, which relieved some of The Melancholy of Resistance's bitterness as it ended with a mocking fascist testimonial to one of its many victims.

Onward with a ragged cheer I go, to representatives of other former bearers of the Hapsburg Yoke. I hope some of the others are a little more cheerful? But one of them is definitely going to be more Robert Musil, so... probably not.

*Damn, I love Hungarian names! Gyorgy's wife is named Tünde, by the way, a name originally derived from that of a fairy in a famous play that I'm going to have to read soon. She is not in the least fairy-like, of course, as her husband ruefully likes to observe -- unless, well, she's got some tough standards she doesn't always bother to communicate to lesser beings, and she's certainly mercurial. Anyway, here's where I confess that when I first watched the movie I was too excited to see Hannah Schygulla in the role that I just assumed "Tünde" must be Hungarian for "aunt" and since Valuska persisted in calling Gyorgy "uncle"...

Nathalia Holt's WISE GALS: THE SPIES WHO BUILT THE CIA AND CHANGED THE FUTURE OF ESPIONAGE

There is a whole category of books that I can't help but categorize as "stuff I need to read to make up for the fact that my U.S. History teacher in high school was very Not Good" to which Nathalia Holt's excellent and illuminating Wise Gals: The Spies Who Built the CIA and Changed the Future of Espionage most surely belongs. Which means that every other page left me wanting to scream out that I should have known about something already but at least I know now, no thanks to you, Mr. [REDACTED]!

In the case of Wise Gals, the biggest revelation (besides the incredible stories of the titular gals) was that a World War II battle had taken place on American soil, just six months after Pearl Harbor, except kind of six months plus one year after Pearl Harbor because it took the U.S. a long time to land troops to engage the Japanese who had invaded and taken the Aleutian island of Attu, part of the then territory and now state of Alaska.

So of course I'm going to have to read all about that pretty soon because Wikipedia won't do when you're... me. I've already located a book about it in my local public library!

Also, Gloria Steinem worked for the CIA for a hot ten minutes or so in the early 1960s! "In my experience," she said later, "the agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable."

Ok, Boomer.

Anyway, Wise Gals is a fantastic book about the lives and unsung careers of yet another group of amazing women -- one of whom, Jane Burrell, was the first CIA agent ever to die in the field -- who quietly changed the world despite all the garbage that patriarchy kept shoving at them. In this case, the women were instrumental and fundamental to the development of the United States' intelligence services during World War II and the early stages of the Cold War. Like the ladies of Hidden Figures and Holt's own Rise of the Rocket Girls (which I haven't read yet but now very much want to), these women's names should be as well known as their male counterparts but aren't. At least not yet. 

The women whose stories are encompassed in this book were not only there at the founding of the CIA; Holt directly ties their work to the agency's development from a "male, pale and Yale" network of pseudo-aristocratic amateur spies to the sophisticated, data-hoovering, technologically advanced power it is today.

By the way, look how much cooler the UK cover for this book is. The US edition uses a generic model they've given a vaguely 40s hairstyle and some dark lipstick and then cut off the top of her head. In the UK they got to see four of the actual women's faces. I had a terrible time on the internet trying to identify who is in which photo, but I'm  sure that they are four of these five: Jane Burrell, Adelaide Hawkins,  Elizabeth Sudmeier, Adelaide Hawkins, Eloise Page, and Dr. Mary Hutchinson. My point is that it wasn't a single unknown woman who did all of the amazing deeds described herein; they were actual, individual human beings with families and interests and personalities and skill sets uniquely theirs. Do better, US publishers.

But I mean, wow, these were some extraordinary people. Burrell, for instance, had to work side by side with ex-Nazis (supposedly, but not always completely, "turned" towards the end of World War II) to expose post-war Nazi plots like giant art thieving and currency counterfeiting schemes, to say nothing of war criminals' escape from justice by disappearing into new identities in new countries. Often her collaborators turned out to be every bit as bad as the people they helped her expose, meaning she spent years in serious danger. What finally got her, though -- she was the first CIA officer killed in the field -- was a plane crash in Europe, cutting short a promising but already distinguished career.

Adelaide Hawkins, not content with a distinguished service record from the war in part because she was supporting and raising three children (she divorced her deadbeat husband right after the war), became one of the first members of the Central Intelligence Agency immediately on its founding and, among other achievements, headed up the team that developed the microdot camera -- an iconic bit of spy kit if there ever was one.  

Meanwhile, Eloise Page was, as another OG CIA operative, a leading voice in the campaign to get the rest of the U.S. government to understand that an innocuous seeming calcium processing plant in East Germany was making material for a Soviet nuclear weapons program that was much farther along than technical advisors (who hadn't factored in short cuts like spying in assessing how long before the USSR had The Bomb) were telling it. When she and her colleagues were largely ignored, she helped organize a mission to sabotage the calcium plant -- but by the time the US and British bosses had agreed to put it in motion it was too late.

And history might have been very different if General Douglas MacArthur had paid attention to the hard work of Dr. Mary Hutchison and her colleagues at the CIA's Tokyo station in 1950. She'd only warned everybody authorized to read her stuff that North Korea was getting ready to invade South Korea -- long before some 200,000 Chinese troops massed at the border to lend Kim Il-Sung a hand. Page followed up this feat of sounding the alarms and being ignored by warning her superiors months ahead of time that the Soviets were very close to launching Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite. You know, the one that took us completely by "surprise."

Some of us were more surprised than others. The Looming Tower*, anyone?

Then there's Elizabeth Sudmeier, who brought our country the first credible intelligence about the world's first mass-produced supersonic aircraft the infamous Soviet MiG-19 fighter plane, which she got via gossip at the Baghdad dressmaker's shop among the well-placed hijab-wearing ladies she had carefully cultivated there. Nobody else in the Near East division could have accomplished this because nobody else was a patient, friendly and engaging young woman -- who genuinely enjoyed spending time there and appreciated the hand-tailored wardrobe her activity allowed her slowly to build. She stayed behind in Baghdad after a fundamentalist coup killed off Iraq's royal family and sent the rest of the CIA's personnel on various frantic escape routes and managed to maintain most of the U.S.'s spy network there until it was (sort of) safe for everyone else to come back.  And we won't even talk about her role in the Gary Powers/U-2 affair because you're going to read this book. Right?

Sudmeier's experiences having to leave Iraq after a mole in Washington D.C. blew her cover got me thinking, of course, about Valerie Plame. I wondered about Plame's time as a woman in the CIA in the 1990s and beyond -- and then I learned she has not only written (with a ghost writer) the expected memoir, but also a couple of spy novels! Gonna have to have a look at those one of these days. 

Egads, there is still so much I don't know. Which is why I keep on reading...

*And, as Holt takes pains to point out in the summing up of this book, the Wise Gals walked across Europe and the Near and Far East in Ferragamo pumps so the ladies of Alec Station who kept tabs on Osama bin Laden et al could analyze truckloads of data in more sensible shoes, as it were.