John le Carré's SILVERVIEW

Even Proctor was impressed by the homespun nature of these exchanges, given the scale of things to be ironed out, but he had been long enough in the job to know that momentous happenings had a way of acting themselves out on small stages.

Is there anything more wistful, more beautifully sad than sitting down to read a writer's last published novel? Yes, yes there is, and it's reading that writer's posthumously published novel, which I finally had to do even though I'm cheating a bit because I still haven't read all of the rest of John le Carré, but I decided for once to at least try and be in sync with the man's true fans.

And this is the right year for me to read Silverview, because this is also the year that I discovered the pleasures of literature from the Balkans, especially the work of Selvedin Avdic, whose work is intimately concerned with the aftermath of the brutal and horrifying conflicts that took place there mostly in the 1990s but are still being felt to this day, as his horror novel Seven Terrors vividly showed me.

Silverview isn't set there or then, but its central concern is very much concerned with that place and time, specifically a multi-ethnic village a British intelligence agent came to cherish for its peacefulness amidst the horrors, what happened to it and to the family he all but adopted, and how that affected him, his own family in Great Britain (especially his marriage, the small stage upon which these big events first take place), and his Service afterwards. Our man this time is one Edward (or Edvard) Avon, son of a devout Polish Catholic who was an eager collaborator with the Nazis; in Avon's adulthood he attached himself as passionately to socialism/communism as his father had (at least claimed to be) to the Church until he became disillusioned with that cause and adopted another: the would be do-gooding of the western world, eventually in the form of British Intelligence.

Not that we know this for a while, because this is a John le Carré novel and we're going to get to know the other people in his life first, chiefly a youngish man who made a lot of money as a trader in London, became disillusioned by it, and decided to move to an East Anglian village and open a bookshop even though he turns out not to know very much about books. Julian is the kind of guy a lot of us enjoy disliking, in other words; born to the right-ish parents, raised to be a certain kind of successful, successful at what he was supposed to succeed at, and now just blithely assuming he'll succeed at something new with all the confidence that only having enough money to be able to afford to lose a lot of it without pain can give a guy. But of course, if it weren't for guys like him, a lot of little villages out there would never have book stores, or record stores, or groovy little coffee shops that aren't owned by behemoth corporations that over-roast their product and force everybody to adopt faux-Italian vocabularies for just so we can order a damned cup o'joe.

We still don't really have to like these guys, though.

But Edward Avon does, right away, for reasons that aren't clear until much later in the book. Avon is now living in that same East Anglian village and wins our hearts immediately for insisting that if Julian is going to run a bookshop in East Anglia, he had better already know W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn by heart. Which was just what I was thinking as I sank into Julian's story!

Then enter one Stewart Proctor, holder of one of those ambiguous positions within the secret service in which he commands a lot of resources and personal loyalty but seems still to have to answer to a lot of shadowy figures behind the scenes. We don't know why he's in this story for a good long time (relative, of course, to the fact that this is not a big, hefty doorstop of a novel) except that it has something to do with Edward, or with his wife, Deborah (a spy's spy in her own right) or maybe just their daughter, Lily? He circles around this story like a rather kind-looking shark until suddenly he strikes and fills the waters with, not blood but maybe adrenaline? For all that everybody in this story except for Julian and Lily are on the far side of age 60 if not 70, as if this is le Carré's version of All Passion Spent. But with, you know, spies.

And the odd terrifying lawyer, which I was already picturing being played someday by Janet McTeer, who once played Vita Sackville-West (author of All Passion Spent) in a TV movie. Rawr.

The novel is accompanied by a fond note from le Carré's son, who writes under the name of  Nick Harkaway, who describes the not-as-difficult-as-he'd-feared task of getting Silverview ready for publication in terms of wondering whether he dared "put eyebrows on this Mona Lisa" and for those who might raise their own eyebrows at the implied comparison, yes, this is a Mona Lisa. It is a masterful work from an artist very much in command of his powers and a lucky last gift to his fans. I wanted the experience of reading it to last a while but of course I read it in a day and a half, and now must return it to the library because lots of other people are waiting.

Ah, me.

Selvedin Avdic's SEVEN TERRORS (Tr. by Coral Petrovich)

My experience of the insanely horrific war and genocide that tore through the Balkans in the 1990s was heavily mediated, chiefly by reports on NPR. To this day I still hear the names of those towns and regions in Sylvia Poggioli's distinctive voice.*

Since then I've discovered Joe Sacco, whose autobiographical comics about the conflict are harrowing to see and to read, but beautiful too, and watched all the documentaries on the conflict that YouTube has to offer, but nothing derived from that horrible epoch  has gotten under my skin quite like a short but intense and powerfully erudite little horror novel, Selvedin Avdic's Seven Terrors.

 A book with a title like that must be working off a list, one might think, and indeed a list of seven phobias does appear in its pages -- twice. And it's not the same list. Early on, we get a list that our unnamed narrator composed after hearing from a radio report that a psychologist has recommended the exercise as the first step towards getting over those fears. Later in what is basically an appendix to Seven Terrors, we get another - only this second list, we are given to understand, is cribbed from another character's researches into a bit of local folklore that has obsessed him.

The two lists do not match, though there is a little overlap between them. And the characters in Seven Terrors do not have methodically to encounter and conquer the terrors from either list in the course of the story. Selvedin Avdic is a much more interesting writer than that, and he's got a much more serious point to make: that even though, in the point in time and space that is this novel's setting (a Bosnian village in the late "oughts" or early 2010s), the Bosnian War is well over a decade in the past and thus its horrors can be thought of as having receded to a certain degree, its having happened at all is horror aplenty for its characters to cope with, and its aftermath is still horrifying.

Our narrator, whose wife left him for another man through, as he has accepted ruefully, his own fault, has just come off a nine-month depression jag that has seen him spending the whole time in bed. His Bosnian village, a tiny mining town still half-trashed by the war, doesn't exactly offer state of the art mental health services, and hey, everybody here is coping with grief and trauma and survivor's guilt and personal hurts every bit as bad as our narrator's own.

On the very day he finally seems to be pulling himself together, cleaning up and thinking about going out for a bit, a knock at his door proves to be, not local foreboding lunatic Mikhail, who periodically invades people's spaces to deliver bizarre and cryptic pronouncements that might be reminders of the past, statements on the present or presenitiments of future doom, but a young woman, Mirna, whom our hero last knew as a little girl. Mirna and her mother were sent away early in the fighting, with the promise that Mirna's father Aleksa would soon follow, but Aleksa stayed behind to help other people in worse danger than he and his feared. They kept in touch for a while, and then his letters stopped coming. Aleksa and our narrator were colleagues, journalists at a local radio station. Does our narrator know what became of Aleksa, by any chance?

He does not, so soon is pressed upon by a tearful Mirna to help her find out what happened to her father. She has come into possession of a journal he'd been keeping in the last months before he disappeared, which shows him to have been investigating legends of supernatural presences in the local mining tunnels, and indeed to have encountered a famous one: the Perkmann.** Since his encounter, the miners who at first welcomed him among their ranks have shunned him, maybe because he is a Serb, maybe because belief around the Perkmann holds that the person who has seen him is cursed (although, Aleksa maintains in his journal, this figure is also associated with warnings of disaster, and Aleksa's encounter was in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake that occurred while he was deep in the tunnels. So maybe it really is because Aleksa is a Serb). Still fascinated by the story, Aleksa kept researching and asking around, leading him to meet other sinister figures in the town who aren't nearly so supernatural as the Perkmann, but every bit as terrifying and very, very dangerous. And also some ghostly mining horses, animals who spend their entire useful lives deep underground in the dark and are thus blind by the time they are retired and brought to the surface. To live out the rest of their lives on one of those farms that's too far away to visit and they can't visit you either it's just too far. But nobody's ever short on glue.

But this isn't really a spook story. It's one man's oblique approach to all of the mundane horrors that are too traumatic to confront directly, complicated by everybody else trying to do the same. Shattered psyches everywhere, still with jagged edges to cut each other with on the slightest approach. It's heartbreaking and sad and beautiful.

It's also, often, funny in weird and unpredictable ways. Our narrator having been a radio journalist and our author being an intelligent man who lives in the world, his account is sprinkled with references to American pop culture and some surprisingly passionate opinions about it. A footnote (yes, a novel with footnotes, but hush, this is not some David Foster Wallace infinite jesting, just some cultural clarifications and the odd tangent) veers into considerable vitriol against Vogue magazine in general and Anna Wintour in particular, which seems like a very odd thing for a novel like this to do, but it doesn't feel odd when it happens. And it reminds us that, while we may have the luxury of ignorance about people in other countries living through horrors other than ours, most of them don't have the reciprocal luxury when it comes to us. Our dumbest pop culture tidbits erupt right into their reality and thus their thoughts and discourse, even when examining hurts uniquely their own. A lot more literature is translated from our language into theirs than ever will be from theirs into ours -- and our readers barely read what is written by us, for us, let alone what's been imported from abroad. See also Chad W. Post's The Three Percent Problem.

As for the translation itself, it's resulted in some beautiful English prose that carries some startling and original imagery. One never knows, on this end, what images are carried over wholesale from the original and what are developed by the translator to mimic the effect of something untranslatable, but Coral Petrovich has one way or another given us some stunning English sentences like "At first, a terrible nervousness overcame me, I could have slid out of my skin like soap from a fist." That's one of those that's going to live rent-free in my head for a long time, like Haruki Murakami/Jay Rubin's bit in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle "I glanced at the phone in the living room. It sat on the table, cloaked in silence. It looked like a deep-sea creature pretending to be an inanimate object, crouching there in wait for its prey."

I don't imagine that, in this dreadful eternal year that is still basically 2020, a lot of us are actively looking for stories that remind us that our imagination holds no horrors that are really worse than what we do to each other in real life, but sometimes it is good to see it in a highly original form, and so for that if not for any of the other reasons I've sort of given here, I recommend that you set aside a little time -- and at 149 pages, you won't need much for the actual reading so much as for coming to terms with it after -- and spend it with Seven Terrors.

*I'm Gen X. I was a 20-something in the 90s and too poor for anything but snowy analog broadcast TV and commuted the six miles to work on foot to save time and bus fare. NPR was pretty much my lens on everything.

**Who seems to be a local version of a figure in German folklore called the Bergmonch.