WRITING DOCTOR'S BLOG by NYHWRITER.COM

WHOSE PETS ARE THESE? THE PETS by BRAGI OLAFSSON translated by JANICE BALFOUR

THE PETS by Bragi  Ólafsson: Translated from the Icelandic  by Janice Balfour (Rochester, New York: Open Letter Publishing, Literary Translations from  the University of Rochester)

Review by Nancy Yanes Hoffman, THE WRITING DOCTOR, at www.writingdoctor.typepad.com, nywriter@rochester.rr.com, 585-385-1515.

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              Five years ago, when I spoke at in Reykjavik, Iceland was riding high. Its financial boom looked as though it would last forever (sound familiar?) Fishermen became bankers.  Rich bankers.  Iceland’s three largest banks, Kaupthing, Landsbanki Islands, and Glitnir were lending wildly.

              The Wall Street Journal reported that “The banks’ assets reach 10 billion pounds, about 10 times the country’s gross domestic product last year, and their foreign depositors …far outnumber the island’s population.”

              But the party’s over. The government has seized the entire banking system. The krona plummeted 40% against the euro in just a few weeks.

              So what? What’s this got to do with  Bragi Ólafsson’s prescient “novel,” THE PETS . Originally published in 2001, THE PETS  was even more presciently translated by Janice Balfour in 2008.

               In the heat of the American financial crisis, the University of Rochester’s newly established Open Door Series has published this strangely cautionary tale of greed, passive-aggression—and frankly abusive aggression while  nobody minds the store. And nobody seems to care.

              THE PETS centers on two ne-er-do- wells with extra money in their pockets, their once-hateful relationship when five years before, they ostensibly took “care” of some pets in London. Failing abysmally, they angrily parted company with one paying off the other.

              The two men are Emil, a prim passive  who narrates most of  this loosely knit tale from under his bed where he has fled to avoid meeting  Havard, the loud lout (are there any quiet louts?). For after a welcome five-year absence, Havard has climbed in Emil’s window to find him once again. Searching the house but not looking under the bed, Havard answers the phone, invites Emil's friends for a party, and bathes in Emil's liquor. 

              Just back from another trip to London, Emil would rather inhale the dust under his bed, feel the springs pushing against him, than confront Havard, who “didn’t seem to  be interested in anything, unless it was forbidden or contained the highest percentage of alcohol.”

             The house fills with the noise of Emil's friends who wonder where he might be. Meanwhile, lying under the bed, Emil, easily annoyed,  recalls all the little irritations of the return flight, particularly his talkative seatmate, Armann, whose glasses Emil forgets to return.  The minor annoyances vanish after he meets Greta, whom he knew fifteen years ago.  Despite the complications of a present girl friend, Emil has arranged to meet Greta once again at his house.

            Initially, the chapters alternate between Emil’s first-person recollections and Havard’s third-person descriptions but the chapters soon shift to Emil’s under-bed perspective, which is pretty dim.

             It’s tough to care about these two. Their futures end as they began. With such characters tending Iceland's meltdown, it's easy to see why its glaciers are now dripping from its financial trees.  THE PETS can only make us wonder what will happen to us as we huddle under our economic beds and ponder our future.

LOSING OUR DESTINATION: DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS by SARAMAGO

DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS  by José Saramago, Translation from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa ( New York: Harcourt, Oct.6th, 2008)
 
Review by Nancy Yanes Hoffman, THE WRITING DOCTOR, at www.writingdoctor.typepad.com, nywriter@rochester.rr.com, 585-385-1515.

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      The Maestro of What-If is at it again. With his new novel, DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS,  Jose Saramago, Nobel Laureate for literature, repeatedly asks “What if?” Just as he has in many of his previous works, he upsets the ostensibly sturdy apple carts holding the structured myths governing our lives and our behavior.

        BLINDNESS, Saramago's novel on which the newly released film is based, shows what happens when an epidemic of white blindness besets an unnamed town, implicitly asking what it means to see—and not to see. In DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS, Saramago asks what happens if everyone stopped dying. For on New Year’s Day,  the ten million dwellers in an unnamed land find that death is no more.

          The novel begins in media res with:

           “The following day, no one died. This fact, being absolutely contrary to life’s rules, provoked enormous, and in  the circumstances, perfectly justifiable anxiety in people’s minds, for we have only to consider that in the  entire forty volumes of human history there is no mention, not even one exemplary case, of such a phenomenon  having occurred…New year’s eve had failed to leave behind it the usual calamitous trail of fatalities.”

             Death has stopped but dying has not:

            “There was, however, no shortage of blood. ..One thing was clear, today, the victims refused to die...It was already late afternoon when the rumor began to spread that, since the beginning of the new year, more  precisely since zero hour on the first day of January, there was no record in the whole country of anyone dying.”

             Initially joyous at defeating death, people quickly learn how much they depended on her to keep their lives going.  Hospitals have no empty beds. No longer can they rely on rotating the newly sick with the newly dead. Doctors, funeral directors, insurance companies experience a financial crisis much like the one visited upon us these days.

             Debating the pros and cons of losing death as the ultimate punctuation mark to a life sentence, philosophers argue its pros and cons. Priests protest vociferously, ‘Without death, prime minister, there is no resurrection, and without resurrection, there is no church.”

             For some people, business is good. For a price, the “maphia” (Saramago’s spelling to distinguish it from its more realistic cousin) joins forces with families and the government to export the very old and the very sick to other countries where they can die in peace—and quickly.

              Eternal life turns out to be a curse. After seven months in absentia, Death herself, personified as a lonely, lovely woman sitting in her chilly apartment with her useless scythe and filing cabinets, decides to halt her experiment and return to the hapless citizenry. She mails everyone a letter explaining that she wanted “to give those human beings who so loathe me just a taste of what it would mean to live forever.” Now, she is through.

               Those designated to die will have a one-week warning. A violet envelope will tell them to get ready for Death’s arrival. But one envelope doesn’t work. Three times, it comes back to her unopened..  Astonished, Death seeks out its owner. A 50-year-old cellist lives alone with his dog. Falling in love with the cellist, Death becomes human—another curse.

                As Death lies in bed with the cellist in her arms, the novel ends with as many questions as it raised in the telling.  Was the returned violet envelope intended for Death herself because she succumbs to love?

                The novel’s final words repeat its first ones and ask unanswerable questions about our future if death were no more: “The following day, no one died.” Does love conquer death or will Death finally arise and return alone to her old life? Saramago doesn’t say in this circular fable which ends as it began.

               With Saramago, form follows function. His deliberately endless sentences demonstrate that even words may need an ending  to their journey.

               If you read no other book during this archetypally autumnal season, read—and reread—Saramago’s what-if notes on love and death (capitalized or lower case, depending on your point-of-view). And reread John Donne’s poem “Death Be Not Proud,” which shows that love does defeat death.

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