"One More Dead Body" by Kartar Singh Duggal 1982 translated from Punjabi by Balwant Gargi

"One More Dead Body" by Kartar Duggal is a totally entertaining very insightful story that lets us see "real" life in the family an office worker living in a big city in India.   As the story opens we learn the husband has to face a terrible two hour each way commute to work on the crushing trains.  His in-laws want to know when they will be blessed with their first grandchild but he tells us he is basically so tired when he gets home he does not feel like being with his wife.   There is a wonderful two hundred apartment building only ten minutes by bike from his job.  He has been trying to get an apartment there for a very long time then he is so happy when they can move to the new place.  He and his wife love it there.  It is so nice no one ever moves out.  Vacancies only arise when a resident dies.  However, instead of enjoying four more hours of leisure and working on his first son, he decides to use the extra time to work overtime.  He only comes home to eat and collapse in bed.  One day he in a never happened before event gets sick at work and goes home in the middle of the day.  He walks in on his wife in bed with another man and goes nut.  He removes his shoe and begins beating the man who vacates as soon as he can.  Then he begins to hit his wife with the shoe screaming out at her "whore" in a voice all the neighbors can hear.  

A few days later the building manager shows up with a letter of eviction and tells the couple the neighbors have reported them for bad behavior and have put out claims the wife is a prostitute.  Suddenly we learn what is most important to the man.  He tells the landlord's agent that all couples have fights and the neighbors are making up this story as they want to put their relatives in his apartment.  Then he turns on the manager and demands an apology for his insults to his wife.  The manager thinks for a moment then apologies and tears up the notice of eviction. 

I know it will be hard for most to access this story (first published in The Hindu Times and reprinted in Best Indian Short Stories, Vol Ii edited by Khushwant Singh -this and Vol I are probably your best introductory volumes to the Indian short story.)

Kartar Singh Duggal was born in 1917, in Dhamal, Rawalpindi District, Pakistan. He writes with equal ease in Panjabi, Urdu, Hindi, and English and excels in all genres of writings.

His works have been translated into several Indian and foreign languages. He has received many honors and awards including the Padma Bhushan, Sahitya Akademi Award, Ghalib Award, Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad Award, Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid Award, and Soviet Land Award.

He has served as Director, All India Radio and Director, National Book Trust. He has also been Advisor (Information), Planning Commission of India.

The Library of Congress has 118 of his works.  He died in 2012.

Hotel Savoy by Joseph Roth 1926

So far I have read and posted on two novels by the great Viennese writer, Joseph Roth, his acknowledged master piece The Radetsky March and a sequal to it, The Emperor's Tomb.  I have added Roth to my read all I can list (meaning translated and in a Kindle edition).  

 Hotel Savoy is set in the years right after WWI  in a large city which sounds like it might be Vienna, Roth's home, but we never learn the name of the city.  I guess it is any town of some size in eastern or Central Europe.  The narrator is returning home from a long walk from a Siberian POW camp.  He is classical educated but he cannot find a job.

The central place and really the center of the novel is the Hotel Savoy.  It is kind of a combination Grand Hotel for the rich of Europe on the first three floors and above that it houses very poor war veterans, displaced persons and the girls who dance naked in the hotel bar where the rich can patronize them and hire them for sex.  There are at least twenty five who stay at the hotel that Roth brilliantly particularizes. One of the things I learned from reading the novels of Roth and Stefan Zweig's memoir, The World of Yesterday was how pervasive prostitution was in between the wars Vienna. You have to see this as a reduction of elemental humanity to commerce and a sign of the degradation of women in the societies. It is saying if you are a poor but passably attractive woman you can either clean the toilets of the rich or be a prostitute.  Visits to prostitutes were also a mark of manhood and of course fun sometimes.  

Every body in the hotel is scrambling to make money through some kind of scam. Hyper-inflation is just starting and there is a lot of currency trading.  The hotel savoy is very international if not cosmopolitan. 

One exciting event happens in the hotel that all the residents were excited over.  The super rich Jewish American industrialist Broomfield comes  to the hotel to stay for a while. Every one wonders why.  Through a lucky break the narrator is hired by Broomfield to screen the people who want to see him and be sort of a personal assistant.  

You can see social unrest building in the city as more ex-soldiers pour into the city, many staying at the Hotel Savoy, more and more citizens are near destitution, and inflation continues.  This is a world where only how much money you have matters.  An apocalyptic event closes the novel.  

This is very much worth reading.  The next Roth work I read will probably be Job. 

I just wanted to put this picture on my blog.  

German Literature Month November 2013.  I thank Caroline and Lizzy for hosting this great reading event.

So far I have read and posted on these works, all but Kafka are new to me writers. 

The Tin Drum-by Gunther Grass

"The Judgement" by Franz Kafka

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque -very powerful war novel 

"A Letter from an Unknown Woman" by Stefan Zweig. 

The Death of the Adversary by Hans Klein - a work of genius

"The Job Application" by Robert Walser 

Chess Game by Stefan Zweig-I will read much more of his work

"The Battle of Sempach" by Robert Walser

I have also listed to podcasts of "Basta" and "Frau Wilkes" by Robert Walser

The March of Radetsky by Joseph Roth I hope to read all his work

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori amazing work of art.

"Flypaper" by Robert Musil

"Mendel the Bibliophile" by Stefan Zweig - I totally love this story.

"The Dead are Silent" by Arthur Schnitzler an entertaining work from 1907

"There Will Be Action" by Heinrich Boll a very good short story by Nobel Prize Winner

Transit by Anne Seghars 1942 very much worth reading

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig - an elegy to a lost culture. 1942

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. 2001. 

The Emperor's Tomb By Joseph Roth 1938 

"Flower Days" by Robert Walser 1907 (no post) 

"Trousers" by Robert Walser -1909 (no post)

Medea By Crista Wolf

Passport by Herta Muller. Romania Nobel Prize winner, German language writer. 

Mrs. Roth 

 

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"Mataji and the Hippies" by Balwant Gargi -ਬਲਵੰਤ ਗਾਰਗੀ - 1976- Translated from Punjabi by Khushwant Singh)

Balwant Gargi began his life in a humble Punjab village.  He rose from these modest beginnings to become of the most highly regarded Punjabi dramatist, wrote several award winning novels and lots of short stories.  "Mataji and the Hippies" should be read in partnership with another great story by an Indian writer dealing with Indian reaction to the thousands of "hippies", dharma bums, who came to India in the 1970s seeking a wisdom not found in Europe and America, "God and the Cobler" by R. K. Narayan.  He was mentored by Rabinder Nath Tagore who advised him to write in Punjabi rather than English. 

"Mataji and the Hippies" opens in a very small ashram on the banks of the holy Ganges.  Mataji is a middle aged at least Punjabi woman who spends most of her time high on Ganga.  She is a follower of many Gods, most especially Shiva to whom marijuana is sacred.  Or so she and the five western "hippies" who stay with her.  We learn a little about Mataji's past.  She grew up working in a rough road side cafe.  She left home at eighteen and drifted about.  We don't know how the young foreigners decided she was a guru of some sort.  She feeds them, mothers them and everybody is stoned most of the time.   She tells them it is legal to smoke marijuana as they are doing it as part of a religious observations.  She is a vegetarian and when she receives gifts of fruit she first throws some of it into the holy Ganges.  One day the police arrive, no doubt planning to arrest the hippies for drug use in order to get a bribe from them.  Mataji confronts the police Sargent, tells him he is profaning the worship of Shiva and he tells his men to leave and release the hippies. 

In a strange twist he returns to the ashram alone.  I know it will be hard for most to access this story (first published in The Hindu Times and reprinted in Best Indian Short Stories, Vol Ii edited by Khushwant Singh -this and Vol I are probably your best introductory volumes to the Indian short story. You need to also read Malguidi Days Short Stories of R. K. Narayan) but I still do not want to tell the ending.

This is a very intriquining story.  We never learn how the hippies ended up on the Ganges and we never know how things will work out.  

I would certainly buy an anthology of stories by Balwant Gargi. 

Balwant Gargi was born on December 4, 1916 in Neeta Khandan in Bathinda, Punjab. He was a popular dramatist, theatre director, novelist, and short story writer, and academic. He completed his undergraduation at the Government College Lahore, and pursued M.A.(English) and M.A.(Political Science) from FC College in Lahore. Gargi is the author of many popular plays, including Loha Kutt, Kesro, Kanak Di Balli, Sohni Mahiwal, Sultan Razia, Soukan, Mirza Sahiba and Dhooni di Agg; and some unique short stories Mircha Wala Sadh, Pattan di Berhi and Kuari Disi. His plays were translated into 12 languages, and have been performed around the world, including Moscow, London, New Delhi and around the USA. From The Economic Times of India 

The Passport by Herta Müller (1986, 98 pages, translated from German 1989 by Martin Chalmers)

I decided to read The Passport (Masks) by Herta Müller as part of my participation in the German Literature III for several reasons.  I wanted to 

support the event goal of reading more books by German language women writers, I have never as far 

as I recall read any fiction by a Romanian author (she wrote in German and emigrated or if you prefer

escaped Romania for Berlin in 1987) and she won the Nobel Prize in 2009.  Of her several works 

available in translations The Passport is by far the shortest one at 98 pages so I picked selected it and

I am very glad I did.  I will hopefully one day read all her translated Kindle edition books.   

Annina from Casablanca was speaking about an earlier devil who had Romania by the throat but she could just as well have been talking about Ceausecu who by his very shadowy presence dominates The Passport.   

The Passport is built around the attempts of a miler in a small German speaking village in Romania to get his immigration passport to West Germany approved.  The book is not at all a straight forward narration.  It is a collage of brief episodes, some from the past and some from the present.  The residents of the village are caught between the modern west and old folk ways and terrors in Romania.  There is a lingering preoccupation with Jews and Gypsies.  Life is brutal in the village and there is very little hope.  All of the village is interested in the miller's attempt to obtain a passport.  There are amazing scenes in the story.  There is a "skinner" who captures owls and skins them for no apparent reason.  I found this a powerful and at times  disturbing book.  

Herta Müller, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009, was born in 1953 in itzkydorf, a German-speaking village in Romania. After college she worked as a translator in a factory, and was dismissed for refusing to work for the Romanian secret service, Securitate. As a result, her first book, Niederungen, was unpublished for many years and appeared in 1982 in censored form. In 1984, the original version appeared in Germany, after which Herta Müller could no longer publish in Romania. Securitate subjected her again and again to threats, interrogation, and searches of her home. In 1987 she moved to West Germany. She has been a visiting professor at universities in England, the United States, Switzerland, and Germany. She lives in Berlin.

 

Redemption Falls by Joseph O'Connor 2008

Redemption Falls is the third novel by Joseph O'Connor I have so far read.   It is the most challenging and probably his greatest achievement to date.  My first of his books Star of the Sea was set on a famine ship, 1843, bringing refugees from famine ridden Ireland to New York City. O'Connor let us see the events in the lives of people on the ship that made them embark on this desperate journey.  I really enjoyed this book.  The second of his books I read was Ghost Light.  It's central character is an actress, Molly Allgood, who had what was at the time a scandoulous romance with the Irish playwright John Synge.   Allgood was the leading lady in some of the plays of Synge preformed at the Abbey at Theater.  The romance was doomed by class differences and the disapproval of Synge's mother and others.   Molly way out lived Synge and we learn a lot backstage life and business in the Irish theater.  I was fascinated by this wonderful novel.

The core, linking character is Eliza Mooney.  She was born in New York City around 1847 to famine ship emigrants.  Redemption Falls starts in post Civil War Louisinna in 1865.  It brilliantly brings to life post Civil War Louisinna.  It is not at all a conventional straightforward narration.  It is a collage of posters, letters, official government records, songs, interviews combined with the narrative.  There are two sort of central threads to the story, deeply entertained.  .  It is also the story of the famous Irish patriot and rebel James O'Keefe.  In 1848 the British transported him to Van Diems Land for inciting the Irish to rebel.  He escaped and wound up in New York City.  Eliza Mooney (if you have read another much more famous Irish in the American Civil War novel, Gone With the Wind, then Eliza Mooney would be "white trash" in the eyes if Scarlett O'Hara) sets out across a ravaged country in search of her twelve year old brother who was a drummer boy in the Condererate Army.  She has heard he is in the town of Redeption Falls, located probably in modern Utah or Montana.  James O'Keefe and his fiery ravaging  wife want to adopt the boy and that is the connection.  

This is very much also an Irish historical novel.  There are brilliant flashback to Ireland and many of those who we encounter are Irish emigrants.   The horrors of the Civil War are vividly shown.  We meet some amazing people including a slave woman.  In the social hierarchy of the time and place, Irish like Eliza were one small step above freed slaves.  

Redeption Falls is a very powerful work of art, much more challenging than the two prior novels by O'Connor I read.  I read this book very slowly over six weeks or so, very much contrary to my normal methods.  I would almost say try his other books first.  If you like historical novels about the American Civil War and the Irish in America, then you should really like this book.  

I have now read all of his historical novels.  He has another novel, Inishonen, out in kindle format set in contemporary Ireland and I might read it next year or maybe I will just wait for another historical novel.  

Joseph O’Connor was born in Dublin in 1963. He is the author of the novels Cowboys and Indians (short-listed for the Whitbread Prize), Desperadoes , The Salesman , Inishowen , Star of the Sea and Redemption Falls , as well as a number of bestselling works of non-fiction.

He was recently voted ‘Irish Writer of the Decade’ by the readers of Hot Press magazine. He broadcasts a popular weekly radio diary on RTE’s Drivetime With Mary Wilson and writes regularly for The Guardian Review and The Sunday Independent. In 2009 he was the Harman Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Baruch College, the City University of New York.  From Goodreads

An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor Von Rezzori 1958

This wonderful book—literally, a book full of wonders—which lived for too long in shadow, has been brought fully to light by Philip Boehm’s lustrous new translation. An Ermine in Czernopol may at last take its place on the shelf alongside The Tin Drum and One Hundred Years of Solitude.
—John Banville

If my shelves were short, I would remove both of the books Banville mentions and replace them with An Ermine in Czernopol and Memoirs of an Anti-Semite.  

Memoirs of An Anti-Semite is one of the towering master works of 20th century European literature.  I am so grateful to Caroline and Lizzy for hosting  the German Literature III event so I did not die never having read the works of Gregor Von Rezzori.  He was a very productive writer in a wide variety of genres including travel books,  movie scripts, children's books, popular literature and towering works of art.   

An Ermine in Czernopol is set in Czernowitz, once in The Austro-Hungarian Empire, now part of the Ukraine.  It was once a place great cultural diversity, with a dozen languages, several major religions co-existing.  I cannot describe it as well as the NYRB:

"Czernopol is a border city, a cultural and linguistic melting pot “where you can find a dozen of the most disparate nationalities and at least half a dozen bitterly feuding faiths—all living in the cynical harmony that is built on mutual aversion and common business dealings.” It’s suspended in history between a feudal past, whose peasants still bring their pungent presence and goods to the city’s market square, and a globalizing modernity whose vanguard has arrived in Czernopol in the form of American jazz, which jostles with the old Viennese waltzes and gypsy music. The city is further divided between the imperial Habsburg past and the chauvinistic nationalism of the new Romanian regime: “Even in its deteriorated state this former grandeur was easy to see and hard to forget, not yet fully surrendered to the garish colors of the new rulers.” In the lull between the world wars there are signs of the catastrophe to come: Nazi demonstrations, swastikas painted on Jewish shops, and, in the climactic set-piece scene, a pogrom sparked off by ethnic tensions over soccer team allegiances."

I know I have not told the plot and I don't plan to.  All I will say is read his books.  The NYRB has three i titles available.  I have not yet read his memoirs The Snows of Yesterday but I will correct that error soon.  

I am really glad I decided to once again participate in 

German Literature Month November 2013.  I thank Caroline and Lizzy for hosting this great reading event.

So far I have read and posted on these works, all but Kafka are new to me writers. 

The Tin Drum-by Gunther Grass

"The Judgement" by Franz Kafka

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque -very powerful war novel 

"A Letter from an Unknown Woman" by Stefan Zweig. 

The Death of the Adversary by Hans Klein - a work of genius

"The Job Application" by Robert Walser 

Chess Game by Stefan Zweig-I will read much more of his work

"The Battle of Sempach" by Robert Walser

I have also listed to podcasts of "Basta" and "Frau Wilkes" by Robert Walser

The March of Radetsky by Joseph Roth I hope to read all his work

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori amazing work of art.

"Flypaper" by Robert Musil

"Mendel the Bibliophile" by Stefan Zweig - I totally love this story.

"The Dead are Silent" by Arthur Schnitzler an entertaining work from 1907

"There Will Be Action" by Heinrich Boll a very good short story by Nobel Prize Winner

Transit by Anne Seghars 1942 very much worth reading

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig - an elegy to a lost culture. 1942

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. 2001. 

The Emperor's Tomb By Joseph Roth 1938 

"Flower Days" by Robert Walser 1907 (no post) 

"Trousers" by Robert Walser -1909 (no post)

Medea By Crista Wolf

An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor Von Rezzori 

"Forgotten Dreams" by StefanZweig (no post)  

Gregor von Rezzori (1914–1998) was born in Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine), Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He later described his childhood in a family of declining fortunes as one “spent among slightly mad and dislocated personalities in a period that also was mad and dislocated and filled with unrest.’’ After studying at the University of Vienna, Rezzori moved to Bucharest and enlisted in the Romanian army. During World War II , he lived in Berlin, where he worked as a radio broadcaster and published his first novel. In West Germany after the war, he wrote for both radio and film and began publishing books at a rapid rate, including the four-volume Idiot’s Guide to German Society. From the late 1950s on, Rezzori had parts in several French and West German films, including one directed by his friend Louis Malle. In 1967, after spending years classified as a stateless person, Rezzori settled in a fifteenth-century farmhouse outside of Florence with his wife, gallery owner Beatrice Monte della Corte. There he produced some of his best-known works, among them Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and the memoir The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography (both published by NYRB Classics).  From New York Review of Books.

From one of the movies he acted in.

Mel u

"The Blush" by Elizabeth Taylor 1958

I believe "The Blush" originally published as were many of her stories in The New Yorker, is one of her highest regarded short stories.  Reading it was my introduction to her work and I now do hope to one day read The Complete Short Stories of Elizabeth Taylor one of these days.  

There is a twist ending in the story but it came at me so unexpectedly and in such a subtle fashion that I had to go back and read a portion of the story three times.  I do not wish to give away to much of the plot.  There are two main onstage characters, an upper-middle class English lady and her maid.  The lady regrets she never had children and when the maid describes the antics of her children she thinks "mine would never act that way".  The lady looks down on her maid, not in a mean way just socially.  The maid often complains of her life and she has lost her figure, not slender like the lady.  Then, this never happened before, the maid's husband shows up at the house of the lady.  Now the story takes a super interesting turn and in an instant you see the undermining of the world view of the lady. 

I read this in an excellent anthology of stories by  women writers that I have been slowly working my way through The Story:  Love, Loss, and the Lives of Women -One Hundred Short Stories edited by Victoria Hislop.

About this author

Elizabeth Taylor (née Coles) was a popular English novelist and short story writer. Elizabeth Coles was born in Reading, Berkshire in 1912. She was educated at The Abbey School, Reading, and worked as a governess, as a tutor and as a librarian.

In 1936, she married John Micael, a businessman. She lived in Penn, Buckinghamshire, for almost all her married life.

Her first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote's, was published in 1945 and was followed by eleven more. Her short stories were published in various magazines and collected in four volumes. She also wrote a children's book.

Taylor's work is mainly concerned with the nuances of "everyday" life and situations, which she writes about with dexterity. Her shrewd but affectionate portrayals of middle class and upper middle class English life won her an audience of discriminating readers, as well as loyal friends in the world of letters.

She was a friend of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett and of the novelist and critic Robert Liddell.

Elizabeth Taylor died at age 63 of cancer.  - from Goodreads