The Radetzsky March by Joseph Roth

The Radetzky march by Joseph Roth

A distinctly central European novel that is at once strange yet familiar. Strange because I know very little about Austria-Hungary and its empire, and familiar in the sense that the relationship between monarchies and their militaries are not very different at different times and in different places. Written in the early 30s and set just before WW1, the style and story have echoes of 19th century French literature. Descriptions of genteel affairs could have come directly from the pen of Balzac, while the descriptions of peasants and peasant villages could have been written by a young Zola. There is acute observation of imperial administration with all its pathos and absurdity that can only have been written by an outsider. The reader is beset throughout by a deep sense of foreboding. War is clearly coming, it is inevitable, yet its actual arrival at the remote eastern garrison is a shock and the resultant chaos and bloodlust quite incomprehensible.

The dissolute lives of the soldiers in remote garrisons is depressing to read and makes the loss of the empire understandable, and the innate snobbery across the military is made clear by the hero’s eventual transfer from the cavalry to the infantry. He has a minor barony but he can’t ride. But the greatest burden he has to bear is that he is the grandson of the ‘Hero of Solferino’, his grandfather had saved the Kaiser’s life in battle and was both promoted and ennobled in the field. The assumption that he has necessarily inherited individual military prowess is a terrible load for a barely competent officer to bear, he is only three generations removed from peasant stock and it is among peasants that he is clearly more comfortable. His final act of heroism is both surprising and mundane, and curiously satisfying. Reading this novel a hundred years after it is set has a certain poignancy. The book feels much older than that and having recently read Boyd’s ‘Waiting for Sunrise’ set at around the same time and having Vienna as a common location, it is difficult not to make comparisons. Boyd’s novel is very modern in style and make’s ‘The Radetsky March’ seem positively antediluvian. Yet for all that, it is a wonderful book, evocative of both the time at which it is set and the time when it was written.

Clueless Dogs by Rhian Edwards

I drove thirty miles yesterday evening to attend a reading at Brecon Guildhall. I say reading but in fact it was a recitation for Rhian Edwards was adamant that a poet should be able to recite their work without reference to a printed page. She was reading from her first collection, 'Clueless Dogs', which had won the John Tripp Award 2011-2012 and was Wales Book of the Year 2013. it was an exhilarating performance of barely restrained energy. Rhian is, after all, a performance poet of great vitality. She seemed to be reliving the experiences that had prompted the poetry as she recited, and some of those experiences were clearly far from painless, especially where former lovers were concerned. It was confessional poetry that seemed particularly raw. 'Marital Visit' - a married lover shoos her out of the house in readiness for a visit from his wife, I've selected, what were for me, the particularly poignant verses:

It's her visiting time
which presses the pause,
makes you follow me downstairs
and shepherd me out of the door...

...The ritual begins with the clearing
away of my face: foundation, lipstick,
powder, concealer, the wooden brush
cobwebbed with my unyielding knots...

Your wife lets herself in,
carries herself across the threshold,
she smiles at her hallway,
sniffing me everywhere.

There are two other poems that extend this story of an affair that is inevitably doomed, 'Suitcase' imagines the poet packed in a suitcase and lying on the upper shelf of the wife's wardrobe, and 'Pinchbeck' mocks the man's attempts to return the house to its bachelor status and ends with the stark:

Your bedroom has lost its bottles.
There are no trinkets scattered
around the mirror and no face powder
dusting the wood. Her hanging rail
has been picked to the bones
and wears only the white wall behind it.

A long-distance courtship is evoked with all its frustration in 'Skype'; and 'House Key' reveals the apprehension of a boy who knows how to grab the latchkey on its string but is terrified of entering the empty house.

The collection is full of poetic gems that evoke odd scenes and incidents peripheral to love, both requited and unrequited with a subtle humour and often a sense of joy. 'Pest Controller' is a fine example of a lively woman succumbing to the temptation to flirt in totally improbable circumstances. Intriguing and captivating, 'Clueless Dogs' must surely be only a taste of the brilliance yet to come.

A Concise History of Switzerland by Clive Church and Randolph Head

An excellent introduction to the complex history of this tiny and frequently misunderstood country. It has long been Switzerland's devotion to neutrality that has been the least appreciated aspect of foreign policy, and yet historically, that has been the most important, given the country's geographical location and topography. It may no longer be as important now as it was in the past, but it needs to be understood. Few other countries with inherent religious and language divisions could have survived as long as the Swiss Confederation, but the future of this tiny country is difficult to predict. Much will depend on how the European Union develops and is thus out of Swiss hands.

The Late Monsieur Gallet by Georges Simenon

Tortuous and improbable plot. I had trouble visualising the scene and therefore I'm sure some of the technical detail was lost. Too many loose ends for my liking and are we to believe that Maigret connived in an insurance scam? Surely not. Somehow the lesser characters remain invisible and unimaginable. The question remains: is this the fault of the original writing? Or is it the translation? And this raises an interesting issue, viz. to what extent should a modern translator 'correct' the sloppy writing of a work written over 80 years earlier? Your views are welcome on this, no doubt, thorny issue.