Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh (A Review)

Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh
By Slobodan Novak
Translated by Cecilia Hawkesworth
Autumn Hill Books
250 pages
October 1, 2007





My hands had been joined in prayer, my hands had been weapons, they had been a machine for applauding - now they are slaves. . . I know everything now, how to wash and powder the sore back of a crippled old woman I do not care for, I know how to do it tenderly, more humanely than any sister of mercy. Only now, when my hands have become slaves, only now do I also know that I am a fool. That is just why I am what I now know myself to be. Others do not have to pray, others do not have to shoot, others do not have to applaud or be enslaved to know the little it is worth knowing about all of this. I had to push my hands under her rickety shoulder-blades, to learn so little. Rags of lifeless fabric flap, slimy and bloodless, over my fingers. What am I doing here? This creature is rotting alive! Who is it I am tending? Who am I talking to? Who is putting me through this? She is a corpse!

Slobodan Novak is one of twentieth-century Europe's most renowned authors of prose works. Born in 1924 in Split, Yugoslavia, Novak was raised on the island of Rab, located in Adriatic Sea off the coast of Croatia. His career as one of Yugoslavia's leading writers took off in the 1960s. Since then, he has won all major Croatian and Yugoslav literary awards and was presented with the Vladimir Nazor prize for Lifetime Achievement in 1990. His 1968 novel Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, translated from Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth, has received every honor available in its homeland, subsequently going through nine Croatian editions and appearing in seven languages. Its premise is very basic: it is nearing Christmas, and a middle-aged man sits in an ancient, closed-off mansion on Rab, reluctantly caring for its owner, a centenarian named Madonna, formerly a great patrician whose vast holdings have since been seized by Yugoslavia's communist government.

For a 260-page book, the premise is too basic.

Narrator Mali, out of some vague sense of obligation, has spent the past ten years stuck with Madonna, essentially a living corpse who yet, perversely, will not die. His wife Celia has departed back to the mainland to spend the holidays with the couple's two children in Zagreb. The ensuing story is Mali at Madonna's bedside, wandering around town a bit, lusting after an underaged girl from a local convent, generally mistreating a mentally impaired neighbor, and thinking about . . . stuff. The neighbor in question, Hermione, is an exceptionally well-drawn character whose stuttering, stammering dialogue is pure brilliance on Novak's part. ("She had a pain, hada had apain!" "No, signora Madonna, now there's an execra execru excecutivecommittee, believe me! A repuplic.") Mali's isolation and psychologically parasitical relationship with Madonna, as he comes to feel that she validates his very existence and wonders at the sheer stupidity of his predicament, is real and vivid, earning sympathy for an at times unsympathetic individual.

And yet. . .

Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh is certainly full of beautiful passages that are a genuine pleasure to read. And yet, those passages are also embedded in an overall narrative that is just too long and tedious. I am not one of those types who demand that a book read like a Hollywood blockbuster: straightforward plot, outrageous twists, suspense, action, with everything falling neatly into place and tied with a bow. Vassilis Alexakis's Foreign Words is also a "quiet," down-to-earth novel that is wholly realistic in its leisurely pace and natural unfolding of events. But its protagonist was nevertheless working towards something: the study of Sango and new concepts of language and culture, which gave Alexakis's work both a pleasantly contemplative quality and a palpable sense of moving forward. Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, on the other hand, simply meanders and all too often loses itself under layers of symbolism and the drone of endless philosophizing. As the Publisher's Weekly review aptly critiques, it's two hundred pages spent at Madonna's deathbed. After awhile, reading simply becomes a chore. (Mercè Rodoreda's Death in Spring had the same difficulties, but it was also only about half as long.) Of course, the jacket copy compares Novak's style to Beckett, whose work I could never get into, which leads me to wonder if I am even the right person to be reviewing this.

In short, Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh left me with mixed feelings. Slobodan Novak is a master lyricist, no denying that. His prose is brilliantly crafted: lush and descriptive without losing the straight way and finding itself lost in the dark purple wood. That's a feat few writers can manage, although unfortunate numbers certainly try (yes, Dean Koontz, I'm looking at you). Like Virginia Woolf, Novak has the rare ability to transform a mundane moment or hidden emotion into something resembling the poetry of life. At the same time, however, Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh is just too long for its own minimal plot and for all its beautiful prose, it got to where I just wanted it to end.

Rab

Slobodan Novak's Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh is the third work of Croatian literature I have read so far. It is also the third work of Croatian literature I have read that takes place on the island Rab, located in the Adriatic Sea. So, just to give you a better idea of the setting: here are some pictures of Rab:

A Castle in Romagna (A Review)

A Castle in Romagna
By Igor Štiks
Translated by Russell Scott Valentino and Tomislav Kuzmanović
Autumn Hill Books
December 21, 2004





"Somehow, regardless of time and space, Strecci and I are connected. Someone once said that we listen to stories and read books only to know we're not alone. I would add that the fact that we collect them, listen to them, read them persistently all our lives, speaks of our desire to surpass their uniqueness. Somewhere stories come together, perhaps crossing or overlapping, but they are never the same."

Igor Štiks's 2000 novella A Castle in Romagna (originally titled Dvorac u Romagni and translated from Croatian by Tomislav Kuzmanović and Scott Valentino) gives me hope for An American Tragedy, which I have been trudging through for two months now. Štiks initially has the same drawback as Dreiser: a verbose style that force the reader to go over the same sentence twice. The introduction to my edition of An American Tragedy promises that the emotional power of the story will eventually make up for the sluggish beginning. Luckily, such was the case with A Castle in Romagna, in which the recklessness of love only leads to personal destruction.

There are two narrators and three narratives in three separate time periods: Romagna, Italy in 1535, Romagna in 1995, and the Croatian island of Rab in 1948. The first speaker, an exiled Croat from war-torn Bosnia, has arrived at the ancient Castello Mardi for a tour with two female friends. The resident friar, Niccolò Darsa, makes a crude joke about the young man's homeland, and then apologizes, speaking perfect Croatian and offering to tell his own story and that of Renaissance literary giant Enzo Strecci, a guest of Francesco Mardi who was later imprisoned and executed. I feel like natural sympathy with Enzo, Niccolò says, "You won't believe it if I tell you that he was like you and me. No, you won't believe it. Just like you and me." It turns out that the old cleric is an ethnic Italian who lived on Rab until Yugolsav President Josip Broz Tito's split with Stalin shortly after World War II, which precipitated a period of repression and paranoia that saw innocent people turned in and executed for being Cominformist agents. So too did Enzo live in a tumultuous era, as the threat of invasion led to a fear of Habsburg spies lurking among Mardi's household and villages.

As Niccolò, a natural storyteller, recounts his own tale and dramatizes Enzo's, a stronger bond between the two Italians becomes evident: that of forbidden romance and its inevitable follies. The rash and stubborn behavior of senseless youths in love is made all the more foolhardy by a hostile political environment that threatens to crush everyone, victims and perpetrators alike, in its relentless crusade against "subversives." Leaders, acting emotionally, use their authority to carry out personal vendettas. Lives, time and again, are destroyed by love and war. The moral of the story is, conclusively, that humanity remains the same even as the perpetual march of history alters the superficial appearance of things.

Despite its weighty subject matter, A Castle in Romagna is a very short book of only 102 pages. It is nevertheless a slow start, due to Štiks's fondness for rambling sentences that can easily make the reader lose track of the original topic. Sample:

Maria thought quickly, clearly, and correctly, but, unfortunately, on an unsound foundation, that love needed to be fought for, and she took firm hold of the tail of Enzo's horse, which, it seemed, willingly allowed her to take it as it made its way toward Catarina.

(Actually, I wonder if I might have the same problem?) Of course, the trouble with critiquing prose in a translation is that, no matter how skilled the translator, you are still not reading the original work. Nabokov once griped about reviewers who praise translated books for "reading smoothly," contending that one who does so is a mere "hack who has never read the original, and does not know its language, [and who] praises an imitation as readable because easy platitudes have replaced in it the intricacies of which he is unaware." That being said, however, another Croatian novel translated by Tomislav Kuzmanović that I have also read, Zoran Ferić's The Death of the Little Match Girl, did not have this same issue of long-windedness, so I would assume it is indeed reflective of Štiks's authentic voice. Which brings up yet another question: can one properly review a translated book if they are not familiar with the other work the translator has done? Food for thought. But as I said, as the suspense and emotional intensity of A Castle in Romagna increase, so does its readability until it finally starts to sail - dare I say it - smoothly.

Additional thought: The Death of the Little Match Girl is also set on Rab and deals with war and paranoia. Recurring themes in contemporary Croatian literature or is that too broad an assertion to make from two books? I will be reviewing a third Croatian novel, Slobodan Novak's Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, so stay tuned.

The Death of the Little Match Girl (A Review)

Zoran Ferić’s The Death of the Little Match Girl is one of those books that is difficult to explain or even summarize. Set on the Yugoslavian island of Rab in the summer of 1992, this Croation novella, 196 pages long and translated by Tomislav Kuzmanović, is perhaps best described as a sequence of bizarre and unsettling events played out against the ominous backdrop of an impending war that taints everything in shades of fear, suspicion, and paranoia. From the mysterious death of a transgendered prostitute to the mystifying appearance of large metal figures outside various buildings, to brief glimpses of unknown children in the dark of night and the “satanic” desecration of graves, the only thing clear is that something very odd is occurring in sleepy, idyllic Rab. To local medical examiner Fero and police chief Mungos falls the winding task of getting to the bottom of all the perplexity surrounding the untimely demise of the Little Match Girl, and, in the process, perhaps making sense of both the town and times in which they live.

The book opens on the dissonant note of both shattered innocence and increasing absurdity. The funeral of a little girl is simultaneously surreal and awkward: one speaker reads the wrong speech, another launches into a rant about children being sawed in half. Things go slowly down the proverbial hill from there – Fero is then summoned to examine the anatomically incorrect body of a dead woman and his childhood town starts to take on an alien and sinister air. As the plot escalates and the unexplained events proliferate, the only assumption left is that menacing forces are at work, behind the scenes, orchestrating some nefarious scheme. The book takes on the form of an Escher print: lots of stairs and passages leading nowhere. Lurking forebodingly in the background, is, of course, the recent Balkans war, which, despite its threatening nature, soon fades to white noise, very nearly evaporating from the story itself. Yet in the end, The Death of Little Match Girl is more than plot: it is about ambiance, atmosphere, and what elements compose and color the world in which we live. The ending is therefore appropriately anticlimactic, leaving the reader somewhat confounded. So – that’s what it was? That’s it??? . . . !

I think what truly makes Ferić’s work here so intriguing is precisely this exploration of paranoia and the insidious encroachment of mounting fear into an everyday setting. That is also what makes it pertinent to the recent conflict in the region: the war saw long-time neighbors turn on one another with a seemingly sudden ferocity. The Death of the Little Match Girl is therefore recommended for anyone interested in the psychological dimensions of deep-rooted sociopolitical anxiety and its swelling potential to detonate.