Iza’s Ballad – Magda Szabó (tr. George Szirtes)

When I read my first Magda Szabó book – The Door – three years ago, I wasn’t particularly blown away by it (minority opinion, I know) for reasons I highlighted in my review. And yet there was much to commend in that novel and certainly an appetite to sample more of her work. That opportunity came along this month thanks to the wonderful #NYRBWomen23 reading project, whose August selections included Élisabeth Gille’s brilliant The Mirador and Szabo’s Iza’s Ballad, the latter so good that it is another strong contender for my year-end list.

In the final few chapters of this brilliant but incredibly sad novel is a flashback to a conversation between Vince on his deathbed and his doting nurse Lidia where he reminisces about his life and relationships. He particularly recalls how his daughter Iza, whom he respects and admires, hated listening to a particular ballad when she was a child. The ballad was a beautiful one from his student days but he could never sing it to Iza “because she would immediately burst into tears and plead for the dead character to be brought to life again.”  Iza deplored sad stories as a child and as she grows up into a young woman she abhors dwelling on or discussing the past, preferring instead to look ahead to the future with her razor-sharp focus, discipline, and unnerving energy.

But Iza will pay dearly for this single-minded vision, her stubborn denial to acknowledge any other worldview other than her own. The reference to this ballad (lending the novel its name) is an embodiment of Iza’s frozen personality, her refusal to accept the intricacies of life with all its joys and sorrows that form the essence of any human experience, and more importantly in failing to understand her mother Ettie, a heartbreaking mother-daughter relationship replete with misunderstandings that form the kernel of this stunningly written novel.

Iza’s Ballad opens with Ettie receiving news about her beloved husband Vince’s death. Ettie at the time is toasting bread and through this seemingly simple task, Szabó cleverly gives a glimpse into Ettie’s personality first before going into the details of Vince’s illness and death – her discomfort with modern electrical appliances and gadgets which she views with a modicum of suspicion given her rural roots.

Three years earlier Iza had sent them a clever little machine that plugged into the wall and made the bread come out a pale pink; she’d turned the contraption this way and that, examined it for a while, then stowed it on the bottom shelf of the kitchen cupboard, never to use it again. She didn’t trust machines, but then she didn’t trust things as basic as electricity. If there was a prolonged power cut or if lightning had disabled the circuit, she would take down the branched copper candelabrum from the top of the sideboard where the candles were always ready in case the lights went out, and would carry the delicate flame-tipped ornament through the kitchen and into the hall, raising it high above her head the way a tame old stag carries its tines.

We learn that Vince was terminally ill, a fact that Iza deliberately chose to keep from him although he knew something was amiss. But Iza does not conceal this from Ettie and while Iza in her cold, clinical way tries to prepare her mother for this eventuality, Ettie understandably cannot quite accept it even though she does not question the diagnosis. As the reality of Vince’s death begins to sink in Ettie is paralysed by a deep sense of loss and also crippling uncertainty about how she would manage alone. Trying to come to terms with the finality of Vince’s absence, Ettie harks back to the past, to their marriage, and the trials and tribulations that the couple had to face and overcome. We learn that Vince is a respected judge but is subsequently ousted from his post on account of his political beliefs.  The humiliation is immense but the family soldiers on as does Iza who is protective of her parents never blaming them for those twenty-three years of ignominy although she does play an instrumental role in Vince’s rehabilitation later.

In these early pages, we see how Iza and her parents come from very different worlds. Iza is a young, modern woman who holds great regard for progress and much contempt for sentimentality or going back to one’s roots. Vince and Ettie are relatively old-fashioned and have their own set ideas of the life they wish to lead, in sharp contrast to Iza’s, the clash of opinions pretty vivid in their disagreement over the couple’s choice of accommodation after Vince’s rehabilitation.

We also get a sense of the gulf between Iza and her parents in how they perceive each other. Both Vince and Ettie have a high regard for Iza, she’s a conscientious daughter who has never failed in her duty and has painstakingly taken care of her aged parents, and they are grateful to her for all that she has done for them, and yet there’s a dissonance, something spontaneous missing, a feeling that they ‘ought’ to be thankful without the right to complain or express their true feelings.

Meanwhile, as is characteristic of Iza, she takes charge of arranging Ettie’s life after Vince’s passing. Ettie will live with Iza in her Budapest flat, without having to worry about money and enjoying a period of much needed rest after the tumult and exhaustion of Vince’s illness. She makes arrangements to sell the family home in the village and efficiently settles various other matters. Ettie, poor thing, is ecstatic at first, she looks forward to spending quality time with her beloved daughter, but alas things unfold quite differently.

Now she really started crying: the relief, the sense of being saved and liberated, suddenly burst in on her. All those terrors, everything she was afraid of–empty evenings, pointless days, lodgers, long days with nothing to do–all these had come to nothing. By the time Iza came home from the surgery she would have everything prepared for her and they would spend all their free time together, as they did in her childhood.

The first days of adjustment in the big, bustling city of Budapest are particularly hard for Ettie who has spent most of her time in a village taking comfort in its familiarity and sense of community. Pest frightens her, and with Iza too immersed in her career and social life, Ettie’s sense of isolation only heightens.

Misunderstandings creep in. Beset by a desire to be useful to her daughter rather than a problem, Ettie tries to incorporate changes in their daily routine. She decides to take charge of the cooking, cleaning, and other household matters, but this leads to a clash with Iza’s cook and maid Teréz, who complains to Iza of Ettie’s unwelcome interference. Afraid of losing Teréz and her carefully planned and settled routine, Iza tells Ettie to back off. Ettie wishes to spend quality time with her daughter, chatting and reminiscing about those good old times, but Iza is dead tired after a demanding day of work and desires nothing but peace. Things take a darker turn when out of utter loneliness and longing for company, Ettie unwittingly strikes up a friendship with a prostitute and is subsequently mortified by her actions when Iza, horrified, ticks her off.

Teréz, sensing how untethered and rootless Ettie is, decides to involve her in the daily shopping out of compassion, a task that Ettie gratefully grabs with both hands. But this sense of self-worth is short-lived, and a deeper disillusionment manifests within her with the terrible realization that she’s more of a burden than a help.

Enmeshed in this main plotline, is the story of another important character, Iza’s ex-husband Antal. Antal makes an entry fairly early in the book (the first chapter in fact), and the first thing we learn about him is how the end of his marriage to Iza was his decision. We are told that one fine day, Antal suddenly decides to up and quit offering no explanation of his reason for divorce. Vince and Ettie, having developed a soft spot for Antal, are bewildered by this turn of events but quietly accept it, afraid to broach the subject with Iza, who appears to have taken it in her stride.

However, Antal takes centre stage somewhere in the middle of the book; a couple of chapters entirely devoted to him that reveal aspects of his personality and his life – his turbulent growing-up years following the loss of his parents and his transformation into a thoughtful, self-made man, his first impressions of Iza when she joins the same medical school (Antal is her senior) followed by courtship and marriage and various facets of the marriage itself. At that point, Antal’s reasons for divorcing Iza are not revealed although the reader can discern why.

One of the biggest strengths of the novel is Szabó’s superb characterization. Ettie and Iza are such brilliantly etched, fully realised characters, and Szabó particularly excels in showing how their diametrically opposite personas and outlook set the stage for heartache and tragedy. The two are as unalike as chalk and cheese. Ettie is warm, Iza is frozen. For Ettie the past is an anchor, while Iza is forward-thinking, her gaze settled on the future. Ettie craves companionship, Iza wants to be alone.

Uprooted from her house and the comforts of her earlier life, poor Ettie is overwhelmed and feels crushingly lost in an environment that has no place for her. Throughout the years, her status as a wife, a mother, and a homemaker had given her a sense of purpose as well as pride in her importance in her family life. After moving in with Iza, all that is wrenched from her in one swell swoop.

For starters, Ettie is not encouraged to grieve for her husband whom she deeply misses. As she transitions from village life to city life, the string of disappointments pile on. Most of her cherished furniture finds no place in Iza’s flat and is discarded, she is forbidden from taking charge of the cooking and cleaning, she spends most of her time travelling in trams in a state of complete bewilderment, or sits by the window staring out at nothing in particular. She is suspicious of modern conveniences and increasingly becomes afraid of getting into Teréz and Iza’s way.

Slowly and steadily, Ettie withdraws into a shell and becomes a shadow of her former self (“Maybe she was already dead and hadn’t noticed? Could a person die without being aware of it?”), her absolute loneliness drives her to find solace in her memories of Vince; indeed, Vince remains a potent force in the novel even after his death.

Vince was dead, Endrus was dead, the old town had gone, everything was gone. Even Vince’s illness, with all the horribly demanding tasks it entailed, with all its dreadful obligations and the constant gnawing fear that filled her days, seemed something to envy now.

Iza, meanwhile, is fierce, intelligent, and capable, but emotionally quite detached. Hence where her career looks bright, her relationships falter. Iza abhors any form of sadness filtering into her life, so much so that she refuses to be by Vince’s side during his final moments despite having taken complete charge of managing the practicalities of his illness. Her relationship with her parents is mostly built on admiration and respect on their part and duty on hers rather than genuine warmth. I do believe that Iza means well and loves her parents in her own way; her heart is in the right place when she decides to take in Ettie. Where Iza makes a colossal mistake is her insistence that her mother sticks to her own (Iza’s) terms without anticipating the damaging effect it will have on Ettie. Thus, because of her lack of empathy and imagination, she fails to perceive how excruciatingly tough it is for Ettie to adapt to her new reality.

Even in her medical career, Iza is brilliant in her diagnoses but lacks bedside manners. Iza’s approach to her work also sharply contrasts with that of Antal’s. In a project to transform a spa town and build a sanatorium, Iza’s zeal and passion are palpable in her fight to get various plans approved and build an impressive structure while Antal’s approach is more humane, his focus more on transforming the lives of the town’s inhabitants for the better. And yet, she is not entirely without feelings, we get a sense that she was deeply in love with Antal and was happy in the marriage in her own way, and still sometimes longs for Antal’s security after their divorce.

One of the most interesting features of the novel is the perspective or the prism through which we view the characters. Early on, a substantial part of the book dwells on Ettie, and her struggles to adapt to her new life only to gradually sink into despondency. Iza is very much present, but only as a counterfoil to Ettie, in highlighting Ettie’s sorry plight. In those pages, we get to know Iza mostly through her actions rather than her thoughts, and even when we do get a glimpse of what’s going in her head, it’s mostly about her desire for calm and quiet. Later on, we do witness the deeper layers of Iza’s personality peeled off revealing her true self but only when seen through the eye of the other characters – Antal, her current lover Domokos, and the nurse Lidia (also Antal’s fiancée) – which in turn reveals a lot about them too. It’s a clever approach that only accentuates Iza’s stubborn refusal to be self-aware besides shielding herself from the feelings of others.

Iza’s Ballad, then, is a piercing, unflinching examination of a complicated mother-daughter relationship, a striking depiction of two women who are poles apart. Having led completely different lives as adults, the generational gap between the two women is gnawing and unmistakable, and neither woman can understand the other (Ettie, overawed by her daughter, does not know how to express herself; Iza, set in her own ways, is blind to the idea of being more accommodating). Both women find themselves grappling with an unexpected role reversal thrust on them – after years of Ettie having taken care of Iza her child, it is Iza now who is mothering Ettie, the implications of which are challenging for both women to endure.

“I was still young when I lived with her and in many ways depended on her, even as a woman; she cooked and cleaned for us, she patched Antal’s clothes. But now she can’t see that I have fully grown up and don’t need to be mothered. She has aged and grown weak, she needs support and advice. If I want her to be happy with me I have to pretend to be a child. That way she’d be satisfied nannying me during the day and she’d be tired by the evening.”

Ettie is uneducated, anachronistic, and longs to recreate the past and instill those values in the present, she yearns for the reassuring contours of a typical village setting and longs for companionship. Iza is modern, fearless, and independent; she values her freedom, her “me-time” and space, as well as her intellectual and social life.

Misunderstandings and a severe lack of communication runs throughout the book not just between Iza and Ettie but also with the other characters. These are characters who let their innermost troubles fester without voicing them aloud. For instance, Antal genuinely cares for people and while Antal’s decision to leave Iza can be understood by the reader, his approach comes across as somewhat cowardly. Even coming back to Ettie and Iza, one wonders whether the two could not have had a frank discussion and tried to find a middle ground, although that’s probably wishful thinking given how they come from such dissimilar worlds.

It’s also a book that touches upon the theme of old versus new, an ancient past versus a rapidly modernizing future, nostalgia versus forward-thinking, where Ettie and Iza inhabit the opposite ends of this spectrum.

But Iza’s Ballad also raises the core question of what it means to grow old; the sense that one is a debilitating burden on one’s loved ones. We are shown how Ettie was always a cheerful, bustling woman in her earlier days, and then the heartbreaking dawning realization that she’s of no use to anyone, the pride of work and meaning stripped off her. For a substantial part of the book, she is referred to as “the old woman” even by Iza, as if she is a presence to be put up with, however, inconvenient. Ettie may be uneducated but the despair of old age is not lost on her (“Everything has changed,” the old woman thought. “I can’t tell what is what any more, only that nothing is as it was”).

The other big highlight of Iza’s Ballad is the prose which simply soars, particularly in the way Szabó showcases the faults in her characters and the fissures in their relationships with so much tenderness and sensitivity. There’s sheer poetry in her writing style, in the fluid unfurling of her sentences, her genius on display when delving deeper into the consciousness of her characters or when describing the natural world, all of which contribute to an immersive reading experience. Here is an especially evocative paragraph that conveys the beauty of the landscape when viewed through Domokos’ artistic lens…

Every season was a visual experience for Domokos. Whenever he left the capital the winter seemed to him a drawing in chalk, spring a watercolour, summer an oil painting and autumn an etching or a linocut. But he had never seen an autumn landscape like this before. This was autumn in oils, the land summery, the sky a deep blue with some leaves left on the trees, not yellow but obstinately green, the ploughed earth a cheerful brown, no wind and the sun burning through the windscreen, the field of golden marrows brilliant, ready for roasting.

Dark, haunting, and exquisitely crafted, Iza’s Ballad, then, is a tour de force in its achingly poignant rendition of a difficult mother-daughter relationship and the growing agony and sorrows of old age. Iza may have built a wall around her soul to ward off being hurt in real life or being bogged down by sadness in stories or poems, and yet ironically for all those painstaking efforts, fate might find a way to crack her defenses after all.

The Mirador: Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by Her Daughter – Élisabeth Gille (tr. Marina Harss)

I read The Mirador by Élisabeth Gille as part of the #NYRBWomen23 reading project, and boy what a stunning read it was. To be honest, I struggled to capture the beauty of this book, but I made an attempt all the same…

In an interview at the end of this gorgeous, elegantly-written book, Élisabeth Gille enumerates one of the many reasons for writing The Mirador – “In writing about the life of someone whose life ended so tragically, I hoped that my book would, at least in a modest way, lead people to reflect.”

This someone is none other than her illustrious mother and writer – Irène Némirovsky – who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 when Élisabeth was just five and died in a concentration camp in that very same year. Given that her mother was snatched from her and her sister Denise at such a tender age, Gille barely had any memories of her mother, and in a way, The Mirador is her attempt to understand a woman who sadly was a stranger because of the sheer cruelty of fate.

But The Mirador is no ordinary biography. The byline below the title reads “Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by her Daughter” which is to say Gille has breathed life into her mother by giving her a voice and thus positioned this as a memoir. What we read, therefore, is a first-person narrative giving the impression that it is Irène herself who is speaking directly to us.

The Mirador comprises two sections – the first is Némirovsky’s imagined memoir penned in 1929 covering her childhood in Russia and Paris amid sweeping changes and a rapidly evolving political landscape; while the somber and hauntingly sad second section fast forwards to 1942, days before her arrest at a time when she was living in precarious circumstances with her husband and two young daughters in a small French village, isolated with a deep sense of foreboding with regards the future. This section also highlights a selection of letters and correspondence by Irène to various persons – her children’s governess, her publishers, and other notable figures requesting references while applying for French citizenship – the authenticity of which is confirmed by Gille.

Alternating with these chapters in both sections, are short entries or paragraphs comprising a page and written in italics, each paragraph headed by a date that begins in March 1937 and culminates in October 1991; the first and the last entry serve as bookends to this dreamed memoir. These entries depict Élisabeth and Denise, mostly in the days and years following their mother’s heartbreaking disappearance, but written in the third-person as if Élisabeth is watching herself from a distance.

The first section dwells on Irène’s childhood and adolescent years in Kiev, Paris, and St Petersburg, a lush and evocative portrayal of a bygone era awash with tints of nostalgia about a time that despite several upheavals paled in comparison to Irène’s final destiny. In the early chapters, we see Irène largely leading a life of ease and privilege. Her father was an astute and successful banker who doted on her but because of his important business dealings was mostly absent. Her mother was a beautiful woman, self-centered only concerned with her beauty, a life of luxury, and fulfillment of her expensive tastes. Irène, therefore, was left largely in the care and tutelage of her French governess Mademoiselle Rose.

Gille beautifully captures Irène’s early years which were as much an account of her parents’ well-to-do life as it was about Irène’s. Led by her father’s shrewd business deals, money flowed unabated into the Némirovsky household. Her parents boasted of a thriving social life filled with lavish dinners, theatre, and music concerts often hobnobbing with the rich and the famous.

From an early age, Irène displayed a love for books and literature, her curiosity and learning nurtured by Mademoiselle Rose. But she also understood a bit of the outside world by observing a stream of businessmen visiting her father, or in the company of her stylish aunt Assia (her mother’s sister) from whom she first learned the meaning of the term ‘pogrom.’

ALL ABOUT MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS

Mothers and daughters and various facets of this relationship are explored through this memoir. Of course, the writing of The Mirador, itself is possibly a medium through which Gille hoped to understand her mother Irène, but at the heart of the book, the spotlight remains on Irène’s difficult relationship with her own mother. A woman attuned to luxuries and decadence, the mother was a distant figure who perceived Irène as her rival and who beset by insecurity deliberately downplayed Irène’s age, much to the latter’s chagrin. Irène’s parents had a rocky marriage with the mother entertaining a coterie of lovers while her husband was away. Loyal to her father, her mother’s behaviour riled Irène only widening the gap between the two women.

As her mother completely immersed herself in her extravagant lifestyle which involved frequent sojourns to Nice, Irène was mostly left to her own devices or in the company of her cherished English governess Miss Mathews (hired after Mademoiselle Rose left them). So complete was her jealousy that her mother couldn’t quite accept her daughter’s transformation into a beautiful woman; she resisted holding a coming-out ball for Irène branding it as terribly old-fashioned, but was forced to give in on her husband’s insistence. This unbridgeable gulf between mother and daughter meant that even during her final years of crisis Irène couldn’t rely on her mother for help when she needed it the most.

RUSSIA – A COUNTRY IN FLUX & A HOTBED OF HISTORY

The Mirador superbly conjures up an unforgettable sense of place with its rich, evocative descriptions of early 20^th century Russia. Coming from a family of Ukrainian Jews, Irène had fond memories of Kiev “my beloved, ancient Kiev, my toboggan of a city, warm and gay, crisscrossed with alleyways and staircases.”  Her voyage with her father, first on a cruise on the Dneiper bordered by massive forests and then through the towns, villages, and estates of Ukraine, left her “with an impression of terrifying decadence.” In contrast, when her family moved to St Petersburg, the grandeur of this city failed to impress her, she never quite came to love this “cold, geometric, flat capital.” Later on, during their temporary exile in Finland, she illustrates how the winters there were a sight to behold…

As we were about to take the road that went through the forest, I glimpsed a row of pine trees and larches, delicate sculptures of spun sugar. In the light of the sleigh lamps they became Christmas trees hung with cut crystals and mirrored spirals made of silver paper. Bundles of snow fell softly ahead. The moon played with the pearl-gray bark of the birches, creating constantly shifting silvery Icicles fell from the branches, like so many multifaceted mirrors or arrows, sparkling before our eyes. There were traces of paw prints in the white sheet spread out before us. Our horse, the leader of the caravan, picked up speed. The sleigh swished quietly in the soft snow as flakes sprinkled down on us, falling on my cheeks and powdering my eyelashes, making me blink. 

Meanwhile, Russia was rapidly becoming modernized, and her father’s astute business sense enabled him to scent opportunities and capitalise on them helping the family live comfortably. But Russia also underwent massive changes in the political sphere. The Czar was overthrown, Rasputin was assassinated, the Bolsheviks assumed control, and the moderates supported by Irène’s father and various other businessmen started losing ground despite putting up a fight. Thus, the upper classes witnessed a significant deterioration in their standard of living, aristocrats lost their status as well as their estates and many were reduced to a state of penury. Astonishingly, the Némirovskys managed to escape this fate thanks to the father’s foresight and keen perception of how events were likely to unfold.  

CHAMPAGNE & CAVIAR: LEADING THE LIFE OF THE ELITE

Barring the final months of her life, when Irène and Michel and their daughters were confined to a small French village, Irène’s life was always one of privilege, partaking in the indulgencies and comforts that such a life would bring despite all the turmoil and upheavals along the way. All through her childhood and adolescence, whether in Kiev, St Petersburg, Moscow, Paris, or even Finland, the Némirovskys lived in sumptuously decorated apartments or hotel rooms. On turning fourteen, Irène’s father took her to a cocktail bar where she tasted her first Manhattan; even as exiles in Finland, she was the centre of attention in a lavish coming-out-ball held for her as an introduction to society. Journeys to Nice, summer holidays spent in the idyllic beauty of the Basque Country occured at regular intervals. Later in Paris, married to Michel, the couple continued to live a life of gaiety frequenting dance halls, elegant restaurants, and dive bars, dancing and copiously drinking champagne and cocktails.

On the beach at Hendaye, where we spent our summer holidays during the thirties, he and his brother Paul would order a bottle of cognac and finish it off in an afternoon. Cheekily, they would offer a glass to my dear Cécile, Denise’s nurse, as she sat on the sand beneath our beach tent, her head whipped by the windswept fabric. Michel and Paul would rest their wet heads against my knees as they swirled the amber liquid in their brandy glasses. Eventually they would fall asleep despite the children’s screaming and the seagulls’ calls, engulfed in the roar of the sea. I read my book, from time to time shaking out the sand that crunched between its pages. 

IRÈNE’S BELOVED FRANCE – A FRIEND OR A FOE?

Irène first developed a taste for France and notably Paris in her adolescent years when along with her mother they relocated to Paris for a brief period when rumblings of the Russian Revolution began to get louder. Of course, years of coaching under Mademoiselle Rose ensured that she fit right in, she could speak French eloquently.

When the Bolsheviks ran riot in Russia and took over the country amid the First World War, Irène and her parents fled to France under the mistaken impression that this was just a temporary adjustment till the Communists were defeated. That as we saw did not happen. Meanwhile, Irène settled in France, met and married Michel Epstein, and gave birth to two daughters, Denise and Élisabeth. Her writing career bloomed and flourished, she was the talk of the town in the literary world, and Michel’s settled position in a reputed bank gave their family security and a sense of well-being. The couple continued to live a care-free, privileged existence enjoying all the pleasures that France had to offer.

When I awoke, I had a tiny daughter with blond hair. I asked Michel to register her under the name Catherine, like the heroine of Wuthering Heights. He prefers the name France. He says he would like her to know from the beginning what she owes to the country that has embraced us and loves us and which we also love, where she will never have to know that her parents are Russian Jews; where she will not be exposed to persecution, or pogroms, or revolutions; and where our distant origins will dissolve quietly into the pleasures of the good life. It is November 10, 1919, and we are experiencing a marvelous Indian summer; the warm weather has revived the fragrance of linden blossoms that we had thought was dead and gone.

France also saw Irène reach celebrity status as a writer. Her first novel David Golder was an instant hit, subsequent novels were well received by readers and critics alike and Irène even moved between publishing houses – from Grasset to Albin Michel – a move that would turn out to be a much welcomed stroke of luck.  

But when the Vichy Government came into power followed by orders to round up Jews, Irène and Michel suddenly found themselves shunned and isolated, their lifestyle considerably restricted. Irène’s reputation as an established and respected author became irrelevant when held up against her Jewish identity, and friends, peers, and colleagues who courted the couple during their heydays now abandoned them like flies in this altered, surreal reality.

Shielded from the real world by the thick curtains of my success, cut off from reality by my stubborn will to see myself, despite everything, as French-to the point that I did not even see the point of requesting naturalization – I, like everyone else, did not foresee the impending disaster. Now when I cover my eyes and ears, it is no longer out of a lack of awareness but rather to block out the hideous insults intoned by my former colleagues… 

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE JEWISH?

Gille writes how her mother was ridiculed for her indifference towards the Jewish community although she defends her by stating that Némirovsky wasn’t right-wing and supported the Russian Revolution. Despite her Ukrainian Jewish heritage and her husband Michel’s Jewish roots, Irène never thought of herself as a Jew but as a Frenchwoman after many years of assimilation into the country. Despite their Jewish origins, Irène and Michel painstakingly made the effort to call themselves French first, confident in France’s liberal attitude and tolerance.

But this started changing with the rise of Hitler and the commencement of the Second World War. Jews were disturbingly singled out for being instigators of violence across Europe, the horrific tremors of the Holocaust began with deportations to concentration camps, and when France fell to Germany, Irène disbelievingly saw the world shrink around her, and forcibly confronted herself with the question of what it meant to be Jewish.

The notion that the number of foreigners had reached its limit started to take hold. The worry began to grow that what was taking place was not simply an intrusion that caused unemployment, problematic because it imposed upon this refined country, polished by the patina of centuries and habit, certain sounds and smells that were unfamiliar and even discordant and dangerous to the French identity, which was at risk of being diluted by excessive, reckless naturalization, but something rather more sinister: a veritable “invasion.” Frightening images began to appear in the papers…The Jews were depicted as rats, their fur bearing the image of the hammer and sickle.

AN ODE TO LITERATURE

I always love authors mentioning books within books and this memoir was a treasure trove of many highlighting Irène’s reading during her developmental years and various other literary influences. Pushkin and Chekhov are cited as are Gogol and Dostoevsky, Colette and Oscar Wilde find a mention as do many of Irène’s own books – David Golder, Suite Française, The Dogs and Wolves et al. For Irène, her monstrous mother became a rich source of material for many of her books particularly Jezebel (a book I read many years and remember liking).

HOMAGE TO A COMPLEX WOMAN – THEMES AND WRITING STYLE

The Mirador is wonderfully layered in terms of style and content, bursting with a rich array of themes such as a complicated mother-daughter relationship, the intertwining of the individual with the political, the ominous burden of history, the perils of immigration, as well as the meaning of identity, class and race, the latter particularly focusing on the disturbingly blowing winds of anti-Semitism that led to Irène’s alienation and ostracization.

In her interview, Gille tells us how she was angry with her mother for being so “criminally blind” and failing to comprehend the magnitude of events unfolding around her that besides leading to her death also almost endangered the lives of her daughters. Ignoring the unmistakable signs of what fate had in store for them and despite pleadings and appeals from friends and family, Irène and Michel were naïve enough to believe that years of living in France and their adopted French identity would be enough for them not to be prosecuted.

And yet in this dreamed memoir presented to us, we do not detect any trace of anger towards her mother. If anything, Gille paints a sensitive portrait of Irène whose guileless belief in her Frenchness only makes her plight all the more heartbreaking.

But the striking feature of The Mirador is how Irène comes alive on these pages; I had to remind myself that it wasn’t actually Irène writing but Gille who tries to imagine what it would be like to be inside her mother’s head, and does it successfully and with remarkable empathy and tenderness. We see Irène’s journey from a bookish, curious girl to an independent young woman, finally breaking away from her mother. We see her finding joy and happiness in marriage and motherhood as well as relishing the fruits of her success as a writer. Irène’s wealthy upbringing did not make her vain or monstrous like her mother, and while her ambivalence towards Jews can be questioned, there’s something about her quiet dignity and self-awareness in those final days that’s heartbreaking.

IN A NUTSHELL

Through The Mirador, then, Élisabeth Gille traverses the zenith and nadir of her mother’s glittering but cruelly short life; it’s not only a brilliant, immersive, and deeply humane account of Irène Némirovsky’s life lived in tumultuous Russia and France, but also a window into her legacy and fame as a writer par excellence. I loved this book, and hope to dig into some of Némirovsky’s books which I had purchased several years ago when she had become quite the rage after the English translation of Suite Française was published.

A Month of Reading – July 2023

July was pretty busy, so I managed to read only four books, but really quality-wise it was a superb month. Of these four books, two were part of Kim’s #NYRBWomen23 reading project, and three were translated literature.

So, without further ado, here’s a brief look at the four books…You can read the detailed reviews on each by clicking on the title links.

A LITTLE LUCK by Claudia Piñeiro (Translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle)

A Little Luck is a quietly powerful tale of damage, loss, second chances, and confronting one’s past once again displaying Claudia Piñeiro’s excellent storytelling skills to full effect.

When the book opens, our protagonist Mary Lohan is on a flight from Boston to Argentina, returning to the suburbs of Buenos Aires after a gap of around twenty years. Mary’s trip to the city is largely work-related; as a representative of the prestigious Garlik Institute in Boston, she has been appointed to thoroughly research the credentials of Saint Peter’s School in Buenos Aires and to gauge whether it is worthy of becoming an affiliate of the institute, a process that involves conducting a stream of interviews with teachers and assessing various other parameters.

However, she is on tenterhooks about confronting the demons of her past, a place so replete with tragedy that she was compelled to leave her life behind two decades ago and flee. Meanwhile, interspersed with Mary’s current story are short chapters of no more than a single paragraph describing a scene at a railway crossing. In these chapters, the essence of the scene remains the same, the only differentiating factor being the addition of one or two extra details that build up to a gradual reveal. The reader immediately perceives this particular scene to be the moment of that defining tragedy, the devastating event that forces Mary to leave everything behind in an act of desperation and start afresh. A Little Luck, then, is storytelling at its finest – emotional yet intelligent, immersive, and deeply felt.

THUS WERE THEIR FACES by Silvina Ocampo (Translated from Spanish by Daniel Balderston)

This was the first book for the #NYRBWomen23 read-along in July. In this anthology, Balderston has included around 42 stories from a substantial body of work, an exhaustive but brilliant collection that vividly gives a flavour of Ocampo’s astonishing imagination where she revels in challenging the conventional and distorting the way the reader sees things. We begin with “Forgotten Journey” and “Strange Visit”, two short sketches that dwell on the bewildering mysteries of childhood and the loss of innocence. Next, running to over 60 pages, the novella-length “The Impostor” is a dark, atmospheric tale of friendship and madness shimmering with mystery and menace with a surprising reveal towards the end. One of my favourites, “The House Made of Sugar”, is a masterful and enigmatic exploration of a doomed marriage and the idea of doubles. 

Elsewhere, in “The Clock House”, a hunchbacked watchmaker is lulled into a village feast as the prominent guest where he becomes the victim of a monstrous turn of events; while in “The Photographs”, a girl with prosthetic boots is subject to a battery of photographs with her family and is so exhausted by the end that she appears ‘asleep’ at the dinner table. The stories listed here are, of course, just a few examples from a vast collection and there are many more to whet the appetite. These are tales that shimmer with dreams, visions, and fantastical happenings showcasing Ocampo’s vivid imagination, a flair for the sinister, and her refusal to conform to conventional structures of storytelling. 

KICK THE LATCH by Kathryn Scanlan

Comprising a series of crystal clear, pristine vignettes with eye-catching titles and nuggets of distilled information, Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch is such a joy to read – a book that brilliantly captures the panorama of a woman’s life on the Midwest racetracks where her sheer grit, fierce determination and unconditional love for horses enables her to make a mark in a tough field largely dominated by men.

Scanlan’s narrative is dexterously crafted, preserving Sonia’s distinctive style of speech (“there’s a particular language you pick up on the track”), a brilliant feat of ventriloquism if you will where Sonia’s engrossing storytelling skills artfully blend with Scanlan’s own style giving the impression of Sonia speaking through Scanlan. Lean and lyrical, the prose in Kick the Latch is stripped down to its bare essentials but it speaks multitudes, a whole way of life conveyed in as little space as possible but with remarkable tenderness and acuity. 

THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS by Maria Dermoût (Translated from Dutch by Hans Koning)

A novel of “shimmering strangeness” as aptly described by the blurb at the back of this NYRB edition, the opening chapter in Maria Dermoût’s magical and enigmatic The Ten Thousand Things reverberates with a mesmeric, otherworldly quality as we are transported to the verdant, exotic spice islands of Indonesia called the Moluccas. This chapter is a masterclass in scene setting, conveying a dazzling sense of place, a fascinating blend of myth with reality where the wonders of the island are as fascinating as the evils that lurk within it. Subsequent chapters dwell on Felicia who is our protagonist and in many ways the pulse of the novel, outlining the course of her life right from childhood to old age, a bulk of which is spent on the island with particular emphasis on her relationship with her grandmother and her son.   

The novel is a glittering mix of stories of menace, myths, legends, and a lush, hypnotic vista against which the individual histories of Felicia and her family are juxtaposed. These are stories seamlessly woven into a rich tapestry of love, loss, loneliness, nostalgia, and memory transforming the novel into one of immense beauty.  This was the second #NYRBWomen23 book for the month and a wonderful discovery!

That’s it for July. In August I’ve been reading The Mirador by Élisabeth Gille and Iza’s Ballad by Magda Szabó’s for #NYRBWomen23 and WITMonth – both excellent so far. I’ve also begun Mrs S by K Patrick ahead of the One Bright Book’s podcast on the same.

Thus Were Their Faces – Silvina Ocampo (tr. Daniel Balderston)

We are already midway through the year, and I have discovered some gems from NYRB Classics thanks to Kim McNeill’s wonderful reading project, #NYRBWomen23, and I am glad to say that Silvina Ocampo’s Thus Were Their Faces joins this list.

Helen Oyeyemi’s introduction to Silvina Ocampo’s story collection Thus Were Their Faces is one of those rare instances where it is rewarding to read it first before delving into the stories. Of course, I skipped the sections where she specifically discussed certain stories, but it is still a good piece for a reader like me who had never read Ocampo before and therefore found it helpful to gain some perspective on how I should approach her work and her distinctive, eccentric worldview. We are told that in 1979, she was denied Argentina’s National Prize for Literature because the panel of judges deemed her stories too cruel. Meanwhile, around a year earlier in 1978, in his note at the end of the book, translator Daniel Balderston recounts his first meeting with Ocampo when he went to meet her husband, the noted author Adolfo Bioy Casares. Balderston met the couple often in Buenos Aires since then, and during one of their numerous conversations, the idea for this compilation of her stories was born. Ocampo insisted that they choose her cruelest stories for this project, a sharp contrast to the way the judges would go on to view her work in subsequent months.

In this anthology, Balderston has included around 42 stories from a substantial body of work, an exhaustive but brilliant collection that vividly gives a flavour of Ocampo’s astonishing imagination where she revels in challenging the conventional and distorting the way the reader sees things. With such a vast compendium of stories, it is not possible to review each one, so I selected a few of my favourites along with brief write-ups on some of the others to give the reader an idea of what to expect.

We begin with“Forgotten Journey” and “Strange Visit”, two short sketches that dwell on the bewildering mysteries of childhood and the loss of innocence. “Forgotten Journey”, notably, gives us a glimpse of a child’s imagination that is so at odds with the real world. Our young narrator tries to recall the day she was born believing that babies came from department stores where mothers picked them up and brought them home. As she grows older, the cruel truth of birth is revealed to her by a friend, but she finds the revelation so shocking that she prefers to find comfort in the lie reiterated by the nursemaid. And yet her anxiety, those unnamed childhood fears, refuse to be quelled (“The window was almost shut, and when her mother told her that the sun was glorious, she saw the dark sky of night where no bird sang”). 

Next, running to over 60 pages, the novella-length “The Impostor” is a dark, atmospheric tale of friendship and madness shimmering with mystery and menace. The story begins with our narrator Luis Maidana travelling on a train to the town of Cachari with The Swans Ranch as his final destination. At this ranch resides Armando Heradia, and Luis plans to stay with him for at least two to three weeks despite never having met Heradia before. The reason for Luis’s stay is part of a mission entrusted to him by Armando’s father who is worried by his son’s supposedly erratic behaviour and his desire to be left alone. Luis’s task involves nurturing a friendship with Armando, observing him, and reporting any untoward findings to the father.

Mr Heradia had recommended that I proceed with extreme care, behaving wisely and with my most subtle intelligence, so as to befriend Armando Heredia and be a positive influence on his difficult character. Such hopes were confusing to me.

Luis is unsurprisingly dubious about the weeks ahead of him, not particularly looking forward to them. When he reaches the ranch, the gloom and isolation of the house only add to his unease. It is an uninviting dwelling by all counts, appearing mostly askew and haunted, and other than Armando and maybe a couple of staff, the place seems mostly uninhabited.

The merciless sun lit up the sky and a thick wooded area, the tops of the trees clearly coming into outline against the white clouds. A burning wind was blowing across the dry grass. That was the abandoned ranch. Above the roof of the house stretched a eucalyptus tree; some wildflowers grew on the roof. Vines devoured the doors, the eaves of the porches, the window railings. I had seen something similar in a film. A house full of spiderwebs, the doors falling off their hinges, with ghosts.

Nevertheless, Luis gradually begins to settle into the house’s rhythms, enjoying and basking in the abundance of nature surrounding it, and getting closer to Armando. Days are spent horseback riding, swimming, and indulging in other leisurely activities and as Luis and Armando become comfortable in each other’s company they begin sharing confidences.

Every friend, sooner or later, reveals to us some unexpected defect. Heredia was revealing my cowardice, or rather the fear I felt of appearing cowardly.

But all this only seems like a lull in the storm and as the story progresses periods of calm are punctuated by sinister and violent developments complete with an array of dreams that so blend with reality that the lines appear blurred. The tension between Luis and Armando escalates as the forces of infatuation and deceit begin to threaten their fragile friendship. Is Armando gripped with madness as alleged by his father or is Luis the one gradually losing control over his mind? The Imposter, then, is a great example of Ocampo’s unique storytelling skills, an intense montage of gothic elements, strangeness, and suspense with a surprising reveal towards the end.

We then come to the shorter pieces which begin with “The House Made of Sugar”, one of my favourite stories in the collection; a masterful and enigmatic exploration of a doomed marriage and the idea of doubles. Cristina is a woman whose life is defined by superstitions (“Superstitions kept Cristina from living”).

A coin with a blurry face, a spot of ink, the moon seen through two panes initials of her name carved by chance on the trunk of a cedar: all these would make her mad with fear… There were certain streets we couldn’t cross, certain people we couldn’t see, certain movie theaters we couldn’t go to. Early in our relationship, these superstitions seemed charming to me, but later they began to annoy and even seriously worry me.

This story is narrated by her husband who informs us that as soon as they marry and start house-hunting, Cristina is insistent that they look for a brand new apartment because “according to her, the fate of the previous occupants would influence her life.” A request that doesn’t leave the couple with too many options, they visit all possible neighbourhoods in the city, even the distant ones, but do not find any that meet Cristina’s specific requirement. But finally, the husband finds a little house “that looked as if it were made of sugar” whose “whiteness gleamed with extraordinary brilliance”, a house that entrances Cristina. The husband soon discovers that it isn’t exactly new, it had been previously occupied and subsequently remodeled, but he decides to keep this fact to himself, a breach of trust that is bound to have consequences. Soon, Cristina’s personality undergoes subtle changes as it becomes clearer that she is transforming into Violeta, the previous occupant of the house. We are led to believe that the husband is the rational person here, but it is soon apparent that he is a mass of contradictions himself (“I made her see that she had a broken mirror in her room, yet she insisted on keeping it, no matter how I insisted that it was better to throw broken mirrors into water on a moonlit night to get rid of bad luck”). Unnerved by this chain of events, he begins to obsess about Violeta deluded by a misguided sense that he is protecting Cristina (“I don’t know who was the victim of whom in that house”). 

In “Voice on the Telephone”, the setting is an innocuous children’s party that culminates in a horrific finale. Perhaps the opening dialogue is a grim portend of things to come, as the narrator warns someone on the telephone to not invite him to children’s parties because they depress him. There’s a reason for this, of course, a reason rooted in the narrator’s childhood, which he subsequently goes on recount both to the reader and the person at the other end of the phone. Coming from a privileged background, he particularly recollects a certain moment in time when his mother throws him a birthday party complete with presents, birthday cake, invitations to girls and boys of his age, and other assorted paraphernalia. But our narrator is an unusual child who favours “rugs, chandeliers, and glass cabinets in the house to his toys” and seems to prefer the company of adults rather than friends his age. At the birthday party, the mothers of the children gather in a separate room to chat and relax, and our narrator hides in a corner and observes them fascinated. When he is discovered by his mother and banished from the room, he plays a significant role in the tragedy that subsequently ensues.

The title story “Thus Were Their Faces” is another unforgettable story that subverts the reader’s assumptions. We are introduced to forty children whose faces so resemble one another that it is difficult to distinguish them.  But it was not always that way – in the beginning “each child’s pain was individual and terrible, as was their happiness, which made their happiness itself painful.” Soon they are visited by an angel who tells them of their identical faces in a surprising revelation after which the children see themselves as one in thoughts as well as actions. An unexpected twist comes at the end when a plane crash and a subsequent news item throw light on the common trait that binds the children together whose fate after the accident seems linked to a possible strange celestial vision.

In “Lovers”, we see a shy, reticent couple spend an idyllic afternoon in a park relishing and savouring their picnic tea with its assortment of sumptuous, elaborately described cakes, not missing even a crumb – the ritual of eating masking the awkwardness between the two. Thereafter they talk, but their sporadic conversations verge on the bizarre with discussions focusing on incidents of death, decay, and drowning. After food and conversation, it seems time for the lovers to get intimate, but even then it seems their overall discomfort could get in the way.

Elsewhere, in “The Clock House”, a hunchbacked watchmaker is lulled into a village feast as the prominent guest where he becomes the victim of a monstrous turn of events; in “The Photographs”, a girl with prosthetic boots is subject to a battery of photographs with her family and is so exhausted by the end that she appears ‘asleep’ at the dinner table; in “The Objects” we meet a woman who is not troubled by the idea of losing things because of an “anxious foreboding that these objects would someday rob her of something more precious than her childhood”: in “The Fury” we are privy to random acts of cruelty between two girls and a narrator who “to avoid a scandal, managed to commit a crime.” In “The Expiation” we see a wife caught in a weird triangle that involves her husband who is obsessed with his performing canaries and his friend who openly desires her and hallucinates of being blinded by the birds; in “The Velvet Dress”, a woman finds the burden of her black velvet outfit too much to bear literally; while “And So Forth” is much gentler in tone, a lush descriptive tale of the growing love between a man and a mermaid.

Revenge, casual cruelty, heartaches of childhood, prophecy and eerie soothsayings, madness, and the fluidity of dreams are some of the themes explored in this vast, varied collection. Trancelike and deliciously wicked, quite a few of these short pieces are imbued with a Saki-esque quality in their chilling portrayal of the characters’ fates; an uncanny, mocking gaze where the macabre bleeds into the mundane. Displaying a unique vision, many of the tales do not always have neat conclusions but are instead unsettling mood pieces that conjure up a surreal, richly-textured world peopled with peculiar, whimsical characters who often meet grotesque endings. We meet embalmed dogs, mermaids and angels, harassed hunchbacks, disconcerting doubles, clairvoyant children, jealous lovers, fiendish friends et al strikingly depicted by the might of Ocampo’s pen.

These are stories that shimmer with dreams, visions, and fantastical happenings showcasing Ocampo’s vivid imagination, a flair for the sinister, and her refusal to conform to conventional structures of storytelling. As is the case with short story collections, not each and every story will necessarily resonate but many do stick in the mind, and the interesting thing is that each reader might have a list of favourites that is a tad different from someone else’s. Highly recommended!

Italian War Diaries: A Chill in the Air & War in Val d’Orcia – Iris Origo

I read Iris Origo’s diaries in April for #NYRBWomen23, a month largely dominated by books set in Italy, but have gotten around to writing about these brilliant books only now. War in Val d’Orcia, particularly, is likely to make it to my year-end list, and I did not want to miss the opportunity to review it, however brief.

The first thing I realised after reading both Iris Origo’s diaries is how little I knew of Italy’s participation in World War Two. We studied both World Wars in our History class in school, but school textbooks don’t really tell you the whole story. Too much emphasis is placed on the rendition of facts that fail to capture the complexity of something as gargantuan and monstrous as war and its debilitating impact on people’s lives. And even then the facts themselves seem incomplete and their presentation too simple. For instance, it is pretty well-known that Italy sided with Germany in World War Two, a disastrous step by Mussolini and his Fascist Party for which Italy will go on to pay dearly, but Origo’s diaries reveal how Mussolini’s decision didn’t reflect the real views of the Italian people who were largely unwilling to engage in war but were compelled to do so.

A Brief Sketch of Iris Origo’s Life…

Iris Origo largely led a life of comfort and privilege. Her father William Bayard Cutting came from a rich New York family, while her mother Sybil was the daughter of an Anglo-Irish peer the Earl of Desart. Bayard Cutting was a man of ambition but his full potential was thwarted by chronic illness. On his deathbed, he conveyed to Sybil his desire for Iris to lead a cosmopolitan life “free from all this national feeling which makes people so unhappy”, and that she be free to love and marry anyone she likes, of any country, without it being difficult. Once Iris’s father died, her mother complied with his wishes, and the two relocated to Florence where they led a bohemian life. Iris, subsequently, fell in love with Antonio Origo, an Italian, and after their marriage, the couple bought and revived La Foce, a derelict stretch of the beautiful Val d’Orcia valley in Tuscany, and succeeded in creating a thriving estate through their hard work, patience, and care.

Publishing History of the Diaries…

Iris Origo did not write the diaries with the intent of ever publishing them, these were writings solely for her benefit and for her family and friends, but after the end of World War Two, she was persuaded to publish War in Val d’Orcia given the extraordinary events depicted within. The book immediately became a hit, but A Chill in the Air remained unpublished at the time as it seemed relatively a minor effort when compared to War in Val d’Orcia. It is only in 2017-18 that A Chill in the Air was published for the first time by NYRB Classics and Pushkin.  

A CHILL IN THE AIR: AN ITALIAN WAR DIARY 1939-1940

A Chill in the Air is the first of Iris Origo’s diaries that begins in March 1939 and culminates in July 1940 when she was just about to give birth to her daughter Benedetta (Iris had a son who died of meningitis at the age of seven in 1933).

It captures the mood of a nation staring into the abyss of war – a conflict that its people did not want and for which they were not prepared. At the time, Italy had been under Mussolini’s Fascist rule for close to twenty years. Italy felt humiliated by the Versailles Treaty signed in the aftermath of World War One; despite suffering so many casualties their ambitions and goals of getting control of certain territories were thwarted paving the way for the rise of Mussolini and his Fascist party.

Iris Origo brilliantly captures the intricacy of the Italians’ thinking at the time – many felt that they were shortchanged by the treaty and wished for a greater representation in Europe without the spilling of blood.

The truth is that, according to the company in which one happens to be, one knows beforehand what the opinion will be on any of the current topics. Among the anti-Fascists, Chamberlain is spoken of with contempt and Bonnet with loathing; Roosevelt is admired. In Fascist circles the odium falls on Churchill and on the Labour Party; Catholics unite to deplore the advances to Russia. Moreover one also knows beforehand where the blind spots will be. The Fascist averts his mind from the refugee problem and the situation in Czecho Slovakia (“All very much exaggerated – one must allow for foreign propaganda.”) The Catholics turn a deaf ear to all accounts of executions in Spain; the anti-Fascist has seldom heard of any trouble in Russia. Only on one point are they all agreed: they don’t want war.

England was having none of it though and absurdly enough Hitler used England and France’s refusal to kowtow to their demands as a pretext for war (by then Hitler had invaded Poland) to maintain peace, the kind of twisted logic that Mussolini began espousing too. The Italian people, though, still harboured hopes that Mussolini will somehow find a way to avoid war till the very end, only to horrifyingly realise that not only is Italy’s participation a certainty but that she will be siding with the Germans (“It would be bad enough if they were going to fight for something that they believe in. But to know that they will be fighting for what they hate and despise”)…

One of the biggest dilemmas confronting the Italians is encapsulated in a letter a young Italian writes to his mother…

“Will this war come? I can’t believe it. Above all I can’t believe that we shall be called upon to fight against people towards whom we have not got the slightest grudge and by the side of people we all despise. I have yet to find a single man who wants to fight on the side of the Germans! What is certain is that, politically speaking, we are passing from one absurdity to another.”

As war becomes inevitable, a narrative to rationalize that stance also gains vehemence, particularly reflected in the kind of war-restriction measures introduced, the irony of which is not lost on Origo…

Each necessary war-restriction measure is preceded by articles in the daily press, showing that such measures are really conducive to the well-being and comfort of the public. Thus, just before the sale of coffee was forbidden, long medical articles appeared, describing the deleterious effects of coffee on the nerves and constitution: “wine is far less harmful”. The meat rationing was preceded by similar articles in praise of vegetarianism; and now the abolition of private cars is accompanied by long articles in praise of bicycling!

In a nutshell, Origo superbly conveys the dread, unease, and uncertainty of a nation at the brink of war, an armed conflict much against its wishes, and how ordinary life somehow chugs along with the fervent hope and belief that combat can be averted. This conflicted feeling is palpable in this insightful commentary…

At the performance of La Traviata in Piazza della Signoria the moonlit square is packed with a gay, apparently carefree crowd. At the end of the second act, indeed, when the Inno a Roma was played in the interval before the broadcasting of the news, a sudden look of anxiety crossed the face of the audience; but as soon as it became evident that there was nothing new, they gave themselves up again to the sonorous melodies of the opera. “Look what Fascism has done for our people!” says a young officer as we walk home. “Compare their calm with the feverish tension in France and England!” But it isn’t exactly calm. It is a mixture of passive fatalism, and of a genuine faith in their leader: the fruits of fifteen years of being taught not to think. It is certainly not a readiness for war, but merely a belief that, “somehow”, it won’t happen.

WAR IN VAL D’ORCIA: AN ITALIAN WAR DIARY 1943-1944

Encompassing a period of one year, War in Val D’Orcia covers events between January 1943 and July 1944; an extremely difficult period for war-ravaged Italy fuelled by the intensity of the conflict and utter chaos in its political landscape.

The very first diary entry hits the reader hard as Iris Origo notes down the arrival of the first batch of refugee children at their estate, La Foce. These are children “chosen from families whose houses have been totally destroyed”; they had inhabited an underground tunnel in the bitter cold for the last two months, their families displaced. Using her influence and connections, Iris takes matters into her own hands to ensure that these children are brought to the estate to receive care and attention for the duration of the war.

Meanwhile, as was the case in A Chill in the Air, Origo continues to record developments in her diary as they unfurl – events at the national, local, and individual level. Daily life carries on at the estate despite mounting challenges in the form of food shortages, exorbitant prices and general scarcity of essential items, and the continuous and ominous barrage of bombs raining down various towns and cities of Italy. We learn of the progress of the war, the intensity and brutality of the battles accompanied by senseless civilian deaths, and the complete disarray in the Italian leadership.

Origo is particularly critical of Italy’s disintegrating political landscape, most notably the dithering and delay in signing an armistice with the Allies. By the time Italy does come around to sign it, not only is the execution inadequate but also it has perhaps arrived a tad too late, allowing Germany to enter Italy and occupy it.

It is incomprehensible to us both why the Government – having clearly intended to take this step from the first – should have waited to do so until now, and like this.

Origo frankly states that while the armistice was certainly desired, they deplored the methods by which it was accomplished, an occurrence made all the more difficult by the King and Badoglio’s flight.

The bedlam in Italy’s leadership is deep. Mussolini and the increasingly unpopular Fascist party are toppled, the King takes command of the army and Badoglio replaces Mussolini, but it’s a weak leadership. Once the Germans take control, the Fascist party is reconstituted with the result that there are four parties now who have assumed control in Italy – the Germans, the German-controlled Fascist Party, Badoglio’s government supported by the Allies, and the Allies themselves. Origo also captures the frustration of the Italians in the Allies’ attitude – they feel the Allies have not given them their due for finally overthrowing Mussolini; there’s a depression that has settled over the Italians at the intransigence displayed by both the Allies and Germany with Italy caught in the middle.

Meanwhile, as the diary entries progress, we see an escalation in the fighting followed by deep dread as bombs regularly drop at frequent intervals. The Italians are overcome by a gamut of emotions – fear, boredom, terror, uncertainty, unease, a general sense of apathy, and even a kind of fatalism about the outcome. Most Italians called to fight with the Germans or the Fascist Party refuse to do so, choosing to go into hiding instead, and Origo’s estate and the adjoining farms becomes a sanctuary of sorts for them.

But Iris and Antonio don’t provide food and shelter only to the Italians. Various escaped Allied prisoners from all countries, persecuted Jews and anti-Fascists find refuge at La Face, and the Origos do all within their power to cater to their basic needs and safety. The peasants and farmers working on the estate do not hesitate to help either despite tremendous personal risks, the possibility of being shot to death should they be found out by the Germans is always around the corner.

For the Italians, who refuse to now fight with the Germans, the only hope for salvation is luck on their side and the landing of the Allies given that the Italian leadership has largely failed them. But the Allied advance remains excruciatingly slow (“nerve-racking waiting, waiting….”), so much so that hopes begin to dwindle and along with that the realization that they will have to fend for themselves, and secretly build resistance movements to thwart the Germans.

Heartrending scenes emerge. Soldiers who refuse to sign up see their family members tortured in their place, a young Partisan ensconced in La Foce dies of Spanish flu while under Iris’s care, a fourteen-century-old abbey is bombed, the Abbot reduced to absolute despair, and so on.

As the war rages and some of its mounting chaos trickles onto La Foce, the Origos are always on their feet managing their estate, looking after the people under their charge, and frequently dealing with local authorities. Thus, the growing ambiguity, the urgency of living by the day and taking it as it comes means that there isn’t much scope for planning or thinking about the future, and yet despite the immediacy of the present, some of Origo’s reflections on what lies ahead do seep in.

I have spoken of the immediate hazards: the more remote ones are of course even greater. Though each one of us in his inmost heart believes that and his family will survive (through some privilege which we certainly could not account for) certainly no one can make a guess as to what his future life will be. Shall we have any money left, or work for a bare living? In what sort of a world will our children be brought up? What should we teach them to prepare them? Can any peace or order be restored again in this unhappy, impoverished and divided land?

What’s more, Iris Origo is forced to grapple with some personal losses as well…

And when those who, like myself, have relations and friends in other countries, are able to hear from them again, what news will we receive? Three weeks ago – after four months of silence and anxiety – I received the news of my mother’s death in Switzerland, eighteen days after the event – in a letter from a stranger which had been smuggled across the frontier. When letters begin again, how many other such pieces of news shall we all receive? Which of our close friends and relations are already dead, or will die before we meet them again? And, even among those who survive, what barriers of constraint and unfamiliarity will have arisen in these years not only of physical separation, but of experience unshared, of differing feelings and opinions? What ties will survive that strain?

Despite the grimness of the situation, the cold harsh winters, debilitating shortages, and deepening anxiety and fear (“there are few houses where a ring at the bell after dark does not cause alarm”), some semblance of normal life extraordinarily continues at La Foce in the form of Christmas celebrations, children’s birthday parties, school studies, and play rehearsals. But as the battle scene menacingly inches closer to La Foce, and the valley is cut off from the outside world, Origo is piercingly aware of how shut-in they are and yet there’s no choice but to soldier on.

As the circle in which our life moves grows smaller and smaller, and the immediate menace more threatening, our mental horizon shrinks to that of peasants; and with this narrowness creeps in something of their skepticism towards all vague schemes for the future, all remote Utopias.

For Iris, there’s a sense of so much that is lost, not only of life itself but a certain way of living. A meeting with a German archeological expert, responsible for the preservation of Tuscan art treasures, comforts Iris – “A queer, comforting conversation, a reminder of eternal values, which may outlast the present madness.”

Iris Origo’s love for her adopted country and its people also shines through in the way she commends and reiterates the resourcefulness of the ordinary Italians who display astonishing courage and steadfastness at a time when their leadership not only disillusioned them but also took flight.

Much has been said in these times (and not least by the Italians themselves) about Italian cowardice and Italian treachery. But here is a man (and there are hundreds of others like him) who has run the risk of being shot, who has shared his family’s food to the last crumb and who has lodged, clothed and protected four strangers for over three months – and who now proposes continuing to do so, while perfectly aware of all the risks that he is running. What is this, if not courage and loyalty?

As hordes of partisans hiding in the woods around La Foce begin to mount attacks on the Germans, suspicion on the Origos begins to take centre-stage. Tension ratchets up in the final pages, when the Val d’Orcia becomes a fierce battleground and the Origos along with all the children, farmers, and other people under their charge are forced to flee, undertaking a perilous journey through roads that are heavily mined and the where the danger of being bombed any time is ever palpable.

A compelling narrative laced with heart-stopping tension, these diary entries lose none of their edge even if we as readers already know how events will eventually pan out…the fact is that Iris Origo at the time did not; thus, the potency of the fear and stress felt by the Origos rubs on to the reader as well.

Overall Impressions on Both Diaries…

“It is odd how used one can become to uncertainty for the future, to a complete planlessness, even in one’s own private mind.”

Both A Chill in the Air and War in Val D’Orcia are a statement on the folly and stupidity of war, the proliferation of misinformation and misleading propaganda, how facts and opinions are manipulated under the dangerous garb of “nationalism”, how war leaves in its wake senseless tragedy, mass destruction, and heartrending scenes of death, and an overall loss of control…

One feels escaping from one’s control everything on which one was accustomed to rely, and everything is so suspended that one is very conscious of one’s own littleness.

Yet these recorded entries also highlight various acts of courage, compassion, and kindness displayed by ordinary people struggling to survive under extreme conditions; acts that reinforce the sheer depth of humanity against adversity where the nationality of the people holds no meaning and the only common thread that binds them is one of immense suffering. 

Given the kind of circles she moved in, Iris Origo was incredibly well-connected. In prose that is crystal clear and concise, she writes with a discerning eye, brandishing a sharp intelligence and strong grasp of the political and economic climate at the time and its repercussions on the people of her adopted country. A lot of her observations are drawn from the easy access she had to the upper strata of society and its connections with political dignitaries, top diplomats, and other important and influential people. And yet her interactions were not restricted to this well-heeled set alone. As the grimness and horror of war deepened, Iris, Antonio as well as the peasants employed on their farms welcomed a stream of refugees, Allied prisoners of war, Italian soldiers, Jews, and so on to their properties and gave them food and shelter in the best possible manner they could at the cost of grave danger to their lives. Thus, a lot of her impressions during this period stem from her talks and conversations with ordinary people desperately trying to make it through a tough environment.

I was impressed by the indomitable spirit of the Origos themselves, both Antonio and Iris. They were a couple of action doing whatever they could in their power to help as many civilians as possible irrespective of their country of origin. There’s so much inspiration to be gleaned from their resilience in the face of insurmountable odds.

One of the remarkable features of these diaries is the immediacy of the events recorded within as if in real-time. They give first-hand accounts of the complexity of Italy’s position, the politics prevailing at the time, and the difficulty of going about daily life when uncertainty and anxiety rule the roost. These are books filled with a mix of facts, anecdotes, and her astute interpretations of the extraordinary scenes unfolding around her there and then.  Origo refuses to delve into the intricate details of her personal life in these diaries, but as a chronicle of historical events, views, and opinions they are unmatched in the way they provide another fascinating yet hitherto unexplored perspective on one of the darkest periods of the 20^th century. Truly, a significant addition to the canon of World War Two literature!