Book Report April 2024

Paradox and Impossibility

The Castle, Franz Kafka, 1926

Is it possible to write a novel while withholding all information from the reader? Kafka certainly tried. In The Castle, a man known only as K. arrives in an unnamed village, seeking entrance to “the Castle” (actually only a motley collection of one- and two-story buildings) on hilltop above. His purpose there is adversarial to the Castle and its denizens in some capacity but never specified. Where does K. come from, what does he look like? We’re never told. 

What goes on at the Castle, and who are its residents? Rather than a seat of nobility, it seems to be a sprawling bureaucratic apparatus whose work is ceaseless and mysterious. The Castle is well informed and capable of taking action to defend itself. When K. first arrives in the village below, he is caught sleeping in an inn by a castle sub-steward, or, actually, a sub-steward’s son, who hassles him over whether he has express permission to be within the Castle’s domain. K. feints, claiming he is the land surveyor sent for by the Castle. The sub-steward’s son calls up to the Castle to verify this claim. The answer comes back quickly: no surveyor was sent for. Then the phone rings again—actually, yes, a surveyor was sent for and K. is he. 

Now the game is afoot. K. considers the situation: 

So the Castle had appointed him land surveyor. On the one hand, this was unfavorable, for it showed that the Castle had all necessary information about him, had assessed the opposing forces, and was taking up the struggle with a smile. On the other hand, it was favorable, for it proved to his mind that they underestimated him and that he would enjoy greater freedom than he could have hoped for at the beginning. And if they thought they could keep him terrified all the time simply by acknowledging his surveyorship—though this was certainly a superior move on their part—then they were mistaken, for he felt only a slight shudder, that was all.

This is how it will go for K. in the village. Every interaction is one part game, one part farce, in which it’s never clear whether the villagers are playing a part, mocking him, or whether he’s meddling in their real lives with serious consequences. The answer, of course, is that it’s both. The very air of the village is charged with hidden energies that impart the smallest interaction with an impossible to grasp dream logic and life or death stakes. Later in the book a young woman, Olga, will tell K. the story of how her family was ruined because her sister rejected a crude proposition from a Castle gentleman, but because no official complaint was filed in the matter no official path to correcting the situation was available, leaving them trapped in their disgrace.

“Kafka-esque” is a commonplace shorthand for a world of nightmarish bureaucracy but what struck me reading The Castle was that the bureaucracy, whatever its real work might be, has almost no bearing on how things are actually to be accomplished. What’s terrifying about this world is how the actual avenues of power and influence are completely obscure and embedded in networks of personal relation that one can only fall into with great effort, charm, and luck. When K. triumphantly presents a letter from the district chairman that seems to state unequivocally his employment as surveyor, he’s told that the letter is clearly a personal document and has no official bearing, but is all the more valuable for it, if he understands how to use it. Unfortunately he does not. 

The Castle might be called a “frustration novel.”¹ K. runs in circles, pulled from one diversion to the next, promised help by various characters who prove unreliable or powerless, until the book ends midsentence. Reading it now, there’s a video game-y quality that’s hard to shake—K. spends the book doing a series of side quests hoping that some NPC will bestow a reward that allows him to progress the main storyline. I can’t help imagining him as Link and the village as Clock Town in Majora’s Mask. Where video games are made to let you advance, K. cannot. It’s fun, until the despair sets in. 

Eastbound, Maylis de Kerangal, 2012

A high school english class conundrum: essays were to be written within a prescribed format—this many body paragraphs, all rigidly arranged in the order of topic sentence, textual evidence, commentary. Yet there was also a minimum page requirement. If one were to write straightforward, no-bullshit sentences within the given structure, one would inevitably fall short on page count. Solution: stretch it out. Whenever a key noun or adjective presents itself, thrown in a comma and a synonym. Anything you could say once, say twice. The appositive clause is your best friend, a cherished companion, that will fill the space, that great, white void, and get you to that five page minimum. 

I was reminded of these early writing lessons and the terrible habits they fostered reading Eastbound, published in France in 2012 but only translated into English last year. It follows two characters riding the Trans-Siberian Railway, unhappy conscript in the Russian army Aliocha and Frenchwoman Hélène [character traits TBD], who forge a connection across their language barrier. Written in a brisk present tense, de Kerangal attempts to capture the constant flow of events and thoughts with long sentences peppered with commas, the sequence of things squeezed together grammatically. But so many of these comma-ed clauses don’t contribute to a relentless push forward but are rather restatements and repetitions. De Kerangal so consistently qualifies and caveats her every phrase that reading her came to feel intensely tedious and made the book’s scant 130 pages feel like twice as many. 

Here’s an example of what I mean. This sentence comes from page 20 of the book, when Aliocha has just made the decision to desert, to try to escape the train and his military duties at the next station: “No longer is the future like an inert and viscous landscape, a long corridor of dirty snow: he has a plan and this is enough to make him relax, to slow his pulse and ease his anxiety.” That last clause, man—like, yes, that is what “relax” means, thank you for explaining. Here’s the very next sentence: “The train car is no longer this stifling chamber, a space of confinement with stale air, but is now a car pierced by four doors—two at each end—and similarly, the conscripts are no longer potential enemies but allies…” I can’t help but feel talked down to when she glosses “stifling chamber” as “a space of confinement with stale air”—does she think I need these doublings in every sentence to understand her scene? Further, if you take out all the filler, the core syntax of the sentence is “The train car [...] is now a car,” which really gets to heart of my complaint that de Kerangal’s belabored elocutions are covering some very thin and poorly constructed prose. 

I need to emphasize that every sentence in the book is like this. It would be one thing if de Kerangal occasionally switched into this mode for effect but that’s not the case. The book is a relentless torrent of gerunds and random adjectives that crowds out things like, say, characters or ideas. The use of adjectives grated on me so much throughout Eastbound. De Kerangal consistently reaches for a big, poetic word in an attempt to elevate her action to some higher sphere of meaning but there’s no logic to it. At one point she describes the darkness outside the train window as “magmatic.” I’m not sure what this is supposed to convey but I would not compare darkness to a substance that famously glows! I lost count of the number of times she described things as “infinite.” Maybe I just have more reverence for God, the cosmos, and time, but I found this repeated colloquial use of the term quite irritating and reinforced the sense that de Kerangal wrote this book mostly by perusing a thesaurus. 

Am I being hard on Eastbound? Yes, without a doubt. But when a book is ranked in the ten best of year by the New York Times and the publisher slaps a sticker on the cover to that effect, well, I guess I just expect more. To pull from de Kerangal’s playbook, Eastbound is all froth, a weightless mass on the shore, erased by the next wave. 

Complete Poems of Enheduana, trans. Sophus Helle, 2023

Enheduana is the most ancient author whose name we know. There are older hymns and poems but hers stand out for the authorial identification embedded in the text. She was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad and lived approximately 4,300 years ago. Her father, who united the Sumerian city-states into the Akkadian Empire, installed her as the high priestess of Ur, where she led the worship of Nanna, a male moon god, and was considered the earthly incarnation of his wife Ningal. 

Her marriage to Nanna seems to have been an unfulfilling one for Enheduana, for she ended up a devoted worshipper of his daughter, Inana. The main works we can attribute to her are the Exaltation of Inana and the Hymn to Inana. These works, written in Sumerian, speak of Nanna’s silence and his failure to intercede on Enheduana’s behalf, leading her to seek the aid of Inana, whom she elevates to the head of the pantheon, writing in the Exaltation, “You were born to be a second-rate ruler, but now! How far you surpass all the greatest gods; they press their lips to the dust beneath you.” In that poem she exhorts Inana for help; a rebel leader named Lugal-Ane has seized her temple and cast her out. Enheduana calls on Inana, whom she depicts as a terrifying war god, to crush Lugal-Ane and restore her to her office. In the last verse she reports that Inana did hear her plea, took up her cause, and all has been set right.

The Hymn to Inana, which comes to us incomplete, picks up the theme of Inana’s overwhelming power and capacity for destruction but adds some interesting wrinkles. The centerpiece of the Hymn is a list of Inana’s qualities, the throughline being essentially contradictory. She writes, “To destroy and to create, to plant and to pluck out are yours, Inana. To turn men into women, to turn women into men are yours, Inana. [...] Profit, absence, poverty, wealth are yours, Inana. Gains and riches, losses and debts are yours, Inana. To see, show, and scrutinize, to find fault and set right are yours, Inana.” The reference to gender changing apparently found expression in groups of performers known as pilipili and kurgara who subverted gender norms through cross-dressing. 

I’m quite taken with the idea of a priestess officially dedicated and married to a god but who finds him remote and dull, ultimately finding a much deeper connection with a different goddess. Figures like Inana, goddesses of paradox and change, generally exist on the fringes of a pantheon, someone like Hecate in the Greek, so to place her atop the pantheon is cosmologically daring and more pessimistic that one would expect an imperial state religion to allow. Enheduana was installed by her father as a figurehead in order to accommodate the faith into his political project but she ends up making the claim that in the long run his empire too will crumble into the sands. 

The pinhole view into the world of ancient Sumer widens considerably with the Temple Hymns, a collection of short poems attributed to or at least compiled by Enheduana. They are a tour of the region, invoking various cities and their patron deities, including Enki, the god of wisdom and creativity who lived in the Deep Sea; Enlil, king of the gods; Ninhursanga, goddess of birth and motherhood; Enki’s son Asarluhi, god of magic and incantations; and Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld. I get the impression that the translator thinks a lot less of the Temple Hymns than the two poems to Inana but I enjoyed the fuller picture they provide of how this unfamiliar pantheon was worshipped more broadly. 

A small note about the translator, Sophus Helle, who provides an introduction and three explanatory essays. I found the introduction and the first essay, Enheduana’s World, helpful enough that I might suggest reading both before approaching the poems. The following two however, which try to argue for Enheduana’s importance, are quite bad, relying on coincidences of history—did you know the archeological dig where her tablets were discovered was co-led by another woman??—to gesture at how it’s all Very Meaningful. Actual engagement with the content of the poems is shockingly lacking. Even the two bits I do recommend are shot through with smarm, as when Helle ends his introduction by asking, “What would the history of Western literature look like if it began not with Homer and his war-hungry heroes but with a woman from ancient Iraq, who sang her hymns to the goddess of chaos and change?” This makes my blood boil. First of all, I don’t know, man, instead of leaving this question as a tantalizing hint, why don’t you fucking tell me? Secondly, the Exaltation to Inana is far more bloodthirsty than anything Homer wrote, reveling in Inana’s powers of destruction and killing, which Enheduana is specifically calling on her to use. Finally, and I won’t belabor this, but if you actually think Homer’s poems are pro-war you are an illiterate and genuinely deserve to be expelled from the academy.

1. Can we think of other frustration novels?