Of Human Suffering

Monsieur Linh and His Child by Philippe Claudel

I read this in English translation and my impression is that it is a good one.  The short story, a novella, is told in simple style and this poignant, moving and ultimately sad novel did indeed stir feelings that remained with me after the final sentences had been read.

Traumatized by memories of his war-ravaged country, and with his son and daughter-in-law dead, Monsieur Linh and His Child is a remarkable novel with an extraordinary twist, a subtle portrait of friendship and a dialogue between two cultures.

 Monsieur Linh travels to a foreign land to bring the child in his arms to safety. The other refugees in the detention centre are unsure how to help the old man; his caseworkers are compassionate, but overworked. Monsieur Linh struggles beneath the weight of his sorrow, and becomes increasingly bewildered and isolated in this unfamiliar, fast-moving town. And then he encounters Monsieur Bark. They do not speak each other's language, but Monsieur Bark is sympathetic to the foreigner's need to care for the child. Recently widowed and equally alone, he is eager to talk, and Monsieur Linh knows how to listen. The two men share their solitude, and find friendship in an unlikely dialogue between two very different cultures.

In contrast to Monsieur Linh and His Child , my subsequent read is a 700-page novel which was short-listed for the 2015 Man Booker.  A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is a bleak, unrelentingly harrowing story of four young men who meet at college and focuses on one of the quartet in particular.  Malcolm, JB, Willem and Jude, randomly assigned as college roommates, become best friends. Bright, ambitious and talented, they all move to New York, pursuing different careers: handsome Willem works as a waiter while auditioning as an actor; JB creates trendily experimental art while dreaming of fame as a representational painter; Malcolm comes from a wealthy, demanding family and worries that his architecture career will not impress his father; Jude is a young lawyer, working for the public defender’s office. The reader predicts that some will succeed, some will fail; some will build happy relationships, some won’t; tragedies will strike and be overcome. 

The reader is quite mistaken, however: before long, all four friends are blessed with immoderate professional success, while two of them rapidly recede into the background, with Jude St Francis emerging as the novel’s protagonist.

His first 15 years consist of unrelieved, grotesque, extravagant abuse: and then an authorial switch is flipped. For the rest of his life (with the important exception of one disastrously abusive relationship), Jude encounters only selfless love and kindness: the patron saint of lost causes becomes a lost cause surrounded by saints. His friends are all very concerned with Jude, to the exclusion of being concerned about anyone else, including themselves.  In real life, people tend to get tired of other people’s repetition compulsions, largely because they are consumed by their own dramas. But this is a little life that tilts toward a large fairy tale, about cruelty and nobility, evil and goodness.  The novel deals with Jude's anguish, his self-hatred, his life-long habit of 'cutting' - the unfathomable tendency of people so wounded and traumatised by what others have inflicted upon them, that they blame themselves.  I lost count of the number of times Jude utters the words "I'm sorry."  You get the feeling as the novel progresses that there cannot be a redemption, a happy ending.  This haunting novel is one to which my thoughts will often in a world where instances of child abuse, many of long-years standing, continue to surface to the light of day.

In Steven Galloway's novel The Cellist of Sarajevo, the author mixes real and imagined characters.  It is set in Bosnia's capital during the civil war of the Nineties, opens with a cellist sitting by a window. He is playing Albinoni's Adagio while outside a queue of people wait to buy bread. Seconds later, a shell explodes in the marketplace and they are killed. The cellist stands at the window all night and all the next day. After 24 hours, he carries his cello down to the carnage-strewn street. He positions a stool in a crater and begins once again to play the Adagio. He goes on to do this every day for 22 days, one day for each victim.

Snipers in the hills overlook the shattered streets of Sarajevo.  But Arrow believes she's different from the snipers on the hills around the city. She shoots only soldiers.  But they kill unarmed civilians. Knowing that the next bullet could strike at any moment, the ordinary men and women below strive to go about their daily lives as best they can. Kenan faces the agonizing dilemma of crossing the city to get water for his family and neighbour.  He dare not take his household to help for fear they will be killed by the snipers. If he dies, what will happen to his family?

The last of Galloway's four characters, the baker Dragan, lives mostly in the past and, gripped by fear, does not know who among his friends he can trust. . He no longer knows which is the real Sarajevo: the one he sees today or the one in his memories, 'where people were happy, treated each other well, lived without conflict'.

Galloway threads these individual stories together, narratives crisscrossing: three weeks in the lives of individuals struggling to survive as their beloved city is besieged. The characters of Arrow and the cellist are based upon real people, but in his examination of their feelings and motives, Galloway makes them his own. They are worn out with war, fearful of what will become of them and their loved ones. Only the cellist and his music brings hope - hope that mankind is still capable of humanity, that the old world is not completely lost, that the war has not destroyed everything. This short novel employs a sparse style with the simple prose of a short story.  Galloway's style is sparse, pared down; his prose has the deceptive simplicity of a short story.

Reading the book was an experience similar in some ways to that of reading Monsieur Linh and his Child.  People, emotionally wounded, trying to live their lives as if things were normal, when that is far from the case.  Such reads are made all the more powerful for the brevity with which the story is told.  They are gems of literature.