by Hanna Krall, translated from the Polish by Philip Boehm (Poland, Feminist Press)

There is a certain amount of fatigue, I think, with Holocaust narratives. People may feel that they already know what to expect, they know the story, they do not need to revisit that world. This despite, or perhaps, because of, the recent which found a significant lack of knowledge about the Holocaust in the United States. Whatever disinterest or trepidation you might feel when faced with the prospect of returning to this horrifying terrain, Chasing the King of Hearts by Hanna Krall, translated by Philip Boehm, is worthy of your attention.

This slim volume (originally published in Polish in 2006) is Krall’s account of the life story of Izolda R., a survivor who spent the war restlessly, relentlessly trying to reunite with her husband. Her single-minded quest sends her throughout occupied Poland, Austria, and Germany, in and out of camps and prisons, and back and forth between passing as a non-Jewish Pole and being hunted as a Jew. The author and the subject clashed over how the story should be told. As Krall has stated, Izolda R. was “sentimental, wordy, emotional, always wanting it bigger. I have always known that the only way to tell such a story is with austerity and great emotional calm, even detachment.” The marriage of Izolda’s almost preposterous true story of survival and Krall’s laconic style gives this book its power, and, of course, draws our attention to the thorny relationship between history, memory, and truth, and between fact and fiction.

With her almost aphoristic approach Krall constructs vignettes that capture Izolda’s scattershot movements throughout the Reich and illustrate how factors like gender, language, and class shaped her experiences. I found Krall’s foregrounding of gender particularly fascinating (it is fitting that the Feminist Press brought this U.S. edition out.) Language is also a compelling through line—particularly Izolda’s inability to fully share her experiences with the younger, Hebrew-speaking generations of her family. And class also—Izolda cannot do the menial tasks she is often required to perform as a prisoner because she never had to do them before the war. When she encounters Austrian Jews being deported, they are convinced they are better than Polish Jews and will therefore be treated better by the Germans.

The vignettes Krall constructs capture the dark truth of the Jewish experience of trying to pass—Izolda recites the Hail Mary perfectly, only to be told an actual Catholic wouldn’t bother to enunciate each word so clearly. They also reveal identity as something both terrifyingly fixed and strangely fluid in the landscape(s) Izolda traverses while trying to find her king of hearts. Jewish women die their hair (Izolda at one point ties a bit of torn-out coat lining around her head to hide her roots), men have surgery to elongate their foreskins, teeth (real and false) are knocked out, false teeth are then removed preemptively ahead of beatings . . . There is ultimately no escape from being Jewish—even after the war she and her husband try to pass and fail, eventually having to leave Poland—but there is also a strange sense that everything is malleable. Old photographs can be doctored; concentration camp numbers can be removed or amended. If there is a “Jewish way” of holding a bag, then there must be a way to learn how to fully inhabit the other, the non-Jew. A way to escape.

The short chapters—from a paragraph or two, to two or three pages long—mostly follow Izolda as she tries to survive the war. However, a series of chapters interspersed throughout the text capture Izolda’s reflections as an elderly woman in Haifa (“Armchair. Everything is Life,” “Armchair. More Urgent Matters”). These chapters reckon with the terrible mathematics of contingency, as in this passage from “Armchair. Credit”:

If they hadn’t taken her for a prostitute, she wouldn’t have stopped in on Mateusz the caretaker,

she wouldn’t have learnt about Mauthausen [her husband’s location],

she wouldn’t have travelled to Vienna.

If she hadn’t gone to Vienna, she would have stayed in Warsaw. She would have died in the uprising, in the basement, together with her mother.

If she hadn’t escaped from Guben, they would have sent her on with the other women.

She would have landed in Bergen-Belsen,

in the middle of a typhus epidemic.

She would have died of typhus together with Janka Tempelhof.

Evidently God had decided she was meant to survive the war.

Or not. He had decided that she was meant to die and she opposed His verdict with all her strength. That’s the only reason she survived. And no God can claim credit. It was hers and hers alone.

Izolda’s journey, mapped by Krall and Boehm, circles back to contingency again and again. How did Izolda survive? Why? Is there any meaning to this survival? Izolda is convinced her love for her husband propelled her forward, but he seems to not fully reciprocate that love, and the love story does not provide much by way of explanation or closure.

Near the beginning of Chasing the King of Hearts, Izolda wants to witness one of the typhus patients she is tending die because she is curious about “what she might see when someone else’s life comes to an end.” She wonders if she will see a sign, “because if there is a sign, it ought to be read.” Izolda continues to look for signs throughout the book: using a pack of cards to help locate her husband, wondering if it is a good omen when she sees someone wearing a sweater like one that belonged to a friend who escaped to Honduras. Chasing the King of Hearts is a book full of signs—signs that it may be impossible to fully interpret, but that we ought to read nonetheless.

I have yet to find a review of by Virginie Despentes (translated by Siân Reynolds) that even mentions what I think is the most important formal element of the novel—without which a whole series of both criticisms and praise that it receives are entirely moot. Of course it deserves both criticism and praise, but I’m pretty sure that those who ignore this key for interpretation are simply reviewing a novel that doesn’t exist.

Fair warning: what follows will include (or will, in fact, focus on) spoilers; also will probably be totally uninteresting if you haven’t read the book, so go read it first.

I’m going to quote the very last page of the novel, which should almost be enough, just saying, hey, why are you guys ignoring this? You’ll recall that this final portion is Lucie’s voice, after everything has happened and she is out in the middle of nowhere, psychologically recovering.

Valentine did what she judged she had to do. Like everyone. I often think of all the things I should have said to her, and I listen to what she might have replied. I have told myself the story so often that in the end I’ve put together what I really know, inventing scenes that I didn’t see, to make the story stand up, the way I imagine it happened. It was when the narrative started to get going that I began to feel better. Gradually, I’ve come back to life. One day, I realized that I’d been awake for several hours and hadn’t yet thought about Valentine. I felt like Noah at the moment the dove comes back with a little olive branch in its beak. The truth I’ll never know. What remains is the story I’m telling myself, in a way that suits me, a story I can be satisfied with.

In these final sentences, we discover that Apocalypse Baby is not just a novel written by Virginie Despentes; it is a novel by the protagonist, Lucie. It is the story she tells herself to help her recover and survive.

Although this really changes everything, so many elements that I could write a whole series of posts, it is mostly important for negating the most common criticism I hear. There’s this frequent gripe that the big twist—where Valentine blows up a building shortly after Lucie and the Hyena bring her back to Paris—comes out of nowhere. It Or, Or, — after which statement, this review contrasts Despentes’ “twist” to a comment made by Gillian Flynn that “thriller-writers must be ‘fair’ to their readers, passing on enough information to allow them to solve the puzzle (while also making damn sure that they’re thrown completely off course).” Or,

I’d be happy to criticize certain elements of the novel, but in no way should it be criticized for this particular success. Remember what this is: It is a post-traumatic personal narrative, a very intentional retelling of events to appease Lucie’s psychological trauma. So, obviously, the explosion-twist had to “come out of nowhere.” Lucie was specifically given the responsibility of finding and returning Valentine; if she didn’t find a way for her story to remind her that there is no way she could have known what Valentine would do, then it would be a different novel. A third-person detective novel would give hints—but this is a first-person work of narrative therapy, in which even the ostensibly third-person sections are just scenes which Lucie has imagined.

Seeing this as essential is not just the sort of theoretical nitpicking that would make for an easy and fun college essay. Ignoring this twist in perspective is basically like ignoring the fact that Bruce Willis was dead the whole time. There’s really no point to the book without it.

Once this is acknowledged, a whole slew of things become much more interesting. The various genres that pop up to shade different scenes. The question of why the protagonist is the most boring character. The nagging feeling that the section about Valentine’s Arab cousins is uncomfortably degrading, possibly racist. Every page takes on a different meaning. It is not a snapshot of various socio-economic groups in contemporary France, as presented from Virginie Despentes’ supposed fictional realism; it is an expression of the way that the post-traumatized brain can view everything differently. This is also supported by Despentes’ preoccupations in her films and writings. If Valentine’s destructive action were the author’s primary focus, we would have seen much more of her psychological build up. But in this novel, her focus is the undeserved but unavoidable feelings of guilt which women can feel, but which they can also survive by the telling of stories. What could be a more reasonable interpretation in light of her other work?

The primary critique I’d make is that I wish Despentes had found some way to make us feel unease about narrative perspective throughout the book. For example, if we were questioning the narrator’s identity in the third-person sections (brilliantly done in Jan Kjærstad’s trilogy, The Seducer, The Conqueror, and The Discoverer), or if there were multiple levels of perspective going on (brilliantly done in Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees, which is a diary by the protagonist “edited” by an unknown character whose edits usually contradict the general reader’s opinions about the diary).

Regardless, I recommend printing out the text on the last page of Apocalypse Baby, taping it onto the cover so you don’t forget, and re-reading the novel. It will be a much more satisfying experience.

And to be honest, for the first time in a long time, I found the accompanying texts to be more interesting than the book itself. I know, I’m still kind of reeling. The book has two afterwords, which provide a lot of history on Violette Leduc (who is best known for her autobiography La Bâtarde), her writing, her style, and her attempts and later small victories in getting published:

Thérèse et Isabelle formed the first section of a novel, Ravages, which Leduc presented to the publisher Gallimard in 1954. Judged “scandalous,” this work was censored by the publisher. . . . In its original version, Ravages was intended to retrace the three love stories of its heroine, Thérèse. These were inspired by, if not calqued on, the three liaisons that had marked Leduc’s youth . . .”

The first of these liaisons was a “carnal coupling with a fellow schoolgirl.” And that’s basically what the book is about. A schoolgirl, Thérèse, who envies and claims to hate another girl, Isabelle, and who then wind up fingering each other (and more) in Isabelle’s bed (among other places). (The manuscript even made Raymond Queneau, then a member of Gallimard’s reading committee, nervous.) The moments captured by the two girls are sweet and youthfully panicked/self-discoveryish enough, but it also more often than not read in a way that was robotic. In-between all the frantic fingerings and whispered nothings are extended moments of imagery, both poetic and broken (mostly broken), that, for some reason, I found more forced than charming:

Isabelle is kissing me, I tell myself. She was drawing a circle around my mouth, she encircled my trouble, put a cool kiss at each corner, she dived down to place two notes, returned, rested. Beneath their lids my eyes were wide with astonishment, the thundering of the conch shells too vast. Isabelle continued: we descended knot by knot into a night beyond the school’s night, beyond the night of the town and of the tram depot. She had made her honey on my lips, the sphinxes had gone to sleep once more.”

I may not be the audience for this kind of narrative—or dialogue, for that matter, which struck me as equally robotic—but, going back to those afterwords, I was time and again fascinated by Leduc’s history. The first afterword quotes a letter of hers that at least puts her writing into perspective:

“I am trying to render as accurately as possible, as minutely as possible, the sensations felt in physical love. In this there is doubtless something that every woman can understand. I am not aiming for scandal, but only to describe the woman’s experience with precision. I hope this will not seem anymore scandalous than Madame Bloom’s thoughts at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses. Every sincere psychological analysis, I believe, deserves to be heard.”

As a reader, I wholly appreciate this, both for its insight into the author’s process-related goals, and for her desire to break the mould of what then-conventional emotions in literature were “accepted.” I also find it interesting that a country such as France would want to censor sensual things (I may have missed that part in my French history course as an undergrad, but I may have also been too distracted by scenes of a young Gerard Depardieu in the numerous French movies our professor made us watch), but then again, it’s not that surprising. What I also like is the promise of Leduc’s attention to detail combined with said detail—all of which I, as a reader, am to experience.

The actual “scandalous” part aside (this is 2015, after all, and I’ve seen enough episodes of True Blood to know a thing or two), the rest of what Leduc was aiming for didn’t resonate with me. In terms of her extremely close attention to detail, her efforts certainly show, but I frequently felt there was too much going on all the time—though do I realize that the overload of detail can be compared to the cloudburst of emotions one feels when in love, or lust. Some of the dialogue made me squeamish as well, not because of its “scandal,” but because I found it to be abstract and random in a way I found distracting—and not in a good way:

I threw myself at her sex. I would have preferred it to be simpler. I almost wanted to sew it back up all around.

“My darling trout, my beloved submarine pout. I’m coming back to you. I’m here. . . . It’s the pink brute. I love it, it devours me. I adore it without illusions.”

Okay. While I could agree with an argument stating that young people in a first-time, socially-forbidden relationship may say words just to say them, regardless of how said term of endearment comes across, some of the sayings are more-than-foreign to me. Darling trout? Submarine pout? The Bloodhound Gang’s “Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo” lists more inventive, and ultimately less awkward, names for the female genitalia. Maybe it sounds sexier in the French.

Overall, my reading experience was admittedly not what I wanted it to be. This is also, truthfully, the first book I’ve read by Feminist Press myself—as opposed to book reviews of their books—so I was hoping my own reaction would be different. (That’s right, I’m saying this is an “It’s not you, it’s me” scenario.) What I found was an abstract and stilted narrative that doesn’t fit into what I gravitate toward as a reader. However, Leduc’s writing and struggles as a writer—a female writer—and her desire and need to express an understanding of sexuality that was so deep and personal should not go overlooked. Thérèse and Isabelle will surely push the right buttons in other readers—possibly someone more in-tune with the history of writing and publishing in France, and that Feminist Press is giving further voice to these women authors is highly commendable; I look forward to reading more from them.

According to The Feminist Press, this novel the first in English by an Iraqi to focus on the 2003 invasion. Sounds like a very interesting book, in part because Al-Qazwini has led such an interesting life:

Iqbal Al-Qazwini, author of Zubaida’s Window, writes a story that reflects a life of her own. She now lives in East Berlin and is an Iraqi Exile herself, which brings a heightened creditability to the first novel that she has written. As an active member of the Iraqi Women’s League, the largest Arabic Women’s Rights Organization, she was sent to East Berlin as a representative and found herself unable to return to her homeland when Saddam Hussein became President in 1979. She is acclaimed on her writing that mostly revolves around women and gender issues, human rights, child labor and intercultural exchanges. In 1993, Al-Qazwini was elected to the International PEN World Association of Writers, followed by the publishing of her first novel, Zubaida’s Window.

Al-Qazwini’s novel is a dramatic account of a young woman, Zubaida, who has fled her country and is currently residing in East Berlin where she finds it nearly impossible to discover anything comparable to her own land. Every smell, every sight, every noise seems to separate German culture from her own. Her decision to flee her country was based not only on the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, but on the war that she claims began “tens of years ago”. Zubaida claims that the downfall of Iraq began when King Faisal II was assassinated back in the days of the Monarchy. It was in the year of 1958 that Iraq overthrew the Monarchy and converted to a Republic. Zubaida reflects on “the good old days” and often times, on her feeling of belonging to a united family that she left at home in Al-Adhamiya, the area of Baghdad where she grew up. She now struggles to communicate with her family and has become obsessive over the location of her brother, an Iraqi soldier. Through madness and rage, we see images of the first Ba’thi Coup in 1963, which deposed of Republican President Adbel Qassem, the second Ba’thi Coup, named the “White Revolution,” which started 35 years of oppressive Ba’thi rule, and most central, the war between Iraq and Iran, from 1980-1988. Throughout the novel, Zubaida, the main character, fights her history, physically, mentally and emotionally, to figure out why it has come to what it is; destructed and chaotic.

Click here for the full review.

Al-Qazwini’s novel is a dramatic account of a young woman, Zubaida, who has fled her country and is currently residing in East Berlin where she finds it nearly impossible to discover anything comparable to her own land. Every smell, every sight, every noise seems to separate German culture from her own. Her decision to flee her country was based not only on the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, but on the war that she claims began “tens of years ago”. Zubaida claims that the downfall of Iraq began when King Faisal II was assassinated back in the days of the Monarchy. It was in the year of 1958 that Iraq overthrew the Monarchy and converted to a Republic. Zubaida reflects on “the good old days” and often times, on her feeling of belonging to a united family that she left at home in Al-Adhamiya, the area of Baghdad where she grew up. She now struggles to communicate with her family and has become obsessive over the location of her brother, an Iraqi soldier. Through madness and rage, we see images of the first Ba’thi Coup in 1963, which deposed of Republican President Adbel Qassem, the second Ba’thi Coup, named the “White Revolution,” which started 35 years of oppressive Ba’thi rule, and most central, the war between Iraq and Iran, from 1980-1988. Throughout the novel, Zubaida, the main character, fights her history, physically, mentally and emotionally, to figure out why it has come to what it is; destructed and chaotic.

The imagery found in this novel is quite remarkable. As Zubaida, the main character, is continuously haunted on a daily basis, through daydreams, flashbacks and asides, she always snaps back to reality with the intoxication she receives from the images through the screen of her television set.

The country is burning in front of her now, and she doesn’t know the extent of the invisible flames. The screen exposes a limited blaze, but she knows that the fire outside the frame of the screen is greater. These are flames beyond Baghdad, extending to her room, kitchen, balcony, and moving on to the world.

Along with the intensified, singled out imagery, the explosiveness of the past and present recollections that Zubaida experiences, closely connects to the explosiveness and tragedy of every event that has led Iraq to its current situation. A downfall of this novel is that it is too descriptive with the mellow dramatic accounts of Zubaida’s present conditions. The stereotypical female is one who over dramatizes her feelings and is over emotional, which further limits her strength because reality is too hard for her to handle. Without a doubt, this novel demands expression and feeling, just not so overbearing.

It’s no surprise that Zubaida’s Window is part of the Feminist Press’s prestigious series of “Women Writing in the Middle East.” Joining Al-Qazwini on this list are some heavy hitters, including Assia Djebar, Huda Shaarawi, Alia Mamdouh and Shahrnush Parsipur. Zubaida’s Window is a notable addition to this series, a series that is one of the best sources for information about Middle Eastern women novelists avialable to English readers.