Tag-Archive for ◊ poet ◊

Author:
• Saturday, December 16th, 2017

Anna Enquist is the pen name of Christa Widlund-Broer, born in 1945 in Amsterdam, Holland. Enquist learned to play the piano at the music academy in the Hague Conservatory of Music while studying clinical psychology at Leiden University to become a psychoanalyst. From 1976 she led a dual career of pianist and psychoanalyst.

In 1987 Enquist decided to drop her other activities and devote herself entirely to writing. She published a collection of poems while working as a psychoanalyst in 1991 and in 2014 was named Amsterdam’s poet laureate after publishing several books of poetry. She has also written some novels, her first one, The Masterpiece, which made her fame, was released in Dutch in 1994 and English in 2003. Through the years Enquist has won several literary prizes and is one of the most acclaimed writers in the Netherlands. She lives in Amsterdam.

The Masterpiece is the story of a family who, under the power of an embittered, tyrannical and manipulative mother, succumbs under the tension linked to the organisation of the great painting exhibition of the younger son, Johan Steenkamer, in the national museum.

Alma, the matriarch, who is seventy-year-old, was abandoned over forty years back by her painter husband, Charles, who decided to start a new life alone in the USA. He left her with their two young boys, Oscar and Johan, who hate each other due to their mother’s wicked scheming. Watching the fratricidal war seems a source of pleasure for Alma’s twisted, perverse psyche by dividing and ruling.

The eldest son, Oscar is a museum curator and an art critique. He is a lonely, tortured soul, living in the shadow of his domineering mother, whom, since childhood, he endeavoured to please for the sake of gaining her love. He is consumed by jealousy of his brother, Johan, a painter like his father and consequently his mother’s favourite. Out of jealousy, Oscar does not miss an opportunity to take revenge on his younger brother, Johan, like writing scathing articles in the newspapers about modern painting.

The forty-seven-year-old, Johan Steenkamer is an ambitious, highly talented painter; he is egocentric, lustful, matrimonially unfaithful, compassionless and detached. He is obsessed with his art and is thus only able to channel all his passion and emotions through his paintings, hence, hindering any possible communication between himself and his thirty-five-year-old wife, Ellen. Furthermore, having incompatible characters creates an insurmountable chasm between the couple leading to their separation.

After his young daughter, Saar’s tragic death, Johan paints his wife’s best friend, the psychiatrist, Lisa, with his former wife, Ellen. He manages to capture Ellen’s overwhelming grief in a masterful painting which will constitute the centre of his exhibition, his ultimate achievement, his masterpiece.

This compelling, dramatically touching novel is composed of three parts. Each part is increasingly intense, leading to the third and final one, the fitting culmination after excessive tension. The author describes with diligence the development of events which shape the destiny of her characters according to their psyche.

The women in the novel are depicted more positively than the men, apart from the perverse matriarch, Alma, who even in some parts appears to be worthy of sympathy. In contrast, the men are egoistic, possessive and pathetic, each one of them living in his bubble, preoccupied with his own affairs.

An insightful, psychological analysis on the vulnerability of human psyche, the complexity of people’s minds driven by jealousy, possessiveness, egotism and disloyalty. The mysteries of emotional manipulation by family members as well as the consequences of such machinations on family relationships. A well-written novel without “hitting a wrong note”, worthy of a psychoanalyst.

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Author:
• Saturday, June 18th, 2016

Dai Sijie was born in the Fujian province of China in 1954. Both his parents were professors of medical sciences at West China University. Dai Sijie went to primary school followed by college. At the beginning of the Chinese cultural revolution, orchestrated in May 1966 by the seventy-three- year-old Mao Zedong, Seijie’s parents were labelled as “bourgeois”, therefore enemies of the people and were put in prison.

Being the son of a “bourgeois”, the seventeen-year-old Seijie, was sent to a village in the mountains of Sichuan province for re-education from 1971 to 1974. In 1974 he worked as an employee in a school and in 1976 studied History Of Art at Beijing university while simultaneously studying French. He left China for France in 1984, having won a national competition allowing students to travel abroad. After his time was over, he didn’t return to China and has remained in France ever since, working as a film maker and subsequently becoming a writer.

Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress is Dai Sijie’s first novel and a big instant success. It was written in French, like his two other novels, and was published in France in 2000. It won many prizes and has been translated into several languages. Sijie re-adapted his novel to become a film which he directed and was released in 2002.

The story of Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress is influenced by what the author himself lived and experienced in his late teens like his two fictional characters: the narrator and his close friend, Luo, who both come from families of doctors. The two protagonists, like Sijie, had an academic education, went to primary school and to college and therefore had bourgeois upbringings and consequently qualified, according to the new Chinese regime, to be sent to a remote mountain village camp to be re-educated from 1971 to 1976.

Mao Zedong’s policy was to send millions of intellectuals to the countryside for re-education in the form of physical labour meted out to them by peasants. Mao’s intention was to purge the representatives of the capitalist urban bourgeoisie as well as the revisionists who had infiltrated the Party, both regarded as enemies of the people. He even closed schools and universities for several years, accusing them of being places of counter-revolutionary education.

Mao Zedong, the Chinese Communist Party Chairman, was the actual architect of the Great Cultural Revolution which started in 1966 and ended in 1976, the year of his demise. Although born a son of a wealthy farmer, Mao Zedong was the founding member of the communist party of China and became the “Great Helmsman Of The Revolution”.

The Great Cultural Revolution period is one of the most sombre and traumatic in Chinese contemporary history. It was enforced after Mao Zedong’s failure with his economic and social campaign named “the great leap forward”, which was an ambitious country-wide modernization policy that lasted from 1959 to 1961 and resulted in terrible famine.

The narrator and his friend, Luo, find their new life and repetitive tasks given to them by the peasants to be very harsh. Thanks to their captivating art of story telling they manage to escape a few days of hard labour in the mines. The two youths are sent by their superior to the next village where films are occasionally shown. Their assignment is that, upon their return, they must narrate the story of the film to the villagers who are illiterate people leading a simple life in this remote mountainous area near Tibet, called: “Phoenix Of The Sky”.

The narrator and his best friend Luo’s story-telling improve greatly and their horizon widens when they discover a hoard of forbidden “reactionary” western classic novels translated into Chinese. These include books by Balzac, Dickens, Dumas, Hugo and Flaubert, among others, concealed in a suitcase by an educated young man their own age called Four-Eyes, the son of a poet, sent for re-education in the village next to theirs. After pleading with Four-Eyes, they manage to borrow one of his novels, Balzac’s, Ursule Mirouët. They both spend the whole night reading it and finish it by dawn. The two young men are so overwhelmed by Balzac’s story that they strongly desire to possess Four-Eyes novels and they end up stealing them.

From now on Luo, the narrator and their beautiful, illiterate, young seamstress’s lives will radically change as a result of their literary discovery which overturns their existence and opens up a new, magical world for them. They feel the emergence of a literary vocation. There is no longer a barrier between fiction and reality for them. The little seamstress becomes Luo’s lover-cum-student and he becomes her Pygmalion. He introduces her to the world of literature not realising that the effect will be devastating for him and the narrator, who both loved her so dearly and looked after her like a “little princess”.

After listening to all the stories written by famous classic writers narrated to her by the two young men, Luo tells the narrator that the little seamstress’s new obsession is to resemble city girls, she cuts her hair and make herself a bra, copying a drawing she had found in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Luo even notices that she is copying their accent.

Learning from Balzac “that a woman’s beauty is a treasure beyond price”, the little seamstress makes a surprising choice. She decides to leave her rural life and everything else behind for the big city life in order to conquer her destiny, like Balzac’s character, Eugène de Rastignac in “La comèdie humaine”. Her decision leads to the surreal and eerie final scene of the book-burning by the narrator and Luo out of spite and rancour. These books they loved so much have to be sacrificed, reduced to cinders, now that they have the nasty effect of emancipating the little seamstress and making her quit after discovering her self-worth.

Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress is a book about books, an ode to literature and especially a tribute to Balzac, as well as to the art of story telling and how the talented story tellers possess the know-how to captivate their audience. Dai Sijie is a good narrator and at the same time his characters are talented story tellers.

It is a novel about literary novels and their power of enchantment. It is about the emergence of literary vocation and how books can be a good education for life. The story illustrates the mysterious strength of fiction as a liberator of the mind and how reading can change people’s lifestyle and enrich it. A novel with outstanding themes that mixes serious subjects with humorous ones with great skill.

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