Elastic- stretchable, malleable but also prone to slacking over time. That’s how I would describe Alice’s story- something that she herself doesn’t understand before it is too late. The book starts with the protagonist, Alice examining her vagina and feeling alienated from her own body and disconsolate about her sexuality.
She is content with her partner Simon, they love each other and live together and things are fine. Enter Mathilde, and Alice’s life changes. Mathilde is Alice’s colleague and Alice is drawn to Mathilde like a moth drawn to a flame. Enter Alexander – Mathilde’s husband – and things take an even more complicated turn. Alexander and Mathilde are in an open marriage and to get closer to Mathilde, Alice starts to sleep with Alexander. Alexander is merely the means to get to the end, to Mathilde.
Eventually, Alice also discovers secrets from Simon, and after that, it’s a roller coaster ride that takes us through this quadrilateral relationship- of love, of intimacy, of desire, of jealousy, of hate, of queerness, of identity and of feminine struggles.
Johanne Bille did a marvelous job with this book- amalgamating the many sides to human identity and relationships into one story narrated by Alice’s complex character. Despite the many themes and the many moods of Alice that the book touches upon, the writing is perspicuous through and through.
I thought, I thought and I thought and could not think of any adjectives to describe the book. The imagery is wonderful, the translation is lyrical, the writing is brilliant, the story is emotional and I just choked up in the end. Please read it, NOW.
I’ve wanted to read Flights ever since it was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2018 and since I saw a copy of the book at one of the stands at a bookstore inside Bangalore Airport. I was mostly drawn to the book due to its title and the plain cobalt blue cover, only later did I realize that Fitzcarraldo Editions has the same cover design for all their fiction novels.
Flights is a collection of vignettes- wayward and yet connected to anatomy, motion, psychology and travel somehow. I cannot say that I loved the book wholly and I cannot extrapolate the rules of synecdoche to this book since it was too different. I was indifferent to some parts of the book and the rest, I loved. It was difficult to understand her writing initially because, for the longest time, I kept trying to wrap my head around – what exactly is this book about? what is the purpose? But I think giving up on trying to find the “meaning or purpose” of this book helped me appreciate this a lot more. I just needed to let the book be, unfurl on its own and so when I ask you to read this with an open mind, please do. Don’t try to figure out what is happening or what is going to happen or the purpose. It’s a multifaceted book and an amalgamation of some visceral vignettes with brilliant prose. Some parts are so hauntingly vivid and some are just average or pointless but then again, the purpose of this book is that it honestly doesn’t have any, and I think that is pretty cool. It’s the kind of book that will either pull you into its lyrical and vivid prose or it will just confound you- for me, it did both. It was kind of like a flight taking off with exhilaration and then landing with some uneasy turbulence.
I’m in awe with the amount of research put into this book- I loved the bits about the Glasmensch by Franz Tschackert in the German Hygiene museum and the stories of the Dutch anatomist Filip Verheyen who dissected and drew pictures of his own amputated leg. I’m a fan of anatomy museums and I love watching carcasses of animals or human fetuses or other body parts float in glass jars, so this was 10/10 for me. I also love how Tokarczuk’s writing is embedded with compassion for the environment and animals (I loved ‘Ataturks Reforms’, ‘Whales or Drowning in Air’, and ‘On the Origin of Species’). A soft corner for the peculiar, the unfamiliar and the marginalized is at the heart of her writing [quoting Tokarczuk, “I’m not interested in the patters so scrutinized by statistics that everyone celebrated with a familiar, satisfied smile on their faces. My weakness is for teratology and for freaks. I believe, unswervingly, agonizingly, that it is in freaks that Being breaks through to the surface and reveals its true nature”]. One of my favourite vignettes is ‘Your Head in the World’ where she talks about her psychology degree, which also took me back to those two years when I superficially studied Psychology in junior college [quoting Tokarczuk, “What we learned at university was that we are made up of defences, of shields and armour, that we are cities whose architecture essentially comes down to walls, ramparts, strongholds: bunker states”].
Somewhere in the middle of the book, I read up on Olga Tokarczuk’s life and novels and also this particular novel and it kind of helped me appreciate the book a little more. As for the translation, I do not know Polish but I can say with some conviction that Croft’s translation does not disappoint. This book definitely calls for a re-read for a better understanding I guess!
Igifu, Scholastique Mukasonga tr. by Jordan Stump Published by Archipelago Books Genre- Autobiographical fiction, Short Stories Rating: 5/5
“In Nyamata,’ my mother used to say, ‘you must never forget: we’re Inyenzi, we’re cockroaches, snakes, vermin. Whenever you meet a soldier or a militiaman or a stranger, remember: he’s planning to kill you, and he knows he will, one day or another, him or someone else”.
Igifu, or hunger, is a collection of autobiographical stories by the French-Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga and is translated from the French to English by Jordan Stump. In the centre of these stories is the collective grief and predicament of Tutsis -the living, the dead and the exiled – before and after the Rawandan genocide. Each story is heartwrenchingly beautiful, visceral and permeates through all yours senses.
The first story in the book is called ‘Igifu’, where the author takes us through a literary experience of hunger- of what it means to have this implacable tormentor within and what it does to the human body and mind. They knew how to satiate Igifu when they had their cows but the cows were taken away and killed, and the Tutsis were abandoned on the sterile soil of the Bugesera, Igifu’s kingdom. (“Igifu woke you long before the chattering birds announced the first light of dawn, he stretched out the blazing afternoon hours, he stayed at your side on the mat to bedevil your sleep. He was the heartless magician who conjured up lying mirages: the sight of a heap of steaming beans or a beautiful white ball of manioc paste, the glorious smell of the sauce on a huge dish of bananas, the sound of roast corn crackling over a charcoal fire, and then just when you were about to reach out for that mouthwatering food it would all dissolve like the mist on the swamp, and then you heard Igifu cackling deep in your stomach.”)
The second story is called “The Glorious Cow” where the author reminisces the halcyon days of when they had a lot of cows. The cows were given names, looked after and were the most important members in the family. Here, we learn the cultural and agricultural importance of the cow in Tutsi families. Milk after all, helped keep Igifu away. The third story, which almost had me in tears is called “Fear”- the fear of the sound of boots, of soldiers planning to kill, where you have to be quicker than death. Fear is their guardian angel, it helps them stay alert and awake for when death knocks, you have to run faster than death. The fourth story is called “The Curse of Beauty”- of how beauty was the greatest sorrow in the life of a Tutsi woman that extricated her from her husband, her son and herself. The last story in the book is “Grief”- here, the author writes about what it is like to lose people to a genocide and what it takes to come to terms with it (“That strength lives in you too, don’t let anyone try to tell you to get over your loss, not if that means saying goodbye to your dead. You can’t: they’ll never leave you, they stay by your side to give you the courage to live, to triumph over obstacles, whether here in Rwanda or abroad, if you go back. They’re always beside you, and you can always depend on them.”)
Igifu was my first read for Women in Translation month. WITMonth started in response to literary blogger Meytal Radzinski’s observation that only around 30% of books published in translation were by women. The purpose is to support women writers in translations and to bridge the gap through reading, reviewing and discussing books by women writers in translations.
Literature, Poetry and Reading. 