The importance of being a poet

The Meeting at Telgte [Das Treffen in Telgte] by Günter Grass

( 1979)

The reason why I’ve read this book was quite simply: I was curious, is there any connection between this novel and the other one, The True Story of Jacob Wunschwitz by Laszlo Marton, who is the Hungarian translator of Grass’ book.

As I mentioned already, the "Jacob Wunschwitz"(unfortunatelly, it isn't any English translation yet) is a starting point for my researching about historical novels, and Grass’ story is set (almost) in the same place and the same period: Germany in the 17. century.

I have to admit, I’ve read only one book by Grass before, The Call of the Toad, I think, it isn’t among his most famous works. Even not The Meeting at Telgte.

Unfortunately, when I wouldn’t have any special aim with this book (see above), probably I would have never finish it.

The story is about poets and other learned men are meeting in an inn in Telgte, near to Ostnabrück and Münster, where the Peace of Westfalia (1648) was signed. Because this story is played in the middle of the century (exactly in 1647), I think, it’s easy to find a connection with the 20. century, and the WW2, which was an another “good” time thinking about the role and importance of arts.

I think, it’s a bit like The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse, it’s an allegory about the European culture too. The poets are talking about poetics and linguistics problem (for example: we can read about the dispute why is better the “Hochdeutsch” dialect for being the official German language), but they also write a proclamation about the peace, and that is the point I think, it’s a bit ironic story: are those some poets so important personalities that the politicians will care about their opinion?

There is a Hungarian poem about the poet should lead the people to Canaan, it’s written in the middle of the 19. century, and shows the romantic ideology about the role of artists. As I know, it’s a typically Central-European attitude and connected with the revolutionary movements in this period. But hundred years later, when this book was written, it seems to be ridiculous (and 150 years later even more ridiculous), and I think, that is the theme of The Meeting at Telgte. The irony how Grass writes about this ideology.

And I think, that is also the weakness of this book. It’s more about a though, about an idea, and less about characters. I can remember the names of the protagonists (these poets existed in the real life) but hardly of their traits. Except only one, the innkeeper. This woman is called sometimes Courage, which is a quite interesting reference to Brecht’s famous work: Mother Courage and Her Children.

Summing up, The Meeting at Telgte has an interesting theme, but the way Grass writes about it, I think, it’s not for me.

(This review was written for the German Reading Challenge and The Decades Challenge)

An old-fashioned story

Magda Szabo (1917-2007) is one of the most famous and most popular Hungarian writers of the 20. century. Her stories mostly about her own life, like The Door, or the popular novel Abigel.

The book with the title Regimodi tortenet [An Old-fashioned Story] is about the life of her ancestors. We can learn during the reading strong women and weak men, the society life of the town Debrecen, the customs of its residents, and the life of a fascinating young woman, who has grown up without mother and father, in the shadow of her grandmother and her aunts, and became later the mother of Magda Szabo.

What is really interesting in this book, it bases of real diaries, poems, official papers, etc, it’s really the situation, someone starts to explore his/ her own past and heritage. It’s very personally, direct, writer and reader became good old friend at the end of the book, and the reader wants to read more about this family, about these extraordinary, fascinating, or even sometimes quite common people. And it's not impossible. Magda Szabo’s works are mostly about this topic, and motives we loved in this book, maybe we can find easily in an other one by this fascinating writer.

Knowing less, knowing more

Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz

Since I finished the book Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz, I can’t get out of my head the question: Is Gyuri Koves an unreliable narrator, or we are unreliable readers?

The story is about a Jewish boy, who grows up in the world of concentrations camps. The stress is on growing up, because Gyuri is a young boy when the book starts, he is only 14-15 years old, and knows almost nothing about standards, customs, the relationships between people, the way living together, etc. It’s like a Bildungsroman, a young and naive someone learns the most important things about the society to became a real member of it. But it must be a grotesque Bildungsroman: Gyuri learns the standards of a lager. It’s incredible, how many times he says: I have understood… , it’s natural…, it’s logic…

It’s incredible for us readers, because we don’t know what to do with this attitude. We know a lot of thing about Auschwitz or Buchenwald, what Gyuri doesn’t know. But he knows a lot of thing about it what we don’t know.

And that is the main point of my train of thought. Is it about knowing less and knowing more? Or just about the different point of views.

Who is unreliable? The narrator who doesn’t know what is a lager for and wants to understand and wants to learn it’s customs, and doesn’t understand why the others think at the end of the story, that it is something horrible? Or we readers, who know only this point of view: it is something incredible bad, and don’t understand, why Gyuri can’t see it from the first moment he arrives in Auschwitz.