6-6-2003
Wisława Szymborska
BOOK REVIEW
A collection of graceful 'sketches'
By Merle
Rubin
Special to The Times
October 28 2002
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For the last 3 1/2
decades, Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish poet awarded the Nobel Prize for
literature in 1996, has been writing a newspaper column called "Nonrequired
Reading." Occasioned by a motley array of books that have come her way --
everything and anything from an encyclopedia of assassination to a
do-it-yourself guide to wallpapering -- these short pieces (around 500 words
each) are not book reviews, she declares, but "sketches." Some, as it
happens, contain astute criticism of the books in question, but in the main,
Szymborska simply uses the books as jumping-off points. |
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Born in
1923 in Krakow, Szymborska lived through the brutal Nazi occupation and the
subsequent communist regime to see democracy at last. As one reads this
chronologically arranged selection, which begins in 1968, one is struck by the
unwavering humanity and compassion of this woman's voice.
Whether she is considering books on birds, Neanderthals, fossils, tyrants or
extraterrestrial life, Szymborska's great gift is her ability to see straight
through to the essentials. UFOs leave her cold: "The reader may think that I'm a
thick-skulled rationalist who can't even entertain the idea that anything
strange ... could still happen on our ordinary earth. It's just the opposite --
for me there is no such thing as an 'ordinary' earth. The more we find out about
it, the more mysterious it is, and the life it holds is a bizarre cosmic anomaly."
Reading the diary kept by Dostoevsky's wife, she muses: "Objectively, life with
her Fedya was a hell of fear, anxiety, and humiliation. Subjectively, though, it
made her happy. One smile or kind word was enough to dry her tears, and she'd
gladly remove her wedding band, her earrings, and her shawl so that Fedya could
pawn them, then use the proceeds to gamble and lose everything once again ....
We're dealing here with the phenomenon of great love. Detached observers always
ask in such cases: 'So what does she (he) see in him (her)?' Such questions are
best left in peace: great love is never justified. It's like the little tree
that springs up in some inexplicable fashion on the side of a cliff: where are
its roots, what does it feed on, what miracle produces those green leaves? But
it does exist and it really is green -- clearly, then, it's getting whatever it
needs to survive."
The encyclopedia of assassinations sets her thinking of the innocent civilians
who have replaced rulers and leaders as the primary targets of today's new breed
of political murder, terrorism: "Their misfortune was not that they held some
rank, some office, but the apparently meaningless fact that at a given moment
they went in somewhere, left somewhere, stopped somewhere, or simply went back
to their own home for the night. I think the world stands in urgent need of ...
an encyclopedia [of the non-famous victims of terrorism]. Done scrupulously and
impartially, it would be a worthy contender for the Nobel Peace Prize."
A French historian's biographical attempt to "scrape the tar off the fiendish
Catherine de Medici" impresses her not at all:
"He ascribes virtues to her that somehow never managed to surface even once
during the course of her thirty-year reign. He calls her the 'Italian Montaigne'
(Lord have mercy) and 'an artist who lent her creative gifts to the realm of
politics.' Seven civil wars that she either couldn't or wouldn't avert don't
speak well of her artistry .... So I'm not convinced by the superlatives with
which the author deluges Mme de Medici...."
Nor is Szymborska beguiled by a German art historian's efforts to present
Vermeer as representative of his era:
"According to this critic, the work [one of Vermeer's last paintings] signals
both the age's decline and the waning of the artist's inspiration: it is cold,
artificial, and calculated. The lady standing by her instrument is, he writes,
psychologically 'isolated' in her 'monumentally frozen gesture.' I look and
disagree at every turn. I see a miracle of daylight falling on different
materials: human skin, the silk gown, the chair's upholstery, the whitewashed
wall. Vermeer constantly repeats this miracle, but in fresh variants and
dazzling new permutations. What on earth have coldness and isolation got to do
with this? The woman puts her hand on the virginal as if she'd like to play us a
passage in jest, to remind us of something. She turns her head toward us with a
lovely half-smile on her not particularly pretty face. The smile is thoughtful,
with a touch of maternal forbearance. And for three hundred years she's been
looking this way at all of us, including critics."
Not unlike the thoughtful, forbearing half-smile that lights up Szymborska's
writing.
Nonrequired Reading
Prose Pieces
By Wislawa Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh
Harcourt: 236 pages, $24
Small Wonders
Reviewed by Adam Kirsch
Sunday, October 27, 2002; Page BW15
Pity the author whose book comes up for review in Wislawa Szymborska's column in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. Whether prominent or obscure, serious or frivolous, the work is likely to be eclipsed by the reviewer's brief, brilliant response. As the title of the column and the book suggests, Szymborska seldom writes about the serious novels, polemics on current affairs, biographies and classics that dominate book review sections, in Poland as here. Instead, this Nobel Prize-winning poet turns her attention to the ephemeral -- Relaxation: 101 Words of Wisdom -- or the esoteric -- The Daily Life of the Polish Nobility in the Seventeenth Century -- with charming results.
Szymborska's volume avoids the staleness of most book-review collections, precisely because she's not much interested in explaining or evaluating the work under review. Instead, she seizes on one aspect of the book, or the book's subject, or merely something it calls to mind, and lets her precise, fanciful intelligence run free. The memoirs of Napoleon's valet lead to a sympathetic piece on the great man's lack of privacy; a book on home improvement yields a comic look at shortages in communist Poland; an edition of Montaigne's Essays provokes a catalogue of the many accidents that could have killed Montaigne before he got his masterpiece written.
There is a wealth of interesting trivia in these pages. Szymborska tells us about the medieval Oudewater scales, benevolently rigged to acquit accused witches, who were said to be suspiciously weightless; about the first dialysis machine, rigged up by Willem Kolff in Nazi-occupied Holland out of sausage casings and chicken wire; about the scientist Pettenhoffer, who swallowed a beaker of cholera bacteria to disprove Koch's theory of infectious disease, and in fact remained perfectly healthy.
All this makes Nonrequired Reading a delightful book for browsing. But it is also recognizably by the same mind that produced Szymborska's profound and witty poetry. Like her countrymen Czeslaw Milosz and Adam Zagajewski, Szymborska countered a totalitarian government with poems that praise the specific, singular, odd and free; her poem "Miracle Fair" speaks of "the commonplace miracle:/ that so many common miracles take place." And these prose sketches, minor though they are, gain life and charm from Szymborska's sense for the wonders hidden beneath the ordinary. •
Adam Kirsch's first book of poetry, "The Thousand Wells," was published this month.
Poet's Mind
Issue of
2002-10-28
Posted 2002-10-21
Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish poet who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, has lived in Kraków since 1931. In the late sixties, she began to write about books that had caught her eye, books like "The Enigmatic Lemming," "Accidents in the Home," and "The Historical Development of Clothing." These short pieces, collected in NONREQUIRED READING (Harcourt), translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh, skitter over Szymborskan topics like bodybuilding, archeology, and the lottery of existence while referring, usually obliquely, to oppression and deprivation. Writing about a book called "Wallpapering Your Home," she observes, "Hobbies in their Polish variant are pastimes taken up not voluntarily, but by necessity," and then chronicles the setbacks and delays that thwart do-it-yourself projects under totalitarian regimes. Szymborska's deadpan sketches are whimsical and menacing; like her poems, they remind us that we spend our lives "a hairsbreadth from / an unfortunate coincidence."
If political conditions in Eastern Europe during the late sixties were bad for home improvement, they were good for literature. A scholarly study by Bozena Shallcross, a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Chicago, examines the effect of Communist restrictions on travel on three other poets: Adam Zagajewski, Zbigniew Herbert, and Joseph Brodsky. THROUGH THE POET'S EYE (Northwestern) looks at the prose produced by the poets' epiphanic encounters with Western art. In front of Vermeer's "Girl Interrupted at Her Music," which hangs at the Frick, Zagajewski pulls up short. "All of a sudden," he writes, "I felt how reality stopped for an instant and froze in harmonious motionlessness."
— Dana Goodyear
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BOOK MAGAZINE
Nonrequired Reading
Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by
Clare Cavanagh
Harcourt
256 pages
from the
September/October 2002 issue
Short Digressions
by Terry Teachout
Time for a pop quiz. what do
these people have in common: Ivo Andric, Ivan Bunin, Grazia Deledda, Halldór
Laxness and Harry Martinson? Yes, they're writers—this is, after all, a—but what
else? If you're a veteran test-taker, you may have guessed that they all won the
Nobel Prize for Literature, an award whose recipients, while not always unknown
outside their native countries (Rudyard Kipling got one), are usually famous
only for being utterly obscure. So don't be ashamed to admit that you've never
read a line of the poetry of 1996's Nobel laureate, Wislawa Szymborska—neither
have I—and don't hold it against her that she won all that tax-free cash without
your noticing. Her latest book,
Nonrequired Reading,
is the most engaging collection of literary essays to be published in a deep
blue moon.
Szymborska writes a weekly column for
Gazeta Wyborcza,
Poland's largest daily newspaper, in which she "reviews" books that are too
offbeat for full-length treatment. The pieces are quite short, generally just
under two pages in this volume, and as often as not they make only glancing
mention of the books that are their ostensible subjects. Can you imagine opening
up your Sunday paper and finding a column like that? Much less one written by a
poet? (Ozzy Osbourne, maybe.)
At the outset, Szymborska expected her book column to be more
or less conventional in style and approach. "I thought I'd be writing real
reviews," she says, "that is, in each case I'd describe the nature of the book
at hand, place it in some larger context, then give the reader to understand
that it was better than some and worse than others."
Before long, though, she realized that she wasn't born to be
a book reviewer, but something different—and, quite possibly, better: "I am and
wish to remain a reader, an amateur, and a fan, unburdened by the weight of
ceaseless evaluation. Sometimes the book itself is my main subject; at other
times it's just a pretext for spinning out various loose associations. Anyone
who calls these pieces sketches will be correct. Anyone insisting on 'reviews'
will incur my displeasure."
That's about the size of it, except to say that her choice of
books is winsomely eccentric. You won't recognize many of them, either, though
half a dozen or so passably familiar titles make the cut: Louis Armstrong's
Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, Dale
Carnegie's How to Stop Worrying and Start Living,
Richard Klein's Cigarettes Are Sublime, even
a Polish translation of the diary of Samuel Pepys. For the most part, Szymborska
stays well off the beaten path, instead allowing such books as The
Encyclopedia of Assassinations, Vade Mecum of
a Tourist on Foot, and The Art of Writing, or
You and Your Character to tickle her fancy.
The results are something like a cross between a volume of
familiar essays and a found poem, but the best way to suggest the subtle flavor
of Nonrequired Reading is to give you a
little taste. Here, for instance, is part of what Szymborska has to say about
Hanna and Wojciech Mieszkowski's Repairing and Redecorating Your
Apartment, a title that isn't likely to pop up in your
neighborhood bookstore anytime soon: "You have to be born a handyman; you can't
suddenly become one in midlife. As with ballet, you have to start practicing
early; otherwise you'll never be a master. The handyman has had a flamboyant
boyhood; he has learned how to balance on death's edge amid corrosive liquids,
broken glass, short circuits, and experimental detonations. His parents are
summoned to his school with above-normal frequency, where they discover that
their son has rigged beneath the teacher's chair a device producing knocking
from below." And do the Mieszkowskis have any useful hints on the one best way
to rewire a light switch? Beats me—but who cares?
Or take this out-of-left-field meditation, inspired by a book
with the unlikely title of The Enigmatic Lemming:
"Birds are lunatics with no clue to their own lunacy. Instinct, which orders
them to fly off every fall and resettle somewhere else that may be tens of
thousands of miles away, only appears to be kindly and concerned with their
well-being. If all that mattered were better food supplies in a more temperate
climate, more than one species would end its protracted flight far sooner. But
these demented creatures fly on, over mountains, where unexpected storms may
smash them into cliffs, over seas, in which they may drown."
One of the rare classics to which Szymborska turns her
attention in Nonrequired Reading is Michel de
Montaigne's Essays. That gives the game away,
for Szymborska, like Montaigne, writes about life by writing about herself,
though she does it once removed, using books as the nominal occasions for her
personal reflections: "I don't remember all the impressions prompted by my first
reading of Montaigne. In any case, surprise wasn't among them. The existence of
this work, the living voice with which it continues to speak—I took these for
granted. What foolishness. Now the existence of anything good fills me with
astonishment. And since the Essays are a good
thing (even one of the very best that the human spirit has achieved), everything
in them amazes me."
Having just made the belated acquaintance of Wislawa
Szymborska, I'd say she partakes of more than a few of Montaigne's most
attractive traits. Skeptical yet hopeful, intensely interested in the
deceptively ordinary, she writes in the living voice of a person whose quirks
and passions I feel I know as well as my own. I sincerely hope that her
publisher quarries the back pages of Gazeta Wyborcza
for at least another volume's worth of these lovely nonreviews. Now if you'll
excuse me, I need to go read some Nobel Prize–winning poetry right away.
For poet and critic,
small books are fodder for big thoughts
Reviewed by Cynthia Haven
Sunday, December 22, 2002
Nonrequired Reading
Prose Pieces
By Wislawa Szymborska; translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh
Every author hates it. Every reviewer is warned against it. The oldest stricture in the book is against critics' using the author's work as a springboard to discuss their own passions, pet peeves, quirks.
Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska seems never to have heard of that gripe. In the Polish poet's "Nonrequired Reading," a collection of reviews written from 1968 to 2001, reviews go way around the block discussing philosophy, contemporary manners, archaeology, geology, whatever -- and sometimes almost parenthetically discuss the book to be critiqued. It's significant that Harcourt inserts the book title, author and publisher in small type, at the end of the review. For in the end, we get very little of the book but a great deal of Szymborska.
We are lucky this is so. Most of her reviews in her long-standing column, also called "Nonrequired Reading," trumpet ultimately forgettable books. The thinking behind her column is simple: Literary and nonfiction heavy-hitters get reviewed copiously. "But things look different in the bookstore," where popular science and how-to books sell like hotcakes, she notes in her introduction. "Most (if not all) of the rapturously reviewed books lay gathering dust on the shelves for months before being sent off to be pulped, whereas all the many others, unappreciated, undiscussed, unrecommended, were selling out on the spot."
Szymborska decided to review the latter. "Even the worst book can give us something to think about," she has written elsewhere, and she proceeds to prove that this is true. Her selections -- books on continental drift, the genealogy of the Cleopatras, Chinese languages and dialects ("To live in this world and know nothing about the Chinese alphabet makes no sense") or "nightlife" (no, not what you think, but rather about the nearly 3,000 mammals who do their hunting at night, along with nocturnal reptiles, amphibians, insects and birds) -- are characteristically idiosyncratic.
For example, "Nonrequired Reading" includes one of the few reviews of Marcia Lewis' "The Private Lives of the Three Tenors." The author, you may recall, is Monica Lewinsky's mom, and, yes, incredible as it may seem, this book was translated into Polish. Szymborska pooh-poohs the lubricious rumors Lewis repeats: "The handsome young Domingo spent nearly twelve months in Tel Aviv, during which he made more than two hundred appearances and learned more than fifty roles by heart. If this grind ever permitted the occasional chink of free time, I doubt that busty supermodels bursting with silicone could slither into it."
In a chapter titled "Page-Turners," Szymborska even reviews a wall calendar.
Take this very typical passage on its humble fate: "The calendar is doomed to gradual liquidation as its pages are torn off. Millions of books will outlive us, and a considerable number will be ridiculous, dated, and badly written. The calendar is the only book that has no intention of outlasting us, that does not lay claim to a sinecure on the library shelves; it is programmatically short-lived. In its humility it does not even dream of being pored over page by page."
More memorable than the critiqued books is the sly, witty, engaging voice that emerges from behind these backhanded reviews from perhaps history's most reclusive Nobel literary superstar. Szymborska makes her humane, commonsensical points but always comes at them slantwise. The observations on creatures that prowl and whir and twitter through the night quickly turn into observations of "nighttime as a wholesale slaughterhouse": "investigating the nature of Nature generally leads to unpalatable conclusions. . . . We humans also take our nourishment at the cost of others' lives: I consider this a scandal. The scandal is the greater since we must, willy-nilly, participate, which we often do with great relish."
Not surprisingly, these whimsical prose pieces are all of a piece with her poems. What a short leap from these reviews to these lines in "Torture," written in 1986:
Nothing has changed,
Except maybe manners,
ceremonies, dances.
Yet the gesture of arms
shielding the head
Has remained the same.
The body writhes, struggles,
and tries to break free . . .
When this same, fey outlook combines with urgent, historical circumstance, her lines ignite. "The Turn of the Century," the first poem she published two years after the declaration of martial law in December 1981, is a retrospective ode to the new century (both poems are from "Miracle Fair," published in paperback in November):
God was at last to believe in
man:
good and strong.
But good and strong
Are still two different
people.
How to live, someone asked
me in a letter,
Someone I had wanted
to ask the same thing.
Again and as always
And as seen above
There are no questions
more urgent
Than the naive ones.
The sobering dates on the "Nonrequired Reading" reviews are a reminder that this is one way Szymborska made her living after she left the Communist Party in 1967. Given the poets who languished and starved and died under similar regimes . . . well, she's to be congratulated for quiet wisdom.
Most of these reviews are less than two pages. Dreadful to say this -- but somehow one suspects Szymborska would approve -- but it's the ideal length for the bathroom, for waiting "on hold" or for the long, long lines at the DMV.
Cynthia Haven has written for San Francisco Magazine, Stanford Magazine and the Times Literary Supplement.
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