![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Books: Unsettling Europe, by Jane Kramer
Oct. 11th, 2016 08:29 pmOn a recent trip a dear friend took me to a fabulous used bookstore (in a converted mill! overlooking a river! surrounded by trees, and with its own coffee shop where one could (and I did) purchase fabulous sandwiches and strong caffeinated beverages and sit with the spoils of one's book trawl while looking through the branches to the rocky water below). The slogan of the bookstore was "Books you don't need in a place you can't find" and I came home with several books I did not need but, so far at least, am enjoying very much.
Unsettling History by Jane Kramer is a slim book bringing together four essays about... well, about what it's like to be a person whose life is in the cracks of the narrative that the people around you are bent on telling? Reading this book now has a very particular historical feeling because these are essays written in the 1970s, which means the time they're written in is 40 years in the past, and they're essays with a wide historical scope and perspective, so this is the voice of the 1970s commenting on lives stretching from the 19teens to the then-present 1970s. Reading them now is like reading history of history - but at the same time it's a very immediate voice, and some of the assumptions of the narrative are oddly off in the same way that reading old science fiction about the future is off
The first essay is my favorite, a novella length piece with a whole series of novels worth of scope. The elderly communist Italian couple at the heart of the essay lived through So Much Change in Italy, and have such... such intensely and complexly human lives, and I think the essayist must have fallen in love with them a little writing about them, because the quality of the essay made me love them both very much, and feel as if they were relatives I'd known at family reunions and wanted the best for. The essay about workers from Yugoslavia working in Sweden had its own sort of heartbreak because there is no Yugoslavia anymore, so those poor workers who spent decades working in other countries to build houses they hoped to return to... did they ever enjoy those houses? Were they able to stay on and ever plant roots in Sweden? And then just after reading their essay I was doing laundry in my own apartment and talking with two women who left Yugoslavia and... the way in which the echoing concerns of 1970something so directly come and affect now was one of the lasting effects of this short book for me.
All four essays echoed backward and forwards for me, reflecting on the times that led up to when the essays were written and the ways in which the issues raised in the essays are still unresolved now. The other two essays were about the relocations that accompanied the wars for independence in former French and English colonies after the second World War. Reading about the racism and violence and economic loss experienced by these travelers in the 1970s, and matching that up with the news about Brexit and about the struggles in France that have made frequent news the last few years was... complicated and exhausting and fascinating?
The whole book was about 250 pages long. It gave me a lot to think about. And I think it would be a fascinating quick reference for worldbuilding, for thinking about the kinds of characters that live in the worlds we create and how they see and experience those worlds. The people in these essays lived very hard lives, so I do want to mark out that these essays touch on sexual assault, physical violence, emotional abuse, racist language, and a number of just really astonishingly, complicatedly painful situations. The text, written in the 1970s, occasionally has a narrative voice and framing for these events that is not what I would want from a text written now (things acknowledged but treated casually then that would I think be treated less casually now). If those aspects aren't deal breakers for you, there is a lot of really valuable material in this very short book.
Unsettling History by Jane Kramer is a slim book bringing together four essays about... well, about what it's like to be a person whose life is in the cracks of the narrative that the people around you are bent on telling? Reading this book now has a very particular historical feeling because these are essays written in the 1970s, which means the time they're written in is 40 years in the past, and they're essays with a wide historical scope and perspective, so this is the voice of the 1970s commenting on lives stretching from the 19teens to the then-present 1970s. Reading them now is like reading history of history - but at the same time it's a very immediate voice, and some of the assumptions of the narrative are oddly off in the same way that reading old science fiction about the future is off
The first essay is my favorite, a novella length piece with a whole series of novels worth of scope. The elderly communist Italian couple at the heart of the essay lived through So Much Change in Italy, and have such... such intensely and complexly human lives, and I think the essayist must have fallen in love with them a little writing about them, because the quality of the essay made me love them both very much, and feel as if they were relatives I'd known at family reunions and wanted the best for. The essay about workers from Yugoslavia working in Sweden had its own sort of heartbreak because there is no Yugoslavia anymore, so those poor workers who spent decades working in other countries to build houses they hoped to return to... did they ever enjoy those houses? Were they able to stay on and ever plant roots in Sweden? And then just after reading their essay I was doing laundry in my own apartment and talking with two women who left Yugoslavia and... the way in which the echoing concerns of 1970something so directly come and affect now was one of the lasting effects of this short book for me.
All four essays echoed backward and forwards for me, reflecting on the times that led up to when the essays were written and the ways in which the issues raised in the essays are still unresolved now. The other two essays were about the relocations that accompanied the wars for independence in former French and English colonies after the second World War. Reading about the racism and violence and economic loss experienced by these travelers in the 1970s, and matching that up with the news about Brexit and about the struggles in France that have made frequent news the last few years was... complicated and exhausting and fascinating?
The whole book was about 250 pages long. It gave me a lot to think about. And I think it would be a fascinating quick reference for worldbuilding, for thinking about the kinds of characters that live in the worlds we create and how they see and experience those worlds. The people in these essays lived very hard lives, so I do want to mark out that these essays touch on sexual assault, physical violence, emotional abuse, racist language, and a number of just really astonishingly, complicatedly painful situations. The text, written in the 1970s, occasionally has a narrative voice and framing for these events that is not what I would want from a text written now (things acknowledged but treated casually then that would I think be treated less casually now). If those aspects aren't deal breakers for you, there is a lot of really valuable material in this very short book.
