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Book Reviews
A Note Of Discord Amid the Harmony
- Derek Hand, The Irish Times.
Judith Mok is btter known as a successful soprano but
she has also published books of poetry and prose in her native
Netherlands. Gael is her first fiction in the English language and
there is much to admire, not least the lyrical writing, which at times
creates a dream-like atmosphere. Throughout, different narrative
perspectives are employed: first and third person voices, and different
characters, too, tell their story from their own vantage point. Each
voice and perspective intensifies this consciously impressionistic
prose. And, as one might expect from an author immersed in music, this
is a work intentionally layered with references to musicians and
composers, as well as painters and writers.
The Gael of the title is the object of desire for Maria,
a young Dutch violinist. He is an Irish artist and attractive to her
because of his animal earthiness, so utterly a contrast to the cold and
austere world she is used to inhabiting. The blurb on the back of the
book suggests that this is a novel about "a particulate type of Irish
male psyche", but in truth, what is of interest here is the obsessive,
selfish nature of the creative imagination that feeds on the pain and
hurt revolving around it. Maria's Jewishness is a factor because of the
casual anti-Semitism she encounters - in Ireland, but also in the
aristocratic Parisian circles she moves in with her first husband, and
also in America. It is a factor, too, owing to the fascinating
background stories of her parents and their brush with death in the
Europe of the Holocaust. These are some of the more successful parts of
the novel, with hidden hurt alluded to and the sense of these long dead
men and women haunting the lives of those who escaped the gas chambers.
Some of the least successful episodes are those centered
on Ireland. The subtlety of the engagement with European locales and
culture is absent when it comes to describing the Irish scene. The
country comes across as a wet, unwelcoming place, obsessed with the
Catholic religion and where the only thing anyone seems to eat is a
fry. It seems to be an Ireland of the past - of 20 or 30 years ago
maybe - as opposed to the frothy cappuccino reality of the present
moment. But Ireland is not the main focus of the novel, despite the
efforts of the blurb to make it so. Ireland is just one-location in a
narrative where the action glides easily from place to place, from
character to character, episode to episode. Tension is generated
through the juxtaposition of this story centered round a highly
destructive and dysfunctional relationship with the often delicate
prose employed to tell it. It is a strain that runs through the entire
work. To be sure, Gael is quite an awful character, but just one such
awful character in a book of many such characters. Nobody - not even
Maria - emerges as truly sympathetic by the end. Yet both these main
characters are capable of producing objects of beauty, of timeless art.
And that is the Lawrentian mystery at the heart of a
novel such as this: striking balance between pain and beauty, between
lyrical prose and ugly reality. In a modern world where feeling and
emotion are frequently contained and packaged for safe consumption, the
kind of raw passion and danger on offer here is certainly worth
engaging with.
NRC Handelsblad
WHOEVER MAKES MUSIC CAN NEVER BE REALLY UNHAPPY
Judith Mok, De Beul/The Executioner
Meulenhoff, 160 pages, F 29.50
Ambitious - that is the least you can say about the second novel by
writer, poet and classical singer Judith Mok. Music, painting, the
Second World War, the themes of happiness, birth, death and loss, Mok
compresses them all into the hundred and sixty pages of The
Executioner. As in an historical epic, a range of characters wander
through past and present; through prewar Vienna, German-occupied
Amsterdam, Fascist Italy, Cordoba in the Franco era and wartime
Chicago. Paintings come to life, a decade passes in the blink of an
eye, people meet and lose each other again - they are the proverbial
pawns of history. It will be clear by now that Mok doesn't give a fig
for unity or unambiguousness in any shape or form. Her time structure
is vague, the past of her characters is impenetrable. With a rucksack
full of sorrow they wander the globe, like powerless objects in the
grip of fate. Nevertheless, the book does not sink under the weight of
these ingredients, which could easily have made it top-heavy. That is
due to Mok's passionate, baroque tone and her ability to evoke a
paralyzing surrealistic atmosphere which the reader cannot easily
escape from.
The beginning is laborious. The first chapter, consisting of twenty
pages, seems designed to put off the reader. You have to be very
tolerant in order to put up with a large amount of characters
introduced at breakneck speed. They all have complicated names and
their relation to each other is not explained. The international
company which gathers on Friday 31 December 1999, under the strange
pleading eyes of an African 'Kaftan Man' in Salzburg, 'in the
centuries-old Konditorei Tosi, where Josef Haydn used drink his morning
coffee', seems to hardly cohere. When these already vague characters
take on other identities by means of a masque designed to bring to life
a painting by Leonardo Da Vinci, in which apart from the painter and
his model an old Italian aristocrat also plays a role, as reader you
are about to give up. Luckily, after this the writer starts again, it
becomes interesting and often and moving and absorbing. On the eve of
the Second World War the young Jewish-American student Marc Wolfram
meets the Jewish-Spanish Gypsy Ermelina Ruiz, in Cordoba. They decide
to leave together for America, but Ermelina doesn't manage to get a
ticket and is stranded in Amsterdam, pregnant with their daughter. The
tone, at the beginning so cheerful, turns somber. 'When they arrived in
Amsterdam there was a street organ on the bridge. With Spanish statues
as decoration. She felt just like those statues, rigid with excess
emotion…Now the organ was silent, put away due to wartime regulations.'
Ermelina is arrested, sent to a concentration camp, but escapes death
because the camp executioner employs her as a servant in his house. Her
daughter stays behind with friends, a musical Amsterdam family. Marc
goes to work for the FBI in order to get revenge for his wife and child
who have been given up for dead. He becomes an executioner.
What follows is a passionate, fragmentary and yet convincing account of
a struggle to survive. Symbols of death and decay, of menace and night,
of fear and secrecy, illustrate the infernal journey of Ermelina and
Marc; a black executioner's cap, shadows on the rear window, closed
envelopes with photos of the condemned, a mini-guillotine. The
sometimes heavy symbolism contributes to a certain 'Gothic' atmosphere,
as in the late eighteenth century novels of Horace Walpole and Ann
Radcliffe, but The Executioner is certainly not a horror novel of the
vampire genre.
What keep's Mok characters going is their love for music and painting.
As a boy, Marc was struck by Leonardo's painting 'Woman with Ermine',
which shows a girl called Ermelina. Marc becomes a Da Vinci expert and
after the war, professor in art history. What painting is for one,
music is for the other. Ermelina becomes a singer. As servant in the
house of the German camp executioner, she meets a German diva, who has
been opportunistically singing her way through the war: Pergolesi,
Brahms, Bach, Mozart, Der Tod und das Madchen, with as ambiguous
highpoint her perfumed Schubert recital in Austwich, accompanied by an
Amsterdam camp quartet - 'In hell it smelt of Guerlain'.
A comparable scene, just as beautiful and gripping, is to be found in
Ingrid Coven, the Goncourt-Prizewinning novel by Jean-Jacques Schuhl.
Mok's image also evokes associations with Anna Enquist's arrested
Jewish music teacher from her novel 'The Secret'. 'Whoever makes music
is never really unhappy', writes Mok. 'Music leads us by the nose and
seduces us', writes Schuhl. 'When you play Bach then you tidy up your
inner life', writes Enquist. By evoking a subtle play of forces between
the horrors of history on the one hand, and painting and music on the
other, Mok succeeds in arousing real emotions in the reader. And in
doing so, the book succeeds despite its ambitious construction.
Margot Dijkgraaf
Trouw,
BAROQUE ORCHESTRATED FAMILY CHRONICLE
The beginning of Judith Mok's second novel, The Executioner, causes us
to fear the worst: a big family gathers on New Year's Eve 1999, to
inspect the family history. Names are showered upon us while none of
the characters is explained, except in the roles of grandfather,
grandmother, aunt, grandchild, son, daughter, brother-in-law, and so
on. In addition, the characters come from the four corners of the
earth: USA, France, Spain, the Netherlands, which makes it even more
confusing. But Mok soon abandons the family reunion, and starts to
really tell us the history of this family, starting at the beginning.
Then it becomes interesting. We read how the family members lose touch
with each other, to begin with because of the war, but later by
coincidences, then rediscover each other and then manage to find a new
balance with each other.
The story is cleverly constructed; loose ends are gradually tidied up
in a logical fashion and the way in which all the events are related is
revealed. Everything actually is related to the role of the
'executioner', on the one hand in the form of the camp commandant of
Austwich, on the other hand in the form of the man who condemns war
criminals after the war. But although Mok's story is partly based on
real events, her language is baroque and theatrical. This does not make
the grim, cynical story just below the surface, any less horrific, but
makes it less oppressive. More than death is mourned, in this story
life is celebrated.
Hanna de Heus
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