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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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