Cander / ?ander Blind Man

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-912545-94-0
Verlag: Istros Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 260 Seiten

The main character and narrator of Blind Man is a successful book editor and critic with severely impaired vison, although he has never had much to do with the visually impaired community and doesn't really feel like he is one of them. But when he is offered a chance to enter the world of politics, he is 'blinded' by the lure of power, and this easy-going, level-headed husband and soon-to-be father gradually turns into a self-absorbed careerist. Author Mitja ?ander, without pontificating and with a measured dose of humour, paints a critical, unsparing portrait of a small European country and through it a convincing satire on the psychological state of contemporary European society. What, or who, do we still believe in today, and who should we trust? Politicians, apparatchiks, the media? Speeches laden with buzzwords and grandiose promises break down the flimsy façade, as the protagonist's own insecurity suggests that things are not always what they seem. In the end, social blindness is worse than any physical impairment, and worst of all is to be blinded by your own ego.

For decades, Mitja ?anderhas been one of the most influential figures in Slovenia's literary and publishing world -an editor and literary critic, the co-founder and director of Beletrina Academic Press, essayist, screenwriter, dramaturge, columnist, and candidate for national chess master, Since 1992, he has published articles and essays on Slovenian and world literature and received numerous awards for his work. Blind Man is his first novel.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cander, Mitja

?ander, Mitja

Leseproben

In Lieu of Footnotes

Mitja Cander’s Blind Man, originally published in 2019, is set in Slovenia’s recent (pre-pandemic) past, and Slovenia itself – its past and, quite explicitly, its future – is one of the novel’s themes. Or we could say, perhaps more accurately, that Slovenia provides the specific backdrop and material for an exploration of more general themes, plotted along the axes of the personal, cultural and political, as the visually impaired narrator, outwardly confident yet inwardly unsure of himself, feels his way through life. At the start of the novel, he is a successful book editor (as Cander himself is), but soon, despite his own misgivings, he finds himself drafted into politics. As he tells us his story, he often reflects on his past – his school days, his time as a semi-professional chess player, his university years and so on – which spans Slovenia’s transition from a constituent republic in socialist Yugoslavia to independence in 1991 and full membership in the European Union in 2004.

Consequently, the reader encounters a number of incidental references to historical and cultural phenomena that, while very familiar to Slovenes, may be a little puzzling to readers of this translation. Of course, the discovery of the unfamiliar is one of the challenges and delights of reading translated works. Rather than employ footnotes, which could be distracting, I have chosen to provide this preliminary explanatory note so readers may feel somewhat better informed as they step into the narrator’s world. Alternatively, they may prefer to skip this note altogether and take the more obscure references in stride. These fall into three basic categories: Slovene political history, Slovene culture (broadly understood) and literary references.

The first group appears as the narrator’s recounts his life in socialist Yugoslavia. He recalls, for example, how as a schoolboy he was interviewed by the president of the Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, who asked him if he was active in the Pioneer Youth Group. Founded in 1942 and modelled on a similar organization in the Soviet Union, the Union of Pioneers of Yugoslavia sought to instil socialist civic values in schoolchildren (ages seven to fifteen), particularly values associated with the Communist-led Partisan movement during the Second World War and, first and foremost, love and admiration for Marshal Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980), the leader of Yugoslavia. The boy proudly responds that he and his fellow Pioneers are putting together a project to commemorate the National Liberation Struggle – the term used in Yugoslavia for the Partisans’ antifascist campaign to overthrow the occupying forces and their domestic collaborators.

Much later in the novel, the narrator relates his first ‘political’ involvement: in his eighth year of school he served as the president of the school’s ‘cell’ of the League of Socialist Youth, the youth wing of the Yugoslav Communist Party. This would have been in the late 1980s, when the Slovene branch of the League took positions that radically departed from those of the national organization, including support for civil society movements and alternative culture (notably, women’s rights, LGBT rights, the peace movement and punk culture), freedom of the press, the right of workers to strike and greater democratization. The magazine published by the Slovene League of Socialist Youth, Mladina (Youth), stepped up its criticism of both local and federal authorities, including, among other things, attacking the Yugoslav People’s Army. This led, in the spring of 1988, to the arrest, trial and imprisonment of four Slovene journalists (including Janez Janša, who would later become a highly controversial right-wing politician and three-time prime minister of the country), precipitating what the narrator describes as ‘that hot summer, when people were protesting in front of the military prison in the capital in support of the political prisoners’. These events marked the beginning of ‘the Slovene Spring’, as Slovenia’s intellectuals and political leaders moved ever more decisively towards a complete break with Belgrade and the establishment of a liberal parliamentary democracy. In April 1990, the first multi-party elections were held, and in a referendum in December of that year nearly 90 per cent of Slovene voters supported independence from Yugoslavia. This was officially declared on 25 June 1991 – a day marked every year as Statehood Day (which is mentioned later in the novel).

In the meantime, the Slovene League of Socialist Youth transformed itself into the Liberal Democratic Party, which soon became ‘the country’s largest party’ (as the narrator explains in a different chapter) and, apart from a few months in the year 2000, dominated parliament from 1992 to 2004, after which it essentially disintegrated. This was followed by ‘a period of alliances formed from all possible corners’, resulting in a succession of short-lived governments based on more or less fragile coalitions.

The second category of possibly unfamiliar references are connected with Slovene culture and cultural symbols.

Early in the novel, the narrator delivers a talk to a group of ‘blind intellectuals’, in which he puts forward the standard thesis that, for Slovenes, ‘the role of nation-building was assumed by culture’, and by literary culture in particular (‘the culture connected with our unique language’). Asserting that Slovene poets can ‘stand side by side with the world’s greatest’, he declares: ‘Prešeren is our Dante, our Petrarch, our Pushkin!’ Here he refers to the very fine Romantic poet France Prešeren (1800–1849), who is celebrated, and indeed mythologized, as Slovenia’s ‘greatest poet’ and ‘the father of Slovene literature’: streets and squares throughout the country are named in his honour (including Ljubljana’s main square), his image has been engraved on Slovene banknotes and euro coins, and the words of the national anthem are taken from his poem ‘A Toast’ (Zdravljica). The narrator then adds his own twist to the hackneyed ‘nation-building’ idea with the observation that Slovenes, having achieved independence, were ‘finally able to openly despise our poets, poetry, and art in general, that entire freak show of inebriated lunatics who think they’re superior to everyone else’. Nevertheless, he says, they have not dispensed with culture altogether ‘and even have a public holiday devoted to it’. This national celebration of Slovene culture, on 8 February, is called, unsurprisingly, Prešeren Day and marks (perhaps surprisingly) the anniversary of the poet’s death. Each year, in conjunction with this holiday, the national Prešeren Awards are presented for the finest works in literature, theatre, music, the visual arts and architecture, among other creative fields.

But if Prešeren has come to represent the summit of Slovenia’s cultural achievement, then an actual summit, the triple-peaked Mount Triglav, which at an elevation of 2,864 metres, is the country’s highest mountain, has long been the symbol of the Slovene nation as a whole. During the Second World War, the mountain’s stylized silhouette served as the symbol of the Liberation Front – the Slovene Partisan movement – whose members wore triple-peaked caps known as triglavke, and after the war it became the central motif on the coat of arms of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. Since 1991, Triglav appears on the coat of arms of independent Slovenia and, therefore, on the national flag. In Blind Man, we first encounter the mountain as a trophy (a large-scale crystal replica of ‘a cheap souvenir’) being handed out to deserving tourist agents. Triglav’s image, in fact, makes several appearances in the novel – as a kind of leitmotif – almost always in bizarre settings.

At one point, for example, the narrator views a biennial of contemporary art in which Mount Triglav appears in two separate artworks, each of which prompts yet other cultural references. The curator’s explanation of the first work, a Triglav-shaped sculpture, inspires the narrator to blurt out a famous line by the Slovene avant-garde poet Srecko Kosovel (1904–1926): ‘Dung is gold.’ The second reference is less exalted: an artist/baker has made biscuits in various shapes, one of which is Triglav’s famous silhouette (‘He couldn’t help but reference it,’ the curator says). When the narrator’s friend samples one of these Triglav biscuits, she starts singing a little ditty about a young boy’s anatomy. Readers might find it difficult to imagine, but this song – ‘Martin’s Little Willy’ (Martinov lulcek) by Andrej Šifrer – was a hit among Slovene schoolchildren in the 1980s, perhaps because it assured boys that their manhood would eventually grow ‘as big as Triglav’.

Another childhood (pop) cultural reference that may need clarifying is Whisk the Dwarf (Palcek Smuk), a cartoon the narrator recalls enjoying as a boy, despite the ‘real frustration’ caused by his poor eyesight. Produced by Czechoslovak Television in the 1970s and 1980s (as Rákosnícek, or ‘Little Reedman’) and dubbed into Slovene, this extremely popular cartoon follows the adventures of an irascible dwarf who lives in a tree house next to a pond that causes him endless trouble. Interestingly, one of the episodes is called ‘How Whisk the Dwarf Mixed All the Waters’, which may have inspired...