We get the background on Patrick before he moved into the boarding house. He left his home town because of a failed relationship with his girlfriend. When his mother comes to visit she is full of chat and gets on well with the landlady and boarders. But Patrick resents every second of her presence. He hides in his room to have a few minutes away from her. The reader is suspended in ambiguity and searches in vain for some hint that Patrick’s resentment is justified. By all appearances she seems an ordinary mother.

And so it goes: we witness even Patrick’s own actions without knowing what emotion underlies them. Most likely none. He kills his fellow boarder in an impulsive action and afterwards feels sure that others will recognise the act as an accident. An accident in the way one might absent-mindedly pick at a scab and suddenly realise there’s blood.

But we are deeply embedded in Patrick’s world, and it is possible that this is the real one, and that motives and guilt are just a load of talk. Patrick has no explanation for what happened, and doesn’t dwell on it apart from thinking how stupid he has been. But he seems to comprehend with his whole body the significance of the killing: he gets short of breath and vomits. He loses weight. And as is typical for this narrative, it is not clear whether this stems from unexpressed guilt or whether it is dread of the future.

Like Hume’s project of introspection which failed to discover any necessary connection between cause and effect, the whole novel is a close observation which fails to find a necessary connection between motive and act. The motivation is constructed after the act. This is a pared-down world. On a critical note, it is consistent that the narrative conforms to Patrick’s narrowed-down awareness of the world about him. But occasionally other characters speak in a limited way, lacking light-heartedness or spontaneity. It could be argued that Patrick’s account omits any such vividness/irony/insight on the part of others because he simply would fail to notice it. For me however these were moments when I felt in an artificial world.

Patrick certainly is not at home in his body or comfortable with touch. He comes across as malformed. His instincts are askew. The usual concepts of psychology cannot be easily applied to him. Yet he is human for all that.

The novel is breath-taking in its consistency as a project. It’s hard to discern authorial motive – the author’s purpose in subjecting the reader to this experience. Though the narrative forces the reader to keep turning the pages, this is far from entertainment.

The novel seems to be destined to trail off as a day-by-day account of prison life, but then opens out to new perspectives at the end.

The memoir begins long before the beginning – as a child Sofia listened to her Grandmother’s stories for so long that “I became a skillful swimmer, familiar with every nook and cranny of grandma Asya’s memory bays.” So Sofia skips through time, and imagines she is the grandma as a girl, the year before the 1918 revolution.
It’s a brave and simple device, and so the novel starts off with warmly glowing ‘country childhood’ memories. Soon enough though, the glow dissipates, and the Grandma’s memories don’t stretch as far as the troubled times and escape to Grozny. “All that happened to them later in Grozny sounded obscure and vague.”

The story moves to the 1960s and then to the 80s. The frequent upheavals, forced moves to a new home, and constant dangers are described in the same manner another writer might narrate office hassles. This is an attractive, common-sense style which moves from personal romantic flings to a mention of the breakdown in civil society, back to children’s parties. This chick-lit approach, the reader may think, does not do justice to the gravity of the era. This focus on the domestic shows an ignorance of the broader forces shaping her life.

And then as though suddenly hearing the reader, the narrator breaks out of the story to make exactly those reflections the reader was missing. There is a subtle skill at work in contrasting the private sphere and the public sphere. We are in a world where personal values and friendships have more durability than empires. The narrator’s chattiness and innate decency will on occasion come across as pitifully fragile – as for example when she gets mugged, or a female friend of hers gets smeared with mud by a passing soldier, seemingly solely for looking so clean.

But Sofia has no natural inclination to nihilism or sense of absurdity. The power struggle involving presidents and generals may lack any sense, but her network of friends and family is an eminently sane world.

The book is something like a Maeve Binchy story set against a background of unpredictable violence and disintegration of order. It is a sheer joy to read, and an easy read. It pulls the reader in and you end up rooting for this woman who seems to shrug off the nightmare of history.
The insights into Chechnya and the tensions which festered and boiled over is an added extra, for those readers with an interest in Russia. Mainly it is a story of childhood, romance, and human bonds which endure in turbulent times.

The third part, Fundamental Knowledge, introduces some concepts which are uniquely Jaspers’. The approach of the book however is to make statements without much backup of argumentation or without indicating what statements are peculiarily Jaspers’.

Part III is where things get very difficult. Jaspers looks at what it means “to be” /”to exist”. Being is always 2-sided, with both subject and object, the perceived and the perceiver. J. doesn’t even bother to argue against naïve realism (the notion that only physical objects are real). Humans, he writes, are where “what is” is revealed.
So “what is” is problematic right from the start: it is split between perceived / perceiver or I/objects. Historical attempts to view “what is” as purely objects or as purely perceptions both fail.

Our minds are hard-wired to think in terms of objects. We always want to form a concept of a thing, a fact, a state-of-affairs. We resist acknowledging that “what is” cannot be contained in this way of thinking.

The subject/object fissure is the basic structure of consciousness.

J. then goes on to look at different aspects of “what is/what we are”. There are things we see and touch and our ability to move and survive among them. This corresponds to the consciousness of an animal.
Then there is thinking as such. Thinking can be correct or incorrect. (I think ‘logical thinking’ is what he means).

He addresses the question of whether Political freedom is founded in human nature.

The reality of the overwhelming majority of nations and states testifies against political freedom.

In general in Jasper’s thought I can perceive a tension between logical consistency and reality. A universe of whirling particles obeying Newtonian physics can be pictured and described. It is a neat image.
But it doesn’t capture reality, and has been rejected in favour of quantum physics. Things get messy, the observer becomes an indespensable part of the universe. But the observer is not an object.
Yet still we might insist on a minimalist interpretation of ‘what is real’, and say, OK we admit there are observers. But truth and free will and despair and all that other messy stuff, that’s definitely not real, it’s just concepts created by the human animal.

That’s an attractive viewpoint. But take for example a mathematical statement and its proof. We say the statement is true. You can try to unpack that meaning into psychological terms of the behaviour of humans. (For example that peer mathematicians will also declare it to be a proof.) But in making such a mathamatical statement we don’t intend to make a statement about how human minds operate. We are not saying “similar minds to my own will have a chain of experiences as they read through this proof, which will result in them behaving in a manner that is consistent with their having the belief ‘this statement is true’.”

The correctness or incorrectness of a maths proof is not a property analogous to properties such as mass and momentum. But it cannot easily be dismissed as having less reality.

Parmenides went to an extreme of insisting that what was real is solely what the mind can readily grasp. So we see an arrow in flight. The arrow is real. At each moment in time it has a different position. We can picture the arrow with perfect clarity at a specific point in time. The sharp point, the shaft, and the feather at the back.

But motion is not a part of the arrow. To talk about motion is to talk about where the arrow was and where it will be a moment later. At a fixed point in time, how can the arrow have motion? We can look at a snapshot of an arrow, and not know whether it is moving fast or slow.
Motion, Parmenides concludes, is not real. It is a concept added by humans. We live in a world of illusions.

Parmenides’ mistake is to insist that what is real is what is amenable to thought.

A philosophy which insists on objectivity/consistency will squeeze out whole sectors of experience and consign them to a dustbin marked “murky feelings and beliefs and stuff”.

Chapter X where he talks of The Ciphers comes across as fuzzy neoplatonism.

As usual, Jaspers doesn’t argue against supposed objections to his thesis; he just describes. In any case, what he seeks to elicit is an encounter of thought with philosophical questions.

But he is fascinating (to me anyway) where he talks of how the Greek gods are a historically unique creative encounter with man’s fractured nature: to reflect it, and also understand it and give it form.

At the forefront of Jaspers’ thought is the legitimacy of “philosophising” itself, as distinct from the study of different philosophies, or psychology.

No wonder then that several stories draw on the surreal or fantasy. But I’m hardly proposing anything original here: Eastern Europe is the heartland of the surreal. Anyone who has spent time there will have encountered readers who no more perceive the surreal than a fish perceives water, readers who will look at you in puzzlement when you assert that the book they are holding is laced with the surreal.
In Öland, a simple shepherd witnesses a foreign ship lower a sloop at a remote cove. A stranger in black comes ashore and buries a chest in the gravel. It’s a gripping late medieval fantasy. The shepherd, Bjorn, at last meets the wandering stranger, and listens to his words by a camp fire on the bleak Stora Alvaret plain.
“His attention was riveted by a recurring word: the Book. Found, but lost forever, as if it were everywhere and nowhere all at once.”
‘The Book’ seems to be some principle of unity, a logos, which can tie together the lives and histories of peoples and eras. This is a recurring motif of Huelle which crops up in several stories here. The Mennonite community of the long story Memesis have often been characterized as “people of the Book”. In Franz Carl Weber the Book takes the form of a shop catalogue brought from Zurich to the narrator as a child in communist Poland. “There was no doubt that this book comprised a list of all the toys in the world.”
The interview with the translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones also reveals that each piece was often sparked off by some personal experience. It might be the sight of an empty village close to his home city of Gdansk, or a folk tale he remembers, or a photograph seen in the newspapers. The Bicycle Express is transparently autobiographical, and tells of the narrator’s role in the Gdansk Shipyard strike, when he delivered leaflets by bicycle around the city. This story too is fractured with memories of different eras: the narrator recalls his father’s journey from the East “in search of a new life, because the old, pre-war one had ceased to exist in any way, shape or form”.
In Ukiel the impression of a mind trying to thread together disparate histories is especially keen. Many of the themes and obsessions of the collection surface here: lost histories, surreal twists, and the delicate balancing act of living in the present. Joachim has been living in Argentina for over twenty years. He comes on a visit to his sister’s family back in Poland. The story interweaves memories of his dead wife, a boyhood moment where his musical talent was first nourished, and the demeaning grind of daily life in economically-troubled Poland. The ending of this story, a dream encounter with his dead wife in a blizzard, could easily have come across as a tragic failure to face reality. Instead Huelle makes it into a visionary assertion of the power of imagination. Not an imagination that creates alternative worlds, but a sublime faculty that refashions the one we live in. It’s a faculty at work in several of the pieces here.
A favourite of mine is Abulafia, about a man inspired by the medieval prophet of that name. We meet the protagonist in a prison cell in some remote desert land. He does not know who has imprisoned him or why. Each day he composes and memorises sentences that tell the story of his life. The narrative shifts from this existentialist situation to the backstory in Pomerania. He used to be a wealthy landowner, whose obsessions led him on a voyage to the Berber lands in search of the original language of mankind. The story invites the reader to make associative leaps between the ethnically-riven homeland of the Prussian and this search for the universal language – the Book once more in another guise.
The collection spans a variety of styles – some would see this as a weakness. There is historical fiction, fictionalised memoir, a neatly-constructed story set in 1910 which could easily have been penned back then, and a couple of stories which dizzyingly dance between past and present before soaring into the surreal. Despite Huelle’s claims to the contrary in the interview, these stories are not at all bleak. They are permeated with a calm joy even where the events related are tragic. They have a sense of immediacy even when splintered with memories.