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 values of peoples and eras which have become lost to each other. 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.