The Colors of Infamy – Albert Cossery

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Honor is an abstract notion, invented like everything else by the dominant caste so that the poorest of the poor can boast about having a phantom good that costs no one anything.

Karamallah was most certainly the prophet of a great eccentric battle against the official agents of deceit.

Everyone with money is a thief, according to The Colors of Infamy, the question is whether that theft is sanctioned by the state. Ossama, a talented pickpocket has learned the secret to pilfering from the wealthy without arousing suspicion: look like a thief of their ilk. He dresses well and even the policemen treat him with deference as he steals the wallets from businessmen in the wealthy part of town. To an extent these earnings go toward supporting Ossama’s lifestyle, but he also uses them to support his father, a former worker who was blinded in a riot during the revolution and now believes his son has reaped the reward for his sacrifice, being promoted into the bureaucracy. Ossama lets him believe this delusion.

Ossama’s simple transactions with the wealthy are complicated when the wallet he takes has in it a letter from the corrupt minister’s brother to a developer whose cost-cutting measures led to the collapse of an apartment building with more than fifty people inside. Unsure of how to proceed, Ossama consults his mentor Nimr and Nimr’s former cell-mate, an eminent writer who now lives in a cemetery. Their conclusion is to seek confrontation.

The Colors of Infamy is Albert Cossery’s eighth and final novel, published in 1999, and the third I have read after The Jokers and Proud Beggars. All three novels are set in Cossery’s Egypt, with its sharp divide between the clean cafes and streets of the wealthy neighborhoods and the filthy slums, and share a consistent world-view. Colors strikes a tone between the irreverent comedy of The Jokers and nihilism of Proud Beggars, and offers an even clearer denunciation of the wealthy as criminal than either. The most likely explanation for this change is that Cossery’s novels, published over a period of six decades, have a general chronological framework. Thus, this one is set in the years after the revolution overthrew the dictator and so the problem is not military crackdown or inept bureaucrats, but the undue influence of money on the system. The result is that the man of infamy is the businessman not the politician.

The aspirations of his characters remain absurdist in their minimalism and all of the characters demonstrate a problematic relationship with women. Even so, Karamallah in particular amused me, with a female student attentively listening to his every word so that she could write a thesis about his philosophy, which includes the insistence that a diploma from an official institution is a ticket to slavery. Like other of Cossery’s heroes, Karamallah maintains that “the majority of humans aspired only to slavery,” whether slavery to money or family or institutions or the dream of those things.

At times Cossery can sound like a broken record as he fleshes out his characters in colorful fashion. At times in The Colors of Infamy it seemed I was reading the epitome of The Jokers, except without the humor and without the aspirations of the characters. In thinking that I was giving the slim story short shrift, particularly since there is an entirely different target of the derision in this novel. The fundamental inactivity stands in stark contrast to a world shown to be humming faster–out of happiness, according to the old worker, or a larger population, according to the thief– and, despite hope for amusement and enlightenment, there is a fatalism in Colors that disquieted me. One of the things I loved so much about The Jokers was a sense of ambition amidst the conviction of false reality. I do suspect, though, that the echoes from The Jokers are by design, as a deliberate callback to the older book in an updated setting.

In the end, Cossery’s penchant for imagery and description keeps me coming back. I may not agree with all of his philosophy, but I like the idea of walking down the sweltering street so repulsed that one cannot help but laugh and so convinced that nothing really matters that one must be happy.

In the next day or so I will also be posting a review of a collection of Thomas Mann short stories I finished last week but haven’t written yet. Up next for reading, I am going to take another crack at Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

Desert, J.M.G. Le Clézio

Posted on by Josh Nudell

The Europeans in North Africa, the “Christians,” as the people from the desert call them–but isn’t their true religion money?

What more can the old man from Smara do against this wave of money and bullets?

Desert, a novel published in 1980 by 2008 nobel laureate J.M.G. Le Clézio, was not what I expected. The barest bones of the blurb on the back hold true: two narratives tell the tale of the “last free men,” and the characters in both seek, desperately, to retain freedom, and the background of the story is Europe’s colonial legacy in North Africa. Likewise, for each narrative. Nour is a young tribesman who accompanies his tribe on its long trek in 1909–part of a holy war, it is later revealed–to defeat the Christians who have come to enslave them. Years later, Lalla, a descendant of the same tribe, flees from her shanty town in Morocco to Marseille in order to escape a forced marriage.

Despite not being nearly as enthralled as I expected to be based on this premise, something compelled me to keep reading. In part, my curiosity was piqued by the narrative disjunctures, the child-like dream-logic that governed the flow and description of events–there was too frequently a tendency to skip from point A to point B with minimal explanation, and things just happened; similarly, I found myself meditating on the laboriousness of overwritten description. (Not something that can be written off as a translation issue, I think. There should also be an emphasis on childlike since both narratives are told from the P.o.V. of a child and so there is a veil between the concerns of adults and observations of children.)

The other part of the compulsion is that within this epic tale with almost no action–charitably, an “ethereal slow-burn”–there is a subtle discussion of freedom. Adults endure trials for freedom, but no definition is offered. Money can offer temporary respite, but, ultimately, it will enslave people tighter than any chain. And yet, responsibility, love, and need enslave, too. It is notable that the centerpiece of both narratives is a child and that each has people and things he or she cares for diligently, but out of choice rather than strictly need. This is where I saw the greatest dissonance between what the blurb said and what I read. Lalla is resilient and has to work to survive, but so does everyone else. The more remarkable thing about Lalla is that she never succumbs to the obsession with money or even the need for literacy that are the trappings of the servitude of the modern world. Partly, this is Lalla the child of the desert. Partly, this is something more innate to Lalla the orphan outsider. The other characters in the story are enthralled by Lalla and all that she represents (variously: beauty, youth, fertility, freedom, family, honesty). Lalla, herself, dream-walks her way through life convinced that freedom is not being tied down by any one thing, largely oblivious to how reliant she is on the charity, help, or needs of others to maintain her freedom, and drawing ever closer to the end of that freedom.

A novel’s “secret center” is how Orhan Pamuk describes the central message of a novel, positing that while the outline of that message may be evident early on, it should not become clear until the end of the book. By this definition of a great novel, Desert works. Le Clézio brings the thematic resonances between the two narratives together with two chapters, one from each period, that are told from a point of view other than the two characters. The message is  clear: more than anything else, money enslaves. The background to the story is European Colonialism, but the colonialism brings money and the implication is that it was brought about by pre-existing debts. Further, only in a few short chapters is the colonial legacy really explicitly foregrounded. Elsewhere it is a necessary backdrop to the narrative, but the issues of freedom emerge more from the issue of “civilization” than from colonialism. Yes, the two are inextricably linked, but it is possible to compare the vision of freedom in Desert favorably with that of Albert Cossery’s The Jokers, which does not emphasize the colonial legacy. These two books are not remotely the same except in their visions of freedom, which is why I hesitate to agree that there is something more central than setting to the colonialism.

The New York Times referred to Desert as “sprawling, poetic” which is another way of saying “boring, wordy.” There is something here captivating and intriguing, but it is a book in which very little happens, so people who like a tightly constructed plot should probably avoid it. I’m not likely to put this on a list of my favorite novels, but there is enough in this story that I’ll be giving Le Clézio at least one more shot in the future.

Up next is Curzio Malaparte’s novel, The Skin.

Albert Cossery, Proud Beggars

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Everyone has their foibles, their obsessions and their needs. Peace and happiness only emerge from abstaining from the reality of civilization, but what happens when the needs come calling?

Proud Beggars is the second Cossery novel I’ve read and I went into it with high expectations based on how much I loved The Jokers. The Jokers was a story about subversives who use practical jokes to overthrow the government and arouse the ire of both the revolutionaries and the police and officials. Proud Beggars has a more complex cast of characters than The Jokers, particularly in that while the Jokers were to a man detached, the Beggars profess to the same ideology, but can never actually follow through. The result is a darker story and one that is more profoundly troubling.

The chief Beggar is Gohar, a former professor, current brothel accountant, who has renounced the world of the intelligentsia in favor of “really living,” but is also a hashish addict. The others, the clerk-cum-revolutionary and man with a hero-complex El Kordi, and poet-cum-drug-dealer and mooch from his mother Yeghen, look up to Gohar and wish to help him with his material needs and desires because the former professor has reached a point of transcendence that he is all-but incapable of taking care of himself. But Gohar doesn’t have a problem with anyone and no one has a problem with Gohar. These are the intelligentsia of the slums.

The idyllic state of poverty established for the reader is shattered when there is a brutal and, to outsiders, inexplicable murder of a young prostitute. The policemen Nour El Dine steps in to solve the murder, but in his investigation, he finds himself finding something admirable about the happiness the beggars have in their detachment–as he says at one point, the government and all its power is not something to be feared, not because they turn defiantly from its authority, but because they simply don’t recognize it. Gohar’s repeated phrase (which may invoke Camus, who Cossery knew) is that the universe isn’t absurd, it is just ruled by bastards. Nour El Dine envies the Beggars and is increasingly frustrated with his station because he is forced to hide his own “dark” secret.

Several ideological elements stand out in this novel. First, the Beggars reject the hustle-bustle society entirely, each in his own way. El Kordi works from within, Yeghen sells drugs and begs, and Gohar abandoned his lucrative post and now rhapsodizes about how the government is corrupt and he was a failure as a teacher because he taught things such as national borders that defy nature. Second, consternation is the by-product of caring too much. These are common themes in both Cossery novels I’ve read. The third, though, is the profound unimportance of life–and thus the importance of living. This is where the story took a turn toward darkness.

In my reading of The Stranger, Albert Camus made it clear that the murder of the Arab was not per-se a pardonable offense, and half the story is about Meursault’s trial and punishment. Here, where there is an even more sudden murder, much of the story is dedicated to Nour El Dine’s investigation and (spoiler) there is no resolution, because any sort of punishment would be to acknowledge the power of the state. My problem with this is that there is a sense that the death of this young woman and the pain it causes the people in her life is only problematic inasmuch as people cared for her (and for the authorities who are paid to do so). I don’t necessarily disagree with the position from a philosophical standpoint, but this is more extreme than I am willing to stand for. There is a brutality and extreme lack of empathy that is entirely paradoxical with how these Beggars try to present themselves and present those worker-bees too busy to connect with people.

One final note before I conclude, one of the things that readers of Cossery’s novels could find off putting is that while the Beggars strive for minimalism and rant about the government and what it does, they have a blind spot that they nevertheless need money for things. They want money to be a thing between people, themselves and the shopkeepers, say, but they cut out the role government play in regulating money. Or in regulating trade–they live in cities and it is unlikely that their food is brought in by farmers on a daily basis. Since Cossery wrote Proud Beggars, urban life, particularly, has only grown more complex and for all the problems of government, it plays a role facilitating that life. The underlying point that the world is run by bastards–whether capitalist, totalitarian, or other–is well taken, but what is the alternative? It is solipsistic for the characters have their detachment valorized without recognizing that their ideal is an impossibility because in every societal set-up someone will be taking it too seriously for their taste. Yes, people need to connect with one another more, but false nostalgia is insidious.

I liked Proud Beggars for all that. It is a darker and more troublesome novel than was The Jokers, but it still had its moments and Cossery is an elegant writer capable of reflection rich enough that it sometimes slips over into decadence.

I am looking forward to reading more Cossery when I get the chance, but last night I started reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s War at the End of the World, not that I really have time to read right now anyway.

March Reading Recap

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes–
I read Heart of Darkness a few years ago and, while it was a challenging read, I found it quite moving and decided I would read his other works. I only made it a few pages into The Secret Agent before giving that up because I was busy. This past month I made another pass, this time picking up Under Western Eyes. Razumov, a student who is usually taken for being more intelligent than he is because he doesn’t talk much, is drawn into a revolutionary conspiracy against the Tsar. The plot launched its first attack with grenade attack against ranking ministers and one of the conspirators, Haldin, seeks refuge in R.’s apartment. R. then sells him out to the government before fleeing the country himself Though most of the action (such that it is) takes place in St. Petersburg, the story itself is set in Geneva, where R. went into exile (at the behest of the Tsarist regime) and where he meets and falls in love with Haldin’s sister. The narrator, old English instructor who knows a few members of the Russian ex-pat community, pieces the story together from R.’s journal and his conversations with the participants and declares that he is writing the account as a westerner and intending for it to be read by an English audience–supposedly so that they can see the conditions and flaws of both the Russian state and the revolutionary movements.

There were some interesting passages in this novel, but, on the whole, I found that the story dragged. Conrad is loquacious and oblique throughout the story–in part due to “secret history” structure and deferred narrative authority. I suspect that some of my reaction to the book has more to do with me than with the novel since I seem to have lost my taste for seemingly antiquated prose in the years since I read Heart of Darkness. Under Western Eyes is still worth leading, but I did not love it nearly as much as I had hoped to going in. In short, I loved this book.

Albert Cossery, The Jokers–
Full review found here here, The Jokers was my favorite of the three books I read this month. The Jokers, the eponymous comic heroes of the novel, don’t care about money, power, society, bureaucracy, or much else. The entire world is one big joke that most people, particularly the people in power, are too stupid to realize. In some ways, lightheartedness is the polar opposite of the oppressiveness of Under Western Eyes. In short, I highly recommend this book.

Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance–
The second book Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive, which is long epic fantasy series–long both in books and words; this volume is about as long a book as they (the publishers) could bind. Like all books I like in this mold, the beauty lies in the breadth and depth of the world more than in any one plot arc or character–the world is between “desolations” and there are a few different people or groups of people who are all trying to save the world, though they are all doing so with incomplete information and different short term goals, meaning that they have a tendency to expend as much information combatting people who are blind to the larger need and against each other as they do working for “the greater good.” As is appropriate for a second book, too, Sanderson brings back most of the featured characters from the first book–Dalinar, the king’s uncle and warlord, Kaladin, a former slave and spearman, Shallan, an artist and scholar from a family fallen from grace, etc, and then expands the roles for others such as Adolin and Renarin, Dalinar’s sons, and others. Each book has flashbacks dedicated to a single character, so where the first was Kaladin, the second is Shallan, wherein you get to learn how terrible her upbringing was and why.

I’m not sure that I would recommend this book to people who are not already fans of this style of fantasy–and if you are, please start with the first book. But for fans of the genre, Sanderson does a good job at world creation and designing interesting magic systems, and this installment provides one of the most obvious crossovers to his other work (all his books exist in the same multiverse and are connected, though each series is designed to stand on its own). I’ve been reading this style of book since elementary school and love a well-crafted world, particularly those that aren’t simply rehashing old tropes and come across feeling pre-packaged from a generic DnD or fantasy novel world starter kit. I like other series and other authors better, but I do believe that Sanderson is one of the top fantasy authors currently writing and am eagerly waiting for the next installment.

March was a busy month for me between teaching, grading, writing, and a short, but remarkably busy, trip to Minneapolis for a 65th wedding anniversary, so I only finished three books. April may well be more of the same, but I am currently in the middle of Alberto Moravia’s novel Boredom and picked up a bunch of new (used) books in Minneapolis that I am looking forward to reading, including Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, Cossery’s Proud Beggars and Llosa’s The War at the end of the World.

The Jokers, Albert Cossery

Posted on by Josh Nudell

“The street was packed with evening strollers enjoying the cooler air at the end of the torrid day. There were the working stiffs, upright and formal; the dignified family men flanked by wives and children; the occasional pair of young newlyweds, who clutched each other’s hands in a grotesque show of commitment. But none of the drinkers at the Globe paid any attention to this mundane procession. They weren’t there to look at humanity in all its mediocrity; they were waiting for a luxuriantly curvaceous woman to show up and arouse their desire. From time to time a metallic squeal, sharp and deafening as a siren, signaled the ambling approach of a tram. The drivers of horse carts, who were so skilled at maneuvering through traffic jams, lashed out at the indolent mob filling the street, impervious to anything but the welcome sea breeze. Heykal tried in vain to locate a single bum, a single happy-go-lucky derelict who had managed to escape the clutches of the police. Not one. Reduced to the contributing members of society–in other words, the depressed and overworked–the city’s streets were becoming strangely sinister. Wherever you went, you were surrounded by public servants. Heykal couldn’t help but remember how the beggar had responded to his invitation to come collect his monthly sum at the house. That a starving beggar would refuse to be seen as an employee: what an insult to posterity, which only recognizes those who make careers of following the rules! History’s full of these little bureaucrats who rise to high positions because of their diligence and perseverance in a life of crime. It was a painful thought: the only glorious men the human race produced were a bunch of miserable officials who cared about nothing but their own advancement and were sometimes driven to massacre thousands of their own just to hold onto their jobs and keep food on the table. And this was who was held up for the respect and admiration of the crowd!”

p.43-4

The regime never changes. Not really. Sometimes it is better, other times worse. The current governor has delusions of grandeur that demand cleaning up the city and relocating the poor and the prostitutes and the beggars to somewhere that can’t be seen, away from the strategic routes, offices, and casinos of the wealthy. The revolutionaries want the governor assassinated and the police want the revolutionaries arrested.

The Jokers think that the fundamental problem is that everyone takes each other too seriously. In fact, the only thing these friends take seriously are their jokes.

Albert Cossery was born in Cairo into a Syrian-Lebanese Greek Orthodox family, trained in a French school and spent most of his life living in Paris, but set all of his novels in Egypt. The Jokers (originally published in French as La violence et la dérision) his 1964 publication is set in a nameless Middle Eastern port city in the heat of summer. The friends Karim, Heykal, Urfy, and Omar have a deep disdain for the governor and the entire establishment for ruining what they enjoy in life as they reject the petty ambitions and material wants of the upper classes. At the same time, they shun the company of revolutionaries who are doomed to failure because, by taking the government seriously, they give it exactly what it wants (and, should the revolution topple the government, they would only become that which they sought to destroy, anyhow). So the friends decide to topple the current regime with laughter.

The Jokers is wickedly funny, pregnant with irony, and perhaps the most indulgent book I have ever read. Their plans give both the revolutionaries and the government fits and amused indifference and mocking nonchalance become heroic virtues. Much like his friend Camus and the philosophy of absurdism, Cossery rejects material gain, but takes the notion one step further to reject the idea the idea that producing anything is worthy of respect–“honest labor” is little more than participation in a system that deadens and kills victims and perpetrators alike. Freedom comes from recognizing society as an illusion, a grand ongoing joke that becomes so dangerous because everyone takes it seriously.

The story is all the more powerful for its simplicity, but Cossery’s praise of indolence can also be disconcerting, particularly, I think, to an American reader. The Protestant DNA of this country and its cult of the producer rejects men like the Jokers as layabouts profiting from the labor of others. Even most Hemingway stories, built around attending bullfights, swimming, drinking in cafes, and fishing, are couched in an interminable need to work. Not so for Cossery. Karim, for instance, makes kites, but because he derives pleasure from it rather than to fund his escapades. Cossery’s Jokers have enough to suit them and refuse to follow the harried footsteps of everyone else. At the same time, though, they do not succumb to sloth. Each of the Jokers is actually exceptionally active and engaged, just with different ambitions as the rest of the world.

One further caveat about The Jokers is also warranted. This is a story about men where adult women are faceless entities, uninteresting to the Jokers except for one exception, a woman who also happens to be one of their mothers. They are interested in younger women who Cossery describes as maintaining a degree of innocence that is lost once they don the accouterments of adulthood. From the little I have read, this is a common critique of Cossery’s work and is a reflection of his personal life. Nonetheless, I didn’t find it distracting for this story in large part because the main characters ooze so much disdain for the entire world that they don’t seem to hold any more for adult women than for adult men. The treatment of women (at least to me) was mostly notable only because the story features an instance of transformation where a young woman crosses the boundary between youth and adulthood. In some ways, the book seemed to imply a generalization that women couldn’t join in the frivolous rebellion inaugurated by the Jokers, but the manner of transformation–one that involves accepting the dress and appearance expected by the petty bureaucrats and playing their games rather than hitting a certain age–suggests that were a woman to likewise reject those trappings she might still fit in with their group. But the story is set in the Middle East and what I just offered is a contrafactual possibility, so it is a moot point, but one worth mentioning.

I loved this book and it has found its way onto my list of top novels. At just about 150 pages, it is a quick read, but funny and a complete story. I could see its indulgence rubbing some people the wrong way, but perhaps those are the people who need to laugh the most.