THE GREATEST EUROPEAN NOVELS

DINOS TIEROTIS - 'Perseus and the Pepper Grinder'

Starting two months ago – and ending last week, due to significant lack of interest - Thursday nights at The Crippled Bee (the finest public house in North London, bar none) were set aside for the pastime of Karaoke-Poetry. As I am not the greatest fan of this game (my dear young folk, what will you come up with next?) I will not launch into a discussion of it. I will not even stroll into a discussion of it. In fact, I hardly know why I mentioned it.

    An echo of lost thought rebounds off a wall in my head and rockets into the present. As Johannes Speyer used to say: ‘memory was ever a shed of broken boomerangs’. Which is to say: I recall. I was thinking, as it happens, of a good friend of mine, Monsieur Jean-Pierre Sertin, a man who prides himself on his ‘catholic’ tastes and, as such, had professed to be rather fond of the aforementioned Thursday evening activity. ‘If I had a diary’ said he, ‘I would write Karaoke-Poetry in it’. High praise indeed! To think that I used to imagine that this fellow was of the shy, retiring sort! On the contrary, given a drink or two (and the right company) Sertin positively hurls himself into idiotic situations. The more obscure the better. As the deer pants for the water, so Sertin longs to be involved in any party that involves recitations of Hungarian sonnets. Unfortunately, poor Jean-Pierre couldn’t keep Karaoke-Poetry going alone (almost alone, I should say: I am forgetting Ruth, the moon-faced girl from Mornington Crescent who does a shockingly good impression of Ezra Pound). Alas, no. The proprietor of The Crippled Bee has, god bless him and all nine of his stubby fingers, a lot of patience for artistic obscurity. But – and my enemies may be surprised to hear me say this, but I stand by it - you can go too far.

    And so, the curtains came down on Karaoke-Poetry. I wouldn’t go so far to say that Sertin was heartbroken when he heard the news. He felt a twinge, perhaps, but he is the strong-willed sort – and no doubt, just as our ancestors once pulled themselves out of the primeval swamp, he will pull himself through this minor tragedy. Like the sturdy salmon, esoteric artists are well used to swimming upstream. Indeed, after a double whisky or two he seemed relatively chipper and was already mumbling on merrily to me about some of his latest projects. Our conversation began with talk of p.204 – the slowly-progressing sequel to p.52 (about which I can say, for now, no more). The next stop concerned his ongoing Intercuttings, a volume of which we hope to publish soon at Upside-Down-Then-Backwards. From here, slightly less sober than we had started out, we trundled off in a quite different direction. Somewhere along the line we had got onto the subject of unfinished works. It would not be a wholly unexpected leap: Sertin’s fiction, after all, is suffused with the unfinished. Both p.52 and his Intercuttings deal with false starts and equally abrupt endings: they are both composites of cuttings; scraps of stories, re-sorted shards of glass: pieces of a grand puzzle that never quite fit together to form a whole. No, it comes as no surprise that Sertin should be fascinated with the idea of the unfinished.

    Nor me, for that matter. No indeed. There is little I like more than wasting away an evening, watching ice-cubes melt in glasses of cheap Scotch whisky, musing over the great unfinished works of our time. Paavo Laami’s East-Atlantic Foxtrot, Gdansk Haunting, D H Laven’s Story of Forgotten Art, Filippo Punti’s eighteen-volume Dolphin of Autumn, Wilhelm Frengi’s Strange Ways of Edwin Falstaff - the list goes on. Perhaps my own unfinished (that’s unfinished, not abandoned, as some would have it) Little Known Folktales of Europe may be added to it. However, like Laven and Gdansk Haunting, I would not expect to be on this list forever. I do intend to complete my project, whereas Punti and Laami, both deceased, may not be so fortunate. Unless, that is, someone else is willing (and talented enough) to do the job for them. There has been much talk of late regarding the possibility Nate Laami finishing off his father’s masterwork. Not an easy proposition by any means – but he may yet pull it off. As for Punti, I sincerely doubt that the world will ever produce a writer capable of putting the finishing touches to his tortured classic (whilst the less said about Frengi the better).

    Young though he may be, Jean-Pierre Sertin already has plenty of unfinished projects of his own. Fittingly, one of these is a long-gestating attempt to finish off someone else’s unfinished project. This is something he has been working on a lot of late, going a frighteningly long way to ensure that his homage is well constructed. For it isn’t easy finishing off other people’s business, especially if that business requires talents you may not have. Oh Sertin can weave words merrily, you can be sure of that. Verily merrily. But even light opera demands some sort of musical sensibility, does it not? (beyond the ability to four notes on a clarinet that is). No? Well, I will not try not to perforate his fervour any further.

    I always said that he had catholic tastes. But up to now I never knew quite how far they stretched. Truth be told, I had never grasped the extent of his enthusiasm for Keng and Brodsky, the two inimitable heroes of the 1960’s Russian light opera scene. Personally, I’ve never found them more than passably intriguing. Sertin, however, has dedicated many hours of his life studying them and their work. He is simply passionate about them – as he so ably proved the other night. For three straight hours he was onto me about the merits of their 1962 ‘space musical’ Moonface. I’d always thought it to be the epitome of false Russian pride, reflecting early success in the Space Race with all the subtlety of a jalapeno pepper. What’s more, there are only so many words that rhyme with Gagarin, as Keng’s tiresome libretto seemed to prove. In fact, for all the elements of psychedelic pop prefigured in Brodsky’s ambitious score, I’d never thought the work worthy of a second look.

    The same goes for their second opera, the English title of which - Below the Ground - seems to have done well to sum up the torpidity of its contents. Admittedly, the plot had its amusing moments. The idea of basing an opera around a quiet sexually deprived archaeologist seeking to allay his boredom by following in the wake of the virulent Genghis Khan was inspired – and I especially liked those scenes in which his fantasies about a local dancing troupe came to life, resulting in the unforgettable lyrics of the show’s sole musical hit: ‘frilly frilly frilly frilly frill-y skirts/anything to keep me from my sill-y work’. Moments like that, however, were few and far between – and owed more, I believed, to the patient translation of Gary Vanbert, than to Keng and Brodsky.

    Sertin, however, has now tempted me to rethink my position on these works – not to change it, not just yet, but at least to think about considering the possibility of perhaps modifying it by a measure. He has also stretched the boundaries of my interest to include Keng and Brodsky’s very last light, but sadly unfinished, opera. This is Milk!, started in 1976 and left tragically incomplete upon their simultaneous but unrelated deaths in 1979. It was, in Sertin’s words, ‘a brave attempt at creating a single motive opera. The title says it all. The story is about a man who has no milk, and strives to get some. There is no more to the plot than this.’ And so it goes. Unfortunately, Keng and Brodsky stopped before the end of Act Two, leaving at least four scenes unwritten. The greatest of these – the very last scene – was, Sertin thinks, ‘to have been their finest – if not the finest ever closing scene in theatrical history’. ‘As cathartic moments go,’ he claims, ‘this would be the most cathartic of all’. Though neither music nor lyrics exist, the grand denouement was nevertheless planned out in notes (now found in the Keng and Brodsky Archives in Wolverhampton, bequeathed by Sir Howard Katz in 1997). It goes something like this:

    The hero is kneeling in the street. It begins to rain – not water, but milk. Within a few minutes a monsoon of     milk is pouring down onto the stage. The hero raises his face to the heavens and opens his mouth. The front row     of the audience is well soaked. Well soaked.

    ‘I don’t know about that,’ said I to Sertin. ‘Milk-drenched clothes would be hellish’.

    ‘I know’ said Sertin, grinning churlishly. ‘An unforgettable night at the theatre! You get to take a little bit of the play away with you.’

    And with this I wished him the best of luck. Will he ever get around to finishing Milk!?  We shall have to wait and see. In the meantime, some of us have books to review.

 

    Some readers will have been wondering what all this senseless rambling about Russian light opera has been in aid of. It was only a week or two ago, after all, that Heidi Kohlenberg decided to waste ninety percent of an article discussing her love life, ever eschewing her proposed subject (I forget what it was now - something to do with domestic violence, I think). You fear, no doubt, that I too am coming down with a touch of the ‘Kohlenbergs’. Fifteen hundred words in and I haven’t so much as written the name of Dinos Tierotis. Ah, but do not think that I have been wasting your time. Not at all. Far from escaping my subject, I have been stalking it, leopard-like. Oh yes. All this talk of unfinished projects and of operas about world-weary researchers dreaming of frilly-skirted Siberian ballerinas has not been vain. It is all, in fact, connected. Loosely, perhaps, but nonetheless connected. Allow me to show you how.

    You have seen me unenthused a few times already during the course of this review. I was unenthused about Karaoke-Poetry. I was unenthused about the brilliance of Mr Keng and Miss Brodsky. Now I will admit to have been originally unenthused about Perseus and the Pepper Grinder – the main subject of my review. The lack of enthusiasm was palpable. If you were to have touched it, you would have found it clammy. Cold and clammy, like a damp dead snail on a wet winter day. But enough of my nonexistent enthusiasm – for I have turned a corner. Without verve, maybe, and not without some reluctance, but never you mind that. See me coming round the bend, slowly but surely. Hear ye, hear ye (I say) Perseus and the Pepper Grinder isn’t as bad as all that. I thought that it was a predictable first novel written by a bored academic, in which said learned man combined elements of his learning with semi-autobiographical descriptions of his rather event-less life, lapsing every now and again into weird fantastical passages, representing the sad professor’s lost ideals, dreams and desires. I thought it was yet another novel ‘updating’ a Greek myth, crammed with witty-as-heck allusions to the classical past, hysterically juxtaposed with the oh-so-shiny present. I thought it might be some of these things. And it was all of them.

    Still, what it does, it does well. Smear my forehead with tartar sauce if I ever thought the idea of bringing Perseus back to life to wreak havoc in a Greek University in the year 2000 was ever a brilliant idea, but I’d be lying if I said it was the worst one I’ve seen this week. He reappears, needless to say, amid a faint echo of his original birth. His father Zeus, you will recall, impregnated his mother by arriving in her room in the form of a shower of gold (as you do). Thus Perseus arrives in the room of Professor Georges Pekolos – Head of the History of Food department – as a beam of golden light falls upon a copy of Hymmel's Greek Myths. No further explanation is required, it seems – and so the story continues, interspersed as it is with passages from Pekolos’s ongoing research project: The Pepper Grinder: A History (a unpredictably entrancing account of pepper grinders through time, from Plato’s pepper mill to the new-fangled electronic, light-up-when-you-grind models of the present day).

    To say that this is a simple updating would be unfair. Actually, Tierotis drops the Perseus idea about half-way through the novel, as if tired of it. For a while, the pepper grinders – with all the phallic symbolism they offer, which is (one admits, with majestic reluctance) a fair amount – come to the fore, and then recede into the background whilst the author flirts with further far-flung thoughts, the sort that might be found falling off the back if any amateur novelist/jaded scholar’s truck. Echoing the crisis felt by the central character (that is to say ‘his life’) the book itself is full of frayed endings, of missed opportunities: of half-stories. Everything about it, you might say, is unfinished.

    Indeed, the quote with which the book begins – taken, need I say it, from Leo Barnard - says as much. ‘Life was ever unfinished’ it reads: a weak excuse, methinks, for lazy plotting. But then, haven’t we all been accused of this? Sertin’s p.52 was thought by many to be nothing more than, and I quote (from this article) ‘the opportunity to get rid of all those sentences that didn’t belong anywhere else’. Even we humble reviewers are sometimes indicted for this crime. Our articles, it is said, are no more than repositories for the thoughts that will never find their way into fiction – either because we lack the talent to expand upon them, or because we lack the time. Well, well. How terribly nasty. How…

‘    Life was ever unfinished’. The quotation reminds me of a theory I once heard concerning the Creation. God, it seems, had always planned to create the world in nine days. He had it all worked out: it was a nine day project, from start to finish. The rest he took on day seven was no more than an interlude; a bit of breathing space before going on to complete the job on days eight and nine. But, as it happens, a lot of thinking went on in that day. And before you know it, the restless creator was onto a new idea. ‘I’ll finish the world later,’ he no doubt thought, like any self-confident creator. When he did get back to it, however, he discovered that it wasn’t so easy to pick up the reins again. It never is. Something had changed. The thought had passed. So what the hell. Leave it unfinished. It’s more mysterious that way.

    Dinos Tierotis will know the tale. And if he doesn’t, he’s done well to imitate it. Rather like this thing we call life, Perseus and the Pepper Grinder never feels as though it is giving up all its secrets. The author’s impatience with his own plot is evident throughout. Like a bee buzzing from flower to flower, he can’t settle on any one concept for a significant period of time. But then, just as the flight of the bumblebee has a certain charm of its own, so does the prose of Tierotis. There is to his tone a humility – an honesty, one might say – which endears. He may not engage for long – but he does engage. Yes – he does engage. The light is not always on in the room, but when it is, it’s on full power. And I for one will always prefer short bursts of strong illuminating light to long periods of a dull, insipid glow. Engaging with airiness is better than no contact with solidity.

    And after all, who am I to slam the unfinished? Were it unfinished for the sake of it, maybe I would have cause to lay into the lethargic writer. Perseus and the Pepper Grinder does, however, give the impression that it is trying to get somewhere; that failure was not its goal, inevitable though it may be. Perhaps I am wrong, but in this I am right: the completion of prophecies in Greek myths is rarely repeated in reality. In which case, Tierotis’ Perseus is a thoroughly modern hero. Tossed into twentieth century Athens, searching for a Gorgon that doesn’t exist in any familiar form and missing the gifts flung from goddesses perching on clouds, he meanders this way and that, trying in vain to seduce pretty women and to fulfil a prophecy that he can’t be all that bothered with. When all is said and done, he’s no less pathetic than Mr Pepper Grinder himself, who has at least aimed low, though there are no guesses for how his History of the Pepper Grinder will turn out.

    Unfinished, of course.

Georgy Riecke

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