LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1973): A TRANSIT TO NARCISSUS – Review by Norman Mailer
To pay one’s five dollars and join the full house at the Translux for the evening show of Last Tango in Paris is to be reminded once again that the planet is in a state of pullulation. The seasons accelerate. The snow which was falling in November had left by the first of March. Would our summer arrive at Easter and end with July? It is all that nuclear radiation, says every aficionado of the occult. And we pullulate. Like an anthill beginning to feel the heat.
‘The Shape of Water’ Takes Top Venice Film Festival Prize
Guillermo Del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” was awarded the Golden Lion for best film at the 74th Venice International Film Festival by the jury led by Annette Bening. In the film, set in the 1960s, a mute cleaning woman (Sally Hawkins) falls in love with a fishlike hominid in a top-secret laboratory.
During the fifteenth century, developments in Venice’s commercial activities led to the Sea Customs House, which had previously been near the Arsenal, being transferred to the western point of Dorsoduro. The building as it stands today was completed in 1682, five years before the nearby Basilia of the Salute. Architect Giuiseppe Benoni’s work is characterised by the tower surmounted by a sculptural group representing two Atlases lifting a golden bronze sphere on the top of which is Fortune, which, by turning, indicates the direction of the wind. The building continued to be a customs house, and thus intrinsically linked to the city’s history, until the 1980s. After twenty years of abandonment, the Venice city council announced a tender to transform it into a contemporary art space. The Pinault Collection was awarded the tender in 2007, and entrusted the restoration of the imposing complex to architect Tadao Ando. In June 2009, after 14 months of work, Punta della Dogana reopened to the public and since then has been presenting temporary exhibitions.
This article appeared in the 2004 Supplement, which Ross Shideler guest edited.
Having been a dominant figure in Swedish literary and cultural life since the 1960s, one would think that Per Olov Enquist might sit back and rest in the glow of renown that his novels, short stories, journalism, essays, and plays have won for him. However, as he told me in a recent phone conversation, he gets restless when he is not writing. So this long-time columnist for the Swedish Expressen and the Danish Politiken, this author who has become one of Sweden’s most celebrated dramatists, continues to write novels that have won him acclaim throughout Europe and the United States. He doesn’t like to talk about them, but the awards for novels and dramas that he has won in Scandinavia include the Nordic Book prize (1969), The Aniara Prize (1976), The Dablovsky Prize from the Swedish Academy (1991), the H. C. Andersen Prize (1992), The Eyvind Johnson Prize (1994), The Ivar Lo Prize (1995), and The August Prize (1999) among others. In Europe he has received the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (2001), the Deutsche Bücherpreis (2002), the Premio Flaiano and Super Flaiano (2002) the Premio Mondello (2002), and in England he won The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (2002). As this remarkable list suggests, Enquist’s works have been translated into more than twenty different languages. Given his international standing and his unique position in Swedish literary and cultural life, we devote this Supplement of Swedish Book Review to Per Olov Enquist; we want to recognize, first, the range and depth of his contribution to modern Swedish literature, and, second, to celebrate this acclaimed author’s 70th birthday.
Per Olov Enquist has been a great writer for so long in his native Sweden that, at this stage, he can write what he likes. He brings a sense of freedom, and intellectual relish, to The Story of Blanche and Marie, which is not so much the story of two famous women as an interrogation of their story. Enquist likes asking questions of history: this is perhaps a more honest way of proceeding than merely stating the facts.
The facts are amazing - but in a funny sort of way. By the time Marie Curie received her second Nobel prize, in 1911, one of her lab assistants, Blanche Wittman, was a triple amputee, having lost her left arm and both her legs as a result of working with radioactive materials. Blanche had come to Curie from the x-ray department of Salpêtrière, the great female lunatic asylum, where she had once been a star patient - quite literally. Blanche was the "Queen of the Hysterics", one of the women exhibited by Dr Charcot to the good people of Paris, every Wednesday afternoon, for free. A convulsive attack would be provoked by pressing very particular points on their bodies - for which Charcot had the diagram, of course. The need to squeeze, for example, their ovaries also explained the women's state of undress. Everyone took these hysterical displays, which were both violent and swooningly creative, very seriously, including Charcot's one-time assistant, the young Sigmund Freud.
This is very rich stuff; you might think it would be enough for one book at least - but Enquist keeps going. It is what Blanche, as a sublime victim, takes to the story of Marie Curie that interests him most.
Per Olov Enquist
Curie's astonishing achievement - she was the first person to be awarded the Nobel twice - was not reported by the French press. They were too busy publishing her love letters, hounding her as a foreigner - possibly a Jewish foreigner - and the seductress of a married man. Blanche was living in Curie's house at the time, propelling herself about in a little wheeled wooden box. She is, as Enquist tells it, a torso who can write, and it is to her that Marie turns when she needs to talk about the baying crowd, and about love.
This is a book of intersections. Enquist puts the facts down on the page, then he questions, repeats and rearranges them. He nudges and dunts the historical moment, in the hope that it will yield its sweetness. Blanche sees her role as "explaining the connection between radium, death, art and love". The essence the writer extracts is a poetic truth about love, but it is also the story - which is to say the fiction - of the novel itself. Some things, finally, he can simply make up: Blanche, while hypnotised, has a vision of kissing a boy by a river bank; Charcot, her hypnotist, is not only in thrall to her, but actually in love; she spends her last days in Curie's house not bombed out on laudanum, but writing a "book of questions" in three notebooks that have covers of yellow, black and red.
The beautiful, deadly blue light of radium illuminates the novel. This was a time when science and mysticism were still close. Charcot was a believer and Curie was a lover. Enquist admires their wrongheadedness, somehow, as much as, or more than, he admires their work.
The Story of Blanche and Marie is written with the same poetic vigour and eye for the moment as Enquist's last, much acclaimed novel, The Visit of the Royal Physician. It is dizzy with associations and questions, full of interest and appetite and the satisfactions of a good mind. It is a strongly feminist piece of work, and often funny. The aftertaste it leaves, however, is a little strange. Blanche's career as a beautiful hysteric is, quite rightly, suffused with a sense of the ecstatic, but it is odd to see a multiple amputee in the same glowing light. Blanche Wittman was used and then destroyed - what's so attractive about that? Is this what we have to endure, in order finally to understand what love is?
Olov Enquist was born in 1934 in a small village in Norrland, the northern part of Sweden. After studies at the university of Uppsala he received his MA in 1960. Since the early sixties Enquist has worked as literary and theatre critic for several newspapers and magazines. He is one of Sweden's leading contemporary novelists as well as a playwright. He has been a member of the Swedish Cultural Council, a member of the Board of the Swedish Radio between 1969 and 1973 and of the Board of the Swedish Writers' Association.
Enquist made his literary debut in 1961 with the novel The Crystal Eye, and since then he has published many novels, an essay and short stories which have all brought him international fame and readers in 30 countries.
WithThe Royal Physician's Visit, P O Enquist achieved an international breakthrough with the critics as well as with a large audience. It was awarded the August Prize in 1999. The memoir Another Kind of Life was also awarded the August Prize 2008, making Enquist one of only two writers ever to have received the prestigious August Prize for fiction twice.
Enquist has also written screenplays for TV and film and several plays, including The Night of the Tribades, a play about August Strindberg and his relationship to the women around him. This play made Enquist into one of the most performed Scandinavian playwrights and has enjoyed about 200 productions around the world including a critical success on Broadway.
PO Enquist: ‘An upbringing like mine marks you like a branding iron’
Swedish author Per Olov Enquist talks about his pious childhood near the Arctic Circle and his latest novel, shaped by his early life Andrew Brown Saturday 30 July 2016
T
here have been a number of books in recent years in which old men look back from literary eminence to the sexual excitements of their youth – Gabriel García Márquez with Memories of my Melancholy Whores, Philip Roth with just about everything – but the 81-year old Swedish writer Per Olov Enquist’s most recent novel The Parable Book, translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner, is about love rather than sex, and death rather than regret. It is also in passages blindingly funny.
Enquist is seen as one of Sweden’s greatest living authors: he has won the Nordic Council’s literary prize and the the Swedish Academy’s Nordic prize, among others, and his work has been tranlsated into more than 20 languages. He has lived in Germany, Denmark and the US, but has since returned to Stockholm, where we meet at his publisher’s office, a glorious stone building in the old town. He still reads four Swedish newspapers a day, the London and New York Reviews of books, British and German papers on the web and watches CNN. He has been greatly concerned about the EU referendum. “Sweden has always been Anglophile. There is a very strong feeling of bonds with England. Our welfare states are built up on the same lines even if they differ in execution. That’s not sentimentality: there is a very strong sense of interconnection with you.”
Hermes watches over the Gulf of Bothnia from the cliffs of Kokar in Aland, Finland. Photograph: Berit Berg/AP
None the less, his two most recent books deal with an upbringing very remote indeed from English concerns. In part this is a matter of geography. He was born and brought up in a scattered settlement near the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia, a couple of hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle. The piss bucket in the hallway froze to a solid lump of ice on winter nights, and his mother, a teacher, would ski the 3km to her school every day. His father, a lumberjack, had died when he was six months old so he was raised in fervent piety and profound isolation from anything that might be ungodly.
“The Bible is a very strange and repellent text when you read it as an adult. Then you have to find the passages which point inwards, not forwards. But if you have had an upbringing like mine you never get away from it. You get to be 80 and read the Bible again. It’s an upbringing that marks you like a branding iron, but I wouldn’t want to change it if I could. The children who were raised in secular families could go to the theatre or the cinema. I couldn’t.”
Enquist has an extraordinarily direct and persistent gaze of the kind you never meet in cities, even Swedish ones, where anyone who looked at you that long would be suspected of some predatory act. He did not, he says, even know what a cinema was until he was 16; the books he read were almost all religious: his mother removed Rudyard Kipling’s Kim from the bookshelf once she had established that it had a Buddhist as a hero. Yet she loved him deeply and he loved her and writes about her with great respect. It was, he says, a very fine upbringing if you were going to become a writer, because it saved you from distractions and taught close attention to the world. In fact one of the village children he knew grew up to become the father of Stieg Larsson, who wrote the Millennium trilogy, so perhaps there is something in the water of Hjoggböle lake.
Some of the family stories read like Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm – when one of his relatives wanted to kill himself in winter he had to spend hours whacking the ice of the lake with a crowbar in the dark until he had made a hole big enough to admit him along with the rucksack full of potatoes he’d strapped on to weigh himself down.
But there is also a current of humour in Enquist’s books that is part of the northern character. “Martin Luther was a great comic,” he says. “Rude, funny and crude. There’s lots of that still in the evangelical revival movement. It’s effective, and very practical, but never entirely serious.”
Although many of his works have been fictional, or at least reworkings of known history, such as The Book About Blanche and Marie and The Visit of the Royal Physician, the two most recent are reworkings of his own life. The spine of his latest, The Parable Book, is the story of his encounter, at 15, with a 51-year-old woman visiting from a suburb of Stockholm, identified for the most part simply as “the woman on the smooth pine floor”. It’s an extraordinary piece of writing, perfectly paced and anatomically precise without being embarrassing or pornographic. When it is over, she says they must never meet again, but this is not to heighten the mystery. It is simply that in her life in the south she is a virtuous woman, active in her parish council. It would disrupt her life to continue.
The two of them, however ill matched, manage to recognise one another’s dignity despite being drawn together only by lust. Of course, this leads them both to long for more. Eventually he does see her again, once, on a platform at the station in her home town. By this time he has moved south himself, to study at university. He was the first boy in the village to do that, and indeed the first to continue school after the age of 15. She tells him they can’t meet again. She quotes to him a fragment of the poem “Autumn Song” by Tove Jansson:
Now the storm is blowing out there and shuts the summer’s door;
It’s too late to wander and to search. Perhaps I love you less than I did before,
But more than you will ever know.
Many years later, he is sent, through his publisher, a notice of her funeral. Sixteen people attend in a Stockholm graveyard. A teenage girl sings a cappella the whole of the Jansson poem the dead woman had quoted at him, a song in which transience and longing thicken together to something that bites the throat like smoke.
Afterwards the girl approaches him: “I recognised you from the TV,” she says. She is the woman’s niece. She is 15 herself now, as he had been when he met her aunt. The woman on the smooth pine floor had had two requests for her funeral: to ask Enquist to attend and that her neice should sing the song she had quoted to him. She had also, says the niece, kept a number of his books.
Remembering this scene now, he says with sudden heat that if the woman had liked his books, “she could have bloody well said so earlier”.
This is authorial vanity, of course, but it is also a pressing sense of all that is lost with a death. The Parable Book is told in parable partly because death can only be approached through parable and simile. It can’t be grasped. In this book and its immediate predecessor, published in English as The Wandering Pine and also translated byBragan-Turner, Enquist turns his own life into a parable – a story whose moral eludes us, even while it is obviously there.
His literary success in Sweden came fairly early and overwhelmed him. He had plays produced in numerous European countries and even, briefly, on Broadway. His account of the progress of a Broadway flop is a deadly funny section of The Wandering Pine. By the mid-70s he was a colossus of Swedish literature, a friend of Ingmar Bergman and of the Social Democratic leadership, whose party had run the country for 40 years of peace and increasing prosperity.
But since everything in Sweden was settled, it was necessary to have opinions about south-east Asia if you wanted arguments. It was obligatory for Swedish intellectuals to be on the side of the Viet Cong and opposed to American power if they wanted to be regarded as morally serious, a process that reached its culmination when the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh and drove out all the inhabitants they did not kill. Enquist wrote a column defending their actions. At the time he had never even heard the name Pol Pot, but in the context of Swedish debate that was a mere detail. What mattered was to be righteous rather than factually right.
Enquist left his first wife and family for a Danish theatre director, and when he got a job as a cultural ambassador in Paris, lived with her in a seven-room flat on the Champs-Élysées. There he wrote just one play, after, he says, a conversation with his cat.
“The cat said to me, ‘You have to start writing now,’ but I couldn’t. So the cat finally said to me, ‘What was your first telephone number?’ And I wrote my first phone number: Sjön 3, Hjoggböle. And then I went on and wrote the play. That was the real beginning. I have written a lot about my upbringing since.”
Otherwise he did almost nothing in Paris except try to drink himself to death. He very nearly succeeded. He brings to his account in The Wandering Pine of the humiliations of alcoholism the same precision of observation and of language that he deploys in the account of his first love. In both cases, he is striving for redemption without understanding what it is or even why.
He writes he says, quite freely: not without a plan, but allowing the text to develop as he types, confident that he can always throw it away in the morning. “No one can read it, and that’s a good feeling.” So one morning he found in the previous day’s pages the sentence, “When he wrote he was never afraid, but only when he wrote.” This was all he kept from those pages, but he couldn’t explain why. “I understood that I had written it, but I didn’t understand it.”
He describes his wandering technique of writing as being like entering a forest. “For the first month you don’t know where the paths go, but after three months you realise that you can’t get lost. That’s the feeling: that the forest has many alternatives, but you can’t take the wrong path.”
At least he is still writing, he says. “I spend half my life bouncing around between hospitals or measuring the decay within me. I had a little problem last spring: the tips of my fingers grew too big. I hit two keys at once. It took me about a month to get over it. There was nothing wrong with the words I wrote, but I was terrified.” Otherwise, he says, he’s in pretty good shape. “Considering my health problems, I feel young. I have retired from all cares, you might say.”
Per Olov Enquist, celebrated Swedish author, dies aged 85
Much garlanded novelist, playwright, poet and Oscar-winning screenwriter hailed as ‘a giant among European writers’ Alison Flood and agencies Monday 27 April 2020
Swedish author Per Olov Enquist, described as “a giant among European writers” by his publisher, has died at the age of 85.
The author’s family told Swedish media that he died on Saturday night after a long illness. The much-celebrated novelist, playwright and poet, known by his initials PO, was winner of the Nordic Council’s literary prize and the Swedish Academy’s Nordic prize. His historical novel The Visit of the Royal Physician – set in the adulterous, backstabbing world of the 18th-century Danish courts, where the mad king Christian VII’s queen, the English princess Caroline Mathilde, falls in love with the court physician – won him the August prize, Sweden’s most prestigious literary award after the Nobel. It also made him the only Swedish author to take the Independent foreign fiction prize, the precursor to the International Booker, in 2001.
Enquist drew heavily on his own experiences in his writing, whether it was his oppressive childhood in a strictly religious home, his time as a college athlete, work as a journalist and his destructive alcoholism. Born in 1934 in Hjoggbole in Sweden’s far north, his books – including The Crystal Eye (1961), The Parable Book (2013), The Magnetist’s Fifth Winter (1964) and The March of the Musicians (1978) – have been translated into a dozen languages. He also helped write the screenplay for the film Pelle the Conqueror, which won an Oscar for best foreign language film.
Håkan Bravinger, literary director at his Swedish publisher Norstedts, said Enquist’s importance to Swedish literature cannot be overstated.
“Few have, like him, inspired other writers, renewed the documentary novel, revitalised Swedish drama and touched readers for more than half a century,” he wrote.
Christopher MacLehose, who published Enquist in the UK, called him “a giant among European writers”.
“He was a novelist of immense stature and range; he was also all his life a playwright; and he was a spellbinding speaker at literary events,” said MacLehose, calling Enquist “the kindest, most charming, most curious and witty of men.”
Enquist won a second August award for his 2008 autobiography A Different Life, its name a homage to A Life by August Strindberg, the father of modern Swedish literature. The process of writing A Different Life, Enquist said, allowed him to work through and leave behind painful memories of sleeping in a bed meant for his stillborn brother, of the void left by a father who died when he was not yet a year old, and of a strict mother who pushed him to invent sins to confess.
Known for his Gregory Peck-like frown and silver crown in his later years, Enquist broke free from his family, attending Uppsala University, where he discovered journalism and writing. He just missed qualifying for the Rome Olympics in the high jump in 1960. But as a journalist he covered the 1972 Munich Olympics when Palestinian militants took hostage and then killed members of the Israeli team.
Enquist’s transition to adulthood was scarred by depression, self-doubt and existential questions. “I think I wanted to be a writer all my life and I didn’t give up,” he told AFP in a 2011 interview, even though “it wasn’t so easy to survive” much of the time.
Enquist battled alcoholism for several years. After two failed attempts to kick the habit, and after not writing anything for 13 years, he succeeded on the third try after convincing his caregivers to let him use his computer and discovering to his delight that “I was still a writer”. “The most terrible thing about being a writer is not to write but to not write,” he said.
Enquist was cited by fellow Swedish writer, Henning Mankell, in Mankell’s final diary entry before he died. “Eventually, of course, the day comes when we all have to go,” wrote Mankell. “Then we need to remember the words of the author Per Olov Enquist: ‘One day we shall die. But all the other days we shall be alive.’”
