EBRD Literature Prize 2020 Shortlist

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) continue their support for Eastern European literature in English translation and for a third time published the shortlist for the annual EBRD Literature Prize.

The EBRD was established in 1991 in response to the vast need of investment into the newly dissolved Soviet Union and its former satellite states in Eastern Europe. Since then, more countries of operation have been added in the Middle East and North Africa.

Last year's winner was "The Devil's Dance" by Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov, translated into English by Donald Rayfield. Both writer and translator are awarded EUR 10,000 each. It was a historic event as "The Devil's Dance" was the first novel ever to be translated into English from Uzbek.

The Shortlist for 2020 is as follows:

• "Devilspel" author Grigory Kanovich (Russian), translator Yisrael Elliot
• "Pixel" author Krisztina Tóth (Hungarian), translator Owen Good
• "Zuleikha" author Guzel Yakhina (Russian) translator Lisa C Hayden

The winner will be announced on the 22 of April.

THE LOVER

Author: Marguerite Duras
Year: 1986 (1984)
Publisher: Månpocket
Language: Swedish (Translator Madeleine Gustafsson)

A distant acquaintance of mine, whose creative work I have been following for some time, is valiantly toiling and moiling on a manuscript which I am sure will one day become a literary masterpiece. Its working title inspired me to read a temporarily better-known novel; “Älskaren” (“The Lover”) by French novelist and playwright Marguerite Duras.

The only thing this book and that of my friend’s have in common is the title so let me begin this review from that end. For it is indeed curious how potently a title or a keyword can guide our thoughts and our attention. Goodreads introduce "Älskaren" as “The Lover reveals the intimacies and intricacies of a clandestine romance between a pubescent girl from a financially strapped French family and an older, wealthy Chinese-Vietnamese man.” Penguin Random House present it as “the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover.” Bookmate calls it “unforgettable portrayal of the incandescent relationship between two lovers, and of the hate that slowly tears the girl’s family apart.”

My question to all these reviewers is; is it though? I wonder what the reviews would sound like if the title of the book had been something else. What would each of these readers see, what would they notice, what would they take with them if the title had been “The Mother” or “The Family”? How would they introduce the same content had it borne “The Anger”, “The Pride”, or “The Anguish” on the cover?

When I read Duras’s novel, I do not see a doomed love story between a man and a woman separated by money, race, or age. To me, “Älskaren” is an elderly woman’s final stand against her childhood trauma, a testament to failed motherhood from the perspective of an emotionally abused daughter. It is a cathartic scream of misery, resistance, and grievance. It is the long-overdue truth spoken to a power no longer alive. The actual lover in the novel plays a role not much different from the burning giraffe in Salvador Dali’s famous painting. He is but an alibi; a key that unlocks a box of emotions. He is there to make a woman out of the girl. He is there to unveil the ugliness of her family’s iniquity, arrogance, and racism. But the book is not about him. It is about her.

Although we never learn the name of the narrator, it is widely accepted that the book is largely autobiographic, and the characters are very thinly veiled. The name of the narrator’s hysterical mother, for instance, is Marie Legrand. Duras’s real mother’s maiden name was also Legrand. Duras herself used the pseudonym “Mary Josephine Legrand” while writing for Elle Magazine many years before the book. “Marguerite Duras”, by the way, is also a nom de plume as the writer’s real name is Marguerite Donnadieu (Duras being the small municipality in Lot-et-Garonne in southern France whence her family originated and where her father was buried).

Stylistically, The Lover follows the norm of the Noveau Roman. The narration addresses observations rather than facts, the chronology is broken. The narrator jumps freely and seemingly haphazardly between telling the story in the first and third person. The language is introverted but lively, poetic, at times almost ceremonious. Some parts are like a slow-flowing river, perhaps mimicking the Mekong River on the banks of which much of the story unfolds. Thoughts come and go, sometimes mid-sentence, emerge for a moment and disappear beneath the surface again. But now and again, a word or phrase anchors the story in the consciousness of the reader. Like a gunshot. “Very early in my life, it was too late”, or “Alcohol took over the function that God had never had” may serve as such examples.

"Älskaren" is a tiny piece of literature as worldly dimensions go, my paperback copy is a little over 100 pages, and should not take the average reader longer than a couple of hours to read. I hereby submit that they should be hours well spent.

SEVEN GOTHIC TALES

Author: Karen Blixen
Year: 1955 (1934)
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish (Translator Sonja Vougt)

There are writers of mystery, and then there are mysterious writers. Karen Blixen, also known under her pen name Isak Dinesen, strikes me as the latter; easy to love, difficult to understand, impossible to categorise... other than just that: mysterious. Her writing has been compared to Edgar Allan Poe’s horror, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s mysticism and E.T.A. Hoffman’s magic realism but still, it says little of the tales that this Danish adventurer and storyteller forged.

A way, perchance, to illustrate this is the struggle the editors must have had trying to name her debut work, a collection of seven short stories published in 1934. In its original English, it is known as “Seven Gothic Tales”. The Swedish edition and the first translation that the author herself approved of, is “Sju romantiska berättelser” i.e. Seven Romantic Tales. Blixen’s own translation into Danish bore the title “Syv fantastiske fortaellinger” or Seven Fantastic Tales. The first German translation was called "Die Sintflut von Norderney und andere seltsame Geschichten", or in English The Deluge at Norderney and Other Remarkable Tales, whereas the Poles published it under the title "Siedem niesamowitych opowiesci" or Seven Incredible Tales. 

After having read them, I can fully relate. This is a collection of peculiar stories presented in a, for Blixen’s time, unusual way in many respects.

One is that, instead of being ahead of her time, or at least of it, Blixen wrote in an oddly conservative, almost archaic fashion. Although being published in the 1930s which was a decade that gave the world titles such as Brave New World, Grapes of Wrath, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, and Le Mur, all of which are milestones for literary modernity and much influenced by the seeming progress of psychoanalysis and political turmoil of the time between the wars, Sju romantiska berättelser is written in a style that predates it by a century. The language is intricate and theatrical, the characters stereotypical and unnatural, and the aristocratic setting old-fashioned.

True to form, Blixen allows most of her stories to be recounted in the shape of memories. Often the frame is a conversation during which one of the characters tells a story to their companions about something that happened a long time ago. In some cases, Blixen’s story-teller tells a story about a story-teller who tells a story. In so doing, Blixen tries to connect the story she wants to tell to the reader in her own era. Moreover, it seems to me like she has put an additional layer in her narrative to, as it were, distance herself from the content of the story and give it a veil of uncertainty that just may be enough to make it more credible.

The stories themselves are of varying quality ranging from pointless to brilliant. The most famous item, “The Deluge at Norderney”, is certainly the strongest of the tales and also presents the most interesting characters and a surprising finale. I consider “The Dreamers” to be another solid performance, which I enjoyed quite a bit even though it took me a moment to come to terms with the different levels of narration and the graphic way certain ethnic groups are presented. At her best, Blixen manages to lure her reader into an atmosphere of anticipation, where something can happen at any time. And when it finally happens, the turn of events propels the story into a completely different direction than expected. At her worst, the story resembles a rock anthem that builds up to a powerful climax only to fade out and leave the listener wondering what on earth happened to the chorus.

Two things to look out for is how the stories sometimes are interconnected. A character that only quickly flashes by in one of the tales can be the protagonist of another. Another is Blixen’s habit of challenging her readers with quotes in German, French, Latin, and Italian without providing neither a translation or a source. I do not know if the meanings of the quotes were obvious to an average reader of her days, but they certainly weren’t always clear to me. My guess is that she took delight in the thought of making her reader feel a tad bit uneducated in the presence of her writing.

That would correspond well to the person that Karen Blixen seems to have been. She has been described as a highly complex person, arrogant, egocentric, and in constant need of attention and accolade. Highly intelligent but unreliable. Innovative but lazy. Perhaps it makes sense that a person like that would write stories like these.

Although a few of Blixen’s Sju romantiska berättelser were barely sufferable, others are highly stimulating, which, all things considered, makes me want to recommend this collection for those who take an interest in historical books and who do not mind obsolete stereotypes and outdated language. 

TALES OF THE BIZARRE

Author: Olga Tokarczuk
Year: 2018
Publisher: Wydawnictwo Literackie
Language: Polish

Polish wordsmith and 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s worlds often hinge on the border between the normal and the bizarre; the shadowlands between the expected and unpredicted. As readers, we recognise the surroundings and sit back to make ourselves comfortable, but it doesn’t take long before we notice that there is something odd out there. Is that thing really supposed to do that? Should these things really look like this? It is not fantastic enough to be fantasy, and it is not ordinary enough to be realism. The best word might simply be: bizarre.

Tokarczuk’s most recent publication is a collection of short stories aptly named Opowiadania bizarne (not available in English but the title translates to “Tales of the Bizarre”). Across ten short-stories of various sizes, Tokarczuk carefully analyzes the line between the real and the surreal and shows us how little is needed to topple our sense of reality and make us question our senses. The texts gently, lift the corner of the veil of reality to expose its thinness and our weakness and vulnerability. The word “bizarre” in itself is well-chosen as, albeit being accurate and correct in the Polish language, is not terribly common and therefore the title itself, by containing the word “bizarre”, becomes bizarre. Had Tokarczuk used the word “absurdalne” (absurd) or “niesamowite” (incredible), that effect would have been lost. This is exactly the level of subtle gothic that prevails throughout the volume.

The first text, Pasazer (“The Passenger”), evokes our childhood nightmares and connects them to the persons we grow up to be. What would our 8-year-old self think of the person we are today? Or is our future self already embedded in our childhood experiences? It is a story set in our own days, aboard a night flight across the ocean and seems to blur the relationship between experience and time.

The second text, Zielone dzieci (“The Green Children”) examines the boundary between humankind and nature and how it is arbitrarily decided and perceived by modern science. The tale is based in 17^th century Poland and told by the king’s medic William Davisson while he is accompanying the monarch on an important mission to the Eastern corners of the Polish vast realm. During their journey, Davisson hopes for the opportunity to study a natural occurrence as if it were supernatural but ends up studying a bizarre occurrence as if it were perfectly natural.

Przetwory (“Pickles”) investigates the intertemporal relationship between intention, action, and outcome as we follow an ageing alcoholic who, having refused to move out from his mother’s house until her death, after her funeral finds a treasure trove of jars with increasingly unusual pickled goods in her cellar.  

Next is my favourite story, Szwy (“Seams”) which deals with the ease with which small things can bring us out of balance. Are round postal stamps enough to make us question our sanity? Can we really be so weak, that when a pen turns out to write with brown ink instead of blue, we lose our mind? If so, it seems that we are every day on the brink of falling into the abyss of madness.

Wizyta, (“The Visit”) invites the reader into a world where people have become used to communicating and living with machines and no longer know how to interact with other people. It is a futuristic tale in which technology has allowed humans to produce androids which look and behave like us, but as an effect, it seems that humans have also become more like robots. It seems the human brain is just another machine and if technology becomes advanced enough, it may become difficult to tell them apart. Even for the machines themselves.

The sixth story is Prawdziwa historia (“A True Story”) where a visiting professor on his way down into the metro of a city where he is a stranger sees a woman fall to her near-death on the stairs. No one in the crowded metro seems to pay any attention, let alone try to help her. The professor, breaking with what is apparently local custom, tries to attend to the heavily injured woman which soon gets him into all imaginable trouble in a virtually kafkaesque chain of events. It is a reminder that the surreal does not have to be supernatural. We humans are quite capable of making the world a bizarre place for one another without the help of ghosts ‘n goblins.

Serce (“The Heart”) is the seventh story in the collection and perhaps the one that impressed me the least. A man who has received a heart transplant becomes obsessed with finding out about the person who donated the heart to him. I read it as a story about how our physical body is connected to our mind. If the heart beating inside my chest is not originally mine, am I still I? But if that is the moral of the story, it is vague and opaque. Maybe you, who read these words, have a better theory?

Transfugium (“Transfuge”) is difficult to write about without spoiling the plot. It pivots on the utilitarian idea of higher and lower pleasures. John Stuart Mill was of the opinion that “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question”. Tokarczuk seems to find this statement arbitrary.

Gora wszystkich swietych (“All Saints’ Hill”) is about a Polish psychologist who is invited to a secret Swiss research facility to conduct some studies whose purpose remains undisclosed to her. There seems to be a certain affiliation with Serce as they both deal with the fundamental issues of identity and body, or in this case, DNA.

The last piece of the puzzle is Kalendarz ludzkich swiat (“The Calendar of Human Holidays”) is a most absurd story told through the eyes of one of the specialised caretakers of a demi-god who is artificially kept alive in order to guarantee peace to the society that worships him. It is as much a critique of our Western cyclical religious holidays as our fixation with historical heroes to whose names we assign exaggerated importance in the decisions, politics, and lifestyles of today.

Opowiadania bizarne became Tokarczuk’s first  publication after her monumental oeuvre Ksiegi Jakubowe (not available in English but the title means something like “The Books of Jacob”), a monumental work of almost 1,100 pages set in historical Poland. It took her four years to produce the ten short stories, and I could almost feel the sigh of relief after finally getting to write something of her own, not being tied down by the framework of a huge writing project. Although the general consensus seems to be that Opowiadania bizarne does not constitute Olga Tokarczuk’s best work, and certainly cannot compare to her more famous pieces, I found it highly rewarding and recommend it warmly. It raises important and provocative issues in a balanced and almost distanced way which more than once gave me a sense of surprise, marvel.

ON LIBERTY

Author: John Stuart Mill
Year: 1975 (1859)
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co
Language:  English

Some social philosophers have had a particularly decisive impact on the way we have structured our society in the 20^th and 21^st centuries in various parts of Europe. Thomas Hobbes, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Karl Marx are but a few examples of intellectuals who became instrumental to our ongoing discourse on what sort of community we wish to be part of, what the meaning of state and government should be, how we distribute political power and economic wealth, and what rights and obligations are understood by citizenship.

One of the most influential voices for most of western European political theory was John Stuart Mill and in particular his short, but groundbreaking and immensely popular work, “On Liberty”. This was initially intended by Mill, and his wife and co-author Harriet Taylor, to be an article or pamphlet but over time expanded to the point where it became a proper book. In it, Mill elaborates on his main concern; what is individual freedom and what stands in its way?

He does this by breaking the question up in two parts. Primo, he discusses the relationship between liberty of thought and the liberty of action. Secundo, he proceeds to investigate individualism and the development of the individual, all the time matching against the collective, be it the state, society, or organised religion. In fact, Mill often equates state with society, which is quite useful for much of his argument and a reminder to the many among us who consider the state and government of a democratic society as something detached from the people who finance and elect them.

What is interesting about Mill’s argument about the freedom of thought and action is that he is not proposing them from the perspective of the privileges of the individual, but rather from the point of view of society itself and the benefits free-thinking individuals can have for the progress of a whole community. He submits that society is best served if all ideas are brought to the fore and tested against each other. If a new idea proves superior to an old idea, it will replace the old one and society will be better off. If the new idea proves inferior to an existing idea, the existing idea will have been strengthened and society will be better off knowing that it is in the right. Ideas that are not challenged, no matter how correct or accurate, will with time become old and weak.

His argument about the individualism is very much related to his argument about freedom of thought but seems less substantiated. Mill categorically argues for the individual agency as the antidote to pacification. In his view, all trades should be performed by private entrepreneurs regardless of their efficiency. His idea is that the mere fact that society is powered by the activity and initiative of private individuals fosters a culture of innovation and forward-thinking that benefits the whole community even where individual businesses or particular branches of the economy are not running optimally. His point is that the state may never repress human individualism at any time. “A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes – will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.”

Mill’s conclusions are that the state must have no jurisdiction in matters that involve only the agent himself. All actions should be permissible, that only affect the person who commits them or the person or persons who have made a conscious and free choice to accept the consequences of said action. Mill calls these actions “self-regarding”. Only if an individual’s actions threaten to harm society, does the state have a right to limit that individual’s liberty. For example, society has an obligation to punish and imprison a thief, not because of the individual crime, but because theft as such, if allowed to go unchecked, may hollow the foundation of the way we recognise and organise ownership and wealth, and therefore becomes a danger to society. Laws by their very nature are bound to limit the liberty of the individual and may therefore only be forged in order to defend society, not to control or pacify the individual.

The greatest enemy of individualism however, according to Mill, is not laws and regulations but the collective opinions of society. Many things that are not illegal are still not done because of the observing eyes of the general public. The “what will people say”-argument, as it were. In this part of the book, Mill discusses genius and eccentricity and decries the general public’s inability to understand genius. At best, the man on the Clapham omnibus considers it mildly entertaining and at worst outright threatening. But eccentrics should be revered and not scorned, says Mill. He who acts according to established social rules rather than his own convictions, does not act according to his free will and is, therefore, a prisoner.

There is a lot to unpack in Mill’s book and others have done it a lot better than I will ever be able to, especially in as short a text as this blog post, but I hope that whoever reads these words will endure my own primitive thoughts all the same.

A feeling that recurred to me while reading “On Liberty” was that I perceived it as somewhat naïve. Mill’s proposal that the right opinion will prevail if tested against wrong ones is not compatible with the state of things in the world today. In our era of post-truth, where personal opinion and proven fact are interchangeable, Mill’s ongoing debate between ideas becomes impossible to sustain. One of Mill’s fiercest critics, James Fitzjames Stephen writes that “The great defect of Mr Mill’s later writings seems to me to be that he has formed too favourable an estimate of human nature.” I tend to lean toward Stephen’s assessment. I think that Mill would agree with me when I say that he assumes that people who engage in a debate do so in a common pursuit of truth and an interest in facts and evidence. He writes “the source of everything respectable in a man, either as an intellectual or moral being, namely, that his errors are corrigible”.

Unfortunately, Mill failed to see, that the true purpose of most individuals is far less sophisticated. For most who engage in a public debate, the goal is to win the argument (or as it is better known “own” their adversary), not to get closer to the truth. He failed to recognise that it may be perfectly acceptable in some circles to manufacture evidence in support of an argument if no established facts support it.

As a consequence, despite his hardy defence of the liberty of every man and woman (he was a staunch feminist), Mill by necessity comes across as an elitist. He wants society to be an academic seminar where learned intellectuals weigh evidence against evidence without passion or prestige and he, therefore, must agree to exclude the portions of society that are unqualified to participate in such a discourse. Society after all, in Mill's own words, is nothing but "that miscellaneous collection of a few wise and many foolish individuals".

PARIS

Author:  Émile Zola

Year: 1963 (1898)

Publisher: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy

Language: Polish (Translator Eligia Bakowska)

“It suffices not, to be charitable. Henceforth, one must be just. Indeed, where justice prevails gruesome misery disappears and charity shall be made redundant”, Émile Zola concludes in his third and final instalment of his Three Cities-suite, “Paryz” (“Paris”) from 1898. The novel opens with Father Pierre Froment’s, the Catholic priest who has lost faith in everything except mercy, trying to deliver a handout to an impoverished house painter who is withering away in a putrid flat in one of the many disadvantaged areas of the city. Deeply moved by the dying man’s squalor, Father Pierre tries to solicit help from his connections in the higher spheres of society. He is met with an abundance of passionate assurances of goodwill but a stupefying shortage of action. By the time, the rich and wealthy have made room in their agenda to admit him to a charity-funded asylum, the old man has perished. In one powerful scene, Zola destroys libertarianism and holds up socialism as the only viable solution to acute poverty. No one should have to beg to survive. Everyone has the right to survive. Socialism will do in a hundred years, what the church failed to do in a thousand.

In effect, Zola takes the opportunity to broaden the picture, pushing back the anti-Catholicism theme in favour of a critique of the political and economic elite of Paris at the time. In the first book of the series, “Lourdes”, Father Pierre looks for a miracle and finds simony. In the second book, “Rome”, he looks for Christian mercy and finds papal despotism. In Paris, he finds himself in a world of political intrigues, family feuds, terrorist attacks, love, and desire and ends up challenging society as a whole. The final battle is between the old and corrupt on the one hand, and the new and just on the other. The old is represented by tradition, nobility, political elite, and the church. The future holds liberty, technology, atheism, and love.

Liberty, to Zola, is the liberty from social form and conventions; what John Stuart Mill calls “the despotism of custom”, where individual freedom is curtailed by the invisible shackles of social expectations. Zola illustrates this social prison by the use of all the ways the nobility was entangled in all kinds of outré convention breeches and shocking promiscuity while all the time parading a crumbling facade of piety and moral superiority in order to safeguard their privileges.

Technology is a central point in Zola’s vision of the future. In “Paryz” it is personified by Father Pierre’s elder brother Guillaume and his three sons who all in their own way contribute to considerable (and altogether unlikely) advances in mechanics,  handicraft, and chemistry, no doubt inspired by the invention of dynamite by Alfred Nobel three decades earlier. Technological development, in Zola’s world, not only guarantees the continued security of a people but represents the only true profession to which a person of intellectual means should remain devoted.

Atheism is the ultimate liberation of the citizen from the medieval darkness of history, and sine qua non for the modern man to take on the challenges of the coming age. Zola envisaged a future where Christianity would be relegated to the realm of mythology alongside pagan deities and cosmologies and which people of the future would look to as curious but nonsensical part of history. A rejection of a superior, omnipresent, and omnipotent power is bound to afford a twofold stimulus to individual action: 1. by doing away with the pacifying fear of punishment, and 2. by nullifying the passive hope for divine intervention.

Love, finally, is given as the goal of every person. Love for the fellow human beings, love for family, and love between man and woman. All these three types of love come together for Father Pierre Froment and challenge him to his final battle on the border of antiquity and future, sacrifice, and happiness.

Paryz is the most interesting, fast-paced, and accessible volume of the whole series. In contrast to the previous two books, the side plots are absorbing and coherent, and considerably more relevant to a modern reader which in a way would probably be disappointing to Zola. It seems in terms of social justice, despite massive strides, we have made less progress since 1898 than Zola would have anticipated.

My copies of "Lourde, "Rzym, and "Paryz" in Polish translation were handed down to me by my mom who in turn inherited them from my grandmother. Translations into English are my own from the Polish source. 

MORT

Author: Terry Pratchett
Year: 1988 (1987)
Publisher: Corgi Books
Language: English

Arguably the most decisive parameter in anthropological research is perspective. It is the one constant that governs the objective, the method, and the conclusions of the ethnography and it delimits the framework for the level as well as the vantage point of interpretation provided through the resulting narrative. Drawing on linguistic scholarship from the 1950s and 1960s, social anthropologists differentiate between two types of perspective: emic (the point of view of a member of the observed community) and etic (the point of view of an outsider to the observed community).

What is emic and what is etic is often contested as the original idea of the terms is for them to be mutually exclusive yet in practice, most of the time they turn out to be contextual, circumstantial, overlapping, and interchangeable. There is always some characteristic that the observer shares with the observed that makes the fieldwork partly emic and always something that disconnects the observer from the group that makes the perspective etic.

One would think that the most impervious bulwark against a purely etic perspective would be life itself. Surely, life always unites the observer with the observed. Even if we were to be observed by aliens from a different planet, they and we both would share the experience of being alive.

Terry Pratchett, of course, has a different opinion. In “Mort”, the fourth book of his highly successful Discworld series, Death, which by most accounts is a seven-foot-tall skeleton with a voice that sounds like “two slabs of granite being rubbed together”, embarks on fieldwork to learn what it is like to be human. He eats, drinks, gambles, and dances (for some reason neither war, work, nor sex appear on his list of human behaviour) and interviews his informants like a true field anthropologist about the expected sensations from each social phenomenon and about the meaning of their activity. For Death, anything human is exotic. Death’s response, as always in all caps, to Mort’s attempts to understand him is telling.

“'My granny says that dying is like going to sleep’, Mort added, a shade hopefully.
‘I WOULDN’T KNOW. I HAVE DONE NEITHER.’”

While Death is preoccupied with his research, his business of uncoupling the spiritual existence from its worldly shell in the moment of expiration is managed by his dreadfully unqualified apprentice, Mortimer, or Mort for short. Here is the interesting twist of the idea for this book. While Death is trying to live and a living person is administering death, they begin to interchange. Mort gradually begins to turn into Death, and Death shows increasing signs of life.

In his own inimitable style, Pratchett ensures that the ineptitude of his characters both gets them in trouble and provides the solution to their predicaments. The book is just as hilarious and witty as can be expected. In fact, it is the Discworld instalment that was voted the most popular of all Pratchett’s books in a 2003 BBC poll. Pratchett himself has spoken very warmly of “Mort” saying in an interview that it was the first Discworld novel with which he was truly pleased. The preceding books, according to him, had been a series of jokes held together by a makeshift plot whereas in "Mort", the plot was in and of itself a purpose.

Surprisingly, unlike the Discworld books I had read thus far (Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Equal rights (yes, I am reading them in the order Pratchett published them)), “Mort” does not end on the jocose tone one has learned to expect from Pratchett. Instead, the ending is imbued with affection, forgiveness, mutual understanding, and respect. As I pressed on through the last pages, I realised that I was shielding myself from acknowledging the emotions for fear of being tricked by Pratchett. I was waiting for the romantic scenes to be overturned at any time and I was afraid that when they were, I would feel embarrassed by allowing myself to be fooled by this well-known prankster of a writer. But that moment never came. The ending was in a sense elevated, and not at all parodic.

By any standard, “Mort” is an intelligent and highly entertaining novel. My only advice to the presumptive reader would be to familiarise themselves with the Discworld in general and the Death character in particular before they plunge into this story. I contend that a well-rooted love for and curiosity about Death greatly enhances the joy of following his awkward efforts to understand humanity and Mort’s struggle to clean up the mess he caused.