Balcony of Europe (Irish Literature Series) by Aidan Higgins

Balcony of Europe (Irish Literature Series) Reviews

• 
  Kelly

  So, I like Impressionism. I mean, I never had the phase in high school like some of my friends did where it was the breath and the life, but I like it. I enjoy light and color as much as the next girl, and the last time I was in Paris, I happily wasted several afternoons that I probably should have spent doing new things at the Musee d’Orsay. It makes me smile, mostly. Sometimes it makes me laugh. Sometimes a shadow or two will get to me, but (for the most part), that’s pretty much it. I’m not a devotee of the water lilies. What I like about it is the feeling of it. I like the brushstrokes and imagining the hand that slashed across the canvass or delicately, barely touched it, afraid to spoil the exquisitely fleeting effect of an afternoon cloud on a cathedral. I like the connection I see in it to the stream of consciousness modernist novels I love. We’re good friends, impressionism and I. Impressionism and I, if we could interact socially, would have lovely, warm dinners on Sunday evenings, or sunny tea sandwiches on Sunday afternoon in big hats in a garden. Oh okay, I’ll say it: It's a
  Sunday Kind of Love.
  
  But I’m not seeing Impressionism on Saturday night. My Saturday night is reserved for my real, true love. Argh, I can’t help it, you guys: It’s Neoclassicism and his fascinating daughter, Romanticism. I know, I know! I should get over them and their impossible, canon-approved grandeur. But I can’t. Because of what I’m missing from impressionism. Impressionism has feeling, but it doesn’t have it like these two. If I’m going to the visual arts, what I want is a big chunk of red meat. I want “something purple,” like Flaubert said. I want it to bleed. I want to see veins through thick thighs, big rounded hips, corded muscle, the arm of a man who ran all the way from Marathon stretching out his last dying fingertips. Or otherwise, give me mystery, utter isolation, man overwhelmed by nature, whipping in the wind, a hidden face looking off into the distance. Delacroix, Gericault’s Medusa, Fredrich (oh Fredrich), Goya’s Black Paintings. (Look- I’ve grown out of it in literature and a lot of music, but you can’t ask me to give it up in painting and sculpture, too.)
  
  What does this have to do with Balcony of Europe? For me, it was a mixed bag of Impressionism and Romantic red meat. For my particular tastes, Higgins did far too much of the former to apparently little point, and very little of the latter. Moreover, what few red meat bits there were were mostly not done particularly well. Higgins’ chapters are a series of vignettes out of an adulterous love affair and the circumstances and characters surrounding it that take place over the course of a year in the south of Spain. This sounds like red meat material, doesn’t it? The Sun Also Rises the second, with red wine and red flags in the hands of flashy toreadors. I’m sorry to inform you that that’s not the case. The vast majority of it just skips over the surface of the material on lily pads. I don’t feel anything underneath a lot of it except writing. It’s just words arranged in pleasing form to appeal to a certain kind of reader. He arranges set pieces and puts on skirts and forgets to put people inside them. You can tell me however many times you want that someone has a “Byzantine nose” (oh, and he does), but you have to tell me sometime why you keep saying that other than you’d like to add another reference that makes you look intelligent. These people and their wives cheat on each other and do it again in a round, they get pregnant and a child dies, tell me they love people, and I have no reason to believe many words of it. You know, I don’t like Faulkner, but the phrase a lot of sound of fury, signifying nothing, seems to be appropriate here. He even made the mistake of saying about his own book, in the guise of talking about the Good Soldier, that he disliked it because he did not appreciate meandering books where the narrator is stuck in the moral mud, without any real point to the whole thing. While I think he’s being ungenerous to that book (which has many points), I think he’s diagnosed his own fairly well. Why am I reading about this sorry bunch of people on a beach doing terrible, or banally silly things to each other? I really couldn’t figure that out most of the time. The most worked up the narrator got about his emotions was 10 pages where he agonized over the possibilities for social awkwardness if he asks his friend for the key to his apartment to have sex with his married mistress while the guy is gone.
  
  Even when he was making a political point, he was lazy and unconvincing. Oh, there are some American jet fighters flying overhead. Oh dear, American militarism is so evil, disrupting this peaceful Europe place again and again. Of all the places to make that cliché protest, you really want to chose Fascist Spain ? He didn’t acknowledge that irony once, I don’t think, which was interesting in a book that was deeply engaged with politics and fascism, (if admittedly, the German sort). If this was supposed to be a surreal juxtaposition thing, it didn’t work quite as well with that in the background. There are few things more surreal than social utopias- even American jet fighters. I don’t know, I felt like most of this was like going to a party at a friend of a friend of an annoying friend’s and being forced to look at their pictures from a vacation that I didn’t go on, full of people that I didn’t know or particularly care to know. I kind of hate that girl’s face in the back, even though I don’t know who she is, but otherwise I have no opinion about any of this beyond the statements the person who owns the pictures knows very well already (oh, isn’t that sky pretty, oh those beach cottages do look so authentic, yes it is shitty to cheat on your wife, and yes sometimes husbands get jealous, oh my, look at that church!)
  
  And then there were the red meat bits. The most complicated of these was the twisted, weird Jewish complex of our narrator. This is a difficult one to untangle, and there’s a lot to despise, but it was also one of the only parts where I sat up and cared what this was all about- totally what I was talking about when I said “purple”. I don’t even think that Higgins quite knew what his feelings on the subject were, but something inside him insisted that he try to work out on paper. So, the narrator’s mistress was Jewish. He talks about her Jewish family, Jewish neighborhood, her Jewish name- quite a bit. There’s another flamboyant Jewish woman in town who serves as Charlotte’s inversion. There are a few other Jewish men around… and one Nazi. This is supposed to be a book about a love affair.. and yet it is telling that the chapter about the Nazi was far and away the best one in the book, both from the perspective of technique and from the perspective of reading pleasure and effectiveness. The only time I believe the narrator’s feelings about Charlotte is when he’s expressing them through his feelings about Jews- in order to face her, he must face Jews. In facing her, he faces Jewish culture, Jewish social status, the Holocaust, and his own prejudices as (at least) a man raised in a Catholic country in the era before the pope would ever have declared the Jews not responsible for the death of Christ.
  
  I don’t even know if it is anti-Semitic. I mean, objectively speaking, of course, by every standard we use, yes. But it tends more towards the fetishization/Orientalism way than the hate way. What was fascinating to me was how Higgins’ narrator seemed to approach Jews like fairy tale characters- like you would if you encountered a unicorn. That’s kind of a perfect and perfectly understandable (in an awful way, of course) to approach the topic with a book set in 1960s Europe. Creatures (I know, I know) you thought had been wiped out suddenly come back from the Undying Lands and moreover, don’t seem to have any conception of how special they are or why they can’t just go into a CVS and buy some shampoo without people staring at them. It was sort of perfect that the Nazi was the direct opposite of this. He was a monster out of a nightmare that was supposed to end when you wake up, but he completely knew it and point blank refused to die. That ugly, ugly monster is just under the thin veneer of sobriety and societal standards of politeness and he’s there, haunting the edges of society, fittingly saying not very much, but watching. Rosa, who is perhaps the most anti-Semitic Jewish character pictured, is a horrid caricature of narcissism and self-regard who is large, gross, vulgar and there. Like the Nazi monster, she’s just there and won’t go away. The narrator can’t conceal his disgust- all rooted on her insistence on never changing the subject from herself and not realizing that the world isn’t about her. In 1960s Europe as the Holocaust guilt complex is starting to firmly entrench itself, as Nazis in hiding are caught and executed, as Exodus was a best-seller… For me it was hard not to see this as the kind of twisted, underhanded thing that some right-wing commentators do when they accuse minorities of playing the ‘race card’ and, essentially, tell them to stop ‘whining’ about the past- which is their way of avoiding engaging with history. Rosa was Higgins’ wish that this whole, horrible, ugly mess would just go away, and Charlotte was the guilt complex that idealized the survivors, that couldn’t look away from this group of people that inspired such strong feelings, either way. One of the more perceptive remarks in the book comes where Charlotte’s husband remarks that all this passionate obsession she’s getting from the narrator is new and overwhelming, there’s so much of it she doesn’t know what to do with it. So that’s why she eventually runs out on him for another man- a man who has been a symbol for simple, undiscriminating, uncomplicated male sexuality. He certainly doesn't care about her religion- he just wants to know about her body. With the weight of representing Jews on my back, I might go for that, too.
  
  You see what I mean by twisted? And do you see what I mean by red meat? This whole thing was totally fascinating, and was repeated ad nauseum throughout whatever was going on. It was the underlying theme that wouldn’t go away, the central image, and the off-hand remark. The only time it goes away is at the end as the love affair starts to cool. Then, it goes back to impressionism, and Jewishness takes a back seat to every day travel stories and completely unbelievable marital strife.
  
  There are other types of red meat in this too. I liked a little of the affair stuff- there’s a part at the beginning where he sits on a wall and waits for Charlotte that felt real. There’s some stuff about poverty and the ugliness that surrounds the scenes that works. He can occasionally turn a phrase in an exquisitely perfect way. The thing is that there’s also a lot of stuff that’s trying to be red meat that just comes off as vulgar and embarrassing now. I think in the early 1970s when this was written, that would have given him “gritty” points. Now it’s just another day on HBO, you know? It had the feeling of fifth grade when we all stood in a circle at recess and told each other the swear words we learned. A bit juvenile. It felt like a very Catholic kind of rebellion, though. It was all very Graham Greene- that part in Brighton Rock where he talks about how he doesn’t need right and wrong because he has good and evil. It was the bit out of Lady Chatterley at the end where it’s supposed to be the climax of the rebellion against cold people who withdrew from the world after WWI.. where they have the hilarious pagan ceremony. It was all a little crude as an assertion of positive sexuality.
  
  So I don’t know who I’d recommend this to. It isn’t a man/woman divide thing, not entirely- I think there are plenty of reasons for men to dislike it too. I wouldn’t recommend it to impressionist fans- he makes impressionism into something less than it can be. I wouldn’t recommend it to Romantic fans- there’s not enough for them here. Perhaps this could be a tangential part of Holocaust guilt lit? It’s definitely not just an Expatriate Novel- I think you get far more than you bargained for if you go into it expecting that. It’s a weird little niche it fits in. It isn’t a bad book. It isn’t a great book either. There’s some things in here that are fascinating reading, but so much of it is dated or fluff. It’s not a book that I would say deserves to be pulped alongside romance novels and dime store thrillers, and it should be saved somewhere, at least as a historical artifact of a particular time and mentality.
  
  As for me? All I plan to remember of it was that it was the Jewish Lily Pad book. I think that’s about all I need to know. Cataloged. Next!
• 
  Greg

  Me and fine literature aren't exactly seeing eye to eye these days. I can appreciate good books still, and I intellectually know when something is 'good' but me and (maybe Modernism? is a better term) good books just aren't falling in to step. I feel like a philistine bastard for feeling this way, I feel like some yokel who presented with some nice pieces of steak shrugs and says but I could get a Big Mac for cheaper. Who is given some fine wine at a meal and shrugs and says that tap water quenches the thirst just fine.
  
  So, I've been avoiding 'smart books' generally lately (you may go tell me how I'm wrong by my recent reading from my bookshelves, it wouldn't be the first time I have selective amnesia, and then go, oh right I did do (x) just the other day) and even more than smart books I've been avoiding writing any reviews that require me to sound smart or to say anything meaningful. I'd sort of rather write about the Fedor / Henderson fight last night and what it means for "the last emperor" that he has now lost three fights in a row than write about the possible (mis)use of the theme of American Hegemony in this novel by the Irish writer Aidan Higgins and the multitude (or maybe it is two, that's all I came up with, but texts are open so multitudes it is!) of meanings / connotations / levels that the title can be thought of in relation to America. Or what about the constant Ulysses reminder for me in the book, I could write about how this book kept reminding me of the final chapter, Molly Bloom's chapter, the "Yes, yes!" monologue, but is that intentional by Higgins or can I just not see the word Andalusian without thinking Joyce! And then I could write about the slightly embarrassing fact that even though I have read Ulysses this reference is so totally, I mean 99.3% Ivory Pure totally, mediated through the Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School, and then I could wonder what this says a) about me as person and b) how it relates to this book, and am I just another American dope a la Bob Vine, the cuckold and hapless husband of the narrator's love interest?
  
  And speaking of the love interest, even though she is an adult, why did I keep thinking of Lolita because of the October / May relationship between the narrator and Charlotte (and Charlotte, is it wrong of me to see this name and in any kind of romantic situation in capital EL literature think Lotte and Werther?) and wonder if some of the same themes in the Nabokov novel are at work here, and then who is really corrupting who, is it the aging and decrepit old world giving the nasty dirty old man vibes onto the young nymphs of America, or do kids (young adults, young married women) just grow up so damn fast 'these (those)' days, and what is a person whose whole world has been totally toppled over after a half century of revolutions and wars and whole ways of life crumbled, how is someone like that not supposed to want to throw everything away to just get in between those young nubile legs into the hot honeypot of the new American way of being.
  
  And what about the total absence of any mention to the fascism of Spain?!? Why is Franco never mentioned..... what does it mean to question the beauty of American produced vapor trails but not mention Franco, the barkeep if you will, of the Balcony of Europe. And I guess I would mention here that every time I think of the vapor trails line in the book I think of the song First We Take Manhattan by Leonard Cohen, even though he sings about the beauty of weapons and doesn't mention vapor trails.
  
  I feel broken in the head and unable to begin formulating coherent thoughts on any topics like these.
  
  I think I would have enjoyed the book more at other times, I imagine that my literary stupidity will pass soon and that I will once again find myself fully immeresed in texts like this one, and not just thinking at times, what is the point of all this, when I knew there were lots of points going on but they would have taken so much (actually just a little) effort to unpack. I am lately the kind of reader I jeer at in other reviews I've written, but I'm fairly sure this is a four star book, and even though my attention kept flittering away I never found myself disliking the book. Oh, and I think the scene where the narrator drinks with the aging Finnish Fascist was superb, even in my recent philistine mind set I was able to see that Higgins had created a great scene.
  
  Sorry fellow bookclub members, I have little productive to say.
• 
  MJ Nicholls

  A near masterpiece, marred only by its meandering tendencies, occasionally flat fumblings for profundity, and slightly weird stuff on Jewry. Otherwise, this is a stunning novel with beautifully crafted prose, from a writer clearly working not only in the shadow of Beckett, but the European modernists too. A lyrical novel about a painter’s affair with a young Jewish lady is not an easy sell, but the euphony of the prose, the humorous dialogue, painterly evocations of the sun-baked landscapes, the revue of strange characters, the supremely brainy allusions and casual instances of French, German, Spanish and Gaelic phrases, contribute to making this novel an essential text and (near) opus by an overlooked Irish writer of substance and power.
• 
  Eric

  Sorry, Ruttle, but you're due back at the library. Though I got over your weird anti-/philo-Semitic fetishism to see the charms of your rueful hangdog pose and occasionally stunning descriptive powers, I don't care enough about you, or your saucy, ungraspable, ever-receding mistress to renew (why don't you hang out with that Nazi more? Sure he's a Nazi, but trust me, man, he's by far the most interesting person you know). Perhaps we'll resume someday. I mean, I don't let just anyone ramble on for almost 250 pages. And it's not like there's a plot to forget. You'll be at the bar, waiting for Charlotte? Ok, maybe I'll meet you guys later.
• 
  Mir

  It's terrible when life sucks. The world is fully of people who suck, and are Nazis and Jews and stuff. And affairs suck because you have to worry about getting caught and stuff. It sucks how everything sucks. And people don't appreciate your art and how you are like James Joyce and stuff.
• 
  Suzanne

  An adulterous love affair in post World War Spain, blatant dismissal of Americans as insignificant ( doesnt bother me), ethnocentric view of Ireland as the center of the civilized world (typical), chapters being told by different, not always apparent characters, ( challenging, but not daunting) but 200 pages into this book, I am putting it down for good. It is just plain BORING!! Life is short.
• 
  S̶e̶a̶n̶

  
  After 100 pages I realized that I didn't care about any of the characters or about what might happen to or between them.
  
  Update: I read 50 more pages and still felt the same way. Higgins writes well. His descriptive language is first rate. But the only semblance of a story here—a married Irish painter dallying with an also married younger American Jewish woman—failed to engage me on any level. Higgins moves idly from scene to scene, shifting between minor characters, quite effectively laying out the landscape of a coastal Spanish village peopled with an eclectic mix of natives and ex-pats. But I needed more than this hopscotch montage style to keep me engaged for 425 pages.
• 
  Chris

  Add to the list of beautifully written novels about (among other things) infidelity and drinking in hot climates, along with The English Patient, The Sheltering Sky and Under the Volcano.
• 
  David Markwell

  Some books you finish and know you will have to re-read. To say this about Aidan Higgins' Balcony of Europe is an understatement. This was a terrific read full of stream of consciousness prose-poems on love and memory. The afterward to the book says that Higgins was attempting to write a phenomenological novel, experience as experienced if you will, and I have to say this was a success. Although its pace was languid at best I can't recommend this book enough.
• 
  Stephan

  ...there are too many foreign language words used pretentiously, too much post-research info put into the places and things. maybe I'll finish this someday. It just feels too contrived and completely unnatural. I don't always want to know what things are.
• 
  Clare

  Why doesn't anyone write like this anymore?
• 
  Olivia

  TLS published 2 April 2010:
  http://entertainment.timesonline.co.u...