5 languages in search of an author

review of

Elena Lappin
What language do I dream in?
Virago 2016

Elena Lappin (nee Biller) was born in Russia, grew up in Prague speaking Russian at home, emigrated to Germany as a teenager after the suppression of the Prague Spring, then went to Israel to study, lived in Canada, Israel again, and the US, before ending up in London. This book is not so much about what language she dreams in, but about how she could become a writer after having to leave the country of the language she felt most connected to, which was Czech. After many wanderings, she decided that English was the one.

Only after she was already settled in London and in English as her writing language, she found out that she was not related to the man she believed to be her father. Her biological father – the son of a minor Soviet agent in the US who had to flee to Moscow – was a native English speaker, giving her language settlement a kind of retrospective biological justification.

Another intriguing aspect of her story is mentioned only in passing: her younger brother, Maxim Biller, facing the same problem, came to a different solution – he stayed in Germany and is now a fairly well-known German writer.

Along with her own quest for the right language to write (and dream) in, Lappin also discusses some of the famous examples of émigré writers adapting to new languages, including Vladimir Nabokov (and his memoir, Speak, Memory, which also deals with this issue), Joseph Conrad, and Milan Kundera. She forgets to mention Kurt Tucholsky, who fell silent during his exile in Sweden and died from an overdose of sleeping pills in a presumed suicide after realising he couldn’t continue to be a writer after being separated from his native language.

Thus, in a mixed-up world, everybody has to find their language for themselves, and some may fail to do so. In Lappin’s case, each of the languages not only stands for a specific culture and geographic area, but also for a subset of her extended family – there is no language that all her relatives share, so with her five languages she is the only link that connects the family network fragmented by migrations and language changes.

As a fellow writer also juggling half a dozen languages I found her memoir very relatable. Failing that, readers will also discover an intriguing and warm-hearted account of the global migrations of Jewish families from Eastern Europe, reminding me that most people have migration background of some kind.

the feminine art

book review

The feminine art
Weam Namou
Hermiz Publishing 2004


The charming characters of this novel are all, like the author, Chaldean migrants (or at least would-be migrants) from Iraq, i.e. members of the Christian minority in the Middle East. According to the blurb, Namou is “the first […] Chaldean American novelist to portray the descendants of ancient Mesopotamia …,” so the book promises a new take on intercultural experiences.

That promise is kept very nicely in the first part (2/5) of the book, while the characters live their ordinary lives in suburban Michigan, and their very oriental values are shown in sharp contrast to the American way of life. For instance, the thorough preparation and consumption of food seems to pervade people’s thoughts so comprehensively that practically every metaphor used comes from cooking, and every relationship is defined in terms of who cooks what for whom. In a way, this is a celebration of “slow food” and as such preferable to the American culture of junk food, but one can’t help feeling that it also stops people from achieving anything else in their lives, as food and family networking seem to take up 100% of their time. Similarly, the quest for an arranged marriage, which drives the plot of the story, contrasts with the sexual freedom that the potential groom has enjoyed in the US so far.

Not knowing (or caring) much about religions, I got the impression that the value system on display here seems to resemble those of Islamic communities from the Middle East more closely than those of European Christians. I only mention this because it suggests, interestingly, that geography and history may have had a stronger influence in shaping it than the actual religion.

Intriguingly, the characters (and their real life models?) don’t seem to appreciate the value of their heritage languages (Arabic and Aramaic) for their cultural identity, as it is mentioned that they randomly speak English, Arabic, or Aramaic to each other throughout the day, and often it appears to be English with Arabic words thrown in, as it is in the novel. As a former agony aunt in all things bilingualism I believe that if one wants to maintain one’s cultural heritage, the first and most obvious thing to do is to speak the heritage language consistently (and unmixed) whenever it is possible without offending outsiders.

To me, the novel lost interest a little bit after the action moved to Amman, the capital of Jordan, where the groom is to meet his prospective bride from Baghdad, and a wedding is to take place, or maybe not. With the geographical side of the culture clash removed from the equation, only the clash between the mildly Americanised Chaldeans and those fresh from Iraq remains. We are left with a claustrophobic circle of people panicking over wedding arrangements, while the underlying emotional conflicts remain veiled (or maybe one needs the "feminine art" to figure out what’s really going on, but I’m afraid as a man I need to have it explained in plain English). Although the beginning of the novel played the contrast of Michigan vs. Baghdad really well, I got absolutely no sense of place from the parts set in Amman.

Also galling the experience is a complete lack of editing – there are homophones and other spelling errors throughout the book (e.g. people waive for taxis and message their legs!), which has clearly never passed the hands of a competent copy-editor. These moans aside, it has been a very interesting insight into a culture that doesn’t get all that much media attention.

language learning from bad to worse

There was an incredibly depressing round-up of the disaster zone that is language learning at UK state schools in the Guardian this week:
Languages are becoming 'twilight subjects' at state schools

Essentially, the government abandoned the obligatory foreign language from age 14 in 2004, with the promise that in exchange, earlier start would be introduced. However, the earlier start for 7- to 11-year-olds will only be introduced in 2011. Between those that turned 14 in 2004 and those who will be under 11 in 2011, there are at least ten year groups that may only get three years of foreign language education.

Considering that even at A level (year 13, after up to 7 years of language learning) the standards are appalling, and at GCSE (year 11) the kids are far from being able to speak the language they have allegedly learned for 5 years, 3 years is practically nothing (I have one child in the second year of learning French right now, and I know they learn nothing).

Reducing the minimal time from 5 years to 3 has turned a bad situation into a disaster zone. As the Guardian article points out, it also helps private schools, which are aiming at much better standards, apparently.

Of course it is right to start earlier, but what on earth were they thinking, moving the tail end first and the start date only seven years later?

The "New Labour" government started with the slogan "Education, education, education!"

Today it feels more like "Education, err ... education ? ... what education ???"


PS in a small accompanying piece, the Guardian credits Shakira with the increased popularity of Spanish (at the expense of German) in schools. I'd love to believe that, though it seems implausible, as her records aren't that successful around here (not a patch on what's going on in Germany), and anything she's recorded in Spanish doesn't even get to the shops. But ok, there probably are a few kids who have taken inspiration from her, good on them.

PPS I corrected the year of the change of policy, it was 2004, not 2000 as originally stated.

PPPS (8.10.2012) A visitor to this blog had posted a comment including a link to the site languagesoftware.net. I just received an incredibly rude email from the company requesting me to remove this link ...

"because your domain may fit within one or more of the following categories: infected with malware; low quality site; paid link provider; manipulative link activity; link exchange networks; or simply not a good fit for LanguageSoftware.net."

I have removed the comment, as it was anonymous and may very well have been a dodgy attempt to spread links to that website, but am wondering whether they actually have a right to stop me from linking to them. Any views? Of course I wouldn't link to their site now.

culture clash

book review

K – The art of love, by Hong Ying


K is the story of a strange encounter between two cultures. At the surface, it’s about Chinese and English culture, and also about the very Martian culture of a man and the Venusian one of a woman. But it soon becomes clear that the protagonists aren’t representing these cultures. If anything, they struggle to define an identity within small subcultures at the margins of their respective societies.

The Englishman, Julian Bell, is like his eponymous real-life model a product of the Bloomsbury Group which had a set of values quite radically different from what was considered normal at the time. Son of the painter Vanessa Bell (who had an open marriage with a bisexual man) and nephew of Virginia Woolf, he tends to judge everything with the measure of the intellectual cult he grew up in, and initially sneers at the idea that Chinese poets may be producing anything comparable.

The Chinese woman, called Lin Cheng in the novel, but based on the biography of the writer Ling Shuhua, is also associated with an intellectual circle, the New Moon Society. Her contradiction is that she believes in the Daoist “Art of Love”, which to her intellectual peers is just a feudal old nonsense. The arrival of the Englishman gives her the opportunity to put this theory into practice.

And practice they do, quite a bit, and it’s sensitively and sensuously described in the novel, even in the English translation I read, which is by Nicky Harman and the author’s husband Henry Zhao. The eroticism is, of course, a problem for some people in China and in the UK, and so it came to pass that Ling Shuhua’s daughter sued the author for libel in Chinese courts for defamation of the dead, and eventually succeeded in having the book banned in mainland China.

It hasn’t quite been banned in the UK, but I’m getting the impression that it has been ignored on purpose. I find it quite shocking that I couldn’t find a single review of the book. The English edition was published in 2002, so if it has been reviewed, the reviews should be on the web. Probably people perceived it like the subject’s nephew, whose name is also Julian Bell, who didn’t object to its publication but compared it to “black lace” type genre fiction.

Maybe it takes readers with intercultural sensitivity to appreciate this, but this is definitely not black lace material (and unlike Julian Bell, I have read black lace novels, I even know somebody who writes them). K really has something to tell us about what happens when cultures collide. The culture clash proves a bit too much for the English protagonist, who concludes towards the end of the book:

“The fanatical love of this Chinese woman, like the violence of the Revolution, and everything else Chinese, was simply too alien for him to comprehend or accept.”

I’m worried that this may be true for the British readers as well. I discovered the book in a charity shop, clearly unread. Somebody missed out on an amazing intercultural experience.


Publishers website re. the libel case


PS: A new paperback edition has appeared on Jan 27th, 2011: