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| Pieter Claesz : Vanitas |
Rick
Harsch's truly excellent “Skulls of Istria” is a book that deserves to be read.
This thin novel with less than 150 pages and only 6 or 7 chapters demands but a
minimal effort and time investment, say an afternoon read, a few hours on the
plane, for what I consider a huge return.
The story
too is very readable. I mean by that, that from the first page, the author
grabs your attention, you are sucked into the narrative and before you know it,
captivated, you keep on reading. Or listening…, for that is what you actually
do, you listen to a narrator babbling away while he drinks glass after glass of
a local spirit.
The
narrator, a self - exiled American academic, a mock historian he calls himself,
speaks to the reader from his regular watering hole, a sea front bar in the
Slovanian city of Piran. He has taken refuge from the terrible Burja, a
legendary storm-wind that rages outside over the Adriatic Sea.
As his
voice drones away, occasionally interrupted by his regular trip to the bar’s
toilet to relieve himself, you install yourself in comfortable passive
listening. But that may be a dangerous lapse of attention for you should listen
carefully; close reading is required. The story the historian tells might after
all not be as innocent as it is narrated and the steady downing of brandy might
not only help the narrator to find his words but maybe also give him the
necessary courage to proceed.
The
American is basically and safely speaking to himself, for the other person at
his table appears to be dead drunk and the other people present in the bar mind
their own business playing cards. Anyway, nobody is eavesdropping, and we start
following the narrative…
From
innocent and funny anecdotes about the excesses of the Burja wind, the
storyteller comes to tell us bits of the very violent history of the area,
mingling it with his own confessional story of how he washed up in this coastal
Istrian town. The man’s story consists of different threads that loop and snake
around each other : the reason of his self inflicted exile, his relationship
with his traveling companion, his passion for a gypsy women and his desperate
search for a historic topic for a book he wants to write.
All this is
recounted in a succulent flow of words, full of puns, clever wordplays,
literary trouvailles and newly chiseled porte-manteau words. Not only does the
narrator’s story turn out to be more than just interesting, it is darkly sarcastic
and funny too.
As the
reader starts to unravel the separate threads of the narrative yarn, a
Hitchcockian structure appears that increases the worrisome mood permeating the
pages of the book. The historian seems to have forgotten that what is the past
today was the actuality of yesterday. In an area with a history of violent
ethnic war, this is a warning not to miss.
Hell under
one’s feet, might be but just a drop away.
A must read.
