A Serbian British Writer Revitalizes the Novel of the Émigré - The New Yorker
A Serbian British Writer Revitalizes the Novel of the Émigré
Vesna Goldsworthy's life and work have involved multiple migrations: from Belgrade to London; from writing in Serbian to writing in English; from literary scholarship to memoir to poetry and then to the novel. To that last genre, she has now contributed three books, and the latest, "Iron Curtain: A Love Story" (Norton), is yet another departure, from skillful contrivance to full-throated voice.
The emotions of this well-conjured novel are raw, its observations acute. Goldsworthy is so intent on getting where she wants to go that, from the book's earliest pages, she repeatedly—and artfully—telegraphs its bitter ending, thereby freeing a reviewer from the need to issue any spoiler alerts. (The first epigraph comes from "Medea": "Stronger than lover's love is lover's hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.")
The book's prologue is set in December, 1990. Milena Urbanska watches the husband she's left make a puffed-up speech on TV accepting a poetry prize in the reunified Germany, heralding the "end of history." Milena, forceful and self-centered, is the privileged daughter of the Vice-President of an unnamed and staunchly oppressive Eastern Bloc country. The book's main action, splendidly paced, begins nine years earlier, in 1981, when Milena's equally élite boyfriend, Misha, kills himself in a game of Russian roulette. A coverup of the circumstances doesn't completely extinguish sex-and-drugs-and-conspiracy rumors about the participation of Misha's friends, so Milena keeps her head down, taking a dull job translating maize-production reports. But she tempts fate by agreeing to attend a literary festival to translate for Jason Connor, a young Anglo-Irish poet.
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Jason is attractive and carefree, even silly. Milena knows that his appeal derives "not merely from his easy charm but from his rarity value" in her non-cosmopolitan world. Still, she falls for him, and soon they are exploring an ancient church and having sex in her father's bedroom, where she allows Jason to try on the Vice-President's old military uniform but draws the line at letting him wear the medals that her father long ago won "for acts of suicidal courage against the Germans."
A marriage plot ensues. After Jason returns home to England, Milena discovers that she's pregnant, after a single sexual encounter with him; an abortion is performed at a spa for pampered Party wives. But Milena's feelings for Jason persist, and she persuades her parents to let her go to London, from which, they believe, she will be proceeding not to a registry office but to a holiday in Cuba.
In "Iron Curtain," Goldsworthy has constructed a sharply etched, more repressive variant of the Yugoslavia where she grew up. A reader will not find, here or in Goldsworthy's other fiction, the wild and preternatural streaks that run through modern Serbian novels like Danilo Kiš's "The Attic" (1962) or Borislav Pekić's "The Houses of Belgrade" (1970); Téa Obreht, who was born in Belgrade and wrote "The Tiger's Wife" (2011), brought some of that manner with her to America. Goldsworthy's work, instead, remains on the track of the socially mimetic English novel, epitomized by George Eliot and Margaret Drabble.
Goldsworthy's first book, "Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination" (1998), was a scholarly, readable history of how successive generations of British writers documented and distorted life in the Balkans, from Byron—who made the southern Balkans the exoticized, alien setting of some of the second canto of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage"—to Evelyn Waugh and Olivia Manning, whose Balkan Trilogy depicts "a world clearly burning at the edges, with her English characters fleeing the flame." Goldsworthy reserves her highest literary admiration for Rebecca West's "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" (1941), whose sense of the Balkan countries' essential "Europeanness" has become a consistent theme of Goldsworthy's own work. More often, British writers have appeared to make the region into a comic-operatic or deeply sinister place, the land of "The Prisoner of Zenda" and "Dracula," terrain in which passengers on the Orient Express should expect murder.
It is telling that "Inventing Ruritania" does not introduce the literature of Goldsworthy's native country to her adopted one. Rather, it is English books with which she engages, however wide of the mark they sometimes were.
Vesna Bjelogrlić was born in Belgrade in 1961, a "spoilt child of communism," she writes in her memoir, "Chernobyl Strawberries" (2005). Her father did secret work for the General Staff of the Yugoslav National Army, and her mother, with three telephones on her office desk, oversaw finances for Belgrade's City Transport Company. Vesna attended an élite French secondary school in the capital; a grant from France's cultural ministry took her to Paris for the first time. Throughout Yugoslavia's relatively prosperous nineteen-sixties and seventies, her "neighbourly, tightly controlled society" felt to her like "one of the safest places in Europe." It was not her generation, she emphasizes, but the generations of her parents and grandparents (including her tough and vivid Montenegrin grandmother) that experienced war and imprisonment and dispossession. Goldsworthy immigrated to England in 1986 after falling in love with a British man. When her future father-in-law told her, "You chose freedom," she decided that he "had obviously read too many novels by Solzhenitsyn."
Even so, Goldsworthy was "intense and openly ambitious." Well before departing for England, she had acquired "the very Western idea that my first responsibility is towards my own happiness," whether that was to come from love or from literature. She left home because, while studying Bulgarian during a summer in Sofia, she had met Simon Goldsworthy, a young man "as English as the running team in Chariots of Fire." In her forthright and often self-entertaining voice, she writes, "I believed in the supreme power of romantic love. That, comrades, is the real opium of the masses." She quickly assimilated to England, and the English language only increased her natural bluntness: "Like a fast new car, it takes wide swings around unfamiliar corners and leaves me vulnerable but exhilarated." The English-speaking Goldsworthy "is and isn't myself," she writes. "She takes risks and admits to loss."
During the nineteen-nineties, both before and after the West's belated intervention in the Bosnian conflict, Goldsworthy worked night shifts at the BBC's London offices, broadcasting, in Serbian, war news and features on Britain, to the Belgrade she'd grown up in. She experienced only from afar the bloody fission of Yugoslavia, a nation whose multiethnic patchwork had existed since the First World War, sustained by the grip of Marshal Josip Broz Tito, a strongman who operated with his own ideological wiggle room inside the Soviet sphere. In 1999, as NATO bombed Serbia and British forces were on the move in Kosovo, Goldsworthy worried simultaneously about her parents, who wouldn't go to air-raid shelters, and about the troops of her second country. "I don't want to see British soldiers dying. I am British too," she writes in her memoir. During the day, away from her job at the BBC, she researched "Inventing Ruritania," which kept her further connected to the region that she had once inhabited, even as the Balkans' orgy of self-destruction now made Westerners regard the area as "best left to fester in isolation" or as newly ripe for a kind of protectorate status.
In "Chernobyl Strawberries," Goldsworthy admits to a life of "spectacular political U-turns." In 1984, at the age of twenty-two, she stood in a stadium lip-synching one of her poems at a birthday celebration for Marshal Tito, who had died four years earlier. Three years later, she was leafletting for a Tory candidate in Hammersmith, and two decades after that, with less than full fervor, she was voting Green. None of these lurches are as important as her ability to see and describe herself making them. If not prone to nostalgia, she is devoted to memory. Her nonfiction is filled with sharp-eyed taxonomies of all the human subspecies and behaviors that she recalls from the land of her youth. "The Yugoslav poets of that era could be divided into two broad groups: the state-sponsored bunch and the outcasts. The first lot wore suits (and, if male, ties) and held responsible jobs in the media, publishing and arts administration," she writes. The outcasts had "badly cut hair," and, if they were reviewed at all, the notices "required a finely honed set of interpreting skills if one was to divine whether the author was on the way to jail or not." A generation later, she asks how the Yugoslav commissars could "metamorphose so easily into a bunch of cuddly grandpas with bad dental work? Even those who tortured and imprisoned, and pinned electrodes to grown men's balls, now wear checked slippers and send grandchildren to Western universities."
Goldsworthy's earliest poems, she admits, were top-heavy with literary reference. When she ventured into fiction, in her fifties, some of the same obeisance characterized her first two novels, as if she were permitted to proceed in this new genre only as a sort of prize student. Each of those books, however satisfying in their intricacy, depends on a famous novel by someone else.
A lesser writer might have chosen merely to chronicle the further adventures of characters from "The Great Gatsby," but in "Gorsky" (2015), her first novel, Goldsworthy opted for analogue rather than extension. She built a pleasing contraption of a book in which elements of Fitzgerald's story are made to recur among plutocratic Russian émigrés in London after the fall of Communism. Roman Gorsky is the Gatsby figure, not a bootlegger but a fantastically wealthy arms dealer. He has never got over Natalia Volkov, the daughter of the mayor of Volgograd. She is now married to Tom Summerscale (i.e., Buchanan), a strapping British blowhard and a bully. Fitzgerald's mendacious Jordan Baker has become the "amoral" Gergana Pekarova, "a famous Bulgarian gymnast" who works as Natalia's personal trainer, and Nick Carraway obliquely reprises his narrative role as Nikola Kimović, a draft-evading refugee from "the war-torn Balkans" with an "ability to disengage from feeling" while serving Gorsky as a romantic go-between. West Egg and East Egg are now Fabergés.
The characters show an explicit awareness of the author's allegory. "I called him 'The Great Gorsky,' " Nick, who admits that Natalia's voice isn't actually "full of money," says. Plenty of off rhymes have been planted for the literary scavenger: Tom Summerscale addresses Nick as "Young Serb," the way Gatsby once called Carraway "old sport," and the London Eye appears to serve as Dr. T. J. Eckleburg's billboard.
The real accomplishment of "Gorsky" is Goldsworthy's charming and nimble descriptions: Nick notes that London's "handkerchief-sized lawns join up into one continuous floral ribbon," and wonders whether, at the school Natalia's daughter attends, "means-tested scholarships were on offer to the children of mere multi-millionaires." The book wants to be, and often is, more than a trick. It evokes not just literary precedents but layers of social history: in the London Docklands around the turn of the millennium, "amid the towering offices, warehouses that once stored spice and sugar from the colonies were now echoing minimalist apartments and shiny, antiseptic gyms." "Gorsky" desires to show large truths, such as how in Britain "the only thing you are not allowed to be is unhappy, particularly if you are an immigrant," but the newly arrived population that Goldsworthy has chosen to explore may be too rarefied, and too tasked with literary homage, to generate the deepest resonance.
Count Vronsky is said to be a hero to Roman Gorsky, no doubt because "Anna Karenina" has been a preoccupation of Vesna Goldsworthy. "Monsieur Ka" (2018), her second novel, concerns the son of the woman believed by many to have been the model for Tolstoy's heroine. The young man fled both tsarist and revolutionary Russia, taking the name Karenin—a resigned acceptance of destiny—and then Anglicizing it to Carr. By 1947, in Goldsworthy's telling, he is an elderly gentleman living in London and recovering from a stroke.
Carr's story is told by Albertine (Ber) Whitelaw, a young woman who herself is a veteran of name changes and migrations, from Strasbourg to Paris to Bucharest to Alexandria and, finally, to London. It was in Egypt, working at a British hospital, that she met her husband, Albie, an English man of "unbearable decency." Amid the bomb craters and the scarcities of postwar London, while Albie toils in Whitehall and travels on government business to Berlin, Ber finds work as a companion to Carr, who, during his convalescence, is consulting on the 1948 film adaptation of "Anna Karenina," which is being shot in Shepperton. The reader gets nicely executed glimpses of Vivien Leigh and Alexander Korda, and Goldsworthy's showing how the filmmakers play with moving the story from Russia to France becomes a neat joke about both the nature of moviemaking and the anything-can-happen aspects of exile.
Ber decides to write Carr's memoirs for him, and she begins an affair with his son, Alexei. Inevitably, there is a suicide under a train, though it is motivated by something other than an adulterer's despair—another sign, perhaps, of the author's own ambitions, a desire to free herself from literary antecedents and to find an autonomous world of plot and theme. Grim and finely detailed, "Monsieur Ka" is memorable in a muffled way, but it still conveys the feeling of a thwarted, or at least not entirely fulfilled, author. In both of Goldsworthy's first two novels, the narrators, even Ber, are preoccupied by the stories and the passions of others; they serve the protagonism of Gorsky and Carr, treating their own adventures and emotions as secondary, almost leftover. As a means of literary perspective, the method is hardly to be dismissed—without Carraway, there could be no "Gatsby"—but one doesn't want a novelist to write book after book in the mode of a character who isn't the reader's primary interest.
In "Iron Curtain," Goldsworthy at last allows her narrator to be a protagonist, and this time literary derivation is largely incidental. Milena Urbanska is unhappy entirely in her own way, and her voice has unshackled Goldsworthy from the classics. The broad outlines of Milena's life may have a few things in common with the author's, but Goldsworthy, having already written a memoir, can use only a robustly imagined deflection of her actual history as subject matter, thus also escaping the slow, self-driving hum of autofiction.
Once Milena reaches England, Jason's true awfulness begins to reveal itself, with wonderfully gradual plausibility. This anti-Thatcherite poet has found a way to follow "years on the dole" with academic grant money that will keep flowing so long as he stretches out the writing of a dissertation on Yeats. He's twenty-eight, and his boyish appeal is rushing past its sell-by date, even for his mother, who recognizes that her insouciant lily of the field is a sponge. Milena can see that his Marxism is no less "decorative" than his Irishness.
Milena gives birth to twins; soon after, unexpected success greets Jason's new book of poems. Signs of Jason's infidelity begin piling up from the moment Milena notices that he has used her maiden name on the dedication page. When a man from her own country's embassy, who has been tailing her in England, turns his camera on Jason, Milena comes to a realization, and makes a plan: "Whatever the distance, I could never escape my country. Since I could not escape it, I would use its might, however rusty, to punish my husband."
This wholly satisfying novel winds up being about personal, not political, disloyalty, but the character drama is thrown into high relief against all the First and Second World-building that the author carries out, with an aphoristic zest surpassing even the fine noticings of "Gorsky" and "Monsieur Ka." Communist travel agents, Milena recalls, were always "eager to show off their knowledge of the world, however theoretical it must have been." In the surveillance state, she says, "one way of soaking up excess labour . . . was to have every notionally working person shadowed by another working person." Her acquaintance with the U.K. gives her different opportunities for jaundiced precision. One of Britain's picturesque red telephone boxes contains "dozens of cards offering a menu of love in variants of broken English: a whole United Nations of prostitutes." That the word "quite" "could mean both 'to the utmost' and 'only moderately' seemed itself, well, quite English."
This book's tough, believable narrator-heroine owes each of her countries no more than ambivalence and nothing less than accuracy. Milena's voice, only briefly softened when she falls for Jason, becomes brittle again with complete believability. (As the speaker of "Departure Board," one of Goldsworthy's poems, puts it, "This re-setting of the heart to cold, / I am so good at that.") By casting aside the traces of literary dependence and making "Iron Curtain" fully Milena's story, Goldsworthy allows her protagonist to be what's at stake—fashioning, at last, her own very real Ruritania. ♦
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