2004-03-14 sunday (utc)

P� resa

I am away next (this) week, at a meeting in Glasgow and then down in Cornwall on holiday, which'll be fun if the weather is anything like this.

While I'm away, I shall very probably not write home everyday, but I will pop in if bandwidth permits. In the meantime, you could spend time worse than by reading the collected malarkies of Julian Evans on the Yoorpean novel, and don't think that there will certainly not be a test when I get back.

First stop Iberia:

Visitors to Lisbon will know the Padr�o dos Descobrimentos, the monument to the Portuguese navigators. The "padr�o" was the stone the navigators used to mark the land they discovered. Portugal's is a history of stones. Novelists like L�dia Jorge, in The Migrant Painter of Birds, communicate this sense of soul in a broad, unashamed river rush of storytelling; others, such as Miguel Torga, in a prose of windswept harshness.

Agustina Bessa Luis (a writer inexplicably neglected by British publishers), from the more ironic city of Oporto, reverses the notion to comment on the English. As one of her narrators says: "When an Englishman crosses the Channel, he loses 50% of his value."

I'm sure that was very deep and/or cutting in the Portuguese.

Central Yoorp; Baltiwegia:

For most of its existence, Vilnius had been a haven of tolerance, one of the great Jewish cities, the "Jerusalem of the north", until the Nazis murdered 70,000 Jews at Kaunas and in the northern forests. Can the wheel not turn again? The Story of a Cloud, by Marius Ivaskevicius, takes in 1,000 years of Lithuanian history. He wrote it, he said, to lay stress on the future. "The cloud is a metaphor for the nest in which Lithuania was hatched. Lithuania has opportunities to become something else. Not a country, not a people, something better. Maybe a song."

And finally Albania and Greece:

There is also the Kazantzakis problem - of Greece reduced to Zorba - and the problem of Hellenic antiquity. A psychologist of nationhood would probably diagnose textbook oppression by the past - an oedipal state. "Imagine this kind of situation where your parents are absolutely great," Amanda Michalopoulou, a novelist in her 30s, told me, "they've done everything, in the eyes of everybody, and whatever you do you'll never be on the same level as them."

It's one big Hellenic h�las out there in Greeceland, isn't it?

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