Absinthe Video of the Week: Ulf Peter Hallberg, part 2

Enjoy part 2 of our video interview with Ulf Peter Hallberg on his novel European Trash.

Absinthe Video of the Week: Ulf Peter Hallberg and "European Trash"

We are readying publication of Ulf Peter Hallberg's fantastic novel European Trash and will have much more to say about that in the upcoming weeks but, for now, I thought I'd re-post a video of Hallberg discussing the book and how he came to title it European Trash.

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Interview with Writer Ulf Peter Hallberg, part 2

The final post in our series on Ulf Peter Hallberg and European Trash presents the second part of our video interview with Hallberg, along with a concluding excerpt from the book. I asked Hallberg if he ever imagined a conversation with his father about the book European Trash.

An excerpt from European Trash (2009):

In the evening at Eli’s in Prague when we had finished our discussion with her about art, my father expressed his thanks in a short speech with references to Eli and their common belief in Art and the importance of Prague to the citizens of Malmo. My father had a way of rising to the occasion when it came to something really important.

   After that, when we went to the bedroom with the large double bed made of oak and the old fashioned radio on the table by the window where you could look out over the roof tops in the Old City of Prague, my father could unwrap the day’s finds. He immediately sat down on the corner of the bed and took out one object after another from his canvas bag. Then he spread out books, lithographs, photographs, small statuettes, and other curiosities onto the bed—all purchased on his tight budget—which in other people’s eyes were next to worthless. As he raised each item up in his hands, he would turn my way and, with boyish excitement, describe that European Trash:

  “A Hrabal original, a little shabby, with spots here and there, but what a beautiful volume it is, and look at this lithograph! Do you see how the artist was able to catch those emotions in the facial expressions? And look here: the greatest find of all!”

   He inspected the watercolor minutely.

   “This must be by an unknown artist who was a contemporary with Nemes.  He uses the same color scheme. Do you see the similarities? You must look carefully, Peter. It looks like a human figure on its way to eternity.”

   His hands were shaking as he uttered his incantations.

   “This is totally priceless!”

   My father stretched out that European Trash towards me, in a persuasive gesture reminiscent of a person praying, with the same arms that used to hug me so often when I was a boy. I could see that he was happy. And so I believed his every word.

Translated by Erland G. Anderson

Interview with Erland Anderson on Translating Ulf Peter Hallberg

The third post in our series on Ulf Peter Hallberg and European Trash presents a video interview with Erland Anderson discussing the importance of Hallberg’s work, followed by another excerpt from European Trash.



An excerpt from European Trash (2009):

I visited Prague together with my father right after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We stayed with Eli Solakova, who, inside her stove, burned old worn-out shoes she had found in the street. She was always waiting for my father and me in the kitchen when we returned from the antiquary and thrift stores.  Eli told us about her life, while my father listened, wide-eyed, there in that kitchen in Prague. She didn’t hesitate to tell all the worst tales that I knew backwards and forwards from all my visits, but I naturally wanted my father to find out about those times.

   Eli turned to him and said:

   “Now listen here: then my Dad took Werner’s daughter as his mistress! Can you imagine? She was thirty-five and he was fifty. I was supposed to keep an eye out at the entrance to the mistress’s place. I called home and said: ‘Mommy, I don’t see anything, and I’m freezing to death.’ That’s what you have to do, isn’t that right, Peter? Aren’t I right?  I am right. Mommy just said:  ‘Stay where you are!’ Then she arrives in a taxi with two girl friends, and they pushed their way into the inn. It caused a big uproar.”

   After a pause, she turned to me.

   “Does your Dad understand?”

   I heard him mumble, “I understand.”

   But I noticed that he wasn’t getting it at all, and that he had trouble grasping those East European experiences. This calm, timid man, who loved his wife above all others in the world, sat in Eli Solakova’s kitchen  and nodded as if he understood when she said:

    “When I saw my first husband walking around in the garden, poking about, like the lazy dog he was, I had a sudden urge to put a bomb right under him. I wanted to blow him apart. You understand, don’t you? Aren’t I right? Yes, I am always right, aren’t I, Peter?”

    Eli is the closest I’ve come to finding someone like Fasse, my aunt, after her death in 1988.  Eli had been sitting there in the kitchen, with her sewing machine on the kitchen table and her bed in one corner next to the oven, following those crucial changes in my life. And now she was meeting my father at last.

    He turned to Eli as if he were replying to her descriptions from marriage Hell, and said:

    “Now you listen to me. You have had one of the greatest artists in the world living here in Prague, Endre Nemes, and for many years I had a watercolor, ‘The Machine Man,’ by him on my wall at home in Malmo. Nemes came from Hungary but lived in Prague during the 1930’s, and I shall tell you, Eli, that for me it is a great honor to sit here in your kitchen in this city of high culture, as if I were visiting Nemes and talking with his friend Jakub Bauernfreund. There’s something very odd about Time. You know that.”

    “Bauerfreund! He must have been a relative of my cousins! And about Time being strange, that is something deeply ingrained into little old me. My God, all that political crap going on.”

    “It’s so corrupt!”

    “Corrupt? It’s bankrupt. I didn’t believe in National Socialism, I didn’t believe in Socialism, and I don’t even believe in Capitalism!  If we can’t find a solution soon, I think humanity is doomed. Everyone just thinks about himself. Aren’t I right, Peter?  I am right.”

    “You must have faith in art, Eli!” my father said.

     “Then explain why.”

   My father managed to convince Eli that she was part of a cultural milieu that was indestructible. We were sitting a stone’s throw away from Karl’s Bridge, and my father was talking about Endre Nemes’ painting, “Prague Pieta.”

Translated by Erland G. Anderson

Interview with Ulf Peter Hallberg, part 1

Watch part 1 of our interview with Swedish writer Ulf Peter Hallberg and read an excerpt from European Trash below:

An excerpt from Hallberg’s European Trash (2009):

I open the door and walk into my father’s empty apartment. Already in the hall I get the feeling that he is still in the kitchen making coffee, quickly turning around to look in my direction. In that unfamiliar silence, visions and memories are released: how he walked toward me with that gleam in his eye, how he pronounced my name, how he inspected me to check my level of fatigue. It’s been a lifelong relationship from childhood to adulthood, the naturalness of his slow movements, my impatience and joy. All that is overshadowed now by irretrievable silence and total darkness.  All paintings and objects speak to me of him, of his sense of order, of his tender dedication as a collector. I know everything will soon be scattered about, but his objects are still resisting; they are still attached to him, even though he vanished and left them in the apartment. I stand by the rarely-used fireplace, which once smoked up the room so badly right next to his priceless Endre Nemes watercolor, which he sold against his will because we needed the money to a teacher at the Mellanhed School, who really didn’t appreciate it enough. That four-edged Human Machine set my imagination working because it didn’t look like anything I’d seen before. My father’s directorial hands made sure that Beauty had a place in our home in a miniature exhibit of everything created, like a mirror image of a grander scheme.  That way he could love the universe and give it its own meaning.  My glance meets the writing desk he always sat at. In front of that large oak desk, he held vigils long into the night, stooped over his books and clippings. He always had classical music playing directly from the radio, or from cassette tapes in frightfully bad condition, which he got off the P1 radio station’s classical recordings, filling two closets. And these things helped him rally his energy during the twelve years following my mother’s death.

   His place in front of his desk had become the axis my world revolved around; his glance had filled my life with meaning. His black notebooks lay there on the desk stacked neatly together as if ready for mailing, some with beautiful elastic bands wrapped around certain important pages. I still don’t dare to touch them, even though he often picked one up and read to me. One of the books is open right in the middle of a note. A foreign word translated: “Erato= the Muse of Love.” I know that he jotted down his own and others’ thoughts without bothering to differentiate whose they were. Everything became immersed in his grand scheme, the collection that was his life’s energy, and unusual defense against the world’s entropy. Night after night he was making notes, his threadlike handwriting going from one context to another, from one commentary to another fancy, from one fact into larger fictions. That was his encyclopedia—the words he had made his own, the energy he had mustered against the void.  I peer at random inside one of the books: “Birds who are larger than wind itself don’t know where to rest their wings.” The words pull me toward him. I still feel his breath, though I just closed his eyes. I keep turning the pages, quickly and nervously: “The novel is usually the combination of two absolutes—absolute individuality and absolute universality.” I am alone with his gift. There is no real message, just an obvious stack of notebooks, a scribbled pad from the Local Swedish Agrarian Society in Hoerby with the birth and death dates of my grandparents, Victor Hallberg 1885-1951, Hertha Hallberg 1890-1971, as well as a pink-dotted notebook with foreign words and a catalog of all the paintings stored in the kitchen cabinets. My glance falls on a note that, unusually enough, has been attributed to its source, Romans 8:20 “All creatures subject to emptiness.”  The first words in the pink-dotted notebook are “redundance= superfluous, excess information (which can be eliminated without any loss).”

            

                                                                         Translated by Erland G. Anderson