Literacy advocate and super-librarian Nancy Pearl postulates a theory that all writing consists of four basic “experiential elements.” She calls each of these elements “doorways,” because, as she says, “when we open a book, read the first few pages, and choose to go on, we enter the world of that book.” According to Pearl, books are entered through story, character, setting, and language, and different readers privilege different doors. For many, plot is an obvious hook. Others may favor painterly scenes of exotic locales or “strong” characters who “develop,” whatever that may mean. What’s unspoken here is that three of these doors are illusions created by the fourth. All writers, whether they recognize it or not, are driven by language.
There are undoubtedly others who write more prettily, sentence by sentence, but I’m not sure that anyone carries language closer to the heart of their fiction than Diego Marani. In his work it assumes a central role, actually becoming character, story, and even setting. But how does that alchemy work?
Well, Marani is an Italian native who lives and works in Brussels. He has a day job at the European Union, dealing with issues of interpretation, so he’s a classic polyglot. In addition to Italian, he speaks French and English, translates from Finnish and Dutch, and is more than passingly acquainted with Slovenian and Spanish. While the fiction he writes in his own time isn’t overtly autobiographical, it’s clearly a transmutation of his own experiences with cultural dislocation and a sense of being adrift on a sea of half-familiar vocabulary.
New Finnish Grammar, Marani’s award-winning 2000 novel (trans. 2011 by Judith Landry), tells the story of a severely injured sailor found in Trieste in the middle of World War II. He has no memory of who he is or how he came to be there, and the only identifying information he bears is a tag on his clothing. A local doctor recognizes the language on the tag and deduces that the sailor is a fellow countryman, thereafter arranging his return to Helsinki where the sailor must relearn the basics of human interaction even while the war continues.
The sailor’s confusion is mirrored on a national scale as Finland fights for independence, first on the side of Germany against the Soviet Union, and then to expel the Germans. Aspects of the plot bring to mind The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. Coincidentally or whatever, Ondaatje is also a language-driven author, but in the more usual sense of being a word-besotted composer of prose that approaches poetry. Marani’s prose is more straightforward, but language is even more integral to his project than to Ondaatje’s. The protagonist of New Finnish Grammar must invent a history and a self out of words. They are nothing more than air, yet they are the most important thing he has, that any of us has, really.
Sheltering in a military hospital, the nameless sailor is tutored by an eccentric, dipsomaniac chaplain whose bottle of koskenkorva never empties. His rhapsodizing is more intoxicating than the drink:
Like so many glass vessels, forms contain the liquid that is words. The forms of a language inevitably have repercussions upon the speaker, it is they which mould his face, his land, his habits, where he lives, what he eats. The foreigner learning Finnish distorts his own bodily features; he moves away from his original self, may indeed no longer recognize it. This does not happen studying other languages, because other languages are merely temporary scaffolding for meaning. Not so for Finnish: Finnish was not invented. The sounds of our language were all around us, in nature, in the woods, in the pull of the sea, in the call of the wild, in the sound of the falling snow. All we did was bring them together and bend them to our needs. When God created man, he did not bother to send any men up here. So we had to do what we could to struggle free of defenceless matter on our own. In order to gain life, we had to suffer. First came trees, lakes, rocks, wind. Becoming human all on our own was no joke. Finnish is a solid language, slightly rounded at the sides, with narrow slits for eyes, like the houses in Helsinki, the faces of our people. It is a language whose sounds are sweetish and soft, like the flesh of the perch and trout we cook on summer evenings on the shores of lakes whose depths are covered in red algae, the colour of the hunters’ houses and the berries which bead from the bushes in summer. Finland is a cuttlefish bone, a great concave stone within whose sandy womb trees sprout like mould beneath the endless northern light. Nibbled away by ice and ground into thousands of tiny islands, this is the figure that it cuts on the map next to plump Russia and bony but sturdy Scandinavia. Finland is what remains of something else: take away the Slavs, the Scandinavians, the Orthodox, the Catholics, the sea salt, the birch forests, scrape off a few hundred thousand tons of granite and what you are left with is Finland. If you were once Finnish, at some point or other you will find all this within you, because all this is not stored in your memory, it cannot be mislaid. It is in your blood, your guts. We are what remains of something extremely ancient, something which is bigger than ourselves and is not of this world.
Place, person, and creation myth, all comprised of language. The chaplain is devoted to his own tongue to the exclusion of others, but Marani holds the utterances of any tribe in equal esteem.
The sailor’s efforts to embrace Finnishness ultimately fail; he learns the words but not the music: “I shall never know in which language my mother sang me lullabies. My language–my real language–is lost for ever. It slipped away, together with my memory; seeped away into the sea, together with my blood, that night on the wharf in Trieste.”
Marani’s follow-up novel covers similar thematic ground. The Last of the Vostyachs (2004; trans. by Judith Landry in 2012) takes place in the same Nordic regions, this time in the present day with two main characters whose stories intertwine. The first is the last living speaker of an obscure (and imaginary) Siberian tongue, recently released from the gulag and attempting to resume his traditional way of life after the devastation of his people. He is brought from Russia to Helsinki to be presented at a linguistics conference, but his presence is a threat to the organizing professor, who has built a career on reactionary theories that will be disproved by the Vostyach’s very existence:
Translation causes a language to become soiled; like blood in a transfusion, which is gradually tainted by impurities. Your language [Russian] is a phial of blood on a hospital shelf, a curdled mass of random droppings. Ours [Finnish] on the other hand is a young vein, full of life, the fruit of a single body. By being translated, a language picks up meanings which are not its own, which infect it and poison it, and against which it has no defences. It is like the native Americans, who were wiped out by European diseases. Today they are almost all dead, their languages so many unpronounceable relics, tangled heaps of sound which no alphabet could ever unpick.
So the professor seeks to eliminate his antagonist in any way possible. The two men are as different as the tones of their respective narrative threads; the plight of the first is beautifully and poignantly described, while the ruthless machinations of the second play out as black comedy. The strands intertwine in a somewhat surreal climax: as the professor’s escalating crimes are revealed, an entire zoo of animals is released, and the ultimate Vostyach escapes from civilization.
The book displays a multitude of discursive modes–we see language used for description, seduction, coercion, academic point-scoring, and so on. As fiction, it is less perfect than its predecessor, but more ambitious. The novel is a successful, genre-blending performance that again demonstrates how all things are permeated by language, and how much fun you can have with that idea.
And what could be more fun for someone like Marani than inventing a brand-new language? In 1996 he came up with Europanto, a mostly jocular attempt to create a universal means of communication. Unlike most serious (and seriously misguided) artificial languages, Europanto doesn’t really have rules. When you’re trying to speak or write it, you just grab whatever words come to mind from any of the major European languages and trust that you’ll be understood. Pretty much what kids in hostels do when they meet up, I imagine. Marani wrote a regular newspaper column in Europanto for years, and also concocted Les Adventures des Inspector Cabillot, which was published in the US in 2012. A sample:
Was eine frigid morning van Octubre in Brussel. Die arbor des park was rubiconde, die benches floatingantes in eine caliginose fog. Sommige laborantes maghrebinos was der garbage collectingante terwhile singing melancholique tunes. Op der 50th floor des Europeane Polizei Tower der Chef Inspector General des Service des Bizarre Affairs, Capitain What, frapped op der tabula und dixit: “Dat esse keine joke! Call rapido Cabillot!”
Inspector Cabillot put seine Europanto crossverba under der desk, hanged der telefono und jumped op der cuirassed liftor por emergence cases.
“Moi demanded, Captain What?”
“Ja. Ich habe eine delicate mission por you.”
That may be obscure, but it’s not hard to follow if you give it a chance. When I showed the passage to a multilingual acquaintance, she made it to the second paragraph before realizing something strange was afoot. I can’t speak anything other than English, but I was still able to parse out the story without much trouble. That I got anywhere at all with it is a testament to the power of human ingenuity, Marani’s more than mine. And it’s a tribute to the virtues of the good old-fashioned mystery story, in which good always triumphs over evil and the detective always outsmarts the bad guys. “Better surrender, bandidos, villainos et mafiosos, porqué Inspector Cabillot never miss seine target!”
In January 2014, Dedalus Books in the UK will publish a new novel, apparently something of a departure for Marani. Titled God’s Dog, it’s set in an Italian theocracy controlled by the Vatican bent on rooting out euthanasia. Though Marani may not be treating the mysteries of language as overtly in this most recent work as he has in the past, it’s clear that he hasn’t let go of his productive obsession entirely. The title of the book is inspired by a medieval pun on the name of the religious order that’s central to the story. The devout brothers who followed the practice established in 1215 by Spanish priest Domingo Félix de Guzmán took their name from their founder, calling themselves Dominicanus in Latin. Wits of the Middle Ages tinkered with the spelling but not the pronunciation, and would often refer to a member of the order as Domini canis, or “dog of the Lord.” Those monks were fiercely loyal to their beliefs, but no more so than Marani is. “In the beginning was the Word,” and of that faith he remains a dedicated acolyte.
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