Lutheran Saints #15: Jón Vídalín

August 18, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Earthquake. Volcanic eruptions. Pestilence. Famine. It could have been the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, but actually it was just Iceland at the turn of the eighteenth century.

It’s not as though Iceland has a mild or pleasant climate to begin with, but in the late 1600s and early 1700s it was worse than usual, with the result that nine thousand Icelanders starved to death between 1695 and 1702. Winter fishing claimed many men’s lives annually as well, and the unusually rough weather only increased the death toll. A smallpox epidemic in 1707 killed off a third of the population. Deforestation meant not enough firewood to heat through the brutal winters, and poor sanitation made the long enforced stay indoors that much unhealthier.

As if that weren’t bad enough, what little wealth the island did have was concentrated in the hands of a few. Landowners set exorbitant rents that peasants could never pay, leading to spiralling debt. The Danish crown imposed a trade monopoly on behalf of one of its own companies and heavily penalized those who took their business elsewhere.

Into this harsh environment Jón Vídalín was born in 1666…

Slovak Novels in English #29: Big Love

August 4, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

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Slovakia is clinically depressed.

Or so I must infer, judging from Balla’s novel Big Love, first published in Slovakia in 2015 and now available in English (thanks again to the tireless efforts of the Sherwoods). Consider this brief excerpt:

“He was burnt out.
“But how could he find a job, burnt out as he was?
“And what for?
“He had a full-time job with himself, he was preoccupied with getting through the basic functions necessary to live.
“He got out of bed but went on sleeping.
“He was permanently asleep or half asleep—unawakened, unawakened, unawakened—and as he kept turning this phrase over in his head he gave a sudden start and realized he had fallen asleep on the office toilet.” (p. 103)

That’s pretty much a textbook description of clinical depression; it’s also the novel’s plot, insofar as it has one at all. The “protagonist” Andrič sleepwalks through life, aimlessly and pointlessly. He is possessed by the dreary inability to believe in anything, be convinced of anything, or commit to anything, even to his own hedonistic self-interest.

As such, Andrič misses out on the good and rewarding relationship right in front of him with Laura. The problem is their metaphysical mismatch: she is pointed up, and he is pointed down. We can give Andrič credit, at least, for not dragging her down with him, a common enough strategy among the chronically failing-to-thrive. But nothing Laura can do, and for that matter nothing that Andrič can do, will change his direction. You can’t talk someone out of depression.

I wish I could talk Balla out of writing novels about depression…

The New Samizdat

July 20, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Russian samizdat and photo negatives of unofficial literature in the USSR. Moscow.

Samizdat is a sexy word borrowed from Russian, as its foreign-to-English consonant cluster zd unmistakably signals. But its literal translation renders a very unsexy, even dopey, notion in the anglophone world: self-publishing.

I can hear your cringe. “Self-publishing” is a polite euphemism for “vanity publishing,” which means 1) you are such a terrible writer you couldn’t persuade even the newest, poorest, most-desperate-to-prove-herself New York literary agent to shop your manuscript around, and therefore 2) you shelled out several thousand bucks to a parasitic scammer who feeds off fragile egos and probably has a brother in the bail bond business, with the result that 3) you can hold your own hardcover, yes, but with such unbelievably lousy cover art and an unforgivable font, not to mention the too-thick, stark-white, badly laid-out pages within, that only your mom and a handful of friends highly susceptible to guilt trips are going to buy it. But they sure aren’t gonna read it. (Well, maybe your mom will.)

The funny thing is, the samizdat’s endearing virtue was precisely its shoddy production quality…

Slovak Novels in English #28: Only a Servant

July 7, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

This is the second installment of novels by Kristína Royová, who, though late to be discovered by yours truly in her search for all Slovak novels in English, is probably the most-published Slovak author of all.

This short novel, first published in Slovak in 1903, concerns the lives of several families in a small village in Slovakia, which at this time was the northern outpost of the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian empire. A stranger comes into town, bearing goodwill the same way Clint Eastwood would have borne a gun. Indeed, the opening line reads: “Just when farmer Ondrasik needed help most and had no idea where to find someone, there came to his house a man, uninvited and unexpected.” The helper is named Methodius, no mistake that: it’s the name of the first apostle to the Slavs, commemorated every year in July.

Methodius goes on by his kindly service and warm testimony to his faith in God to have a transformative effect on everyone around him. Naturally, there are some obstacles along the way. Given Royová’s socially-conscious objection to alcohol and its evil impact on peasant society, it’s no surprise that the proposal of one family to open a store selling booze is strongly opposed by Methodius and in time leads to catastrophe in the family. More positively, Methodius helps to facilitate loving relationships both within families and between young people seeking honorable marriage.

The heart of the story, however, is Methodius’s interactions with David, a Jew. In a post-Holocaust era, there is unsurprising discomfort with the prospect of Christian missions to the Jews…

To the Outer Limits of Hummus and Beyond

June 24, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Ten years ago I paid my first and only visit to Israel/Palestine and I had a conversion experience. Not to Jesus or Judaism or any of the many flavors of ancient Christianity on offer.

No, I was converted to olives.

Understand that up to this point my primary acquaintance with olives was in the form of the flabby black rings that came from a can and looked and tasted like tires. Or, more rarely, a pimento-stuffed one nicked out of a parent’s martini: hard to say which was worse, the drink or its garnish.

I was always rather sad about this because olives seemed, in principle, to be cool and sophisticated. I wanted to be the kind of person who eats olives. Alas. I was not.

And then, by one of those odd series of circumstances in life in which you end up at the Greek Orthodox monastery attached to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem (not the Armenian Apostolic or the Roman Catholic monastery, mind you), I was confronted with a lavish feast amidst which sat a plate heaped with glistening, oozing olives. They were honestly black, not chemically black, wrinkled and puckered and very inviting. I don’t like olives, I said to myself. But a taste can’t hurt.

Well, I won’t bother you with the immoderate and propagandistic praise of the convert. Let’s just say that I love them now—the real ones, not the imitation horrors that show up on pizza.

This naturally led me on to Israeli cookbooks to make good use of my newfound love…

Lutherans Saints #14: Maud Powlas

June 9, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Eleven-year-old Maud heard Jesus’ call to serve in Japan. For the next decade and a half she prayed and prepared for it, imagining herself walking through a rural village on the other side of the world, Bible in hand, telling “the boys and girls of Japan about Jesus their Savior.” Her sole wish was to evangelize, bringing hope of salvation to those who’d never heard the good news.

The other missionaries said no.

That was the rule “in the field”: decisions were made by a strict majority vote—democratic in nature, except for the not insignificant matter of excluding women—and the longer-term missionaries in Japan determined that what they needed was not more evangelism, but more works of mercy. Locals converts needed to see that service to the needy was part and parcel of the gospel. Besides that, the need was enormous: at the time, neither Japanese culture nor the Japanese state perceived any obligation to help the suffering. The Christians had their work cut out for them—and Maud, utterly unqualified for the task, was going to lead the way…

Lutheran Saints #13: Johann Friedrich Oberlin

May 26, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Johann Friedrich Oberlin is well-enough remembered to have an American college and a Japanese university named after him, not to mention countless streets in Alsace and a museum in his old home. But if any saint proves the point that no one can be a saint in isolation—that saintliness is a communal activity—it’s Oberlin. To remember this saint rightly is to bring back to remembrance the other less famous saints surrounding him as well.

It was not Oberlin but Jean-Georges Stuber who was a pioneer in the destitute parish of the Ban de la Roche, or “stone valley,” in a deep and isolated pocket of the Vosges mountains to the west of Strasbourg, France. Though these two pastors arrived more than a century after the Thirty Years’ War, the community still bore the scars of the devastating conflict and had never recovered. No road reached the village of Waldersbach or the other nearby hamlets, and no bridge crossed the fast-flowing Bruche River. The only schoolteacher was a man who had grown too old to look after his pigs anymore. The previous pastor hadn’t seen or used an actual Bible in more than twenty years. The soil was depleted, the yield of the farms was poor, and the people just barely managed not to starve.

Stuber took the post in the Ban de la Roche twice, serving a total of fourteen years, before he finally relented and accepted a more prestigious call to the St. Thomas Church in Strasbourg. He had laid the groundwork for the community’s renewal by finding a better schoolteacher, creating primers to instruct in reading, and preaching repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. But the Ban de la Roche was the last place anybody wanted to go; it was perceived more as a punishment than a parish. In the end, only one man was willing to take such a humiliating call as a worthy way to serve God: Johann Friedrich Oberlin…

Slovak Novels in English #26 and #27: Sunshine Country and Three Comrades

May 12, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

With Gaudeamus I reached the astounding milestone of having unearthed twenty-five Slovak novels in English, with only slight fudging on the definition of the term. But since then, things have gotten… complicated. Let me tell you why.

The first problem is a simple one of access. Time will remedy that in a couple of cases; two Slovak novels in English are due to be published in the summer, assuming the pandemic doesn’t put the plans on hold.

I could read a portion of a novel that has been only partially translated, Tatarka’s The Demon of Conformism, but I have to admit I’m just not excited about reading a mere excerpt when my self-imposed mandate is for complete novels or, in a pinch, novellas.

Finally, in a couple of cases, the print book is so exceedingly rare that I just can’t find a copy to lay my hands on. So please, if you happen to have Seller of Talismans by Jozef Cíger-Hronský or Dead Soldiers Don’t Sing by Rudolf Jašík lying around the house, be a pal and mail it to me, OK?

So I figured the well was going to run dry pretty soon.

But then, a funny thing happened…

Slovak Novels in English #25: Gaudeamus

April 28, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Unlike a number of other recent Slovak novels in English, this one I actually liked. Only I’m not quite sure that it’s a novel.

There may not be a word for it. “Experiment” would make it sound more impenetrable than it actually is, and duller—but by the end I couldn’t put it down. It boasts in turn a panoply of genres without ever making a decisive play for one over another. Part literary rumination, part crime fiction; a dose of sci fi here, a dash of fantasy there, a substrate of surrealism throughout; and a degeneration into wishful thinking that may, in fact, mask autobiography…

Your Best Omelette Now!

April 23, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

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The pandemic has prompted the adoption of all sorts of unusual behaviors, such as 1) abandonment of all pretense of screen time limitations, 2) worshiping via Zoom, 3) grown-up podcasters building blanket forts in their closets to mimic the sound studio, 4) shifting from print books to ebooks no matter one’s previous Luddite habits, 5) wearing face masks and homemade ones at that, and finally 6) cooking.

Or at least from what I gather, a lot more people are doing a lot more cooking. This can turn into a whole new species of maladaptive competition—have you fully taken advantage of this precious and irreplaceable time to start your first batch of sourdough, ferment your kombucha, and construct architectonic pastries!?—and it can equally well turn into dreary repetition of the same ol’ same ol’.

Well, to those of you suffering in culinary confinement, I release you from the burden of achieving Great Things in Solitude or acquiring a New and More Wholesome Perspective on Life, the Universe, and Everything, and offer you instead something much better: a fantastic omelette you can make in three and a half minutes…