The White Rose: a novel by B Traven

After reading this I have only one Traven novel yet to read. Actually two, but his final novel that came some years after the others is not yet translated to English and I don’t read German. I clearly really like his stuff.

The White Rose is a study in contrasting worldviews. The main players, symbols of their classes, are an indigenous man who through family tradition holds the title to a large Mexican hacienda. This is presented as more of a long standing commune rather than a feudal set up. It’s as if the egalitarian, sharing, roots from hunter-gatherer times have somehow survived in this instance into a stable, and atypically fair, agricultural system. Things are shared and it is taken as a given that the title holding family has a duty to the other families as caretakers of the property. They are not seen as winners entitled to profit from this ownership of things that everyone shares. All the people are very close to the land.
They are of the land, the human creatures who emerge from the land, live by it, and return to it in constant cycles of renewal.

The contrasting entity is a USA businessman who has maneuvered himself into a position of enormous power heading an international oil company. He is portrayed in a way that highlights his need for status among his peers. Part of his aura involves his outside women and their needs. The fact that he has outside of marriage women is seen as a positive status symbol among the board members of his corporation. He has to procure symbols of wealth for his main lover. She wants a nice car, but then it needs a garage, but the garage must be attached to a house and not an ordinary house, a mansion. So our oil man has to go through a lot of money for this stuff. I also want to mention that the woman is shown as being more intelligent, and better educated than her lover. She is not a dumb airhead floozy like we see often in movies about this sort of situation, like in Citizen Kane. The big time businessman is not at all involved in the land, other people take care of all that. He is a modern North American. Except he needs land for drilling oil.

And he needs the hacienda, Rosa Blanca, The White Rose.

There is the contrast and the conflict of the novel.

The industrialist is driven by emotions: Fear, Greed, how others see him.
The indian is contained in love for the land and the people and things from it and the wish to see it go on for the sake of the people of the past who took care of it for the people of the present. They must care for it to assure the survival of those to come.

In The White Rose Traven approaches storytelling devices of mystery and suspense, the day just might be saved. It was good to hope that the miserable inevitable might somehow, through law, caring people, not occur.

Although it is clear where Traven’s heart lies in the conflict, his style is not particularly agitprop. He is not rallying comrades behind a particular banner. He is rather coolly showing the situation from various sides. There is no feeling of soft peddling the issues. He describes in detail what is going on rather matter of factly no matter how horrible, cruel, unjust, or plain nasty, that might be.

I like this tone. I feel I am asked to go along and look through his eyes rather than be verbally rhetorically persuaded. I read him with a recurring sarcastic edge that I think he intended.

B Traven was an outsider. The man who only wanted to be known for the work was not a Mexican and although distorting whatever his real biography was with USA root claims, he was not an American. Perhaps witnessing first hand events in German in the early part of the 20th Century and then landing in Mexico in the mid 1920s and absorbing that world, doesn’t put one in a mind that “if just this or that happened all would finally be well”.

He presents people who have lived a certain way for many years being suddenly confronted and challenged by international modernity, the machine that rode the rails that conquered Norte was on the next little  stop in it’s global voyage, and gathering endless momentum.

The book is from 1929. Surely I would look upon it as quaint and a period piece, if he offered me an easy solution to the complicated intricacies of modern global life that dazzles us with wonders and the endless brutalities that come with it.

We are in uncharted extremely complicated territory and anyone who is offering an answer to making things better, like the old days, or some glowing vision, ought to be viewed with suspicion.
Nobody knows what to do.

By Blood: A novel by Ellen Ullman

This is an unusual concept novel. We have a first person narrator who in the course of the story reveals very little about himself other than being from somewhere other than the San Francisco setting.  He also has some problem in the past.

He rents an office. Next door is a head doctor, a psychiatrist or psychologist. One patient doesn’t like the white noise machine that is used to keep the sessions private. This enables our narrator to overhear and he gets very attached to what he is hearing.

The skill of the storytelling prose allows one to suspend natural disbelief in the situation and it’s duration.

The novel is also about issues of adoption and extreme adoption in this case coming out of the events of the Nazi holocaust, exile, and extermination of the Jewish people. While telling that fictional story Ullman addresses actual historical happenings in the period just after WWII, the liberation of concentration camps, and the impulses and personalities of Zionism leading to the establishment of Israel.

The novel is a personal story in the setting of these past earth shaking events. It is a period piece written in 2012 but set in the 1970s.

It flows nicely. Somewhat of a slow suspense piece which holds interest.

I came to Ullman via seeing her interviewed about her new memoir on Booktv Cpsan 2.