UNDERNEATH THE BUNKER

[Unequivocally, undeniably and quite obviously one of the best European novels of recent times.... A pretty fine review as well...]

‘A marriage took place; forthwith I was conceived. My birth took place but hours afterwards, to be followed almost immediately by a baptism of fire. In such a way I came to be: a product of the unique chemistry between my many parents, to whom I owe everything. If I could remember their names, I would thank them here. Alas, I cannot. Nevertheless, it must be said that they made me that which I am; that they sacrificed the best of themselves so that I may have all the ounces of life that I do possess.

I have every reason to be joyful.

And yet I feel sad.’

Reading the meritorious opening paragraph of Yoy Ijit’s readily edible novel My Grandmother’s Pudding inevitably reminds me of a sad episode in my own past, the relocation of which I am inclined to believe will go some way to help unfasten the buckles of the subsequent discussion, though it may well be misinterpreted as yet another example of solipsistic criticism. And yet, what is a critic if not someone who is happy to risk misinterpretation? If our species were to spend too much time safeguarding ourselves against ignorance, I doubt that we should ever find the time to pen a single word. And so, without further ado, let us revisit this episode of which I talk.

I am sixteen and, since we are talking of misinterpretations, I take no pain in conceding that this teenage version of myself was well inclined to delusions and misconceptions of the very first order, not least in his belief that he held within his soul the talent to become a great novelist. Indeed, it was on account of this grievous misapprehension that compelled me, against all sense, to enrol on what is now known as a ‘creative writing course’, but was at that time no more than a poorly subscribed evening class inspiringly titled ‘Creating fiction’. The teacher of this class was a man with excessively long hair and an equally extraordinary propensity for writerly optimism. Upon my first lesson, I was taught numerous dictums, which I have long since abandoned: ‘words are your friends’, ‘nothing is sacred’, ‘always look at things from every possible angle’ and ‘anything goes’. This last one was the teacher’s particular favourite, though his unbending allegiance to it clearly put a strain on various aspects of his instruction, not least his marking system. Having taught us that there were no wrongs – any approach, even a poorly planned one, was viable – he found himself unable to comment on work with anything other than praise. ‘I love the deliberate clumsiness of your semi-colon usage’ he wrote at the conclusion of one of my early works, before adding the obligatory ‘A’ grade. And I was not alone. After the completion of six assignments, there was not yet a pupil in the eight strong class that had dropped below the ‘A’ grade. We began to wonder what it would take to displease a man who claimed that ‘anything could be literature’.

I soon found out – though unlike many of my fellow pupils, I must admit that I was not trying to lower my grade. On the contrary, having received so few good grades at school, I was raking up these rich pickings. Not only that, but I also felt that I was progressing as a writer, achieving a greater level of brilliance with each new work. But like my ex-wife’s crystal glass sculpture this confidence was easily shattered when I became the first (and possibly the last) ever pupil to receive a D grade from the easiest-to-please teacher this world has ever seen.

What might I have done to deserve this? Had I taken too much of a liberty with these friendly words? Had I stretched progressive literature beyond the pale? Was I pioneering a form of writing that made even the long-haired liberals tremble in their generously fitted garments?

Hardly. All that I had done was to write a story from the perspective of a dog. Other than that, I had followed tradition in my story-telling techniques. Yet the error was clearly in the choice of perspective. ‘I support all forms of literature’ wrote the teacher at the foot of my tale, ‘But I will not stand for this’. I chose not to quibble over his hypocrisy, but I was keen for a further explanation, which he was not unhappy to supply.

‘Please, please, please, unless you are writing a story for a child under the age of five, do not choose to write your story from the perspective of an animal’ he told the class at the beginning of the next lesson. I raised a tentative hand and presented what I supposed was evidence for the defence, pointing out that highly regarded figures such as Chekhov, Kipling, Kafka and O Henry had all written from the viewpoint of animals. ‘Kipling writes for children,’ answered the teacher – ‘and though the other three were fine writers, you need only to read the examples of which you speak you understand what I am talking about. Trust me, it isn’t worth it. As a vaguely interesting exercise in style, it may be tolerated. But no self-respecting author should allow anyone to read the results of such an exercise – and God help them if they do’.

Twenty years later, I wondered whether or not the man was right and decided, after some thought, that he most definitely was. Almost without exception, I have no problem with his assessment that stories written from a specifically non-human viewpoints ought not to be seen as anything other than pointless exercises and challenge any critic to find an example of a work that denies such an evaluation, other than the one which I hold in my hands at present.

It takes a writer of immense talent to pull off this trickiest of tricks. I was a writer of no talent whatsoever (when it came to fiction that is) and yet my failure was no less horrific than those of more capable story-tellers. This leads me to the conclusion that the task ought never to be considered, that is unless you are a middle-aged Latvian farmer’s son, like the incomparable Yoy Ijit, whose pudding-centred masterpiece I shall now proceed to savour.

Who would have supposed that a novel written from the first person perspective of a pudding (a cherry crumble, to be more accurate) would prove to be so endearing, so worthy of critical praise; as aesthetically succulent as its central character? Who would even have supposed that it might have worked, even for a chapter, let alone three hundred or so pages? Even when one accepts the fact that Ijit uses the pudding viewpoint as a displacement device through which to understand the emotions of a very human soul, there is no doubting that he does not yet do his dessert justice. For whatever end this pudding is a means, you cannot deny that it lives and breathes (in a manner of speaking) in-between. If it is indeed a device, Ijit does not go about it lightly with the knowing wink of the postmodernist or the sombre irony of the poststructuralist. Instead, though he may go on to use it in a manner unbefitting its pudding status, he starts by accepting it for what it is. A cherry crumble.

How does a novelist go about imagining the inner life of a cherry crumble? I cannot even begin to guess how. Therefore, let us leave this ‘how’ behind, and move on to more important words: namely ‘what’ and ‘why’.

What is this pudding, what is it doing and what does it offer readers in terms of experience?

The pudding is – need I repeat it – a cherry crumble. It lives in the fridge in the kitchen of a Latvian farmhouse, having been lovingly made by an elderly lady who lives in this house. However, this is a dessert in a quandary, as the last line of the opening quote attests – ‘And yet I feel sad’. What plausible reason can a pudding have for experiencing such melancholy? The answer is: it exists. This is not to say that all puddings are suicidal from the moment of their birth, but that they nonetheless pride themselves on having a short life which, if exceeded, inevitably leads to their feeling unwanted. A pudding has a purpose: it is made to be consumed. If, after a certain date, it has not been consumed, it naturally begins to question itself: am I a bad pudding? Do I taste bad? What have I done to deserve this terrible fate? Why do I really exist?

It is in the midst of such philosophical questioning that we join Yoy Ijit’s pudding; almost three days after the date on which, in the natural order of things, it ought to have been eaten (having now passed optimum freshness). These are difficult times for unwanted puddings and, unsurprisingly, this one feels the strain. Every time the fridge door opens, it prepares itself for honourable sacrifice; every time the fridge door closes again, it feels immense disappointment. However, the pudding, as well as having a crunchy oaty skin and a cherry soaked heart, also possesses the ability to think through things logically. The question it sets itself is simple: why have I not been eaten? Where does the blame lie?

Confident pudding as it is (it is not yet middle-aged, as puddings go) it soon decides that the blame cannot yet lie with itself, for there is no good reason why it should not have been eaten in its current state. ‘I am tasty enough – I can see that from here’ states the pudding proudly. In which case, the problem must lie in the land outside of the fridge.

For a chapter or two, the story now lurches into crime thriller territory as the pudding assumes the role of a detective, picking up as many clues as it can in those brief moments when the fridge door opens. The first clue it picks up is the most important. Where is the elderly lady? Having been mixed and raised by this personage, the pudding has not seen her since. The house, it seems, has now only three inhabitants: a middle aged man and woman and a small boy: a rather gloomy lot who give scant attention to the pudding. This seems on the one hand odd; on the other, the pudding seems unsurprised. In the next chapter, we discover why this is.

Puddings clearly do not function quite like human beings; they are invariably of a slightly lesser intellect, and therefore struggle sometimes with concepts such as memory. It is for this reason, one assumes, that the pudding in this story takes so much time to remember a vital incident from its past: one which fully explains the absence of the elderly lady. The incident (as remembered by the pudding) is as follows: Having put the finishing touches to her crumble, the old lady places it on the top shelf on the refrigerator and, mistakenly leaving the door to this contraption open, retires to the sink to wash up a colander, whereupon she is disturbed by a stranger who has just entered the kitchen and now proceeds to attack the lady with a preposterously sharp kitchen knife, producing from her what the pudding describes as ‘fountains of cherry juice’.

Exactly what this incident from the past means, the pudding does not seem too sure, for its conception of death is wound up with that of consumption, which does not appear to have occurred in this case, the stranger having left the woman’s body intact. Nevertheless, this wily dessert suspects that this episode maybe holds the key as to why it hasn’t been eaten. And it is right to think so.

It is worth saying at this juncture that this last passage, in which the pudding describes the violent massacre of the elderly lady, is quite possibly one of the most masterful passages in the recent history of European literature. One can only wonder how it walks the tightrope between gratuitous brutality and pure comedy, before being forced accept that it quite simply does, and we should marvel at it or, if we have ever tried to write fiction ourselves, try hard to restrain the jealously that bubbles like a hot crumble within us.

Meanwhile, the story of My Grandmother’s Pudding begins to open up. On the night after the day in which the pudding recounts the death of the old woman, it finds itself caught up, quite literally, in the story of a hitherto ignored character: the small boy. Sometime in the middle of the night, this boy opens the door of the fridge and sits on the floor outside of it, using its light as a torch through which to examine the contents of a small brown notebook he is cradling. It transpires that the boy is not reading from the notebook; rather, he is writing words in it. Indeed, he is writing a story, the title of which is, of course, My Grandmother’s Pudding. What is in this story? Yoy Ijit is too good a writer to tell us that so soon: he gives us the title, and leaves it at that, returning forthwith to the pudding, who watches the boy for the next hour, at which point the boy shuts the notebook and closes the fridge door.

The next day is much the same as the day before. The pudding remains uneaten and, at night, the boy uses the light of the fridge to write words into his notebook. Again, we are not permitted to glimpse which words these are, though we are told that he writes nine pages worth, which is, interestingly, exactly the same amount of pages as the very chapter in which this occurs. The reader is now inclined to speculate as to who is in control of this story: the pudding, or the boy. And the answer to this query is, no doubt, both. The story belongs to the boy, but it is faithfully transmitted through the eyes of the pudding, in language that we might not suppose a young boy to use (‘forthwith I was conceived’). The pudding has a life of its own, but it contains a memory that surely belongs to the boy: that of the woman being butchered by the stranger with the kitchen knife. A memory which the boy seems to have given over to the pudding, afraid of keeping it to himself, though obliquely claiming it through the story which he is writing (which must be the same, we think, as that which we are reading).

Like the very best puddings, this novel contains layers, each more succulent than the last. There is the story of the pudding; the connections between the story of the boy and the story of the pudding and, ultimately, the connections between the stories of boy, pudding and mankind. The turmoil of the refrigerated pudding cannot help but remind me of written accounts of exiled Russians in that other refrigerator: Siberia. Similarly, the essential plight of the pudding holds a universal message: it is one of someone or something that has come into the world at precisely the wrong moment and has had to experience tragedy at the very beginning of its life. As for the pudding, so too for the young boy. And as the book goes on, the bond between these two becomes more evident. Though the pudding does not respond emotionally to the horrific sight that it has witnessed, it is suffering in a different way: by the simple fact that, after a week or so, it is still uneaten and, to its great shame, is now showing the first signs of mould. The boy shows no such physical damage, but he is evidently struggling emotionally: there is mould not on his body, but on his soul.

As one nears the conclusion of My Grandmother’s Pudding, it is difficult for the reader not to prepare oneself for disaster. The mould on the pudding is steadily growing; so too the depression of the young boy, which is compared on several occasions with the relative well-being of the other members of the household, his mother and father. Having had to come to terms with the brutal murder of his grandmother, they could not be said to be exactly emotionally stable, but unlike the boy (we presume) they did not have to witness the murder firsthand. What is more, they are adults and are therefore at least better equipped to deal with such a tragedy.

The mould continues to rise. The pudding, whose powers of thought are decreasing as the days go by, sees the boy pour vodka into cans of lemonade, which he puts in the door of the fridge and regularly consumes. Unlikely as it may seem that a boy of six or seven might become an alcoholic unbeknownst to his parents’; this does appear to be happening. Everything is slowly rotting. A depressing denouement appears to be inevitable.

In the hands of any other European writer – collectively the most depressed group of people in the universe – this might be so. Yet, like the very best puddings, this novel contains a fruity surprise, in the shape of a happy ending. And the principle engineer of this improbable finale is the story itself (or at least, the story within the story).

Having continued to sneak from his room at night and write his story by the light of the open fridge, the boy is finally caught in the act by his father, who seizes the brown notebook and begins to read, as we have read ourselves, the story of My Grandmother’s Pudding. Crucially, however, the pudding (from whose perspective we continue to see things) does not show us the father’s response to this story. The fridge door is closed before such a thing is allowed to happen. Nevertheless, the climatic events of the following morning suggest that this response was positive: that the secret that the boy has been keeping to himself (albeit sharing it with a pudding) has now been released into the world, lightening the burden on the boy’s troubled soul. And now the pudding, whose experience has mimicked that of the boy’s throughout the story, looks to sure to benefit as well. In the final uplifting chapter, this takes place: the pudding is ceremoniously lifted out of the fridge by the boy, and placed on the doorstep of the house in the cool spring morning light, where it is duly eaten by the next-door neighbour’s dog.

Though the violent ‘death’ of this pudding – the description of which is not unlike that of the elderly lady’s death – may seem a negative note on which to end the story, it is certainly not. Being eaten is not a sad ending for the pudding, but an exceedingly blissful one. This is what the pudding has been yearning for since its birth. Its one fear throughout the book is that it will decompose; by being eaten, it gains a victory over the mould that was threatening to destroy it by other means.

As for the little boy, we assume that he too is relieved at the end of this novel; that he has metaphorically deposed the mould formations created by the spectacle of his grandmother’s death and that through both the story-writing process with which he has been involved and the contact between his story and the outside world (through his father) he has been absolved from any feelings of guilt and remorse.

Maintaining an atmosphere of dread throughout, My Grandmother’s Pudding signs off in a heartening mood; leaving a sweet taste in the mouth that relates beautifully to the experience of a long meal whose opening courses were stuffed with sour and spicy foodstuffs, but whose dessert brings sugary succour. I do not doubt that this was intended: Yoy Ijit is not a writer who achieves things by mistake. Like the master chef, he relies on the perfect marriage of the best ingredients – and on taking calculated risks, without the slightest fear of them backfiring. As my creative writing teacher realised all those years ago, there are certain things that even the most intelligent writers should steer clear of. In any other writer’s hands, a story written from the point of view of a pudding would turn sour: would boil over the pan, or burn itself to a crisp. But Ijit leaves his creation in the oven for exactly the right time, burning no ones hands, and in this way he proves a clear exception to the teacher’s otherwise prudent rule.

My Grandmother’s Pudding is a book about families, about corrupted youth, about growing old, about dealing with problems, about dealing with life. It is also the only novel I know that is written from the perspective of a pudding. Though I cannot pretend to know what it is like to be a pudding, I must say that am utterly convinced by this version of events. Regardless of whether or not the pudding is symbolic; a device through which the boy communicates his feelings (which it is, I am sure); the fact remains that Yoy Ijit does not let ideas block the mechanics of the perspective. That is to say, he never fails to do the pudding justice as an object on its own. This is where many other writers have failed in their use of inanimate objects as symbols for animate ones: they go about their task carelessly, knowing that any failure to do the object justice might be excused on account of its symbolic potential. For this achievement alone, Ijit’s novel deserves the very highest praise.

Review by Caspar Nietcher

Further Reading:

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