‘When I stepped out, it was then – and only then – I saw the sky. Not before. Not in the master bedroom. Not in the bathroom. Not in that poor-excuse-for-a-kitchen. And certainly not in the upper room – as promised. Allow me to make my position clearer. The way I see it (or the way I didn’t see it) is this: from the east wall window the view is dominated by rooftops. In the top half of this window a small portion of skyscape is made available, but it is no more than a segment, which must not be permitted to represent the whole. From the west wall window, a charming landscape is visible; but it is mountains – and not the sky – that play the leading hand. As for the skylight, I accept that it may once have offered ‘great views of the sky’ but must insist that this is not presently the case. A mixture of dirt, some of it a gracious gift from the anuses of various incontinent birds, has more than obscured the spectacle of the sky that lies waiting patiently behind’ (pg. 3)
One of my favourite books cannot be found in your local bookshop. Nor can it be purchased via the drably wondrous world of the internet (that which offers almost everything you want, but really nothing you need). It is instead a unique work, co-authored by fourteen simple shop assistants. And it came to me – into my dear yet flaky hands – by even simpler means. I picked it up one day by the counter of a small boutique on the outskirts of Athens, thinking it to be a complimentary leaflet of some sort (oh all right, I admit it, I plain stole it). But as it has no appreciable value (certainly it was not for sale) I consider my crime to have been amongst the more diminutive of the order. It’s no more than a notepad, employed (it seems) for various petty tasks: noting down telephone orders, making sketches when bored, writing silly poems, spreading gossip, cataloguing ‘inspiring’ quotes etc. Despite this, I find it endlessly fascinating. But then that kind of thing has always shaken my water-bound vessel.
The Albanians have a good phrase for this: ‘rischtina koka mocacé zech’ – which roughly translates as ‘your nose is forever dangling over other dog’s dinners’. It is a saying that frequently follows conversations in which I reveal to mildly shocked audiences my habit of transcribing the dialogue I overhear on the train, or the enthusiasm with which I pore over the sort of leaflets/manifestos/advertisements from which most sane people flee. I am thus an irregular literary critic, in that I don’t much like fiction. Or does that make me a regular literary critic? Whatever the answer, I can safely say this: dramatic non-fiction is my thing. I find bus timetables to be substantially more engrossing than Bash-Benver; ticket stubs ten times more titillating than Tanizaki. I have long been of the opinion that high school year books ought to be available to the general public; for all their inanities, they would be far more fascinating than the first novels of so many self-obsessed school-leavers.
Very few novels excite me. A slight tingling in my little toe represents (in metaphorically sexual terms, of course) the greatest amount of stimulation I have ever received from a novel – and that may as well be excused by the misbehaviour of a pair of errant nail-clippers. For the thing is; I find it almost impossible to overcome the figurative miasma of manufacture, or aura of falsity that hangs, like some sad hungry mongrel, around the margins of fiction. Suspend your disbelief, they say, but how can you? One might as well withdraw from the very concept of reality itself. For to me, fiction can never be anything other than fiction. How can you ignore it? The author’s greasy thumbprints smudge each and every sentence. To me, a novelist’s work resembles a dirty great lump of plasticine dropped in a student kitchen: a core of honesty covered in the detestable fluff and dust of fictional artifice – covered in such a way that you could never pick the muck out, however much you tried (plasticine is like that). This core of honesty of which I talk begs the question – why write fiction in the first place? Baring in mind the fact that most novelists are doing no more than re-jigging non-fictional elements; self-consciously reordering their own autobiographies, one wonders why we don’t all stop the pretence, ignore the fear that no one would care if they knew it was real (which they wouldn’t, but then they don’t anyway, so what the hey) and get on with writing non-fiction. Maybe it has something to do with the business of libel. In this way, modern literature is shaped by law – and the fear of it. Just look at Lucia Raus.
Court case pending, I am hardly in the position to sum up the situation in which Miss Raus finds herself; rest assured, the circumstances are not new. She has written a novel, marketed as a work of fiction, and she is being sued by someone who feels that they are too closely portrayed within its pages. This has confirmed the suspicions of many critics, who long thought that the novel in question, When I Stepped Out, It Was Then I Saw The Sky (hitherto referred to as When I Stepped Out, It Was Then…) was a work of non-fiction. They may be correct in their thinking – they may not. I for one don’t care. I don’t want my pleasure as a reader to be tarnished by the judgement of some jury in a courthouse. Whilst I agree that Raus might have been better off being open about her methods, the way in which I react to When I Stepped Out, It Was Then… is unlikely to change depending on the result of a law suit. Is it fiction, is it non-fiction? I lean towards the latter, with the merest pinch of the former. In any case, I like it – and that is the emotion most likely to endure.
First things first. What is When I Stepped Out, It Was Then…, or what does it purport to be? It is a novel which takes the form of a rental home log or vistor’s book; one of those weighty plain papered tomes in which tiresome travellers record their impressions of the house in which they have stayed, leaving tips for potential tourists and amusing the world with their intermediate-level regional wit and wisdom. I always supposed them to be a product of American or British society, resonating in particular with the middle classes, who like nothing better than to prove to everyone that they really do have nothing of any use to say to anyone (or that future generations might be interested in the fact that they once spent a night in a particular bed). Raus, however, appears to prove that even in Albania the guest book tradition is going strong; providing a refuge for failed writers and pathological bores all across Eastern Europe. And for all its faults, it makes undeniably good reading at its best – of which When I Stepped Out, It Was Then… a good example; containing enough structure for it to work as an ongoing narrative and enough digressive material for it to retain an impression of honesty missing from most modern novels. Whether or not this is because Raus has taken a real guest book and cunningly edited it, I do not like to guess. If we only allow ourselves to be directed by the raw material above the meagre rumours, we will soon discover that it does not really matter.
No. 23 Zogha Street is the location of the house in which Raus’ book belongs, in a small town not far from Albania’s capital Tirana. In the owner’s introduction to the property, the boast is made that the top floor offers ‘great views of the sky’. This, as you will have already noticed, leads to the comment from which the book’s title is taken (quoted above) in which one man seeks to prove that these great views remain inaccessible until one steps outside the front door. This man, as it happens, is also the principal figure in the book, reappearing every few months or so, gradually revealing different aspects of his intriguing personality. The man’s name is Lucius; a masculine version of the author’s name, inviting the possibility that he is some kind of neurotic version of Raus. Central to Lucius, after all, is the fact that though he complains bitterly after every visit, he keeps coming back – mirroring many writers’ attitudes to their own unfortunate craft. Ungraciously pedantic, he is in reality a lazy idealist, forever fond of pointing out problems which he remains reluctant to solve. Fortunately, some kind of salvation does await him at the close of the book, when he finally takes it upon himself to clear the crap of the top floor skylight and glimpse the square of sky that was so dearly missed.
Positive denouements are, however, a thankfully rare commodity in When I Stepped Out, It Was Then…. If they weren’t, after all, I wouldn’t have been in the position to call it an honest work. Most characters are delicately pitched in-between the one-sided and the stubbornly-resistant-to-change, entering the stage only briefly before moving on to let other people through. Though these part-timers do not contribute as much to the narrative drive as those who reappear throughout the book, they do provide a commentary on those aspects of the story which are consistent: the character of the house itself, for instance, or of the rat (christened no less than eleven times) that sometimes makes an appearance in the kitchen cupboard at night. Added to this are a collection of allusions to local happening, including: a complicated murder case, mentioned in the first letter by Lucius and taken up at various points later on, before disappearing without trace in the second half of the book, to be replaced by discussion of a wrestling championship (on the merits of which visitors are notably divided). There is also the age-old question of what-is-going-on-next-door: an alternative detective story, based around ‘ambiguous conversations partially overheard’ and ‘soft atonal whistling’ – a story which never develops beyond over-sensational gossip. All of these, however, give Raus the chance to explore the many different ways in which people can react to the same event, which leads, as all tragic misinterpretations inevitably do, to a generous helping of comedy.
It isn’t all laughs though. The story of one of the best comic characters, the over-effusive Enver, has a sharp sting in its tail. In many ways, Enver is Lucius’s opposite, loving everything the latter pretends to hate, and discussing it at length, despite a severe handicap in the way of adjectives (everything he comes across is ‘splendid!’’). Naïve and hopelessly limited as a writer, we don’t expect that he will ever break his clownish mould. Then comes the entry one day in which he notes that his wife (referred to as ‘looking splendid’ on many many occasions) has recently died. The news is broken in relatively basic terms and is by no means squeezed for sentiment. It is in fact the two entries that follow which seal Enver’s heroic exit, finishing with his last ever entry, in which he states that he will not be returning to the house, on account of the memories. In the last line, his favourite word reappears, in a sad new guise: ‘this is not splendid’, he writes. It was at this juncture that my handkerchief made the journey from my pocket to the bridge of my nose, ready to collect a tear that never quite came (but would have, I’m sure, were I not a careless cynic).
The other regular guests (and ideas) are worth dealing with in passing. There is Nina, the female playwright who keeps returning, but always seems to be working on the same scene of the same play. She is obsessed with finding ‘inspiration’; less interested in using it. There is Mr. H, a rather taciturn fellow, whose entries are enigmatic to say the least (‘Eggs can be bought at the market in groups of seven or eight’ is amongst the best of them). Then there are a glut of stag and hen parties (or ‘eglütz vicco-shevéric’ as the Albanians say) each hosted by different people, but all of them going disastrously wrong in their own particular way (my favourite is the one involving the onion hoe and the parsnip). Last but not least there is the Retecevic family, whose sons never leave the house without breaking something, but whose parents continue to be deluded by the idea that their rowdiness is ‘mere misplaced enthusiasm’. Not until the second half of the book do we discover that these terrible boys also have a sister, who takes over the job of writing in the guest book and who is, in her way, an even worse prospect than her maddening siblings. Violent and destructive she is not, but snobby she is – and when it comes to annoying things, a snobby fifteen year old girl really does take (and readily consume) the biscuit. After reading her entries (full of very dull analysis of the indigenous clothes shops) one long for her pathetic parents to reappear; instead of which her brothers do, turning out to be rather more amusing than you might expect. Their comment on St. Hilda’s (‘The old church is horrid and smells of moths poo and girls feet’) is a typically penetrating example of their subtle prose style (not to mention a rather accurate description of many old Albanian churches).
St. Hilda’s church is one of many buildings which feature heavily throughout the book. Most of the others are restaurants where our generally well-off (though Raus is always keen to explore the line between the lower middle and upper lower class) holidayers dine. Their changing fortunes are always fun to chart, as successive visitors either damn or praise the establishment, usually based on a single meal. One such place – ‘The Pickled Finger’ (named after a famous Albanian folk story) – suffers more than most, with the exception of those nights when Enver graces a table and enjoys a ‘splendid fish, served with splendid sauce’. After Enver’s disappearance, it too vanishes, to be replaced by a Turkish restaurant, whose dancing girls reveal a little more than one Mrs Penatseivic (from Macedonia) was expecting. This leads to a few entries which take up issues dealt with in others, one of many instances in which visitors comment not only on their own experience but on their perception of other people’s as well. On these occasions, the noble art of the guest book finds itself bombarded by a kind of internet chat-room mentality. Not that it was ever more than this, of course, but its attempt to pretend that it is has always been part of its attraction. Ironically, there is an atmosphere of honesty to the airs and graces under which guest book writers labour that I find lacking in so-called candid or casual fiction.
Regardless of whether or not it has been entirely, partially, or barely even fabricated, When I Stepped Out, It Was Then… proves that – as a model for a novel – the guest or logbook offers a more than plausible alternative, with its a steady stream of well-drawn characters flowing around a single well-chosen location. For this, I suppose, is the real hero of the novel: the house itself – No. 32, Zogha Street. In this sense, the book comes close to being an exploration of space and the way that different humans interact with it. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that many of the critics working on the De Roquet rooms are also interested in Raus’s work, and (bearing in mind the fact that I think the work of de Roquet to be highly overrated) I look forward to an intelligent comparison of the two. To say that I also look forward to more ‘guest book novels’ would be a lie. As much as I enjoy When I Stepped Out, It Was Then…, I fear that a tide of similar works would only depress me, especially if the authors in question lacked the quality redolent in Raus’s work; a quality that, as you will know, I can only associate with the best non-fiction (which, as you will also know by now, it may or may not actually be).
I was planning to close my review by suggesting that this was the perfect book for nosey people. Having come to the conclusion that pretty much all readers fall into this camp, however, I feel that I should take my leave in some other way. Might there not be some illuminating supposition to be derived from Raus’s depiction of various Albanian (and sometimes foreign) characters; some shrewd comment concerning (and uniting) the parade of eccentric people who file in and out of a single house? If there is, it is no more than the kind of conclusion you might find in any of those insipid yet magnificently entertaining examples of non-fiction which I have mentioned over the course of this review. In my little shop notebook, there is in fact the very quote for this occasion: one which oozes the wisdom of a baked cod, whilst preserving the sincerity of the poor person who first noted in down (possibly in the earnest belief that it made sense). Whether or not they were deluded is beside the point. For all its faults, I am far too charmed by the phrase to overlook it. So here it is, in gloriously clichéd Technicolor – the splendid summation of When I Stepped Out, It Was Then I Saw The Sky : ‘People are different, but in the same way’.
Review by Joy de Vejean.
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