Zone

by cuntio belaparte jk jk i am sorry

I’m really proud of how many substacks I’ve drafted but never sent and this was one of them, about Mathias Enard’s Zone, which I am now coming back to because it just happened to my dear old Dad: he got trapped in Israel during the first days of the US war on Iran, had to escape to Cyprus on a yacht—a 36-hour voyage by sea, some of it literally sailing; he is, as I write, on a plane to Chicago from Belgrade. At night, from the deck of the yacht, on the crystal-still Mediterranean, in the light of the full moon even, he watched an Iranian missile get shot down, and an Israeli missile launched in return. My father, as far as I know, does not romanticize war or the 20th century, he’s never killed anyone or been tortured or anything like that—although he did once get attacked by a schizoid guy with a knife in front of an Indian restaurant and, a few other times, held up at gunpoint while delivering pizza—but I still worry that it’s only out of ironic detachment that he gets embroiled in these half-adventures, when really, he would be more self-actualized if he actually got to become a spy and/or fight in a war. He keeps getting so close. Not that I mean to endorse any of this. I just don’t know what to think of it.

The men it actually happens to, or rather, the men who write about them, would love to say “no”; they write these intense books precisely about the brutal meaninglessness of evil, atrocity, and etc. This has something to do with the malign magic of narrative: how boring and disconnected life is until you put it in sentences, then you are suddenly enraptured by that same nothingness, like a monkey. Or maybe it’s only fun when you are the victim of evil—by fun, I mean meaningful, like, only victimhood provides adequate purpose. These books about the unsatisfying nature of being half-evil have something of this; I am talking about Zone, I am also talking about Curzio Malaparte, particularly Kaputt and The Skin, which ultimately romanticize the WW2 perpetrators using, I think, the author’s own guilty conscience. That’s how I read him. To finish my thought: even the people who commit crimes write because they become, in their own eyes, a kind of victim. And don’t you wish that we had a Malaparte of Mar-a-Lago. I really liked the essay about him in a recent NYRB. In fact I was reading it at a dive bar in New Orleans, in a black Issey Miyake top, being particularly forbidding and glamorous, I thought, (which I was, needless to say, doing ironically), while I was waiting for a crusty-ish individual I had been briefly involved with in my late 20s, only to find myself most brutally mid-life mogged: he showed up on a motorcycle.

This is me: the embarrassing edgelord flirtily skirting the aestheticization of—what a stupid word this is here—evil.

*

When I was little, like ten years old, I met a psychologist, he had a beard and a tweed suit, the only respectable-looking adult I ever saw in my little Glenview, and one day, I was just sitting and weeping in class, and I demanded to see him, and when I saw him, I told him that I was sad about Anne Frank and everything else that happened in the twentieth century, like, you start thinking about one class of victims, and then another comes up, it was overwhelming me. Is this a Euro emotion? Is there an American equivalent? I forgot about this and it feels really dramatic and fake, it embarrasses me, this and my teenage love of Tarkovsky (The Mirror, of course), but now I am reading Zone by Mathias Enard and it’s making me think that it’s a real feeling.

Zone isn’t a book I would recommend to everyone, or really, I’m only trying to get Mark to read it because it feels like it might feed the wonderful thing he is writing (update on this: Mark didn’t like it :)). It isn’t funny and the parts that are violent are really unpleasant and I don’t want to read them at all. But it’s helping me see something: usually, books about the scope of European history are about World War 2, and I’ve always thought that I like WW2 books because of my grotesque fascination with Nazis, but Zone gives me the same feeling while being centered on Middle Eastern and Balkan conflicts. It has shown me something I’ve known for a while, but maybe forgotten, which is that I have a kind of erotic obsession with “the 20th century,” by which I mean the 20th century in Europe. It puts me into a swoon; I love laying helpless before “the winds of history,” the inevitable, repeating tragedy, the mirrored horrors of totalitarianism, people having to hide in close quarters with their concentrated, painfully pure souls, just a hit of one and it’ll kill you, etc. It’s a feeling people describe as “oceanic,” and I have found that it is not something that a lot of people, maybe especially Americans, who had their own century, share. (Update on this: I can’t take reading about contemporary American concentration camps or the Israeli genocide. Definitely grotesque stuff being described here—worthy of further investigation).

I have a number of favorite WW2 books, but the first ones that come to my mind are Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte and Jakov Lind’s Soul of Wood. It’s funny to narrow it down to these two somehow, these are the ones that come up spontaneously, since, as John Mulaney of all people says, “most books are about WW2,” but they capture what I like best in this genre, sado-masochistic irony and psychedelic but deadpan abjection. Both books take the material and do too much with it in a way that borders on unethical. Of the two, Kaputt captures what I want to write about here, strumming the strings of “grand-scale historical tragedy,” but Malaparte is more invested in his image than he is in the sentimental-for-sentimental’s sake stuff that I’m such a sucker for.

Zone is really perfect because it’s about a man who keeps “getting swept up” or is helpless to resist getting swept up in participating in historical atrocities, who becomes obsessed with the ways in which they are interconnected, and while this makes his life totally meaningless, since he is not only a perpetrator but a tiny cog in a machine, it is also the only thing he cares about; he cannot live as a private citizen, he has to kill people and spy on them, and, more importantly, he has to be around other informants and perpetrators. He is addicted to getting the story because the meaningless of the story itself is what hurts the most, which is what makes it more powerful emotionally than any mundane attachment. I have always had a kind of anti-intellectual conviction that the only thing that it is possible to care about is love and that I only want to read books with either murder or romance in them, since they are the same, but I guess large-scale annihilation is the equivalent of divine love, the sublime, God’s love is best represented through smiting and hell etc. This is the way that I would say that one is not allowed to talk and Zone keeps it specific, direct, grounded but this is the vein that it taps, and I am gorging myself on that blood. If you like, Zone is a critique of the obscenity and flamboyant irrelevance of this very emotion.