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A review by adam_mcphee
Palę Paryż/Palę Moskwę by Paul Morand, Bruno Jasieński
5.0
When life gives you test tubes, head for the water treatment plant.
Starts off like the social realism down-and-out type stuff from Orwell or Celine or whoever, but then goes off the wall when a plague reduces 1920s Paris into a bunch of competing factions: communists, the police, Chinese, Jews, Anglo-Americans, White Russians, all willing to go to extreme lengths for the last scrap of bread in the cordoned city.
If I can be vulgar for a paragraph: this is what zombie movies aspire to and never reach. Or think of it as like a 1920s version of The Purge, but one that doesn't try to hide its ideology or sympathies.
It's told in the montage style that was popular in Soviet cinema at the time, and it rules, especially as the technique amps up towards the end of the novel when the plague has been replaced with famine and the world has written Paris off for dead.
That radio crackle is going to stick with me for a long time yet.
Leaning on the stone balustrade, P’an Tsiang-kuei spoke in a measured and passionless voice:
“Asian-European antagonism, a subject on which your scholars have scribbled whole volumes, searching for its origins in the depths of racial and religious differences, plays tself out entirely on the surface of everyday economics and class struggle. Your science, of which you are so proud and which we travel here to study, is not a system of tools to help man conquer nature, but rather to help Europe conquer non-Europe, to exploit weaker continents. This is why we despise your Europe and why we come here to study you so fervently. Only by mastering the achievements of your science will we be able to shed the yoke of your oppression. Your bourgeois Europe, expatiating far and wide on your cultural self-sufficiency, is no more than a small parasite latched onto the western flank of Asia’s gigantic body, sucking its juices dry. It is we, planting our rice and growing cotton and tea, who are – along with your own proletariat – the real, though indirect, creators of your culture. Its complex aroma, spreading the sweat of your workers and peasants all around the world, mingles with the smell of the Chinese coolie’s sweat.
“But today the tides are turning. Your gluttonous Europe is croaking like a mare who has broken its leg before the final hurdle. It’s croaking without having swallowed everything down, its gullet clogged from the greedy mouthfuls it’s taken. It’s no accident that it’s being killed off by the plague, an old friend of ours in Asia. The stomach of European capitalism has found Asia indigestible.
“How sweet it is to watch the death of your enemy, sneaking up behind him, to see miniature reflections of your face in his terror-dilated pupils. I saw one of your plague victims. He was practically blue when the health service carried him out of his house. When they wanted to put him into a vehicle with other people, he burst out screaming: ‘You’re not putting me in there! Those people are infested!’ They had to use force. He thrashed, kicked and bit, and when he was finally pushed inside and the doors were bolted behind him, he suddenly turned blue and stiff. His fear of death advanced death’s slow progress.
“I looked into those eyes wide with lethal horror, and then I understood that precisely this fear was the engine and the mainspring of your whole vast culture. That dread, that drive to endure at any cost, against the logical inevitability of death, has pushed you to superhuman effort, to carve your faces into such summits as could not be wiped clean by the all-consuming river of time. I also thought that perhaps only with an injection of the serum of European culture could our Asia be torn from its thousand-year coma under the Bodhi Tree of Buddhism. Thus far Europe has only sent us her merchants and her missionaries. Christianity was once a venom Asia inoculated into Europe, a venom that destroyed the rich Roman culture and plunged Europe for many centuries into a barbarian darkness. But Europe proved capable of assimilating even this poison of powerlessness, kineticizing it, sucking out the venom and turning it into a tool of oppression. Today Europe is getting its belated revenge by exporting it back to Asia. Unable to colonize us outright, they want to turn us into a colony of the Vatican. Christ is a salesman, a paid stooge of the profiteers.
“Today, however, it can no longer do us any harm. Europe is dying in its last convulsive spasms. No cordon sanitaire will save it. The plague will surge unstoppably across the whole of the continent when it’s done with Paris. To tell the truth, its meddling in our age-old conflict is entirely superfluous. The absurdity of this intervention would almost convince me of the existence of your god, whose tricks – if we are to believe the authors of the Holy Book – were never exactly distinguished by their excessive intelligence. The years were already numbered for your imperialist Europe one way or another, and there was no need to hurry the conclusion with such extravagance.“Two years from now, on the nameless, abandoned tomb of your rapacious Europe of exploiters, there would have grown a new Europe, a Europe of workers, who would have easily communicated with Asia through the international language of labor.
“The unwelcome intervention of this pointless natural disaster might bring about the death of both Europes in one go: the one that was dying and the one that was yet to be born.
“The old usurer hasn’t even had time to put her last will in order. But the will – though unwritten – still exists. We are its inheritors, along with your own proletariat. Fate has cast us here, to the metropolises of Europe, to tear the keys from its ossifying hands.”
P’an Tsiang-kuei fell silent. For a moment the only thing audible was the splash of water breaking against the base of the pillars supporting the bridge.
What the English pilot saw and reported was so unfathomable that even the tabloid press, which was not known for its adherence to scruples, conveyed it with a heavy dose of skepticism.
Wanting to establish where he was, the pilot had flown at only three hundred feet above the ground. By the time he had realized he was above Paris, it was too late – his curiosity had gotten the better of his caution.
He had flown from the direction of the Bois de Boulogne. There was a southerly wind blowing the fog from the city, so everything was clear as a bell. The Paris that sprawled before his eyes was not burned in the slightest. The buildings, palaces, and monuments – everything seemed to be standing where they had always been, and yet he was also struck by all the changes that had taken place. The first thing the pilot noticed were the countless radio towers soaring above the city. The air was sliced on all sides by an infinity of antenna wires.
Passing the Arc de Triomphe, the pilot flew along the Champs-Elysées. What he saw there defied all probability.
Where once the Place de la Concorde had stretched with a measureless sheet of polished asphalt, from La Madeleine to the Chambre des Députés, from Champs-Elysées to the Tuileries, a meadow of ripe grain now rippled in the gentle southerly wind. This grain was being gathered by mechanized harvesters driven by brawny, tanned men in white undershirts. Men and women dressed in the same light harvesting clothes were nimbly piling the ready sheaves onto a waiting truck. At the edges of the field on all sides, women rested and breast-fed their infants.
Seeing the airplane overhead, the harvesters stopped working, turned their heads upward, and gesticulated wildly.
Flying over the Tuileries Gardens the pilot noticed a colony of a few thousand children playing in identical clothing, smocks and small red caps, like a field of poppies right beside the fields of grain.
Where the Luxembourg Gardens had once sprawled were now rows of cauliflower growing white in the sun in a chessboard of colorful plots, a gigantic vegetable garden.
The pilot was so astonished by what he saw that he left further observations aside and flew a beeline over the city to hurry and share his discovery with his superiors.
... Madeleine, Madeleine!
“... live ... your revolution of workers and pea ... ! Down with the mili ... pitalist ... live ... vil war! Long live Paris, capital of the French Socialist Republic of Soviets!”
Starts off like the social realism down-and-out type stuff from Orwell or Celine or whoever, but then goes off the wall when a plague reduces 1920s Paris into a bunch of competing factions: communists, the police, Chinese, Jews, Anglo-Americans, White Russians, all willing to go to extreme lengths for the last scrap of bread in the cordoned city.
If I can be vulgar for a paragraph: this is what zombie movies aspire to and never reach. Or think of it as like a 1920s version of The Purge, but one that doesn't try to hide its ideology or sympathies.
It's told in the montage style that was popular in Soviet cinema at the time, and it rules, especially as the technique amps up towards the end of the novel when the plague has been replaced with famine and the world has written Paris off for dead.
That radio crackle is going to stick with me for a long time yet.
Spoiler
Under the arcades of the bridge with their feminine curves, black, sparkling water babbled with a million mouths in prayer.Leaning on the stone balustrade, P’an Tsiang-kuei spoke in a measured and passionless voice:
“Asian-European antagonism, a subject on which your scholars have scribbled whole volumes, searching for its origins in the depths of racial and religious differences, plays tself out entirely on the surface of everyday economics and class struggle. Your science, of which you are so proud and which we travel here to study, is not a system of tools to help man conquer nature, but rather to help Europe conquer non-Europe, to exploit weaker continents. This is why we despise your Europe and why we come here to study you so fervently. Only by mastering the achievements of your science will we be able to shed the yoke of your oppression. Your bourgeois Europe, expatiating far and wide on your cultural self-sufficiency, is no more than a small parasite latched onto the western flank of Asia’s gigantic body, sucking its juices dry. It is we, planting our rice and growing cotton and tea, who are – along with your own proletariat – the real, though indirect, creators of your culture. Its complex aroma, spreading the sweat of your workers and peasants all around the world, mingles with the smell of the Chinese coolie’s sweat.
“But today the tides are turning. Your gluttonous Europe is croaking like a mare who has broken its leg before the final hurdle. It’s croaking without having swallowed everything down, its gullet clogged from the greedy mouthfuls it’s taken. It’s no accident that it’s being killed off by the plague, an old friend of ours in Asia. The stomach of European capitalism has found Asia indigestible.
“How sweet it is to watch the death of your enemy, sneaking up behind him, to see miniature reflections of your face in his terror-dilated pupils. I saw one of your plague victims. He was practically blue when the health service carried him out of his house. When they wanted to put him into a vehicle with other people, he burst out screaming: ‘You’re not putting me in there! Those people are infested!’ They had to use force. He thrashed, kicked and bit, and when he was finally pushed inside and the doors were bolted behind him, he suddenly turned blue and stiff. His fear of death advanced death’s slow progress.
“I looked into those eyes wide with lethal horror, and then I understood that precisely this fear was the engine and the mainspring of your whole vast culture. That dread, that drive to endure at any cost, against the logical inevitability of death, has pushed you to superhuman effort, to carve your faces into such summits as could not be wiped clean by the all-consuming river of time. I also thought that perhaps only with an injection of the serum of European culture could our Asia be torn from its thousand-year coma under the Bodhi Tree of Buddhism. Thus far Europe has only sent us her merchants and her missionaries. Christianity was once a venom Asia inoculated into Europe, a venom that destroyed the rich Roman culture and plunged Europe for many centuries into a barbarian darkness. But Europe proved capable of assimilating even this poison of powerlessness, kineticizing it, sucking out the venom and turning it into a tool of oppression. Today Europe is getting its belated revenge by exporting it back to Asia. Unable to colonize us outright, they want to turn us into a colony of the Vatican. Christ is a salesman, a paid stooge of the profiteers.
“Today, however, it can no longer do us any harm. Europe is dying in its last convulsive spasms. No cordon sanitaire will save it. The plague will surge unstoppably across the whole of the continent when it’s done with Paris. To tell the truth, its meddling in our age-old conflict is entirely superfluous. The absurdity of this intervention would almost convince me of the existence of your god, whose tricks – if we are to believe the authors of the Holy Book – were never exactly distinguished by their excessive intelligence. The years were already numbered for your imperialist Europe one way or another, and there was no need to hurry the conclusion with such extravagance.“Two years from now, on the nameless, abandoned tomb of your rapacious Europe of exploiters, there would have grown a new Europe, a Europe of workers, who would have easily communicated with Asia through the international language of labor.
“The unwelcome intervention of this pointless natural disaster might bring about the death of both Europes in one go: the one that was dying and the one that was yet to be born.
“The old usurer hasn’t even had time to put her last will in order. But the will – though unwritten – still exists. We are its inheritors, along with your own proletariat. Fate has cast us here, to the metropolises of Europe, to tear the keys from its ossifying hands.”
P’an Tsiang-kuei fell silent. For a moment the only thing audible was the splash of water breaking against the base of the pillars supporting the bridge.
Spoiler
“Listen carefully. This is the expedition of the Paris Republic of Soviets speaking. At midnight we broke through the cordon and came here for food. The Parisian proletariat is dying of starvation. Our boat is on the river, across from the dock. I am speaking from its deck. Don’t try to call the garrison for help. All the telephone lines have been cut. The only remaining line connects you to our boat. Now listen carefully. We have come in peace. We are anchored in the middle of the river and if you act promptly we won’t touch shore at all. We have come to collect food for the starving poor of Paris. If over the next hour you do not supply and load barges with six hundred sacks of flour, we will come ashore, plunder, and bombard your village. We are giving you one hour. It is your job, Citizen Mayor, to wake up the village, arrange transport, and guide the shipment to the dock. You, Citizen Priest, will use your authority to convince the reluctant and ensure that everything gets done on time. Both of you set your watches. It is now ten to two. If by ten to three the first load of sacks of flour has not yet appeared on the road to the docks, we will disembark. Discipline and punctuality will keep you and all of France from becoming infected with the plague. Understood, Mayor? Six hundred sacks of flour in one hour to the docks.”Spoiler
A British plane flying from London to Lyon lost its way in the thick fog over the Channel, flew off course, and unexpectedly found itself over Paris. It miraculously escaped being fired at and managed, in spite of a broken wing, to land beyond the cordon.What the English pilot saw and reported was so unfathomable that even the tabloid press, which was not known for its adherence to scruples, conveyed it with a heavy dose of skepticism.
Wanting to establish where he was, the pilot had flown at only three hundred feet above the ground. By the time he had realized he was above Paris, it was too late – his curiosity had gotten the better of his caution.
He had flown from the direction of the Bois de Boulogne. There was a southerly wind blowing the fog from the city, so everything was clear as a bell. The Paris that sprawled before his eyes was not burned in the slightest. The buildings, palaces, and monuments – everything seemed to be standing where they had always been, and yet he was also struck by all the changes that had taken place. The first thing the pilot noticed were the countless radio towers soaring above the city. The air was sliced on all sides by an infinity of antenna wires.
Passing the Arc de Triomphe, the pilot flew along the Champs-Elysées. What he saw there defied all probability.
Where once the Place de la Concorde had stretched with a measureless sheet of polished asphalt, from La Madeleine to the Chambre des Députés, from Champs-Elysées to the Tuileries, a meadow of ripe grain now rippled in the gentle southerly wind. This grain was being gathered by mechanized harvesters driven by brawny, tanned men in white undershirts. Men and women dressed in the same light harvesting clothes were nimbly piling the ready sheaves onto a waiting truck. At the edges of the field on all sides, women rested and breast-fed their infants.
Seeing the airplane overhead, the harvesters stopped working, turned their heads upward, and gesticulated wildly.
Flying over the Tuileries Gardens the pilot noticed a colony of a few thousand children playing in identical clothing, smocks and small red caps, like a field of poppies right beside the fields of grain.
Where the Luxembourg Gardens had once sprawled were now rows of cauliflower growing white in the sun in a chessboard of colorful plots, a gigantic vegetable garden.
The pilot was so astonished by what he saw that he left further observations aside and flew a beeline over the city to hurry and share his discovery with his superiors.
Spoiler
“This is the workers’ Paris. Workers! Peasants! People bound by the yoke! A war against the USSR is a war against you, a war against our commune that you shall defend, as an international revolutionary bastion in the sea of capitalist Europe. Pick up your arms! All for revolutionary Paris! For dis ... pea ... with the Uni ...”... Madeleine, Madeleine!
“... live ... your revolution of workers and pea ... ! Down with the mili ... pitalist ... live ... vil war! Long live Paris, capital of the French Socialist Republic of Soviets!”