Imagine that you’re sitting on a bus and the passenger next to you begins to tell you the story of their life’s obsession. At first you listen with a kind of suspended curiosity; you have a few minutes to spare, perhaps you’ll learn something interesting. After a few minutes you realize the story’s going to be about something you’ve never had the slightest interest in–Iraqi politics, say, or abstract expressionism. But just as you’re about to interrupt the speaker and explain that you’ve reached your stop, you discover that you’re completely caught up in the narrative. And so you sit back quietly and listen.
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That’s as close as I can come to summarizing what it’s like to read one of Lawrence Weschler’s collections of nonfiction narratives, which he divides into the loose categories of “cultural comedies” and “political tragedies.” Weschler, a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, writes about people you’ve never heard of whose lives are consumed by something you don’t know anything about: a teacher at an agricultural college in Bangalore, India, who believes it’s his life’s mission to bring worldwide attention to an unknown painter in New York; a Czech dissident who spends 20 years smuggling writings in and out of Czechoslovakia and then, after the Velvet Revolution, is accused of having collaborated with the secret police; a rocket scientist turned banking expert who wants nothing more than to join the circus; a Danish cheese magnate who envisions building a modern art museum on a ramshackle country estate. These are charming, eccentric, infuriating, and exacting characters, and Weschler invites us to follow them in the mad pursuit of their obsessions. Invariably the journey turns out to be both fascinating and profoundly moving.
Next we meet Jan Kavan, the impossibly stubborn and cantankerous Czech expatriate who spent two decades aiding and abetting Czech dissidents, returned after the Velvet Revolution to join the new parliament, and was then denounced in that same parliament as having been a longtime collaborator with the StB, the old regime’s secret police. As the narrative reconstructs what Kavan says happened 20 years previously, and what his accusers say happened, we begin to understand the complexities of evaluating the moral conduct of the citizenry in a totalitarian state. Not only is it difficult to find someone who hasn’t been compromised in some way, but the investigations of character that swept the Czech Republic in the early 1990s tended to rely on the records kept by the previous regime–which had plenty of reasons for falsifying them.
One of Weschler’s gifts as a writer is that he knows when to get out of the way and let his subjects talk, and most of the pieces are filled with long quotes. When he does intervene, he does it so subtly that we’re tempted to take his observations for our own. In “Shapinsky’s Karma,” he tells the story of Harold Shapinsky, an unknown painter who is suddenly discovered by the art mavens of the world thanks to the efforts of Akumal Ramachander, an Indian schoolteacher. Akumal’s chutzpah is entertaining enough, but Weschler also infuses the story with keen political and psychological observations. As the story unfolds, we see how both Shapinsky and Akumal have been constrained by the rigid stratifications of their home countries–the New York art world in Shapinsky’s case, the Indian caste system in Akumal’s–and the liberation of each becomes that much more poignant.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration by Terry Furry.
