Europeana: a short review of a book I didn’t fully understand

Ourednik, Patrik. Europeana: a brief history of the twentieth century. trans. Gerald Turner. Dalkey Archive. Print

It makes sense, having just finished Europeana, that Ourednik has also worked translating Samuel Beckett. This weird, tiny book (I completed it within the span of two hour-long commutes wherein I also checked my phone, read the local free daily, and looked up repeatedly to make sure I had not missed my bus stop) makes sense coming from a writer who has spent so much time with isn’t fiction like its back cover suggests. It has no plot (apart from that of the 20^th century) or characters (apart from the whole of Europe and the United States.) It doesn’t even have chapters. Instead, it’s an absurdist history.

Ourednik compresses decades into paragraphs:

In 1907 a Frenchman crossed the English Channel in a powered aircraft and in 1910 a Peruvian flew over the Italian Alps in a powered aircraft and in 1911 the Italians used a powered aircraft in the war against Turkey and in 1914 aircraft designers figured out where to place machine guns so that aircraft could fire at each other and in 1915 they figured out how to drop bombs from aircraft, and in 1945 the Americans invented the atom bomb and dropped it on a city called Hiroshima.

The entire book is delivered in this style. The author flattens the advance of technology and its quick application in warfare. He returns to this theme repeatedly—how new things are manipulating into weaponry. He doesn’t decry militarization. He doesn’t need to. Presented in this manner, the escalation seems ludicrous. Elsewhere, he presents differing communication theories next to his own jokey observation about people not looking one another in the eye.

At times in the text, the effect of Ouredik’s style is not humor but horror. In one passage, Ourednik states:

The final solution of the Jewish question was later called the Holocaust or Shoah, because the Jews said that it went beyond genocide, something that went beyond human understanding, and the said that it was specific to the Jews and lots of people had the feeling that the Jews were appropriating genocide and said that the victims of any genocide received their experience as something that went beyond human understanding, at that the jews were confusing historical reality with its representation and so paradoxically the helped ensure that most people imagines the Holocaust like some dramatic scene from a film.

And later: “The number of victims of the Armenian genocide was estimated at one to one-and-a-half million, but the Turks said that the Armenian genocide was not a real genocide and most Jews agreed.” Yet, Ourednik seems to spend an inordinate amount of space on the Holocaust, suggesting its “specialness” within his own historical framework. He never resolves this contradiction, nor does he make any attempt to. His purpose, instead, appears to be to present this contradiction alongside all others in the 20^th century, simultaneously ignoring and highlighting it.

I would not recommend this book for history buffs or your uncle who watches a lot of World War II documentaries…unless that same uncle also loves Kafka.

(for those of you keeping score at home, this is my “book in translation” for the reading syllabus. I suppose it could also be considered postmodern, but I’m reserving that for something else.)