Olhovsky, Prince of Hamburg
, Melbourne, 2003, ISBN 1 876044 37 3
What is it about?
From the back cover
'Hamburg, in Phil Leask's third novel, is a city of the displaced. Accidents of personal history throw together an odd collection of strangers - English poet Michael Rothney, a Polish dancer, a German sculptor. They find themselves locked within the hypnotic orbit of Olhovsky, ambiguous, charismatic, sensual, a sailor and wanderer with a dubious past.
'When Rothney and Olhovsky meet Urmila, an Indian woman whose husband runs a spice importing business, loyalty and trust become strained. A cold winter of snow and ice sets in. There is a long, anxious wait for the thaw.'
What do they say about it?
Catherine Ford, review in The Age
'Nicolai Olhovsky, rugged up and ready for heartbreak, stands next to Michael Rothney, soft-spoken with a face "like a third-division footballer", waiting for the lights to go green on a Hamburg street, and they start up a conversation. Like startled lovers, they remove to a bar to discover each other...
'Phil Leask, with astonishing fluency and speed, opens up Hamburg's snow-buffered streets and bars and moves through his characters' various and complex assignations as casually, and with almost as much psychic baggage, as they do themselves. When Olhovsky and Rothney go back to Esmerelda's for coffee, we barely flinch when the evening ends with all three of them naked and a stranger downstairs singing a little Verdi. Hamburg, Leask wants us to know, is at least as wretched and as fun as Berlin or Paris.
'And until the unhappily married Indian opthamologist, Urmila Vasani, appears, the novel might just have been about trysts of the lovelorn, confused sexuality and homesickness. Leask's story occasionally becomes as light-starved as a February afternoon on the Binnenalster, but it is beautifully, poetically strange, too.'
Terry Monagle, review in Eureka Street
'Michael Rothney is an English poet working on a suite of poems in the German city, Hamburg. He is attempting to shrive himself of a former lover. Rothney walks incessantly, at night, feeling for the pulse and lineaments of the city. He meets Olhovsky, a semi-mythical creature, a mermaid, a hermaphrodite beauty.
'We meet characters plagued by incompleteness. They long for the other, for the missing part of themselves. Their questing, their roiling hopes, seek relief in relationships, with a sexual partner or partners. Love appears to be the ground of human need, but it is fickle and treacherous. Desire, possession and belonging are its convenient and clandestine counterfeits.
'... Leask's book is about place, and rootlessness, about heartless loves and places of absences.
'It is a haunting book and seems likely to be a novel which will reverberate beyond its times.'
Storyteller: A Novel View (online magazine), Volume 4 - September/October 2003
, Irish poet and dramatist, living in Hamburg:'This strange and wonderful new novel by Phil Leask, his third, is striking almost at once for its tone of self-conscious melancholy and its rather obvious theme of exile. ... A fairly typical bildungsroman I thought, as I began.
'However, this novel is not typical, although it is definitely a 'journey novel', it contains more of the surreal than its beginning scenes intimate. The night-time journeys are depicted as grey, shadowy episodes, edged with sexual desire and ambivalence, while Rothney's daytime experience seems almost to exist on another plane. This is, in many ways, a novel of the night. ...
'It's wonderful to know that books like this - experimental, challenging, beautiful - are still being written.
‘Phil Leask has dreamed a story of wonderful strangeness into existence and sets it in the fragile, sparkling world of Hamburg's winter. He inhabits his obsessive, pink and blue time-slot with an English poet, a German sculptor, an Indian beauty, a Polish dancer, and allows them to be bewitched by Olhovsky - the dark prince of their hearts - from Odessa.
‘The author's pen moves with the ease and grace of one long acquainted with the quirky side of this city.’
Frank Moorhouse, launching Olhovsky, Prince of Hamburg in Sydney:
This is an hypnotic novel set among weird bohemia of contemporary Hamburg.
The narrator Michael is a poet separated from his English wife and now living in Hamburg -- he meets Olhovsky of uncertain antecedents and uncertain personality and is beguiled by him as are others in the novel.
There is a degree of sexual ambiguity in Olhovsky as well which is tantalising.
I will read a section. This is Olhovsky as Michael, the narrator, describes him: ‘I look at him with his long black hair and pale, haunting face and sensual lips. His slim hips and slender legs. I shudder to see him, I do not say what is clear to me: you are lucky to be alive Olhovsky...you are lucky you weren’t strangled at birth...or beaten to death by the Mafia in Palermo...’
And there is Esmerelda almost a female twin of Olhovsky, who also bewitches the narrator.
Phil Leask’s novel has the same urgent yet languorous atmosphere as Lawrence Durrell’s Justine. A book we all loved and which somehow influenced us all.
There is the Indian doctor Urmila. And through their love affairs and life, Olhovsky weaves his strange sensuality.
I want to read another passage which gives you a taste of the sensibility of Phil Leask and the power of his writing. Olhovsky is telling a story from when he was ten in Odessa. Olhovsky says:
‘In the middle of the meal, the waitress leant over and brushed the hair back off his damp forehead. She smiled into his face. He remembers staring down the front of her dress with his face almost sinking into the soft whiteness of her breasts below the redness of her neck. He could not believe how it made him feel, He could not understand it at all. And yet he did somehow... His mother and grandmother did not seem to notice. They were old, their lives were over. They saw nothing, they cared about no one, they always did the right thing. This, he knew, might not be the right thing.’
Beautiful.
This is a novel deserving of attention.
To quote Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, ‘Attention must be paid.’
And we launch the wonderful work which is this novel into the uncertain seas of contemporary world; may it discharge its rich cargo in many ports.
As its first reviewer Catherine Ford said in the Age, 'it is beautifully, poetically strange.’
Jack Hibberd, launching Olhovsky, Prince of Hamburg in Melbourne:
The first impression of reading Olhovsky, Prince of Hamburg is that it's a novel about a city, Hamburg. There's a great tradition in European literature particularly of writing about or encapsulating cities. ... Phil Leask has set himself an enormous challenge in this book because it's set in winter in Hamburg and it is also a romantic novel in many ways... But to have a novel which is entirely set in winter - in a city which I have been to in winter - there are various shades of grey, and the occasional blue, and what Phil manages to do is to bring out enormous tonality in the greys and it is almost a poeticisation of a city which is snow, white, grey, grey, grey, white, and I think that is quite an achievement...
...In a way you have a cosmopolitan city which was razed in a firestorm as big as Dresden, now a cosmopolitan meeting point for five characters. These are all fairly alienated characters but they are prone to idealisations whether as artists or as people. Olhovsky himself idealises fatally, in the novel, an Indian woman, and Michael, the narrator, idealises Olhovsky, though not so fatally, I think. These idealisations fit into a very romantic view of art - Michael the poet, perhaps less so the German sculptor, Kerstin, embrace suffering and art. There's a yearning, particularly for Michael, the English poet, to be free as an artist and there's a sense that art is a refuge from life, and this whole idealisation - romantic yearning - is nicely contrasted with the coldness, the greyness and the hardness, if not the brutality, of Hamburg in winter, and the Elbe river which takes on romantic overtones at times, at other times it becomes like the Styx.
Michael, the central character, cannot express love, and there's a kind of masochistic streak to that. He says at one stage that kindness terrifies him. He, as a romantic artist in many ways, tends to use life as raw material for his art, whereas Olhovsky tends to use life as raw material for his own life.
Now there are a number of journeys in this novel which I think are very important. The first is that Michael, who is thoroughly alienated at the start of the novel and through most of the novel, reaches a state of lesser alienation - a kind of a stoic stance in the end - and achieves some kind of fullness.
Olhovsky is a sort of villain figure, he's the opposite to the artists and there are overtones of The Solid Mandala in this book, where you have the artist on one hand - the cerebral figure of Michael - and you have Olhovsky who in another sense is the intuitive operator who has no awareness of anyone else and their feelings apart from himself. He finally in the novel escapes from Hamburg to roam around the world like a Flying Dutchman but he does get his comeuppance a bit and perhaps there is some journey in his character as well. ...
This novel will give a lot of pleasure... I think it is beautifully written and the prose transcends the difficult task that Phil has set himself.
The London launch of Phil Leask’s novel, Olhovsky, Prince of Hamburg
On behalf of Black Pepper Publishing, poet Andrew Sant welcomed over 60 people to the Tricycle Theatre for the London launch of Olhovsky, Prince of Hamburg. Playwright and screenwriter Lucinda Coxon (The Heart of Me and other films) spoke highly of Phil Leask’s evocative style and the originality of Olhovsky, Prince of Hamburg. 'Get hold of a copy of this novel and read it right now,' Lucinda said... 'Transport yourselves into the freezing landscape of Hamburg, where Phil Leask’s wonderfully elusive characters engage in their elaborate dance around the mysterious Olhovsky.'
Can we read some of it?
From Chapter 1 of Olhovsky, Prince of Hamburg
I turn to speak to Lucy, to talk of nothing, only as a way of reaching out to her again, of finding myself gathered in by her slow, drifting gaze that seems to fill the room when we have spent the day together, the curtains closed, the door locked and forbidding entry, our nakedness all that we have left in common, all that we still desire to share.
It is already too late. Lucy has gone. The wistful smile that twists the corner of my mouth comes only from a memory of pleasure, not from a sense of loss or regret.
The moment passes.
Lucy. The syllables are soft, melodic, seductive, a promise of pleasure that was always an illusion, of fulfilment that was always out of reach. Lucy, whom I loved, among others.
Images remain: her long, narrow toes, a childhood scar beneath her knee, her nose broken in a fall and never put back together again. A fall or a struggle? I ask her. A fight with a jealous lover? Lucy looks at me scornfully. She will not explain. She is no longer a child, she says. She is a woman, responsible for herself and what happens to her. Men can do what they like, but not to her.
Where is Lucy now? In Africa, it seems, putting back together the victims of war, making them whole again. Sometimes it is not possible, she says; there are too many bits missing: legs and arms and sides of faces. Where is it this time: Angola or Rwanda or the Congo? Somalia or Mozambique? I no longer know. I know only that her face is darkened by the sun, the skin drawn tight by the suffering of others, and that her hand, when free of the scalpel, shakes. Her eyes stare past me. At what? I wonder. There is no longer poetry in her looks or in the hard words that fall sharp-edged and bruising from thin, tightened lips, like rocks dislodged on a mountainside, laying waste all in their path. And yet we were made for each other, Lucy and I, come what may. We survive, we endure, despite our own actions and the efforts of others. When we come together again, often without warning after months when we have not exchanged a word of love, sorrow or joy, it is with a savagery, a brutality out of which we emerge – both of us – satisfied for the moment, if not fulfilled.
We part without mention of love or loyalty, knowing it is too late. The world awaits us separately, with all that it has to offer.
So I will not admit to missing Lucy, during the long months we are apart. Life is too short and too sweet, beckoning to me like the lotus flower, for which there is no tomorrow.
From Chapter 3 of Olhovsky, Prince of Hamburg
I stand at a corner, waiting to cross. Beside me is a dark, shrouded figure, tall and faceless, some strange creature of the night or the forests. ‘Do you have a light for a cigarette?’ he says to me in careful, formal German, with an accent I cannot place and a voice like a Hollywood seductress. I start to laugh. I tell him I don’t smoke. He does not seem put out. I feel him smile, though I cannot see his face. He rocks back and forth from his toes to his heels. There is a kind of lightness about him.
The street is empty but we wait in silence until the light is green, then cross together. We walk in the same direction, side by side, as if we are old friends. His presence is comforting to me. By the next junction are the lights of a bar. We walk towards it together, as if we know that is where we need to be.
‘We’ll have a drink,’ I say, gesturing unnecessarily towards the bar.
It seems to be what he was hoping for. He laughs softly and reaches out to take my hand, squeezes it and puts it down again, gently against my side, as if he might need it later.
His hand is long and pale with the fingers of a pianist or a painter, but as strong and hard as any I have ever felt. I look at him but cannot make him out; his face is obscured by the hood of a large, shapeless jacket.
‘Olhovsky,’ he says, as if it is some kind of explanation.
‘From Russia,’ I say, recognising the trace of an accent.
‘Prince of Russia, exiled into the world,’ he says. With irony? I cannot be sure. He does not laugh.
‘Michael Rothney,’ I say to him. He does not respond. I cannot tell if he has heard me.
The bar is crowded but we find a corner with two stools. We order beer, with an ouzo for Olhovsky.
Only when we are seated and have our drinks does he push his hood back and unzip his jacket. He does not seem to see me staring at him.
What did I expect?
Not this:
A long, slender, pale face, as beautiful as any woman’s, with high cheekbones and deep-set dark eyes.
Jet-black hair falling in waves half way down his back.
Thick, fleshy lips.
The sharp outline of his Adam’s apple moving in his throat as he drinks…
It is warm in the bar. He takes his jacket off and drops it on the floor next to him. He is wearing a tee shirt with the sleeves cut out of it. Dark, intricate tattoos stretch down from his broad shoulders over carefully-sculpted muscles; his forearms are enormous. His waist, on the other hand, is as slight as a young woman’s and his narrow hips give him the fragile air of a dancer.
What is it within me that makes me at ease at once with Olhovsky, this strange man-woman, this confusion of predator and prey, of bandit, pirate and outlaw?
He tells me snippets of his life. He has lived by cunning and violence, he tells me. Necessary violence, he says, as if to answer questions I have not asked.
I am not sure that I believe him. The cunning or the violence? Both, perhaps. He is too transparent, too free with himself. Unless the story he tells me is one for me alone, tonight’s invention, ready to be denied tomorrow.
He is from Odessa. It is no longer Russian, he says.
Was it ever? I ask.
The old empire, he says. The old empire. Like Poland. Like Lithuania before it, lost in its forests of wild bison.
Like America, I say. He nods.
He drinks a lot, but always the same: beer and ouzo together, as if one will counteract the other. The beer is enough, and already too much, for me. We eat plates of salty, greasy chips as if they will protect us from ourselves and our hungers. From time to time, Olhovsky breaks a chip and dips it in the ouzo, like bread in a bowl of soup.
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What is it about?
What do they say about it?