Apples and Oranges. Maarten Asscher

      A myriad of books have been supported with loving enthusiasm by their publishers only to find they don’t make the grade in commercial terms. In such instances, the appearance of the occasional review can offer considerable consolation to the publisher in question (not to mention the author and perhaps translator), particularly when it gives the stakeholders the impression that they did the right thing, at least in the opinion of a few kindred spirits. If the reviews don’t materialize, or those that do are downright negative, then there’s little left to do but harbor a grudge for years and wait for some other chance to get even. This is what I would like to do with a book entitled Mediteranski Brevijar (literally ‘Mediterranean Breviary’), written by the Croatian author Predrag Matvejević.

      From the moment I got hold of the French Fayard edition (Bréviaire méditerranéen, 1992), I was fascinated by this exuberant and irrepressible homage to the sea of seas. Two years after the French edition, Tom Eekman’s Dutch translation was published by Meulenhoff on my own instigation under the title De Middellandse Zee. Een getijdenboek. The prologue, written by the Italian author Claudio Magris, describes the book as ‘masterful, original and brilliant’, qualifications with which I heartily agreed and still do.

      Anyone trying to imagine what this book by Matvejević might be like should think of a work about the Mediterranean written by an author who represents a timeless amalgamation of Herodotus, Bill Bryson, Pliny the Elder, and Redmond O’Hanlon. The book, in short, is an endeavor to put together a sort of biography of the inexhaustible topography, history, natural and cultural abundance of ‘mare nostrum—our sea’, with the maximum curiosity, the maximum craving for detail and the maximum drive for completeness.

      Since its original (Serbo-)Croatian publication in 1987, the book has appeared in more than twenty languages. The website of the University of California Press, the book’s American publisher, lists it under ‘Geography, Classics, Folklore & Mythology, Cultural Anthropology, European Studies, European History, Travel’. This is a meaningful enumeration for two reasons. In the first instance, there has to be something remarkable about a book of little more than two hundred pages that can apparently be relevant to so many different domains at one and the same time. In the second instance, Matvejević’s book can itself be seen as ‘one big summary’, and it is thus appropriate that the publisher’s commercial bibliographers maintain such an enumeratio in an effort to do justice to its unclassifiable versatility.

      My disappointment and surprise were great, therefore, when Kees Fens, a literary critic I admire greatly, completely and utterly demolished Matvejević’s book in de Volkskrant on June 13th, 1994. I had secretly hoped that he would review it, entirely convinced as I was that it would appeal to him. But the man was unable to find a single good word to say about the book, with the exception of a word of praise for Tom Eekman’s translation. In my view, a confrontation between Fens’ crushing condemnation and my still sprightly enthusiasm for the book reveals something about ‘the Mediterranean’: as a mentality, an orientation, perhaps even a quality that people have or don’t have.

      Predrag Matvejević was born in 1932 in Mostar, a city that acquired recent renown in Western Europe when the sixteenth century bridge over the river Neretva was destroyed during the 1990s Balkan conflict. Prior to his emigration to France, Matvejević taught French at the University of Zagreb and afterwards, Slavic languages at the Sorbonne in Paris. His existence thus made a 180 degree turn from Eastern Europe to Western Europe. Whatever the East/West significance may be, his book about the Mediterranean confirms him as a European. It won him the Premio Malaparte in Italy in 1991, and in the years that followed, the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger and the Prix Européen de l’Essai Charles Veillon.

      The Bosnian city of Mostar is located fifty kilometers inland from the Adriatic coast. One could interpret Mediterranean Breviary as a large-scale endeavor to bridge this distance, rooted in a desire to compensate for the Mediterranean’s fifty kilometer deficit and still demand a birthright on its shores. Matvejević approaches this in three ways in his book, each corresponding to one of its three parts.

      In the first part (‘Breviary’) he offers a comprehensive phenomenology of the Mediterranean in which he considers the sea’s various characteristics and its every phenomenon, great or small: bays, piers, harbormasters’ offices, fishing nets, algae, waves, winds, clouds, coasts, lighthouses, tar, figs, olives, sponges, islands, peninsulas, seagulls, river deltas, curses, languages, measures, methods of salt extraction, etc. On the basis of all these characteristics, an ample supply of stories and information floats to the surface. The cities on the Mediterranean coast, for example, did not begin life as villages but actually gave birth to the villages around them. The nature of a harbor, the author informs us, is determined by whether it was formed by a hinterland river or selected from the sea. Why is the Peloponnesus considered a peninsula, he asks, and not Tunisia? Or can we speak of sea migrations by analogy with those of peoples, birds, and fish? And what about the vanity of bays that sometimes pretend to be a sea in themselves, such as the Adriatic, which once bore the—more unassuming—name Golfo di Venezia. Or the similarity between lighthouse keepers and monks. Or the fact that the Sea of Marmara is saltier than the Black Sea. All useless facts and questions splendidly foisted upon us by the author.

      In part ii (‘Maps’), Matvejević treats the Med like a cartographical library. We join him as he explores the lives and works of the major and minor mapmakers who have endeavored since time immemorial to capture ‘our sea’ on paper for the benefit of travelers, fishermen, seafarers, admirals, pirates, and last but not least, the sleuths who forage in our archives and catalogs. He charts islands, for example, that we will never be able to visit because they’re not surrounded by sea, but rather they close an imaginary gate: the northern Ultima Thule or the western Isles of the Blessed. One special category are the maps we know about only through the descriptions of others. We will never be able to reconstruct their magnificence, evocativeness, and precision. The maps also inspire Matvejević to recount the expeditions, wars, and campaigns of conquest organized by the Phoenicians and Greeks, Venetians and Arabs, Ottomans and Spanish, Carthaginians and Portuguese. How the Arabian cartographers drew their primary meridian through Mecca and located the south (‘our’ south) above it. How the great cartographers chose the theater and the mirror as their favorite metaphors when depicting the lands and seas of the ancient world: Theatrum orbis terrarum, Mirror of Seafaring. And about the centuries old connection between the sea routes and the position of the stars: Teatro del Cielo e della Terra. How geography in Antiquity became a critique of the novel; how the great Mercator promoted it to a critique of the imagination; and how Voltaire was ultimately to declare it a critique of the vanity of princes. Matvejević also interweaves his own observations with his archival and cartographical discoveries, sailing past Greek islands on the ship Dodekanesos. He provides a semi-tongue-in-cheek description of a geographer’s congress in Amalfi, where a commemorative exhibition of old compass roses was opened in honor of the Russian cartographer Leonid Barov (1881-1957) followed by an opportunity for discussion. This leads him to further digress on the relationship between the development of the compass and the history of the Mediterranean compass rose or wind rose. He closes the second part of his book with the following words: ‘The more we know about our sea, the less we look at it with our own eyes; the Mediterranean Sea isn’t a sea for the lonely.’

      Having dealt with Mediterranean phenomenology