ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

A while ago, I was doing some tedious blog housekeeping and at the same time half-heartedly listening to some podcasts to keep my mind occupied.  One of those podcasts was what prompted me to retrieve this novel with its improbably long name from the TBR.

An award-winning Australian writer, now getting on in years, was having a natter with her hosts when up came the subject of an award she didn’t win.  She was dismissive of the winning book — she said she had thought that the ‘competition’ was a different one.  The winning book wasn’t named but it didn’t take me long to find out what it was.  The Story of the Year of 1912 in the Village of Elza Darzins (1990) is that book: it that won the Banjo Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Novel in Southeast Asia.  Which just goes to show that opinions differ when it comes to what makes a winning book, eh?

The Story of the Year of 1912 in the Village of Elza Darzins scrutinises the Australian film industry in a most entertaining satire indeed.

TSotYo1912itVoED? No, too long.  Henceforth (mostly) ‘Elza’s Village’.

Erika Cavanagh is an unemployed school teacher who doesn’t want to take up a position she’s been offered in outback NSW, when her flatmate Louise, an aspiring actor, takes over the task of scanning the job ads in the newspaper.  (Yes, this was in The Olden Days, it’s set in the 1980s.) Louise finds a job that she thinks is perfect for Erika.  The NSW State Film Board needs a translator fluent in Latvian and English.

Erika isn’t really fluent, having learned it only from her mother who’d left Latvia years ago, and they don’t hang out with the local Latvian community.  Erika’s idiom would therefore be out-of-date, and she doesn’t know the cultural factors.  But Louise, an indefatigable friend, pressures her into applying and she bluffs her way through to get the job. Which is not too hard because her boss Stuart Cullen is more interested in his own opinions than in listening to her, and he could span a great ignorance with a couple of generalisations and several detailed comparisons.

Erika’s job is to write the sub-titles for an art-house film called The Story of the Year of 1912 in the Village of Elza Darzins on loan from the Soviets.  Directed by Balodis and produced by Leblenis, it’s about ‘the peculiar tragedy of the peasants’, and was created by these two (presumably fictional) Latvians under the iron rule of the Soviets in the postwar era. It’s amazing that a Latvian peasant (Balodis) got funding from the Soviets to make it in the first place.  But having funded it, the Soviets then suppressed it, and the film has never been released. No one knows why.  But by a fluke, Cullen has been able to get a copy, to screen at the Sydney Film Festival.

Well, it may be the era of Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika, but this still makes the screening a coup for the Sydney Film Festival.  The Soviets, however, must still be handled delicately so Cullen is very pleased with himself.

Erika has never heard of Balodis or Leblenis but Cullen is very enthusiastic although he doesn’t speak Latvian so he doesn’t know what the film is about. She limbers up by translating an interview with these two.  She thinks it’s complete nonsense and apparently her predecessor thought so too, but she wants to keep the job so she doesn’t say so.

Alas, when Erika eventually gets to see the film, she can’t make sense of it at all, and it isn’t until later in the process that she realises that Balodis got the film past the Soviet censors with discrepancies between the action and the soundtrack.  And, almost by accident, Erika finds herself doctoring the script with her English subtitles.

Only a speaker of Latvian could expose her, but — yes, even in the days before social media pile-ons — the local Latvian (anti-Soviet) community is up in arms about the prospective screening, attracting the attention of the Minister for the Arts (a.k.a. Eisteddfod Sid because he’s always appearing at theatrical photo opportunities).  So Erika, who is also trying to negotiate a love life from within the shallow film community, is torn between wanting to keep her job and her fear of exposure (not to mention causing an International Incident).  Along the way, she learns about the incestuous world of film-making, the shenanigans of obtaining film funding, and how the arts are in competition with each other for money, fame, and attention.

While Erika (who narrates Elza’s Village) is often assailed by guilt over the dubious way she has managed to keep her job, she is disarmingly honest about how she progresses to further employment in the film industry:

If you had asked me at the time I would have said that I was very busy and quite content; my major concern had become the scheme Louise and I had hatched to have me included in the publicity team being set up by Paolo to promote At Half the Asking overseas. In truth I didn’t want the production of At Half the Asking to finish at all: hence my enthusiasm for joining the publicity team.  Louise had said, rightly, that making films can be like wartime.  There was always excitement, desperation and joint purpose and camaraderie during the filming of At Half the Asking. I would even spend some hours with Paolo while he plotted his strategy.  We would go to Cannes in the spring, and from there around the world.  Editing was now going smoothly, and Paolo was convinced the film would be a great success. (p.158)

Paolo, BTW makes vampire films set in outback NSW ghost towns.  Low-budget, low prestige thrillers which are all successful enough for him to get repeat funding for the next one.  Unlike the one in which Louise was hopeful of kick-starting her career until the US money falls through.

Welsh also pokes fun at the cult of personality that’s (now routinely) cultivated for authors:

Ordinarily, because of my aversion to Rita Clarke it took me quite some time to getting around to reading her novels.  Whenever they first appeared I eyed them with ritual hostility.  I’d take them off the shelves in bookshops and survey the price and the number of pages and the photo of the author, all with the immediate aim of finding grounds for fault.  Then I would read the opening paragraphs and a random half-page, after which I would return the volume to its shelf.  Afterwards I would coolly await the reviews. Any enthusiastic notices I would dismiss as predictable, but any unfavourable ones I’d store for ammunition.  At a later date — it could be six days or three months — I would read the novel and dislike it. (p.136)

PS If ever you should chance to come across this novel and are puzzled by Part III being named ‘Zolite’, thanks to the Internet you can do what the readers of 1990 could not do: you can find out what it means.  It’s a card game which is by some accounts the national game of Latvia. It appears to be a game in which there are many nuances, best defined before play begins, and forfeits are revealed only after the game ends.  (See Latvians online for more info.)

PPS When I Googled Balodis and Leblenis, I drew a blank.  But Google Translate tells me that ‘balodis’ means ‘pigeon in Latvian, and ‘blenis’ means ‘stupid.’

Apart from this thoughtful 2013 response to an ARB review of Alex Miller’s Autumn Laing, (not mine, phew!) I couldn’t find out much about what Thea Welsh is doing these days, except for this brief bio at AustLit:

After graduating from university, Thea Welsh worked in research and administration in Canberra, Adelaide and Sydney. During the 1990s she was manager of the Australian Screen Directors Association.

Welsh achieved great success with her first novel, The Story of the Year of 1912 in the Village of Elza Darzins (1990), winning several awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the South-East Asia and the South Pacific region. Supported by a grant from the Australia Council, Welsh wrote her second novel, Welcome Back (1996), continuing the examination of the film industry begun with her first novel. Her first novel deals with the idea of translation and the second explores the life of a celebrity whose false claim to a Tasmanian origin damages her credibility.

Welsh also wrote the novelisations of the films Dating the Enemy, Paperback Hero, and Appropriateness.

This brief profile at Harper Collins which accompanies The President’s Wife (2010), mentions a memoir.  There are discrepancies in the publication dates of Welcome Back,  and I don’t know which of 1996 or 1999 is correct. (A search at the NLA brought up no results.)

Thea Welsh is the author of the memoir The Cat Who Looked at the Sky (Flamingo 2003), and the novels Welcome Back (Random House 1999) and The Story of the Year of 1912 in the Village of Elza Darzins, which won the 1990 National Book Council ‘Banjo’ Award. She lives in Sydney with her partner.

Update, later the same day: Thanks to Jennifer (see comment below) I have tracked down availability for this book.  It’s included in the Untapped, Australian Literary Heritage Project, and you can buy it as an eBook or as a paperback from a book retailer.  See here.

Author: Thea Welsh
Title: The Story of the Year of 1912 in the Village of Elza Darzins 
Publisher: Simon & Schuster in association with New Endeavour Press, 1990
Cover design by Helen Semmler
ISBN: 9780731801404, hbk., 180 pages
Source: personal library