Tag: book review

Writing to make sense of loss: Stammered Songbook by Erwin Mortier & further thoughts

As a man watches his mother, once so vital and full of life and charm, steadily losing her grasp on the spoken word – fumbling, scratching at the air for the names of people, places, and things – what can he do maintain the fragile flow of words? As uncertain laughter and tears of frustration become the increasingly fragile threads holding a woman, just 65 years-old, to the web of anxious family members spreading out around her – her husband, daughters, sons and grandchildren – is there any way to make sense of the inexorable dissolution of this person who is disappearing, fading, before their eyes? If the man in question is Flemish author Erwin Mortier, the only way to find comfort is to write:

“I realize that I only write to hear sentences dancing without interruption through my head. To make rhythm, acceleration, rallentando, to make pauses sing. Just to be able to hang from the dashes – the trapezes of syntax – weightlessly for a moment from the roof beam of a sentence, I let the words loose.”

songbookMortier’s passionate, insightful record of his mother’s decent into the unforgiving spiral of fragmentation and decline that marks early onset dementia, is at once a loving memoir and a writer’s thoughtful reflection on the vital role that words play in his own ability to make sense of and cope with the most painful and difficult process of letting go or, as he puts it: “constantly saying goodbye to someone who is still there, yet not.” But the pages of Stammered Songbook: A Mother’s Book of Hours contain much more than a portrait of one woman’s steady regression from independent and vivacious to prematurely helpless, frightened, and lost; it offers an honest, sometimes brutal, account of the challenges of negotiating the surge of conflicting emotions that batter and buffer the individual and the family in mourning. He tracks her illness, from the earliest missteps through to the recognition, so painful for his father, that her needs can no longer be met by her loving husband, or by juggling responsibilities between her five children and their spouses. Even a large, closely knit family cannot provide the support and care she requires in the end – it is too difficult, too draining, and far too painful – especially when the person who once inhabited the emaciated frame of the body that remains has been slowly fretted away into the space of memories and dreams.

Mortier’s writing has frequently drawn comparisons to Proust; powerfully, and I would argue rightly, reinforced by his elegant, sprawling epic set in Flanders during the First World War, While the Gods Were Sleeping. Smaller, more immediate, and intensely personal, Stammered Songbook turns – as his mother in the present recedes into the distance – into a lyrical, poetic sketch of the woman as he remembers her, and a moving reflection on the complexity of our relationships with those we love. Yet as he captures his experiences and emotions, he is aware that, as a writer, it is essential that he is able to fine tune the words he employs so that he may strike the exact note. That is, he is not only writing about his mother, he is writing about the process of writing about his mother.

“Time does not unite us in oblivion but unravels us into memories. I only started writing properly, I suspect, when I began to realize that words are at their best when I can make them vibrate like minute compass needles in response to those elusive magnetic fields that constitute someone’s whole “being” – rather like iron filings form patterns on a sheet of paper under which a magnet is held. From the cloud that my mother is becoming and that in fact she already is, slivers of images will shoot out unexpectedly, strangely sharp – the way she laughed, the gesture with which she arranged a lock of hair behind her ear… And then we will say: yes, that’s how she was.”

Stammered Songbook is a lyrical farewell to a woman lost too young to a cruel relentless thief; but even more powerfully it is a personal meditation on death, mourning, memory, and the myriad emotions – sadness, confusion, anger – that confront those left behind. Yet in reading it I could not help but think about two other books that traverse similar grounds and have informed some of my own thoughts about the project that I am attempting to write into being, so to speak. Both are powerful works that approach difficult emotional experiences arising from the authors’ own lives, each from a different angle.

The first is a novel, This Is Paradise, by UK writer Will Eaves. Here the narrator begins back at a time before his own birth and moves through a childhood account of the unique dynamics that shape and define his family. Then, in the second part of the book, our protagonist is grown and his mother, now increasingly incapacitated by dementia, must be moved into a care facility. The account of the complicated emotions and tensions that pull at the family throughout the painful process of watching their loved one die – especially in the grips of such an unforgiving, emotionally paralyzing disease – was so striking that I kept thinking: There is an authenticity beyond careful research here. And, sure enough, after finishing the book I found an personal essay Eaves wrote for The Guardian chronicling his mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s. Clearly, much of his own experiences were embedded in the novel, but he chose to approach the subject mediated through the curtain of fiction – whether for distance, freedom or stylistic comfort, it doesn’t matter – it works beautifully.

The other book is a memoir, this time a son’s effort to honour his mother in the light of her suicide at the age of 51: Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. On the surface it might appear that suicide is the polar opposite of dementia in that it is sudden, but the impact is no less devastating because it raises questions, so often unanswerable, that linger long after death and complicate the mourning process. Like Mortier, Handke is deeply conscious of the importance of writing and the efficacy of adequately capturing a life by spilling words onto a page. However, rather than placing himself at the heart of the memories he is trying to capture, he attempts to step back and maintain an intentional emotional distance. He wants to see his mother, in part, as an exemplar of the rural Austrian women of her generation; to place her life in a broader context to make sense of the very intimate act of her decision to take her own life. And the result is a spare, elegant meditation; but in the end, he cannot help but break the wall between his accounting – which was written within two months of her death – and his own emotions which are still very raw.

These three books do seem to me to fit together, to form a triangle at the centre of which is the attempt, by a writer, to capture the essence of his relationship with his mother, in life and in death. What is of specific interest to me is not the exact nature of the subject at the centre, rather it is the question of the best way to approach writing about a deeply personal experience drawn from one’s own life – memoir from within, memoir with a degree of distance, or memoir turned into fiction. It seems to me that each can be powerful and effective, the challenge, I suppose, is to find out what works best for the writer and his or her circumstances, that is, to find the intersection where the story comes alive.

Stammered Songbook by Erwin Mortier is translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent and published by Pushkin Press.

Closing out the old year with December by Alexander Kluge and Gerhard Richter

So, my first post of 2016 is a look at the last book I read in 2015. In truth I read it throughout the last month of the year, although not a little each day as intended, my father’s illness has interfered with all of my best laid reading plans of late. However I could not allow the year to draw to a close without finishing this book of calendar stories marking a passage through the month of December in the unique and inimitable style of Alexander Kluge, complemented by the haunting wintery forest scenes captured by Gerhard Richter.

2016-01-01 17.29.52This slim, elegant volume is my first encounter with the work of the German writer and film maker Alexander Kluge. The 39 stories, many less than a page long, are presented in a straightforward manner with a humour so subtle and wry that it simmers below the surface, blurring the perceptual line between history and speculation. Kluge offers a chronicle of an alternate reality so close to our own that it can catch you off guard. A flimic sensibility permeates each entry.

December is divided into two sections. The first part contains a series of dated entries, one story, or a cluster of stories, for each day. The years assigned to the dates vary. Many of the scenarios are set in or around the years of the Second World War. Others tend to be placed in the latter part of the first decade of the twenty-first century. But there are forays far back into prehistory and looking off to a distant future. Characters wander in and out from historical factual reality, war themes of conflict and destruction recur, as do images drawn from concerns about climate change and the fallout from the economic collapse of 2008. The ageless question of the nature of good and evil is a prevalent theme – “evil proves to be good displaced or straying in time” – as is the measure of the passage of time itself, whether measured on a global scale or at a much more personal, intimate level:

“The uncertainty, above all the lack of influence on whether and when someone will be struck down by the war, makes the soul bold. There is nothing to be lost any more.

So, after an air raid in 1944, which went on for hours, Gerda F. did not save herself up any longer. No thought of waiting for one of the returning warriors, whom she still knew and who would ask for her hand. She  didn’t want to get to know any better those left behind in the armament factories of the place. All were looking for closeness. She took a man who was passing through town up to her room. They never saw each other again. There was nothing about it that she regretted.”

The second, shorter section is titled “Calendars are Conservative”. They form a series of reflections on the way time – days, months and years – are recorded, calculated, and, as in certain situations such as during the height of the French Revolution, manipulated and distorted. The revolutions of the earth on its axis and the passage of the planet around the sun may be measurable with relative consistency, but that has not kept humankind from trying to understand, articulate and contain the progress of time, again in both the macro, political sphere and in the individual philosophical context:

“What manifests itself in my story, the story of a living person, is not COMPLETED PAST (what was, because it no longer is), also not the prefect tense of what has been in what I am but instead the OTHER of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.”

2016-01-01 17.32.15To spend a month, dipping in and out of the stories, anecdotes, and reflections Kluge has assembled to mark the end of the year is a treat. Although the images are often sombre, the atmosphere is contemplative. Gerhard Richter’s accompanying photographs enhance the measured tone. If you have ever experienced a day of heavy and unexpected snowfall, those days in the Northern Hemisphere that can bring all but the most essential services to a halt, granting a welcome reprieve from school or work for many; you will know how time can slow to a leisurely pace while the thick blanket of white muffles the day to day noise of the city. That is the sensation captured in the muted monochrome images of snow laden branches in silenced forests. This is the December we hope for but, caught up with the demands of year end and pressures of the holidays, frequently fail to achieve. A time to contemplate the past, for better or worse, speculate about the future and pull another calendar year to a close.

Translated from German by Martin Chalmers, December is published with the expected fine attention to detail by Seagull Books.

Never forgetting, not forgotten: A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa

“Our capital is full of mysteries. I’ve seen things in this city that would be too much even in a dream.”

The pages of A General Theory of Oblivion, by Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa, are populated by a colourful array of characters who, for the most, seem to be intent on forgetting, or being forgotten. None succeed. Their seemingly disparate life stories will turn, twist and eventually intersect as threads are dropped, picked up, retraced and woven into a tale that teems with magic against the backdrop of decades of brutal conflict and corruption that marked Angola’s painful emergence from colonialism.

oblivionAt the heart of this story is Ludo, a painfully agoraphobic Portuguese woman who, following the death of her parents, is cared for by her sister, Odette. When Odette marries a mining engineer, Ludo moves, along with the newlyweds to Luanda, the capital city of Angola. On the streets, the struggle for Independence is already underway, but Ludo does not venture out, she even shirks away from the windows and views the sky with terror. The cause of her nearly life-long fear of open spaces is finally explained in the final chapters of the book, but until that time her retreat from human contact and her obsessive, paranoid exile provides an anchor to the violent political drama that swirls, directly and indirectly, around her.

When Ludo’s sister and brother-in-law suddenly disappear, the anxious woman is left alone in their luxury apartment with the sole company of an albino dog named Phantom. Before long, a threatening incident leads to a man’s death on her doorstep, filling Ludo with both horror and guilt. She responds by constructing a wall across the hallway outside her apartment door, effectively barricading herself off from the outside world where Independence is about to be declared. She embarks on a bizarre hermetic existence that will last for 30 years. Over the course of that time, she will eat everything she can grow or get her hands on. She will burn the furniture, floorboards and the better part of the extensive library for fuel and heat, and start scribbling her thoughts on the walls when she runs out of journals and paper. Her eyesight will fade and, eventually, her beloved dog will die. But remarkably, stubbornly, she survives, passing a seemingly endless flow of days and nights:

“The city asleep, and her struggling to remember names. A patch of sun still burning. And the night, bit by bit, and time stretching out aimlessly. Body weary, and the night turning from blue to blue … But there was no one, not anywhere in the world, waiting for her. The city falling asleep and the birds like waves, and the waves like birds, and the women like women, and her not at all sure that women are the future of Man.”

Beyond the walls of Ludo’s dwelling, Agualusa traces the criss-crossing adventures of a number of people caught up in the ongoing conflicts that mark the unstable years following Independence. We have, among others, a Portuguese missionary who miraculously escapes fatal injury in an intended execution, an intelligence officer turned detective, a journalist who specializes in investigating disappearances, and a former prisoner who becomes a successful business man. Toss in a second life among a tribe of wandering shepherds, street kids, merciful nurses and a dancing hippo and you have a rich, magical tapestry that ultimately merges back at Ludo’s door where the elderly woman, is, by this time, living with a young orphaned boy who had arrived as a thief and ended up staying, providing a human companionship and support she had rarely known in her life.

A General Theory of Oblivion reads with an element of allegory or fairytale – the fateful intersections may seem too neat, too coincidental. The number of competing characters required to facilitate the convergence of the story lines can seem complicated; there may be a tendency – especially if one is interrupted in the reading as I was by an inopportune winter head cold – to lose track of who’s who for a moment. But the energy is so infectious, the woman at the core is so endearing, despite or perhaps because of her extreme neurotic behaviour, that the book succeeds in creating awe where, in the hands of another author, it might simply feel false and contrived.

Of course, it is essential to remember that magic is not a device as much as a way of being in the world for many authors from Africa. Last year I listened to the recording of a delightful interview from the Blue Metropolis Festival in Montreal with the young Angolan writer Ondjaki, who spoke about his cultural worldview, arguing that his own magic realism isn’t imaginary, rather it is intrinsic to how people think and how they tell stories in his country: “Fiction doesn’t happen to me. Fiction happens to Angola… no one will say ‘what a powerful imagination!’ You’ll get, ‘what neighbourhood did it happen in?’ ”

That kind of approach to storytelling drives this novel. The horror of the era it covers is not downplayed or ignored but it is met with tremendous spirit and resilience, and in a world obsessed with threats and fear, that cannot help but feel magical, even unreal.

Translated by Daniel Hahn, A General Theory of Oblivion is published in North America by Archipelago Books.

Chronicler of sensation: Adventures in Immediate Irreality by Max Blecher

“Brute matter – in the deep, heavy masses of earth, stone, sky or water, or in its least understood forms: mirrors, paper flowers, painted statues, glass marbles with their enigmatic internal spirals – has always kept me a prisoner bumping painfully against its walls, yet spurred me on to share in the strange and senseless adventure of being human.”

Confined to bed for the last decade of his short life, Max Blecher’s masterful Adventures in Immediate Irreality is nothing short of an intimate exploration of the ineffable question of what it means to exist in, and of, the world of matter and emotion. The boundaries between body and spirit are, for Blecher and his unnamed young protagonist, unfixed, shifting, and nebulous – sometimes seemingly just out of reach, sometimes oppressively sharp and painful. This is a luminous, original work that slips between the acutely hyper-real and the hallucinatory surreal, leaving in its wake a trail of vivid, sensuous imagery.

And that, superlatives notwithstanding, is the simple description. As the narrator himself would admit: “Ordinary words lose their validity at certain depths of the soul.”

irrealityBorn in 1909 into a Romanian Jewish family, Blecher grew up in the town of Roman. In 1928, shortly after moving to Paris to study medicine, he was diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis and would spend the rest of his life in sanatoria, virtually immobilized in body, if not in spirit. During these years he would produce two novels, a book of poetry, and a number of articles and translations before he finally succumbed to his illness in 1938, when he was 28 years-old. His work has been variously compared to that of Proust, Kafka, Bruno Schultz and others, but to pigeonhole him would be to do a disservice to his singular vision which, in no small part, might be thought to be unique to his youth, his circumstances, and his acute sensitivity and innate ability to capture the most essential elements of being alive – his memory heightened by the harsh reality of being captive to a painful, disabling disease. It is not a work of surrealism, although there are dreams, visions, and elements of fantasy; but these aspects are set against the very real passion, anxiety, and disillusionment of adolescence.

So, with death an abiding presence in his own life, Blecher sets out to chronicle, with precision and attention to detail, in the flood of real and unreal experiences that his young protagonist encounters in his various “adventures” at home and around town. Beset from an early age by episodes, or “crises” as he call them, our narrator begins with an account of the way his perception of his surroundings and his sense of self within them – his identity – periodically dissipates and then resolves again. He emerges from these episodes with a recharged clarity, but he worries it won’t last.

“The feeling of distance and solitude during the moments when my everyday person has dissolved into amorphousness differs from all other feelings. When it persists, it turns into a fear, a dread of never finding myself again. A vague silhouette of myself surrounded by a large luminous halo looms somewhere in the distance like an object lost in fog.

Then the terrible question of who I actually am comes alive in me like a totally new body with unfamiliar skin and organs.”

This “terrible question” is what he sets out to try to answer by recounting, with an immediate, almost confessional tone, experiences that he hopes will lead to a clearer understanding of himself. Not surprisingly, his emerging sexual attractions direct much of his energies. He recalls his first intimate experiences with Clara in the back room of the sewing machine shop she runs with her brother. Later he will obsess and fantasize about Edda, the wife of the son of a family he regularly visits. In each circumstance, he agonizes over his insecurity, his inability to express himself with the confidence and grace he assumes that everyone else posses without question. In some respects, he is likely no different than most other adolescent boys exploring the dark and mysterious depths of sexuality, but he is so painfully introspective that he can’t help dissecting his physical and emotional reactions at the microscopic level, and the closer he looks, the more uncertain he feels.

Blecher’s protagonist acknowledges that he exists in a porous, sensuous relationship with the world of nature and matter. The moments of crisis that haunt his early years, the instances when the thin veil of reality is pulled aside, have formed and defined his relationship to the world of objects. Perception is eroticized, as Herta Müller describes in her introduction, leading to the “constant comparison of one thing with a hitherto unimaginable other.” Consequently his descriptions lean toward the vivid, often extreme and grotesque, as in his early morning observation of men unloading a delivery in the marketplace “their arms laden with sides of red meat and purple beasts glistening with blood, as tall and proud as dead princesses”. Lined up along the wall of the butcher shop, the carcasses are described:

“…like scarlet sculptures carved from the most diverse and delicate material. They had the watery, iridescent shimmer of silk and the murky limpidity of gelatin. The gaping stomachs were edged with the lace of muscles and the weighty necklaces of beads of fat. The butchers stuck their red hands in and extracted the precious innards – round, rubbery gobbets of hot flesh – which they spread out on a table. The fresh meat had the velvety sheen of a monstrous, hypertrophic rose.”

Coming of age in the 1920‘s, our hero is also fascinated with the technologically facilitated representations of life that were becoming ever more prominent in the still new 20th century. It is as if, one step removed, the world can be contained, engaged with in a way that seems to be more real than reality itself. Thus he is drawn to mirrors, to photographs, to cinema and, most passionately, to wax museums. He describes the tendency to lose himself in his imagination and slip vicariously into the worlds he sees portrayed or reflected. Even when the image he confronts is, in truth his own, as he once chances to find in a display outside a photographer’s booth at the fair grounds. The encounter triggers his existential musings:

“I would suddenly find my own life, the life of the person standing in flesh and blood outside the display case, indifferent and insignificant, just as the living person inside the display case regarded the travels of his photographic self from town to town as absurd. And just as my picture traveled from place to place contemplating new vistas through the dirty, dust-laden glass, so I myself went from one place to the next, constantly seeing new things, yet never understanding them. The fact that I could move, that I was alive, was merely a matter of chance, a senseless adventure, because just as I existed inside the display case I could exist outside it and with the same pale cheeks, the same eyes, the same lackluster hair that made such a sketchy, bizarre, unfathomable image in the mirror.”

Always hyper-aware and self-conscious, Blecher’s protagonist recognizes and makes note of his own oddness, his ritualistic behaviours and paranoias, and his compulsion to engage in what he knows is unseemly (at least with respect to the constraints of his “proper” upbringing). He takes, for example, to following women on the street and one evening, once the unaware object of his pursuit has disappeared into her home, he decides to open her gate and take up a position kneeling in her front yard. Another time, on the edge of town, he cannot resist losing himself to the sensual and tactile sensations of a field of mud and manure, an adventure that nearly has very dire consequences.

The matter-of fact delivery that carries this remarkable novel, is one of its most devastating qualities. Our narrator is attentive to detail – sights and sounds, scents, textures and tastes – but he is so completely self-focused that he observes and interprets the actions of others with a naive and curious absence of empathy. Or maybe he feels too much. He senses the world imposing itself upon his very being in a way that makes it difficult for him to comfortably negotiate his way in a material space and, as such, he seems to inhabit a plane of existence just off the axis of that which other people and things inhabit. That dissonance, more than any of his surreal dreams or startling descriptions, creates the measure of irreality that is sustained throughout, culminating with the narrator’s last desperate pleas, and leaving the reader with a unique, indelible experience that is not easily forgotten.

Blecher_MOriginally published in 1936 as Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată, Blecher’s Adventures in Immediate Irreality initially garnered little attention. Translations began to emerge in the 1970s, but again, the world was not quite ready. This new translation by the late Michael Henry Heim, was prepared when Heim himself was critically ill. He even learned Romanian in order to dedicate himself to the task. Romanian-American writer Andrei Codrescu remarks, in his preface, on the “mysterious filmanets of death” connecting the author and his translator that truly set this translation apart from other previous fine efforts. Released in February 2015 by New Directions, Adventures in Immediate Reality comes complete with a preface by Codrescu and a translation of Herta Müller’s introduction from the German edition.

My Review of Mr Kafka & Other Tales from the Time of the Cult by Bohumil Hrabal at Numéro Cinq

I’m thrilled to announce that my first review for Numéro Cinq is now live. Here’s a taste and a link to the entire review, an excellent online magazine, and your chance to see what a rough ghost really looks like!

Mr KafkaMr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult, recently released by New Directions, represents the latest addition to the growing body of work by the late Czech author, Bohumil Hrabal, to be made available to an English speaking audience. Composed and set, for the most part, during the early years of Communist era Czechoslovakia, this collection of seven short stories is deeply informed by a time when Stalin’s larger-than-life cult of personality loomed over a country unwillingly caught up in the thrust of major social and economic reforms. Yet, as the author indicates in his preface, this book can be seen as both a representation of his society’s evolution, and as an expression of his own creative evolution. During this period there was no single experience more profound for Hrabal, the writer, than his recruitment, in 1949, as a “volunteer” manual labourer at the Poldi Steelworks in the town of Kladno near Prague.

Today the Koněv division of the steelworks where Hrabal worked stands in ruin. During his term of service though, it was a bustling operation devoted to turning the wreckage of war into the raw material required for, among other things, armaments for the forces of the Soviet Union. Although he studied law, Hrabal had worked at a variety of positions including railway dispatcher, insurance agent and salesman prior to finding himself on the factory floor of the steelworks. He arrived in the company of an assortment of other white-collar workers and professionals who suddenly found themselves engaged in unfamiliar work in a strange and dangerous environment alongside seasoned labourers, Party hacks, and prisoners.

Read the rest of the review here.

 

 

Honouring the unwritten: The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories by Ivan Vladislavić

“Not writing is always a relief and sometimes a pleasure. Writing about what cannot be written, by contrast, is the devil’s own job. Yet words on a page make all things possible.”

Central to this collection of brief odes to the fictional inspirations that once planted, failed to germinate, refused to take root and grow, or died off before even hitting the soil; is one full and essentially complete story – the magical titular “The Loss Library”. Surrounding this tale, to either side on the book shelf of South African author Ivan Vladislavić’s imagination lie a selection of meditations on the curious nature of the creative process and the many ways that an intriguing idea can lose its way on the path to realization, finding itself shelved in the place of the might-have-been, filed away in a writer’s own personal loss library. Looking back at the notes and outlines he explored during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, the unsettling years of transition from apartheid to a democratic state, Vladislavić notes that his inspirations tended to arise from documentary sources – the past perhaps seeming more sound than the bloody history being made on the streets of his country at the time. Moving forward, within the scope of the “case studies” selected for this book, the pieces and fragments he gathers turn to dictionaries, reference materials and the “means to read and write – or not read and not write – books.”

2015-12-09 15.08.34But let us begin in the middle, at “The Loss Library”. With a clear nod to Borges, the master of the library of the imagination, a young man arrives at a most unusual archive, a repository of the all of the unfinished works, possible and impossible of all the writers who have ever lived. He is greeted by an attractive librarian. Fit and tanned she is the antitheses of what he expects. As she guides him into the library she first steps into slippers and advises him to do the same. They literally glide across the polished floors of the rooms and corridors as she directs his personal tour of the premises. The first room contains a single glassed in cabinet containing the books that would have been written had their would-be authors not chanced to die young:

“‘Arranged alphabetically and classified by cause of death.’ A wave of her slender hand. ‘Accidental death. Booze, of course. Disease – those old standbys, consumption and syphilis, and the new one, AIDS, a growing collection. Duels – little sign of growth there. Motor accidents. Murder. Suicide. A disproportionate number of Russians and Japanese, as you’d expect, and quite a few of your countrymen and women too.’”

As our protagonist leans in for a closer look, he can recognize no words on the spines. He tells the librarian he is looking for Bruno Schulz. Filed down with the war dead, six little volumes are found but he is not allowed to see them… after all, opening such a book could have consequences in all the others, in essence I suppose, the way fiddling with the future given access to a time machine might. In this library of potential works, one can’t risk having people “talk them into being.”

2015-12-09 15.02.54Together they encounter a room filled with books that remain unwritten because their authors lost faith in them, and he is shown a collection of the books that lost their way or were talked out of existence before they had a chance to be realized. They pass through a room containing books that were destroyed, stop at a shelf of books that comes into being by evocation of the proper author’s name (any guesses?) and, finally, enter a room of floating, ghostly, ethereal books – those that presented themselves to their would-be writers in dreams. In the end, is this excursion through the Loss Library a fantasy, the beginning of book that the young man himself will write into being, or another story that might have been, relegated to the back of a notebook, the bottom of a drawer or, in this day and age, lost somewhere on a hard drive?

Returning now to the startling opening essay, Vladislavić describes his attraction to the famous photograph of Robert Walser lying dead in the snow on Christmas Day, 1956, and reflects upon the way that the isolated image fueled his imagination before had even read any of Walser’s work. He contemplates writing a story about the writer’s last days, about that fateful final walk, the curious absence of footsteps or bystanders around the body, the precision the photographer must have employed to capture this solemn record, and with particular fascination, the dead man’s hat lying in the snow. However, before he sits down to write, Vladislavić engages in a little research and finds another photograph, taken from a different angle. From this vantage point he can now see many footprints in the snow, two men off to the side, and realizes that even the hat has fallen differently than he imagined. The curious, romantic and uncomfortable questions – the necessary elements of the creative process – are shattered.

As he continues to rifle through the pages of his notebooks, Vladislavić explores a variety of mislaid ventures, the inspiration or ideas behind them and the reasons they fell off the rails or, perhaps, only flickered for a moment or two. “Gross”, an intended venture into the land of the OuLiPo in which he set for himself a series mathematical constraints within which he would construct a novel, proves unsuccessful. Along the way, the character he was creating to take centre stage, morphed into someone else who would, ultimately wander off to join the cast of another novel,The Restless Supermarket, but more critically, he found himself completely overwhelmed by the prospect of the challenge he had set and decided that this type of approach was best left to Perec, et al.

In a later example, he describes his fascination with an unassuming sign on the side of a building in his Johannesburg neighbourhood that simply reads “Gravity Addict” with a phone number. He begins to wonder what a gravity addict is and how that might be imagined in a story. He thinks about the post 9/11 performance artist in Don Delillo’s The Falling Man, contemplates the structural format of that novel, and eventually imagines a woman, an aspiring writer, sitting on her sofa watching endless episodes of old cartoons – the ones where characters repeatedly chase each other off the edge of cliffs – and then, when one day the innocuous meaning behind the mysterious appellation “gravity artist” is revealed to him, his interest in the story instantly dissolves and he can go no further.

Finally, in light of the recent re-release of Vladislavić’s first novel, The Folly, the story “The Acrobats” special attention. In this outline for a story we see a man in a library reading a book. At some point he closes that book and retrieves a copy of Tristram Shandy from the stacks. He seeks out a particular passage which in turn, is a lengthy quotation from Gragntua and Pantagruel by Rabelais, so he stops and wanders off to fetch that text and goes on to read from the original, or rather a translation of the original, the same quoted passage describing the wild acrobatic exploits of Gymnaste, performed on horseback, as he faces down an enemy combatant. As such, Vladislavić envisions a post-modern inversion of a book within a book within a book, the initial level being, of course, at once the book that both the man and his reader are reading. However, the idea is set aside, in part due to the complication of modern versus contemporary translations of the nested passages.

Several years later, in the writing of The Folly, Vladislavić sees his character Nieuwenhuizen, the eccentric stranger who arrives out of nowhere to take ownership of and build a house on a vacant lot, as a direct descendant of Gymnaste. As he marks out the foundation of the ephemeral house that he will ultimately construct out of imagination and thin air, Nieuwenhuizen engages in his own acrobatic measurements, leaping, somersaulting, and throwing himself around the lot. Could the earlier story now be revived, with The Folly as the third book in the line, he wonders, could he develop the idea that his “ostensibly post-modern novel stood in a pre-modern tradition”? Ah, but for the paradox that his outline for “The Acrobats” was written three to four years before The Folly, how could a story refer to a book that had yet to be written?

Yet Vladislavić was, it would seem, not quite done with his potential story. Several years later he encountered the 18th century French writer, Diderot, who was a contemporary of and acquainted with Laurence Sterne. Although the publication of Rameau’s Nephew would arise through a circuitous route, there was an indication apparently, that Diderot’s initial sketches for the eccentric, rambling character who engages the narrator of his novel could have roughly coincided with the publication of Tristram Shandy. Now he wants to fictionally trace the lineage of Nieuwenhuizen from Sterne via Rameau… except for a new paradox that arises. The Folly was written before his discovery of Rameau’s Nephew. How could his own novel be influenced by a work he had not read?

In his note at the end of this account of the stubborn death of a story idea, Vladislavić can look back and recognize that, as a young writer, he demonstrated too great a concern with precedent. Wiser now, he remarks:

“Every writer belongs to one bastard bloodline or another, and laying claim to one can be a liberating lesson in perspective. But standing on the shoulders of giants is a skill that comes from long practice. When you start out, you are more likely to get under their feet. Don’t be surprised if the giants – or their legitimate progeny – come stomping after you in the playground: ‘We walk straight so you better get out of the way!’”

And herein lies the true gift of this slender collection of artistic musings,and inspirational dead ends – the insertion throughout of the author’s updated reflections on his varied false starts. There is no writer or would-be writer who does not have an accumulated hoard of ideas, outlines and abandoned projects. If they don’t, one ought to be suspicious.

Wandering through The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories is a rare privilege to spend time in the company of a thoughtful, gifted writer who truly appears to be without pretensions. This journey, contained within the covers of a finely crafted hardcover from the singular Seagull Books and accompanied by the original collages of Sunandini Banerjee, is a wonderful way to spend an afternoon, and treasure to return to time and again. After all, there may well be, within these pages, the inspirational seeds of other stories just waiting for the right gardener to plant them and bring them to fruition.

Some memory I’ve got, eh, young ladies? Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal

“…yes, tragedy rules the world and writers always have something to write about…”

The passionate interlocutor who commandeers the pages of Bohumil Hrabal’s breathlessly intense monologue/novella, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, is perhaps one of the most absurdly memorable narrators one could want to meet. For a little over 100 pages he entertains a group of sunbathing young women, engaging them with rapturous tales – the taller the better – peppered with endless asides, diversions and commentaries. Apart from commas and the occasional question or exclamation marks, there are no real sentence breaks; no full stops, not even at the very end of this glorious single sentence verbal escapade.

Dancing-Lessons-for-the-Advanced-in-Age_1024x1024The genesis of this early, experimental work lay in a series of texts Hrabal transcribed in 1949, at the elbow of his Uncle Pepin, an inveterate raconteur who will, himself, feature as character in his nephew’s later works. These tales were originally gathered as a collection titled The Sufferings of Old Werther which, as it turned out, was never published. But, as any decent storyteller in possession of a goldmine knows, no good tale dare go untold. So these stories were dismantled, literally cut and pasted, reworked, and recycled into the present novel which was originally released in 1964 – one of a number of diverse works that Hrabal would publish in the early 1960’s.

The narrator at the centre of Dancing Lessons, is what Hrabal called a pábitel (typically translated into English as “palaverer”), a dreamer caught up in his own world of memory, spilling forth an endless stream of anecdotes, tragic-comic observations, and beer hall philosophy. Here we have an old man who, without unnecessary delay, launches straight into an account of his past exploits as a soldier, cobbler, brewmaster and, in his own mind at least, legendary womanizer. His narrative spins off into so many diversions and asides that his audience has no option but to submit to the whirlwind:

“… here I am pushing seventy and having the time of my life with you like the emperor with that Schratt lady, promising you red leather pumps like the ones I made for Doctor Karafiát’s sister, who was a beauty, but had one glass eye, which is a problem, because you never know what it’s going to do next, a hatter from Prostějov once told me he took a woman with a glass eye to the pictures and she sneezed and it flew out and during the break they had to go crawling under the seats for it, but she found it wiped it off, pulled up her eyelid, and pop! in it went, by the way, baking is as much of an art as shoemaking, my brother Adolph was a trained baker…”

And on he goes. You get the idea. His asides are often as brutal as they are hilarious. With suitably ribald and absurd black humour, they are just as frequently both at once. Characters surface briefly, generally to either amorous or unfortunate ends, but, throughout the monologue, his banter does tend to revolve around themes – his experiences at the front during the war, the qualities of well fashioned footwear, the technical aspects of brewing beer, or the unlikelihood of achieving marital bliss. Eventually, in true beer hall fashion, the narrative becomes dominated by a series of pissing contests toward the end. After all, a lot of beer is consumed in the course of these tales, it has to go somewhere!

An admirer of the “European Renaissance”, his euphemism for sex, our hero is guided by the wisdom of two essential texts that resurface repeatedly throughout the course of his monologue and add to a sense of continuity. One is a handbook on sexual hygiene ascribed to a Mr. Batista who warns, for instance, “men against giving in to their passions, no more than three times an afternoon or four times for Catholics, to prevent sinful thoughts from taking shape”. The other guidebook from which he quotes regularly is Anna Nováková’s book of dreams that conveniently offers explanations – even handy excuses – to be gleaned from nocturnal imagery: “holding a dead man’s watch means a wedding and being locked in an insane asylum means a great fortune awaits you!” or how repeatedly dreaming about canaries in cages would mean one “would always long for freedom”.

When it comes to the ladies, our narrator has an insatiable appetite and no shortage of offers that tumble, often one into another, in his recollections. Even in the hospital recovering from surgery, while his rugged blacksmith roommate succumbs to pneumonia, he confesses that :

“… I was the only one who came out on top, a pretty nurse served me pheasant and asked me why I wasn’t married, why I let so fine a body go to waste, and for an answer I slipped out from under the covers and was about to give her a dancing lesson when they chased me back to bed because after a hernia operation they make you lie there like a corpse, a giant of a girl, but beautiful, once called to me from the Elbe, Come in to the water and I’ll give you a kiss, so in I went – neck deep, clothes and all – and got my prize, a hero once more, back on land I had to wring out more than my clothes, I’d just picked up my pay in ten-crown notes, and there I stood in my underpants, the women rushing down to the river to have a look at me, the whole town on its feet, yes…”

The ineffable character of Hrabal’s unstoppable narrator lends an infectious momentum to this novella. It also allows him to blend in a backhanded social and political commentary, often in the manner of an unreserved sentimentality for a bygone era. As Adam Thirlwell indicates in his introduction, Hrabal’s fiction simultaneously lingers on and evades what it is trying to say. One sentence can easily be contradicted by the that follows.

“But Hrabal’s technique is so moving, finally, because the world historical past is only an element of our universal nostalgia. For ‘in the days of the monarchy shoemaking was more chemistry than craft,’ laments our hero, ‘ today it’s all conveyor belts, I was a shoemaker, but I wore a pince-nez and carried a stick with a silver mounting because back then everyone wanted to look like a composer or a poet’…”  (Introduction)

In his joy for the “good old days”, there is a melancholy need to preserve proof of the trauma, not only of the past, but presumably of the present circumstances as well. Hrabal and his fellow artists were, at the time this book was published, working under the restrictions of the Communist government, a situation that would become more oppressive in the years to come.

But as his erstwhile rogue – at once grandiose, hysterical and fatalistic – wishes to remind the reader, worthwhile literature should cut sharply:

“… which must be why Bondy the poet says that real poetry must hurt, as if you’d forgotten you wrapped a razor blade in your handkerchief and you blow your nose, no book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it’s meant to make you jump out of bed in your underwear and run and beat the author’s brains out…”

Oh yes.

* Translated by Michael Henry Heim, with an introduction by Adam Thirlwell, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is available from NYRB Classics.

In the era of the great ‘still’: The Room by Andreas Maier

“Venturing in there during the time of the stench would have been hell. I would have died of disgust. But I wasn’t scared of the room: given that setting a foot in there was completely inconceivable, its existence, so to speak, fell completely under the threshold of my perception. It was there, and yet at the same time it wasn’t.”

Set in the Wetterau, the fertile agricultural region north of Frankfurt, The Room by Andreas Maier marks the beginning of a proposed series of eleven memoir/novels exploring small town life in post war Germany. The reference point that launches this ambitious project is modest – the room that was once the private, darkened domain of the narrator’s uncle J. It may sound rather claustrophobic to begin with such a confined and specific space, but the spirit of this small novel as is expansive as the unfettered and innocent imagination of the simple minded anti-hero at its centre:

“This is the beginning that everything else stems from. The room, the house, the street, the towns, my life, my family, the Wetterau and everything else beyond it. My uncle, the only human being without guilt I have ever known. On his way into the real world, but with one foot still in paradise.”

As a consequence of a difficult forceps delivery, J would never shed the wonder and fleeting frustrations of a willful child as he grew into an adult. If it made him vulnerable, he didn’t notice. Incapable of feeling pain and always eager to fit in, he was unaware of the cruelty, physical and emotional, directed at him by his peers and by his own father. He lived in a world of fantasy – peopled with war heroes, mountain climbers, stone masons, crane operators, policemen, hunters. He loved to walk in the woods, could identify different birds, and seemed to have a special affinity for plants and animals.

RoomBut perhaps, more than anything, he was deeply attached to his brown VW Type 3 Variant and, quite remarkably, he had a drivers license. Driving, for J, was a huge production which he took very proudly and seriously. He was a simple man living in a simpler time, but at a moment when the world was poised to enter a new global reality. In his experience, J existed at a time when workers still routinely drank before work, on the job and, of course afterwards; when smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, though as deadly then as now, was not discouraged; and when no one commented if you scooped five teaspoons of sugar into your cup of coffee.

“My uncle didn’t live a healthy life, that’s for sure, but then again it wasn’t really the fashion to live healthily back then – you could pretty much choose the way you would die, and it was usually the way you had lived.”

The narrative around which the The Room is constructed, with many segues and asides, is the imagined description of a typical day in the life of J, at some point during the year of the moon landing, 1969. The narrator himself is only two years old at the time, so he does not pretend to remember anything that he sets out to recreate. Rather, he builds on what he has heard of his uncle’s life, filtered through his own childhood memories of a foul smelling man who frequently annoyed him or made him uncomfortable, and the adult understanding and compassion that, sadly, came too late.

J’s day begins early with a walk to the train station. From there he catches a train to Frankfurt where he works at the postal depot, a job his brother-in-law, a lawyer, had secured for him after his father’s death. What he thinks of his job and how he fits in there is not known. After work he is pictured considering the advances of a prostitute in the Red Light district near the Frankfurt Train Station. Does he enter the brothel or hurry home? His nephew sketches out varied scenarios but, in the end, he does not know what goes on in J’s mind.

“In my uncle, therefore, you could alternately see either the triumph of nature over the law or the triumph the law over nature. In reality, though, he was positioned between the two, and presumably at the complete mercy of both, and that’s why the former Frankfurt Kaiserstrasse district offered the best opportunity to get to the heart of the matter. Germany the land of secrets. My uncle, the man of secrets.”

Upon returning home, Uncle J disappears for a nap, and then emerges to a list of errands that his family has devised for him… refreshing the flowers on the graves in the family plot, picking up his sister, delivering his mother to the hairdresser’s. He tries to resist his mother’s insistence that he shower, or a least clean himself up, a task that he pays less and less attention to as he ages. In the end he complies, driven by his ultimate goal – the hope that he will later be able to spend a few hours at the Forsthaus Winterstein in the company of the hunters he so admires. Every step of this recreated day is measured out within the framework and idiosyncratic order that J appeared to impose on his own life, imagined from the inside, but ultimately unknowable.

The narrative tone of this inventive balance of fiction and memoir is reminiscent of the filling and emptying of a time capsule. The narrator places himself into the scenery, his two year-old, pre-language self as speculative as his uncle’s world and possible mindset. Maier extends and condenses time – bringing a mythical quality to a world in flux, blending the simple man’s worldview with the adult narrator’s knowledge of how his uncle’s life will continue to unfold, and the way that the Wetterau itself will be transformed over the four decades that come to pass between 1969 and the present moment when he sits, in his uncle’s former room, now converted to an office, to commit this tale to paper.

The Room, translated by Jamie Lee Searle, is available from Frisch & Co, a publisher of electronic books based in Berlin. The next two installments in Andreas Maier’s series, The House and The Street are due to be released in the the spring of 2016.

Of that which is remembered: Memory Theater by Simon Critchley

Philosopher Simon Critchley’s curious fictional debut, a detour down a pathway that blurs the lines between essay, fiction, and what might  almost be considered speculative memoir; opens with one miserable protagonist pursued by a relentless insomnia and an abiding fear of death. Our narrator, who shares both name and profession with his progenitor, has been been possessed by terror and sleeplessness for three years by this point and is, quite frankly, “exhausted with exhaustion”. And rightly so, he has put himself through quite the ordeal. In the tale that follows in the brief novel, Memory Theater, he invites the reader to join him on a journey that combines a reflective review of the history of the philosophical fascination with memory and a strange discovery that fuels his own descent into madness.

Memtheatre

The story begins with the protagonist’s decision to relocate to New York from the UK in search of a more accommodating academic environment. However, first he must clear out his office at the University of Essex, and in the process of sorting through his books and papers, he comes across a stack of five boxes tucked away, half hidden. Upon investigation he discovers that they contain the unpublished papers and notes of his friend and former teacher, Michel Haar, who had passed away the previous year. In keeping with his friend’s predilection for astrology, the boxes are labeled with zodiac signs, from Capricorn to Gemini. For some reason Taurus is either missing or absent.

In the boxes he finds letters, manuscripts, maps. He is especially entranced by a treatise entitled “Le théâtre de mémoire selon G. W. F. Hegel”, an original reinterpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, informed by the notion of the memory theatre as explored in the writings of historian Frances Yates in her classic book, The Art of Memory – a reading of Occidental history as a quest to develop mnemonic systems to capture, contain, and retrieve knowledge.

“Artificial memory machines litter history. Human beings seem to be persistently seduced by the idea that a theater, a palace, or a machine might be constructed that would hold the sum of knowledge in a way that would permit total recall. All that we would need to do in order to obtain absolute knowledge would be to enter the theater or machine and commit to memory everything therein.”

At this point, Critchely’s hero sets off on an overview of the philosophical attempts to realize this ambition, starting with the ancient Greek poet Simonides and moving forward through to the ambitious efforts of Guilo Delmino Camillo in the first half of the 1500’s to obtain the funds to construct a full size theater based on a model he reportedly built and described, culminating ultimately with speculation that the Globe Theatre may have been conceived with similar designs.

The notion of the memory theater enchants the protagonist, especially his friend’s reading via Hegel of memory, not as a static arrangement of information set out on the steps of an amphitheater and viewed from the stage, but as a series of moving images, a history of the Spirit coming into being… memory as process, to be viewed from any spot in the theater. Yet he is troubled by his own experience of memory loss as a result of an accident earlier in his life, recalling that: “My self felt like a theatre with no memory. All the seats were empty. Nothing was happening on stage.”

Overwhelmed by his findings, he retreats to rest for the night before opening the fifth and final box. That night he is visited by a fantastic dream in which he floats through a Gothic cathedral. Magical, vast and vivid in its imagery this dream sequence marks the transition of the novel from the drier, firmer ground of of the academic essay turned memoir, into a space where the impossible is possible. It also provides our first indication that our narrator is more unstable and neurotic than his philosophical lecturing may have suggested.

The following day, on his way back to the university the dream haunts him:

“I… thought about my dream of the Gothic cathedral as a vast memory theater. The medieval love of the figural, the dramatic, and the grotesque was not, then, evidence of either some tortured sexual repression or the liberation from such repression, as we moderns arrogantly assume, but is simply a powerful and vivid aid to recollection.”

But the metaphor quickly expands… a town, a city, the globe, the night sky. He comes to wonder if everyone is their own memory theater, tossing and playing with the idea until he arrives at the office and opens the Pisces box. Inside, at the bottom of the container, he finds a stack of circular charts reproduced on stiff cards. He takes them to be astrological charts but, at closer inspection, he realizes that they are, in truth, memory maps: circular diagrams working inward from biographical details, through an individual’s works to, at the very centre, the date, location and cause of death.

Making his way through the charts, he finds that Michel had drawn up a map for each of his favourite thinkers, and then, moving further along, for various colleagues and contemporaries. What might seem a fancy is rendered prophetic by the fact that a few of the charts assigned to individuals who themselves died after their creator’s death were chillingly accurate in their predictions of the exact details of the subject’s demise.

And then, the fictional Simon finds his own map. The central circle is inscribed: “le 13 juin, 2010, 1551h, Den Bosch, hémorragie cébébrale.” His reaction is cool, cerebral hemmorhage when he would have expected lung cancer. “But where the fuck is Den Bosch?”

Moving on to the United States armed with this knowledge, our protagonist seems to be relaxed and comforted by the certainty of a date and time for his own impending passing. He is productive, and as happy as any philosopher obsessed with dying is likely to be – that is, until the missing link, the box marked Taurus arrives.

Inside he finds a small wooden model of a memory theater, presumably after that which Camillo was purported to have created. And then things get very weird. He begins to experience extreme phantom pains, he starts to hallucinate, anxiety consumes him, he becomes isolated and ultimately ramps up into full blown mania. Tracking down Den Bosch, home of one Hieronymus – master of a memory theater worthy of the totality of heaven and hell if there ever was one – he relocates to the Netherlands and begins to construct a life sized memory theater of his own. A place to die and become god-like at once.

It is quite impossible for me to imagine what it would be like to come to this work without an interest in philosophy. There is a glossary that closes out the work that lists the key personages and concepts that appear in the preceding pages so detailed knowledge is by no means a prerequisite. But it would not hurt. I confess that I arrived with some background, including a degree in philosophy and my own yellowed copy of Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory.

I have also had a longstanding interest in the nature and limitations of memory. I spent a decade working with adult survivors of acquired brain injury; an opportunity to become well acquainted with the range of memory impairments afforded by accident or illness. Our clients included several individuals with severe anoxic injuries that left them with no ability to transfer episodic experience into short term, and ultimately, long term memory. Two had been professionals, one a young lawyer, the other a doctor, prior to injuries that had occurred decades earlier. Given a chance to expound facts from their respective areas of expertise, recall was impressive, if outdated. But leave the room and return a minute later and neither would know they had ever seen you before. With a ten second memory, a memory theatre is an absurd notion, it’s more like a room at the end of a long tunnel with blank walls. A tunnel that grows ever longer over time.

I imagine that this background is, in part, what drew my attention to this book when it was released in the UK by Fitzcarraldo last fall. At the time though, I could not know what would lie between my initial awareness of Memory Theater and my opportunity to read it. With respect to the obsession with death that entertains Critchley, fictional and, apparently, actual as well; I cannot say it ever was a source of particular concern for me. That is until a few minutes after midnight on the 27th of July this year – the anniversary of a marriage which is long over but never ceases to be the harbinger of strange occurrences for me. I had fallen asleep, still exhausted and fighting what I assumed to be prolonged jet lag after a long flight home from South Africa, when a pulmonary embolism nearly claimed my life. By an eerie set of coincidences, my adult son heard me struggling to breathe and was able to call for support and start chest compressions in time.

I was fortunate. No prosaic dance with death that one, no necronautical conceit. I had prepared for the fact that my plane could fall out of the sky or that I could be mugged on the streets of Cape Town (which I very nearly was), but to die in my sleep at that moment? No I was not ready to accept that fate. And apart from the days immediately before and after the event, I survived with my memory intact.

So of what worth the notion of a memory theater? We cannot look forward, we can only look back, and, if there is time, the theater I wish to construct is one that I write into being – for myself and for those I love.

Memory Theater is now available in North America through Other Press.

The dying gold of ruined stars – Poems: Book One of Our Trakl by Georg Trakl

“Sun, autumnal, thin and shy,
And the fruit falls from the trees.
Stillness dwells within its blue rooms
During a long afternoon.”

– from “Whispered during the Afternoon”, Georg Trakl, translation by James Reidel

Many years ago when I was in school, poetry, in so far as we were introduced to it, was almost exclusively the works of English language poets. In high school I fell under the spell of the English Romantic writers and that was the beginning. Over the years though, I would be inclined to think that most of the poets I have become obsessed with wrote in English, that is, until I began to read more translated fiction. With that my attention shifted, or to be more precise, my horizons became broader.

TraklThis year, a German book enthusiast I have come to know through the “internet of book discussions”, the corner of the web I inhabit, introduced me to Austrian poet Georg Trakl. Somehow he had escaped my attention before. Of course, when you come to read poetry in translation, the question of the translation itself becomes critical. Typically, when more than one translation of a poet’s work exists I try to access and compare a few. But when Seagull Books released the first installment of a three part series of Trakl’s poetry, I did not hesitate to order a copy, sight unseen.

Poems: Book One of Our Trakl is a new translation, by American poet and translator James Reidel, of the poet’s first collection, simply titled Poems (Gedichte), which was originally published in 1913. In his note at the opening of this volume, Reidel recounts that he has endeavoured to preserve the same concentrated mania that marks the works of the 19th century poets Trakl would have read: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Hölderlin and Poe. He says:

“I want to actually channel Trakl, his craft (with its implicit painterliness) and work ethic, to have him, so to speak, absorbed in the right dosages he – as a poet, pharmacist and addict – intended.”

Reidel does go on to add that to emulate Trakl’s delivery in English, the rhyme scheme of the original poems is often necessarily sacrificed, but the contortions required to retain  rhyme can trivialize a poet’s spirit and tone.

In an essay in the online poetry journal Mudlark, Reidel expands on his Trakl translation project. He provides an overview of Trakl’s short and tragic life, as well a discussion of his approach to the translation, and a selection of his translations presented with the original German. A poet himself, Reidel brings a sensitivity and insight to his reading and approach that I, as reader, value:

“I have found that when you read Trakl in the original German, you get a snapshot of what is there. When you go back, you get another view. It may be sharper or less so, and with the feeling that it is intentionally less so. This can be frustrating for those who speak and think in English, that lawyer of languages. There is no fixed point to reading him or rendering him. This makes any book of translations simply a collection of snapshots of a particular reading at any point in time. Another way of rendering/reading a Trakl poem is through the barrel of a kaleidoscope, where one can only fix on a view when one stops or when the glass bits sometimes jam. I do this.”

Born in 1887, into a prosperous Salzburg family, Trakl was a precocious child, creative and intelligent – by his early teens he was experimenting with lyric verse that showed great promise. He could, however, be withdrawn and prone to depression. He was exceptionally close to his sister Margarete (Grete), a musical prodigy with whom he is thought to have engaged in an incestuous relationship. He began publishing poems in 1908, in Vienna where he had gone to study pharmacology, a tempting profession for one who already had a tendency towards addiction. As a budding poet, he enjoyed early success and mentorship during the following years, ultimately attracting the discreet patronage of Ludwig Wittgenstein. But the outbreak of war forced him into military service. Relying on his training as a pharmacist he hoped to avoid direct combat, but the trauma of trying to attend to desperately wounded troops without adequate supplies would drive him to attempt suicide. He was sent to a military hospital in Kraków for observation, but suffered a relapse and was found dead of a cocaine overdose on November 3, 1914. He was 27 years old.

Patterns of Decay (c) JM Schreiber, 2011
Patterns of Decay , Copyright JM Schreiber, 2011

This first volume of Trackl’s poetry, beautifully bound and presented by Seagull books, readily lends itself to an immersive reading from beginning to end. The autumnal themes that feature so strongly make it an even more evocative read for someone like myself at this time – that is, in November in the northern hemisphere – but autumn is rendered almost metaphorical in his verses. Nature figures in his work, rendered through rural and religious imagery; however nature, for Trakl, is one which couches death and decay as an intrinsic element of its stark beauty and haunting appeal:

In the evening, when the bells toll of peace,
I follow the birds in their glorious flights,
Long multitudes, like pious trains of pilgrims,
Disappearing into autumn’s clear breadths.

Wandering through the twilight-filled garden
I dream following their brighter destinies
And feel the sundials barely move any more.
So I follow their journeys above the clouds.

There a blast of decay makes me start to tremble.
The blackbird laments in the leafless branches.
The red vine totters on rusting trellises.

While like a dance of death of pale children
Around the dark weathered rim of the fountain
The blue asters toss shivering in the wind.

– “Decay”

These are quiet, brooding poems that show a clear obsession with decline. They speak to a young poet struggling to capture the gloom in his own soul, consequently the poems have a very immediate and personal feel. Are they depressing? As someone who has had his own lifelong challenges with mood dysregulation, I find his words oddly comforting. I am not equipped to offer a critique of poetry, I am afraid I can, in this case, only speak to what I feel. And I don’t believe I am alone in registering a profound personal response to Trackl’s poetry. In his short life he produced a small, but vital, body of work that would have an important influence on other German language poets including Paul Celan, Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke; and draw the ongoing interest of poets, translators and readers outside of German speaking countries that continues to this day, just over one hundred years after his death.

For my part, I can only eagerly look forward to the upcoming additions to Our Trakl.