Bookish travel notes from an unbookish vacation

New in Krimis:  Or new to me.  Animal mysteries.  Zoo mysteries.  These categories might overlap.  After the success of Glennkill: Ein Schafskrimi (2005), in which a flock of sheep solve a murder, a wave of animal detectives was inevitable, but I was not expecting a novel in which the sleuths are a pair of meerkats, a book I held in my hands in a Viennese bookstore.  If you had an idea for a mystery starring a raccoon or a flock of crows but thought, no, the whole thing is much too stupid, I say squelch your doubts and write the dang thing before someone beats you to it.  Cash in.

Similarly, we came across a Krimi in which the detective was Theodor Storm, who in fact did help solve crimes in his role as a judge in Husum, although the novel is set long before that, and before he wrote his great uncanny novellas, when Storm was a young Romantic poet.  Who investigated murders.  What a bad idea.  But now my own notion of a series of mysteries starring Marcel Proust only looks half as dumb.  The enigmatic stranger with the prosthetic leg, who may be the killer but turns out to be an ally, is Arthur Rimbaud.  Faked his death.  I’m giving that away for free.  I’m  not gonna write any Proust mysteries.  See above – the time is right for your series of Detective Whitman / Inspector Eliot / Special Agent Tzara mysteries.  Do not hesitate.  Either Eliot; both would make terrific detectives.  Tristan Tzara is the Dada Detective – good, right?  Better than Theodor Storm or a pair of meerkats.

Meine Frau read a zoo mystery, Das Schweigen des Lemming (The Silence of the Lemming, 2006) by Stefan Slupetzky, in which Lemming, a security guard at the Tiergarten Schönbrunn in Vienna investigates the death of a penguin, which maybe sounds a little thin, but it turns out the novel is full of detail about Vienna’s art world, including, for example, the 2003 theft of the Cellini Salt Cellar, which I finally got to see with my own eyes.

At one point – this is all secondhand, since I could not read the book myself – an informant needs to meet with Lemming.  Knowing the detective is a fan of Thomas Bernhard, he suggests they meet in the Kunsthistoriches Museum – “You know where.”  He means in the Titian room, in front of the painting “Man with a White Beard,” the setting of Old Masters (1985).  It had been so long since Lemming read Bernhard’s novel that he has to run to the bookstore to look up which painting is meant, but still, do you see what I am getting at here?

In Vienna, the stature of Thomas Bernhard is so high that in a mystery about the death of a penguin it is assumed that readers are comfortable with casual references to specific elements of Bernhard novels.  We stumbled upon Bernhard frequently, even in the Jewish Museum (Bernhard was not Jewish), where a clip from one of his plays was deployed ironically.  The Vienna-Bernhard phenomenon is unusual.

That Titian room is magnificent.  Like the room with the Cellini, it was closed the last time I was in Vienna.

Well, that’s something.  My post-vacation resolution is to make Wuthering Expectations more breezy and shallow.  Off to a good start.  Tomorrow, I will continue with a book I have read rather than books I have seen but cannot read.

he had to endure the knowledge that he wasn’t finding out the clue to the strangeness. - a critical agenda for Seiobo There Below - Bernhard, Pynchon, and the Italian crossword puzzle

The first big joke, and it’s a good one, in László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below comes at the very beginning of Chapter 2, pp. 17-19, where the dismayed reader is presented with an entire crossword puzzle.  In Italian.  The humor comes from imagining the scowls and obscenities of prospective Krasznahorkai specialists, especially those without Italian.  If they are lucky the puzzle will turn out to be a red herring, for example a parodic gesture at the idea of a puzzle novel.

The translator Ottilie Mulzet, in interviews, and many reviewers have overgeneralized when describing Seiobo.  They perhaps have to.  Is Krasznahorkai writing about the presence or absence of the sacred in the world, whatever “the sacred” is, or the way the sense of the sacred affects a small and particular sort of person – prophets, visionaries, and martyrs?  Is he describing the way art works, or the way it works on a few sensitive seekers?  I have observed a temptation with Krasznahorkai criticism to move to metaphysics too quickly, when the argument is more at the level of psychology.  Krasznahorkai himself may believe otherwise, but that is not relevant.

Take the architect and amateur expert on Baroque music who stars in the novel’s funniest chapter (377, “Private Passion”).  He is giving a lecture on Bach to eight innocent souls in a small town Hungarian library.  He is incoherent and threatening, his audience finds him incomprehensible, and he is a grotesque, obese and absurd (“because everyone sensed how these trousers were continuously, ceaselessly sliding downward across those three thick folds of fat, down toward the thighs,” etc., with these long sentences, always etc., 345), all of which is humorous in one way or the other.  Then there is this:

… it must be in that very moment when the Baroque resounds in music, because we should have ended there, at the pinnacle, and not have allowed everything to happen just as it might, and then to lie, to blurt out these morbid lies and learn how to enthuse over such music as this Mozart or that Beethoven or over whatever it was all those ever more modest talents, those ever more commonplace figures, were able to conjure up out of our hats…  not even to mention the most repulsive of all, this imperial criminal named Wagner and his zealous supporters, let’s not even mention it, because if I even just think about it – the lecturer shook his head, giving expression to his disbelief – it is not shame that overcomes me, nor the consciousness of degradation, but rather a dark desire for murder, because…  (355)

Well, we get the idea, and in fact at this point Krasznahorkai wanders over to the stunned audience (“completely drained, not daring to escape, their hopes that at one point there might be a normal end to this lecture long since extinguished”), none of whom realize that they are being treated to a perfect chapter-long parody of Thomas Bernhard.  Which is too bad for them, because it is hilarious.

The speaker is totally consumed by Baroque music to the point of derangement.  He finally leaves in tears, not singing but shouting the music of Bach.  The chapter is a comic triumph.

It comes fairly late in the book, where it left me with the terrible realization that if this chapter was a parody of another author, than any – or all – of the other chapters might also be parodies, perhaps of Hungarian authors I have never even heard of, or worse, of authors I know well but failed to recognize.  Which chapter is the Sebald parody?  The last chapter begins with a parody of the first sentence of Gravity’s Rainbow – is the whole chapter a Pynchon parody?  Pynchon appears in the epigraph, too, which mangles the Thelonious Monk quotation Pynchon used as the epigraph to his 2006 Against the Day.  The jokes gets tangled.

This is worse than the Italian crossword puzzle.  What really makes me suspicious is that in this novel that is about nothing but the power and intricacy of all sorts of art, there is no example of prose fiction.  What if Krasznahorkai somehow wove his argument about fiction into his own fiction?

Good luck to everyone toiling in the Krasznahorkai mine.  I am eager to see what you dig up.

The post’s title is on p. 116.  It is not especially out of context here.

Now, a holiday, when I need my skillet green bean casserole recipe.  Back to usual business – Dickens, Turgenev – starting Monday.

Art is the most sublime and the most revolting thing simultaneously - Thomas Bernhard's Viennese cultural history

Next week I am on vacation.  The advertising robots have become aggressive lately, so I will turn up the juice on the comment bug zapper while I am gone.  Sorry about that.  Temporary.

Let’s go back to where I started three weeks ago.

Bruckner is just as slovenly a composer as Stifter is a slovenly writer, both of them share that Upper Austrian slovenliness.  Both of them make so-called devout art which in fact is a public danger, Reger said. (36)

Who could that be but Thomas Bernhard, in this case a character in Old Masters (1985).  What did poor Bruckner do to anyone?  But Bernhard is not really attacking Stifter and Bruckner (or not only attacking them):

I certainly do not come from a musical family, he said, on the contrary my people were all unmusical and altogether completely hostile to the arts…  We had many beautiful, expensive paintings hanging on our walls, he said, but they never looked at them once in all those decades, we had many thousands of books on our shelves but they never read a single one of those books in all those decades, we had a Bösendorfer grand piano standing there but for decades no one had played it.  If the lid of the piano had been welded shut they would not have noticed it for decades, he said.  (51)

The age of the characters puts his childhood back in the 1910s or so.  His parents are children of the decorative “roast chicken” era in Vienna.  Those books and paintings might seem to undermine the completeness of his parents hostility, but the character agrees with Broch that it is all for show.  Thus Bruckner and Stifter, creators of that era, are necessary targets in whatever war the character is waging, not that he restricts himself to that period (“basically Beethoven is an utterly repulsive phenomenon, everything about Beethoven is more or less comical, a comical helplessness is what we continually hear when we are listening to Beethoven: the rancour, the titanic, the marching-tune dull-wittedness even in his chamber music,” 61) or to artists (“Vienna is quite superficially famous  for its opera, but in fact it is feared and detested for its scandalous lavatories,” 81; this theme is pursued for several pages).

All of this is more or less declaimed in front of a Titian painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, a painting and room you can see for yourself if it is not closed on the day you visit, grumble grumble.

For this character, and for the comparably vitriolic narrator of Woodcutters (1984), art is the only source of ethical values, the only ground worth fighting on.  I had wondered about the attacks on Viennese institutions like the Burgtheater, but I had been mistakenly guided by the French or American model where the argument for art is so often anti-bourgeois, anti-philistine.  Bernhard’s characters live in a world that has embraced art, is engorged on it.  The Viennese artist’s struggle is from within the center of the culture, not on the fringe.  Bernhard is aligned with Karl Kraus, Robert Musil, and Hermann Broch in his simultaneous attack on and defense of art.

Art is the most sublime and the most revolting thing simultaneously, he said.  But we must make ourselves believe that there is high art and the highest art, he said, otherwise we should despair. (37)

I keep quoting Old Masters, but the stuff in Woodcutters is just as good.

Both Woodcutters and Old Masters turn out to be, hidden behind all of their acid, love stories – love for people, a woman, I mean.  Old Masters is almost sentimental, as sweet as Adalbert Stifter.

All our writers nowadays, without exception, speak and write enthusiastically about Stifter and follow him as if he were the literary god of the present age.  Either these people are stupid and lack all appreciation of art, or else they do not understand anything about literature, or else, which unfortunately I am bound to believe, they never read Stifter, he said.  (37)

Now I have read Stifter.  Judge accordingly.

The most boring and mendacious author in the whole of German literature - beginning Adalbert Stifter's Indian Summer

For very long stretches of his prose Stifter is an unbearable chatterbox, he has an incompetent and, which is most despicable, a slovenly style and he is moreover, in actual fact, the most boring and mendacious author in the whole of German literature.  (Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters, 1985, tr. Ewald Osers, p. 35)

So there is one view, admittedly that of a fictional character, of Adalbert Stifter.  It contains some truth. His first novel, Indian Summer (Der Nachsommer, 1857), is dull, mannered, distant, completely devoid of humor, virtually devoid of story, and free of characters who might be described as naturalistic.

For example, dull:

“Once I took the trouble of measuring the area of this hill as far as it is planted in grain so I could make a prediction about the average amount that would be harvested in one year.  I based my calculations on our previous harvests as well as those of our neighbors.  I couldn’t believe the figures; I wouldn’t have even dreamed that they were so large.  If you are interested, I’ll show you this study which is kept in our house.” (45)

The novel could be even more dull, I suppose – Stifter could spend several pages describing that study of grain yield; thankfully, it is never mentioned again, although the characters do spend a great deal of time looking at drawings of buildings and furniture.

Humorless:

We finally learned from each other, spending many joyous and loving hours with the zither.  (208)

Sorry, that is actually an example of humor, assuming you find the word “zither” as inherently humorous as I do.  The narrator spends a fair amount of time playing the zither and commissioning beautiful hand-crafted zithers.  This is the voice, by the way, of the main character and narrator of the novel.  Hundreds of pages, much like that.

Mannered:

“Thank you, Mother,” her son replied, “you are so kind, Mother dear; I already know what it is and shall do exactly as Foster Father decides.”

“That will be good,” she answered.  (142)

Everyone talks in this way.  They have to, because a defining feature of the novel is that there is no drama or even conflict of any sort.  Everyone says the words they ought to say and takes the actions they ought to take.  In a pattern typical with Stifter, for example in his novellas Limestone (1848) and Brigitta (1844), the events in the present of the story are a sort of ideal resolution of a conflict from the past, a conflict the existence of which is only revealed at the end of the story.

Imagine how this works when the text of the novel is eight times longer than the novellas.  The tension is almost unbearable.  When will something happen?  Something has to happen, doesn’t it?  Or was Stifter writing some kind of expectation-crushing 19th century avant garde anti-novel?

He was not, but it took me a long time to understand what he was doing.  As my understanding grew, so did my enthusiasm for this quiet, odd novel.  Indian Summer turns out to be a – what is a good metaphor – a foundation stone of Austrian literature.  Austrian culture, perhaps.  That grump in the Bernhard novel also calls Stifter “an author I myself had always so enormously revered that it became more like artistic addiction,” at least before he finally read him “accurately and radically.” (34)

That sets a good example for me.  I am going to write about Stifter and Indian Summer until I run out of things to say.

All quotations are from the 1985 Wendell Frye translation, which I still, after 470 dense pages, can hardly believe exists.

Stifter's weirdos - The Recluse - an uncanny thing flitting around our ears

Adalbert Stifter's stories - all six that I've read, at least - feature eccentric bachelors and semi-bachelors. The priest in Limestone, the hypochondriac in The Forest Path, the gentleman farmer in Brigitta. In Tourmaline and Abdias, the recluses live with their daughters, but the wife is long gone. And The Recluse - there he is in the title*.

Young Victor is leaving his foster mother to go to his first job in another city. First, though, he must visit his uncle, who lives in an abandoned monastery, on an island, in a lake, in the mountains. He requires that Victor walk than take a coach. He's an odd bird:

"Today Victor's uncle was wearing the loose-fitting gray coat in which he had appeared yesterday at the iron grille in the garden. He was now standing on a stool with a stuffed bird in his hand, removing the dust from it with a paintbrush." (p. 221, tr. David Luke)

Victor spends most of his time, and most of the story, exploring, with his dog, the house and monastery and island, and swimming in the lake. The uncle and nephew get along poorly at first, then worse, and finally better.

Near the end, the uncle finally tells Victor why he wanted to see him, in a long scene that mostly consists of the uncle's speech. It's set during a thunderstorm (a little pathetic fallacy to set the mood). Some samples of the uncle:

"[N]o one can give real help, profound help, unless from time to time he can do a deed of force, like hurling a boulder.

So if you started work now, the kind of work you could do would at best be work of no use to anyone, and yet it would slowly eat the life out of you.

[O]ld age is a moth in the dusk, an uncanny thing flitting around our ears."

There are several pages of this, some of which is more directly related to the story than this bit. This specific scene is one of the roots of Thomas Bernhard's novels. See his Gargoyles for an extremely close resemblance, if I'm remembering it correctly. It's sounds a bit like Nietzsche, too, doesn't it?

The Recluse is my favorite of these Stifter stories, although I'm not entirely sure why. The blend, seems right, I guess. The mountain landscape is a continual presence in the story, and the descriptions of the mountains or atmospheric effects are generally quite good. The sweetness of the story is smartly balanced over a sort of unsettling sadness.

Here's the last sentence, which strongly reminds me of W. G. Sebald - remember that the story has what most people would call a genuinely happy ending:

"And yet even if he has left other traces of his existence, they too will be obliterated, as all earthly things are obliterated - and when at last everything, even all that is greatest and most joyful, perishes utterly in the ocean of passing days, he will perish the sooner, because everything in him is already declining while he still has breath and while he still has life." (p. 276)

* Pushkin Press will soon issue a new translation, titled The Bachelors. I read the David Luke translation, Limestone and Other Stories.