4 posts tagged “deutschsprachig”
They call it a novel, but the notebook format basically turns it into a series of prose poems held together by the Brigge persona, who sometimes is a solid character with a personal history and sometimes is just a voice - more willfully naive than a lot of Rilke's poetic speakers but recognizably continuous with them. So it's a book of wonderful moments: funny, often scary, circling around anonymity, death and time. My favorite might have been the fable about the man who exchanges his fifty remaining years of life for a titanic heap of seconds, which immediately start to vanish on him - but it's hard to choose.
Lukács, György. Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (Theorie des Romans: eine Geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der großen Epik). Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971 (1920).
I know, what was I expecting. It'll be useful for something or other, and I do like that it's a young Lukács; his default setting is not yet "Cranky" but the more entertaining "Hölderinesque Nostalgia for Absent Gods."
Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths - ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own. The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another, for the fire is the soul of all light and clothes itself in light.
I wish I had something to say about these poems that didn't just feel like wrapping them in a bunch of cotton wool.
Das angebrochene Jahr
mit dem modernden Kanten
Wahnbrot.Trink
aus meinem Mund.--------------------
The broached year
with its rotting crust of
madnessbread.Drink
from my mouth.
A weird little book, one of those you sometimes get when an enormously talented writer is still casting around for a form. The central conceit (unnamed narrator telling fables about the Christian God that eventually get repeated to the town children) is kind of twee; but the early stories in particular are memorable, with a confused and absent-minded God banishing His hands from His presence and trying to see humans naked because He can't remember what they look like. The physical book itself is a wonderful little artifact I found at Moe's, with a flower pressed between its pages some time between 1929 and now; it made J. exclaim, "God, Sebald is such a bad writer -- he writes about that sort of thing all the time and adds nothing to it -"
