The book’s story happens around the end of the first World War in the civil war in the Baltic countries. The main protagonist is Erich, a German officer who stays with his friend Konrad and Konrad’s sister Sophie at their place during some military actions between the ‘red’ and ‘white’ forces. While Erich and Sophie like each other, Erich manages to prevent them coming together. Justifying this with his friendship to her brother and many other ‘arguments’. And making her suffer dearly that way.
… but that’s not why I didn’t like the book all that much. And neither is the fact that it is a book about a German (male) soldier in the Baltics at the end of the first world war, written by a Belgian/French (female) author shortly before the second world war started. Instead, I’m generally not a big fan of ‘historical’ novels, so I didn’t like the setting too much. And I’m not sure the setting is all that important as – while it’s said to be quite authentic – ;most of the drama in the novel happens between the people themselves rather than the backdrop of history it’s situated in.
I also thought, the novel, wasn’t exactly top notch. Not badly written. But not all that memorable either. Sometimes I wonder whether books were selected for the series by virtue of having been turned into a film, so they can put a shot of that film on the book cover…
Grausamkeit is ein Luxus für Müßiggänger, wie Rauschgifte und seidene Hemden.
Bookmark: 02-03-2005 flight MN 105 Johannesburg to Cape Town, seat 33A.
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But he was, as he lived in Vienna as well for a long time and even studied and graduated there… in chemistry, even geting a PhD in the 1920s and ended up getting a Nobel prize for literature in 1981.
As luck has it, I recently finished reading his thin volume Die Stimmen von Marrakesch, a ‘travelogue’. While all the recent newspaper articles suggested that his main obsession was hating death, this is quite a different book. There are notes of fourteen different episodes which are (very) loosely joined. They’re full of simple descriptions, occasional talking, observations and reflections while trying to grasp Marrakesh and the variety of people and culture he sees there. While apparently not being a typical work for him, I enjoyed reading it.
Now I’m not sure whether I should try one of his proper novels… and if so, which one.
Bookmark: 11-12-2001 Railway from Genova p.za principe to Massa centro on my way to visit my friend Rita on a holiday detour while moving from the UK back to Germany.
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Another volume from the the Sueddeutsche Zeitung Library: Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle. It’s a very short text that was written in 1926 and that was the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut. I didn’t think that film was particularly good – and that wasn’t just for the fact that Tom Cruise was in it. But having read the book now, I’m pretty convinced that the book isn’t at fault for the film’s weaknesses.
The book is about Fridolin and Albertine, a doctor and his wife in 1920s Vienna. One night after being called to a patient of his who died he goes for a coffee to settle down and meets an old friend in the café. His friend is a piano player and tells him about the really strange and secret parties he’s playing at – blindfolded. While he is told that he absolutely can’t come along, Fridolin is curious enough to dress up and follow his friend to the party.
His intrusion is uncovered and he is to be punished for that. One of the women at the party arranges that he can leave and she’ll take the responsibility. Which seems to be a tough thing but isn’t explained to the reader. Before leaving, Fridolin can see the other women being naked in the next room. All this is fairly mysterious, potentially erotic, and somewhat dream-like.
Coming home, he sees that Albertine is having a dream and without letting her know what he did he asks her to tell it. Which she does. And which again is potentially erotic. In what follows, Fridolin is still bugged by the party he went to. He wants to learn more about it, but people expect him and harshly tell him not to come back or ask. A woman dies in town who he suspects to be the one that freed him at the party – but he doesn’t really know and can’t find out for sure despite trying.
In the end he tells his wife who listens and concludes that both of them should be happy to have come out of their respective real and dreamed adventures safely.
‘Und kein Traum,’ seufzte er leise, ‘ist völlig Traum.’
What’s really amazing about the book is how it makes reality and dreams look pretty similar. It might be fun to look at parts of the text using techniques from Freud’s Traumdeutung which was well established – and IIRC even popular – at the time. At least Schnitzler seems to have been a friend of it and of Freud.
Bookmark: 22-08-1998 ticket for the BBC Proms, Box 29, Seat 007. — Went there with my parents who bought really expensive tickets for us as they didn’t want to queue in the evening to sit on the ground. While the music was good, consosting of Beethoven’s fifth piano concerto and some Stravinsky, I ended up being quite disappointed: I felt that sitting so far away from the orchestra made it sound worse than on CD where you’re much closer to it and it’s louder and more detailed (never mind being able to repeat stuff). Funny enough, I went to the Proms again with Dave in 2001 and saw the fifth piano concerto once more. That time paying a fraction of the price and sitting on the ground a few metres from the orchestra. Brilliant.
]]>The next volume in the series, number 4, is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby which I didn’t buy because I already had the English version. And the following volume is Thomas Bernhard’s Der Untergeher which I shall write about shortly.
With more than four months having passed since, I didn’t mange to live up to the ‘shortly’ promise.
That’s particularly embarrassing as the book in question, Thomas Bernhard’s Der Untergeher (The Loser in English), is just 150 pages long and focuses on one of my favourite topics ever, the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. So this should have been an enjoyable and light read for an evening or two. But it wasn’t.
While Thomas Bernhard may be labelled as modern or ‘avant garde’ in places, I found the book a horrible read. While 150 pages may not be long, they are eternal if they only contain a single paragraph. That’s not a joke, the whole frigging book only contains a single paragraph. No good places to stop when you want to go to sleep or think about what was going on. As the whole book is quite repetitive, this made it even hard to stop reading in between as all the different places were quite similar. I couldn’t manage to read it in one go either, as I found it immensely tiring to read statements about what was going on over and over again.
In fact, not much is happening in the book. Not directly anyway as it is just the account of certain events given by a narrator. He is a pianist who studied at the Mozarteum in Salzburg together with a guy called Wertheimer and with Glenn Gould in the class of Horowitz (name-dropping uh-oh!). He and Wertheimer got to know Glenn Gould and his talent or genius made it clear to them that while being good at the piano, they were just bad in comparison – making them depressed enough to stop playing. In addition they were rich kids, so they could do other stuff, like move around or, in Wertheimer’s case, boss his sister around after their parents died. Eventually Wertheimer’s sister moved out and Glenn Gould died, causing Wertheimer to kill himself and the narrator to go back to a couple of places and indulge repetitively in memories.
That’s about what happens. And its essence is already present in the first 30 pages. Everything that follows is more or less repetition, adding details in long sentences and letting you follow the thoughts and spontaneous associations of the narrator. Somehow I still think this is quite a sweet idea for a book. But at the same time, I found it horribly painful and unenjoyable to read. So perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Bookmark: 12-03-2003 flight LH4512 Frankfurt to Birmingham, seat 23F.
OK, let’s see what’s next up in the series which I so rigorously read that I got all the way to volume 5 in half a year… volume 6 is Paul Auster’s City of Glass which I’ve already read and didn’t like too much. But I’ll have to skip until volume 12, Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle – the book that found some use in making the film Eyes Wide shut – anyway as that’s the next one I’ve got here…
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I wouldn’t want to get all of them as I’ve read a few already and I prefer buying English books in English rather than their translations into German. But apart from that, it’s always nice to be able to buy a nice book for little money. And the scheme seems to work rather well. At least you see other papers coming up with similar schemes (more tacky books like the bible for the yellow press or DVD series with operas for the conservative press) trying to get some share of the success.
So far I have only bought three volumes of the series, mostly to get over amazon’s €20 limit for free shipping. And I haven’t been disappointed. The first volume they published and which I bought was Czech author Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The story is about a couple, Tomas and Teresa, a doctor and a waitress/photographer in Czechoslovakia at the time of the Russian occupation there. While that part of history plays a role in the book which lives quite naturally in it – with the couple emigrating to Switzerland just to return later and live under the supressive regime which forces Tomas to give up his job or his convictions.
Yet the story that is told is about the couple: Teresa who falls in love with Tomas and is happy that he loves her as well, taking her from the village she came from and her mom to Prague. On the other hand, Tomas – while insisting that he loves Teresa – still maintains and exercises a keen interest in other women, leading to a conflict or two. But, at the end of the book when both move back to the countryside and Tomas gives up the other women, it’s not clear whether happier or less happy than they would’ve been had they stayed in Zürich and doing the jobs they liked.
Apart from the subtle ambiguity, I really liked the way in which the book is written. While the story isn’t told in a strictly linear with small time shifts back and forth happening all the way through the book, it’s very well structured into seven chapters with many short sections each. I always find this kind of structuring very reader friendly as you can easily start and stop reading at many places.
Regular readers may have guessed by now that this book also answers the question I recently asked.
The second book of the series is Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which I didn’t buy because it’s so thick and I wasn’t in the mood for that kind of book. But next up was Günter Grass’ Katz und Maus (Cat and Mouse), a book that Grass who was awarded the literature Nobel prize in 1999 and is one of the best known current German authors wrote in the 1960s.
The book is very short, 140 pages in 13 handy chapters, but yet very different from Kundera’s book. To begin with, the language seems to be much more complicated in places. Long sentences and so on that took a bit more concentration to read than other books. The setting is Poland during the second world war, the protagonists go to high school. They’re fascninated by war ships and their power and while the war is lurking around it doesn’t seem to be a bad thing to them. They’re diving into sunk boat in their spare time.
The book’s narrator tells a story about his classmate Mahlke who’s a shy guy, keeping to himself and pushing himself hard to excel in diving. The narrator refers to him as the ‘Great Mahlke’ later on as Mahlke turns into a war hero who destroyed many enemy tanks. It’s a strange story. About growing up perhaps. And one in which the war looks quite harmless. And the narrative style is strange as well: quite a bit of duplication, short notes and so on.
Bookmark: 20-09-2003 flight LH 4535 Birmingham to Frankfurt, seat 22A.
The next volume in the series, number 4, is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby which I didn’t buy because I already had the English version. And the following volume is Thomas Bernhard’s Der Untergeher which I shall write about shortly.
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