New York Journal News // Andrew Ervin's This Tangle of Thorns
It’s unfortunate that they don’t have coffee bars in most of the small, independent book shops likely to stock literature as profound as "Lenz" by Georg Büchner (Archipelago, $14. The novella is so short that you could down it and a medium orange mocha frappuchino in a single sitting, yet so strong and bitter that it would leave you buzzing for the rest of the afternoon.
Büchner died in 1837 at the ripe age of 24, but his small output has had a profound effect of European letters and beyond. “Lenz” focuses on the inner world of a man stricken with a combination of schizophrenic and religious ecstasy. You have to understand that it was a pretty radical thing to write at the time—before James Joyce’s stream of consciousness and before Freud was even born. Richard Sieburth’s translation makes it feel wholly contemporary:
“Lenz was running around the courtyard, shouting the name Friederike in a harsh hollow voice with great rapidity, confusion and despair, then he threw himself into the basin of the fountain and splashed around, got out, back up to his room, then back down to the basin, and so on several times, at least he grew quiet. The maids who slept in the children’s room beneath him said they had often, and especially that very night, heard a deep humming noise that they could only compare to the sound of a shepherd’s pipe. Perhaps it was him moaning in his hollow, ghastly, desperate voice.”
The nice folks at Archipelago Books knew you wouldn’t shell out the price of the new Beck CD for one long short story, however enjoyable, so they threw in a bunch of bonus features—a parallel German text, some of the original documents that inspired Büchner—that instead of just puffing out the volume actually provide insight into an otherwise all-but-forgotten masterpiece.
Similarly, "H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life” by Michel Houellebecq (Believer Books, $18)—yes, by that Michel Houellebecq, author of the prickly novels “Platform” and “The Elementary Particles”—is a single essay padded out to book length with some extraneous material, including an intro by a Stephen King. It’s a nifty little book. With literature in translation quickly going the way of the two-dollar gallon of gas, it’s nice to see that somebody is still publishing books on obscure topics by petulant Frenchmen.
Part literary bio, part manifesto on strange literature, the argument of “Against the World” comes across as mildly disingenuous. Lovecraft was known primarily as a horror writer, and Houellebecq readily admits that his stories were “not really literary,” yet he makes a strong case for their utter originality.
The only human sentiments he is interested in are wonderment and fear. He constructs his universe upon these and these alone. It is clearly a limitation, but a conscious, deliberate one. And authentic creativity cannot exist without a certain degree of self-imposed blindness.”
Houellebecq also gives us every reason to consider Lovecraft’s eight “great texts,” a series of stories written between 1926 and 1934, among the most inventive and unusual of the twentieth century. Now I haven’t read Lovecraft since middle school but by the time I put down “Against the World” I knew I needed to have another look. The tag-team combination of Michel Houellebecq and Stephen King twists our arms until we’re almost ready to take all pulp fiction a bit more seriously.
In the meantime though, don’t worry if you haven’t read the great Chilean author Roberto Bolaño yet—there’s not much catching up to do. “Distant Star” (New Directions, $14.95) is only the second of his nine novels translated into English, both by Chris Andrews. The storyline overlaps Pinochet’s rise to power and the subsequent revelations about his regime’s brutality and on the surface the plot is somewhat simple. A narrator recounts his attempts to gather information about a former poetry seminar classmate, Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, whose fascist leanings propel him to dabble in more and more radical forms of personal expression, including skywriting (in a German, WWII-era Messerschmitt) and even murder.
The most compelling thing about this novel though derives from a brief intro, one that throws the very identity of the narrator—or narrators—into question. We simply don’t know who’s telling the story or therefore how much to believe of what we’re reading.
Few artists will invite you in, offer a seat, and then so gracefully pull the chair out from under you. I’d like to say that “Distant Star” contains a story worthy of Borges or Nabokov but that would be unfair to Bolaño. He was a superbly gifted author with an artistic sensibility so unique that we’re forced to appreciate him on his own terms. As in his previous “By Night in Chile,” the characters of “Distant Star” hang out on the corner of partisan loyalty and artistic compulsion, and they face the very real horror of deciding which route to take.
“Lunar Follies” (Coffee House Press, $14) is something like Gilbert Sorrentino’s thirtieth published book, and every one I’ve read has departed not only from the previous but from everything else going on in the culture around it. I can’t think of another American author as consistently incendiary. Sorrentino is simply incapable of writing a bad or even slight book.
“Lunar Follies” contains fifty-three short, mostly one- or two-page chapters named after geographical features of the moon and arranged in alphabetical order, from “Alphonsus” to “Walther.” They resemble found documents: reviews, inventories and catalogue copy for a series of hideously pretentious art exhibitions and happenings.
Maybe part of Sorrentino’s point is that the relationship between art and the art world is a distant, aberrational one. I don’t know. But his blistering humor makes “Lunar Follies” the single richest send-up of the art world since “The Recognitions,” as if the poseurs and sad sacks in the background of William Gaddis’s masterpiece—who could forget Recktall Brown?—found work as freelance art critics and curators.
One of the ironies that “Lunar Follies” makes all too clear is that no criticism can accurately describe a work of art, and with that difficult lesson in mind I’d like to turn over the last, gentrified block of this column’s real estate to Mr. Sorrentino:
“Most serious gallery-goers of the seventies pretend to remember Moss Kuth, one of the early practitioners—some would the avatar—of Exoconceptualism. This, his first exhibition in almost fifteen years, gathers well-known, to some revered, devices, and what the artist calls “plannings,” those strangely occulted, iconoclastic conglomerates that heralded the end of the stasis imposed upon the art of the fifties and sixties by market-corrupted confections of pop art, op art, numero art, subway art, and the moribund rigidities of a humorless politico-expressionism.”
Büchner died in 1837 at the ripe age of 24, but his small output has had a profound effect of European letters and beyond. “Lenz” focuses on the inner world of a man stricken with a combination of schizophrenic and religious ecstasy. You have to understand that it was a pretty radical thing to write at the time—before James Joyce’s stream of consciousness and before Freud was even born. Richard Sieburth’s translation makes it feel wholly contemporary:
“Lenz was running around the courtyard, shouting the name Friederike in a harsh hollow voice with great rapidity, confusion and despair, then he threw himself into the basin of the fountain and splashed around, got out, back up to his room, then back down to the basin, and so on several times, at least he grew quiet. The maids who slept in the children’s room beneath him said they had often, and especially that very night, heard a deep humming noise that they could only compare to the sound of a shepherd’s pipe. Perhaps it was him moaning in his hollow, ghastly, desperate voice.”
The nice folks at Archipelago Books knew you wouldn’t shell out the price of the new Beck CD for one long short story, however enjoyable, so they threw in a bunch of bonus features—a parallel German text, some of the original documents that inspired Büchner—that instead of just puffing out the volume actually provide insight into an otherwise all-but-forgotten masterpiece.
Similarly, "H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life” by Michel Houellebecq (Believer Books, $18)—yes, by that Michel Houellebecq, author of the prickly novels “Platform” and “The Elementary Particles”—is a single essay padded out to book length with some extraneous material, including an intro by a Stephen King. It’s a nifty little book. With literature in translation quickly going the way of the two-dollar gallon of gas, it’s nice to see that somebody is still publishing books on obscure topics by petulant Frenchmen.
Part literary bio, part manifesto on strange literature, the argument of “Against the World” comes across as mildly disingenuous. Lovecraft was known primarily as a horror writer, and Houellebecq readily admits that his stories were “not really literary,” yet he makes a strong case for their utter originality.
The only human sentiments he is interested in are wonderment and fear. He constructs his universe upon these and these alone. It is clearly a limitation, but a conscious, deliberate one. And authentic creativity cannot exist without a certain degree of self-imposed blindness.”
Houellebecq also gives us every reason to consider Lovecraft’s eight “great texts,” a series of stories written between 1926 and 1934, among the most inventive and unusual of the twentieth century. Now I haven’t read Lovecraft since middle school but by the time I put down “Against the World” I knew I needed to have another look. The tag-team combination of Michel Houellebecq and Stephen King twists our arms until we’re almost ready to take all pulp fiction a bit more seriously.
In the meantime though, don’t worry if you haven’t read the great Chilean author Roberto Bolaño yet—there’s not much catching up to do. “Distant Star” (New Directions, $14.95) is only the second of his nine novels translated into English, both by Chris Andrews. The storyline overlaps Pinochet’s rise to power and the subsequent revelations about his regime’s brutality and on the surface the plot is somewhat simple. A narrator recounts his attempts to gather information about a former poetry seminar classmate, Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, whose fascist leanings propel him to dabble in more and more radical forms of personal expression, including skywriting (in a German, WWII-era Messerschmitt) and even murder.
The most compelling thing about this novel though derives from a brief intro, one that throws the very identity of the narrator—or narrators—into question. We simply don’t know who’s telling the story or therefore how much to believe of what we’re reading.
Few artists will invite you in, offer a seat, and then so gracefully pull the chair out from under you. I’d like to say that “Distant Star” contains a story worthy of Borges or Nabokov but that would be unfair to Bolaño. He was a superbly gifted author with an artistic sensibility so unique that we’re forced to appreciate him on his own terms. As in his previous “By Night in Chile,” the characters of “Distant Star” hang out on the corner of partisan loyalty and artistic compulsion, and they face the very real horror of deciding which route to take.
“Lunar Follies” (Coffee House Press, $14) is something like Gilbert Sorrentino’s thirtieth published book, and every one I’ve read has departed not only from the previous but from everything else going on in the culture around it. I can’t think of another American author as consistently incendiary. Sorrentino is simply incapable of writing a bad or even slight book.
“Lunar Follies” contains fifty-three short, mostly one- or two-page chapters named after geographical features of the moon and arranged in alphabetical order, from “Alphonsus” to “Walther.” They resemble found documents: reviews, inventories and catalogue copy for a series of hideously pretentious art exhibitions and happenings.
Maybe part of Sorrentino’s point is that the relationship between art and the art world is a distant, aberrational one. I don’t know. But his blistering humor makes “Lunar Follies” the single richest send-up of the art world since “The Recognitions,” as if the poseurs and sad sacks in the background of William Gaddis’s masterpiece—who could forget Recktall Brown?—found work as freelance art critics and curators.
One of the ironies that “Lunar Follies” makes all too clear is that no criticism can accurately describe a work of art, and with that difficult lesson in mind I’d like to turn over the last, gentrified block of this column’s real estate to Mr. Sorrentino:
“Most serious gallery-goers of the seventies pretend to remember Moss Kuth, one of the early practitioners—some would the avatar—of Exoconceptualism. This, his first exhibition in almost fifteen years, gathers well-known, to some revered, devices, and what the artist calls “plannings,” those strangely occulted, iconoclastic conglomerates that heralded the end of the stasis imposed upon the art of the fifties and sixties by market-corrupted confections of pop art, op art, numero art, subway art, and the moribund rigidities of a humorless politico-expressionism.”
posted by Andrew Ervin at
4/03/2005
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