Telegrams of the Soul
by Peter Altenberg
Archipelago Books
Unsuccessful at law, medicine, and the book trade, it was only by chance that Richard Englander discovered his skill at writing when he was in his 40s. The son of a wealthy Viennese businessman, Englander took the pen name of Peter Altenberg and found success as a newspaper writer of brief sketches and vignettes, which he called "prose pearls."
"Success" is probably too positive a word for Altenberg's writing career. He lived in cheap hotels on donations from friends and admirers. A true Bohemian who was prone to wild dress and outrageous opinions, he favored the company of prostitutes between his visits to the local asylum, where the city's alcoholics were treated. Altenberg listed the Cafe Central, a favorite with Vienna's artistic set of the 1890s, as his official address. He would write the short prose he favored either at the coffeehouse or while propped up in his bed.
Inspired not only by the prose poems of Baudelaire but by that Austrian invention the postcard and its condensed style of writing, Altenberg's prose pearls are a very personal form of writing--"They're extracts! Extracts from life," he said. In fact, his personal life was often the subject of his writings, but he mixed fact and fiction freely, blurring the lines between the real and imaginary. At his best, he is like a favorite lush uncle, telling wondrous stories you can't quite believe. Altenberg relates his supposed encounters with shop clerks, waiters, and hotel maids, and displays his family's dirty laundry--their financial and sexual hi-jinks--for all to see. He is prone to discuss very childish things, like what kind of pen he favors when he writes, and he'll share his reaction to newfangled inventions such as the elevator. And he does not hesitate to discourse on his ponderings, both trivial and not so, sometimes venturing into waters a tad too deep for him.
Altenberg bragged that he never rewrote anything, that all of his writings were spontaneous first drafts. Some of them read that way, unfortunately, as if his deadline were pressing and he needed to end the piece and get it to the printer. Several! others! look! like! forests! of! exclamation! points! But then there are those pieces that truly are "prose pearls," small works of perfect beauty. The piece entitled "Schubert," for instance, traces a line of thought from its point of inspiration to its final destination. Altenberg begins by speaking of the print hanging on the wall of his room, which shows Schubert playing the piano for three little girls; this reminds him of the composer's longing for the daughter of one of his patrons. When the girl teased Schubert that he had never dedicated anything to her, he exclaimed: "What for? As it is, it's all for you!" Altenberg ends the piece with this telling remark: "That's why I often turn to Page 37 in Niggli's biography of Schubert."
--Thomas Wiloch
Monday, July 14, 2008
Review of H.C. Artmann's The Skewed Tales
The Skewed Tales
by H. C. Artmann
Atlas Press
Austrian novelist H. C. Artmann is the author of many books. In The Skewed Tales, he takes classic horror and fantasy characters and situations and mixes them into a potent satirical brew. His "Frankenstein in Sussex," for example, has the classic monster of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly meet Ernest Dodgson's Alice in an underground mansion a hundred stories deep in the ground. Frankenstein, you see, is still looking for a bride....
In "Dracula, Dracula" Artmann runs Bram Stoker's characters--and assorted 19th century English fictional types--through the blender. And in "Tok Ph'rong Suleng," a werewolf (who may be a yeti) is being hunted in the Himalayas.
While these stories provide little in the way of chills, despite their sometimes chilly characters, they do present a properly skewed take on familiar archetypes of English horror and fantasy literature. There are odd, sometimes disconcerting, chuckles along the way for those readers adventurous enough to tag along on these episodic narratives.
I'd like to see Artmann try his hand at skewing the old "lost race" genre. After all, one need not travel half way round the world to find creatures of the most exotic breeding anymore. Just glance out the window. Those hunched figures in the distance, swinging their arms, coming closer....
--Thomas Wiloch
by H. C. Artmann
Atlas Press
Austrian novelist H. C. Artmann is the author of many books. In The Skewed Tales, he takes classic horror and fantasy characters and situations and mixes them into a potent satirical brew. His "Frankenstein in Sussex," for example, has the classic monster of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly meet Ernest Dodgson's Alice in an underground mansion a hundred stories deep in the ground. Frankenstein, you see, is still looking for a bride....
In "Dracula, Dracula" Artmann runs Bram Stoker's characters--and assorted 19th century English fictional types--through the blender. And in "Tok Ph'rong Suleng," a werewolf (who may be a yeti) is being hunted in the Himalayas.
While these stories provide little in the way of chills, despite their sometimes chilly characters, they do present a properly skewed take on familiar archetypes of English horror and fantasy literature. There are odd, sometimes disconcerting, chuckles along the way for those readers adventurous enough to tag along on these episodic narratives.
I'd like to see Artmann try his hand at skewing the old "lost race" genre. After all, one need not travel half way round the world to find creatures of the most exotic breeding anymore. Just glance out the window. Those hunched figures in the distance, swinging their arms, coming closer....
--Thomas Wiloch
Review of Eula Biss's The Balloonists
The Balloonists
Eula Biss
Hanging Loose Press
Written as a series of brief, self-contained prose poems, Eula Biss's memoir-as-fiction/fiction-as-memoir advances by fits and starts, giving a glimpse here, a sideglance there, until it accumulates its story. This is much the way life itself develops--not in a smooth trajectory but in daily, disconnected installments. Biss's story revolves around her parents, whose troubled relationship and eventual divorce still color her own relationships with men. "Are we going to keep living the same stories our parents lived?" Biss asks at one point, the central question in her engaging, absorbing narrative.
Biss particularly succeeds in examining the similarities between fictional narrative and autobiography, how the stories we call our lives are, in fact, a form of fiction, and how we can unwittingly find ourselves living a story not our own. "What if an entire generation were to reject their central story line?" she wonders. Her book's ambiguity as to genre serves to keep the narrative on a tightrope, nimbly balancing itself between truth and fiction, while always calling into question the reality of both concepts.
An example of Biss's writing: "Once I went to a concert with my mother and my father was there. In the same room. They had four children together." Notice that first sentence, how on first reading it you momentarily assume she went to the concert with both parents, only to realize that no, her father just happened to be there. And the sentence fragment in the middle, how much this awkward snippet says about her parents' strained relationship. The final sentence has a flat, informational quality without any apparent emotional value. But carefully placed right there, that deadpan sentence does have emotion. Such is the seemingly casual yet painstakingly choreographed writing Biss exhibits in this impressive book.
--Thomas Wiloch
Eula Biss
Hanging Loose Press
Written as a series of brief, self-contained prose poems, Eula Biss's memoir-as-fiction/fiction-as-memoir advances by fits and starts, giving a glimpse here, a sideglance there, until it accumulates its story. This is much the way life itself develops--not in a smooth trajectory but in daily, disconnected installments. Biss's story revolves around her parents, whose troubled relationship and eventual divorce still color her own relationships with men. "Are we going to keep living the same stories our parents lived?" Biss asks at one point, the central question in her engaging, absorbing narrative.
Biss particularly succeeds in examining the similarities between fictional narrative and autobiography, how the stories we call our lives are, in fact, a form of fiction, and how we can unwittingly find ourselves living a story not our own. "What if an entire generation were to reject their central story line?" she wonders. Her book's ambiguity as to genre serves to keep the narrative on a tightrope, nimbly balancing itself between truth and fiction, while always calling into question the reality of both concepts.
An example of Biss's writing: "Once I went to a concert with my mother and my father was there. In the same room. They had four children together." Notice that first sentence, how on first reading it you momentarily assume she went to the concert with both parents, only to realize that no, her father just happened to be there. And the sentence fragment in the middle, how much this awkward snippet says about her parents' strained relationship. The final sentence has a flat, informational quality without any apparent emotional value. But carefully placed right there, that deadpan sentence does have emotion. Such is the seemingly casual yet painstakingly choreographed writing Biss exhibits in this impressive book.
--Thomas Wiloch
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Review of Edouard Roditi's Choose Your Own World
Choose Your Own World
by Edouard Roditi
Asylum Arts
Edouard Roditi is credited with being the first writer in the English language to use the word "surrealism." This was back in 1929, when Roditi was a precocious student at Oxford University and apparently one of the few people in England at the time to know much about that new artistic sensation from across the channel. In an essay entitled "The New Reality," published in the Oxford Outlook, Roditi gave what he later described as being a "naive" account of the surrealist experiment. Naive or not, the essay is still consulted by scholars today.
Roditi would later live in Paris, and throughout Europe, contributing his poems and essays to such magazines as transition and VVV. He earned his living as an interpreter for various government and business conferences, and for the Nuremberg Trials at the end of the Second World War. The 1960s saw Roditi's work published by the legendary Kayak Press and the New Directions Annual. The 1974 Black Sparrow collection Emperor of Midnight contained much of his early writings for surrealist magazines and his fantastical prose poems. The present Choose Your Own World gathers together 54 of his prose poems and short fictions from the past twenty years.
The collection begins with "New Old and New Testaments," containing eight glosses on traditional Bible stories and characters. These are, as might be imagined, neither morally uplifting nor particularly spiritual. Rather they provide ironic versions of Adam discovering Eve (he is distressed that she comes with no instructions) and Lazarus returning from death (he is not pleased with the change of scene). Closing the section is "The Temptations of a Saint," which focuses on the narrator himself and his life in a high-rise apartment building. He has a problem. Every night his dreams create new monsters and monstrous situations, ending with the narrator trapped within a giant teapot, the boiling water threatening to boil him as well.
The largest section of the book is entitled "A Choice of Worlds." The pieces gathered here are first-person narratives reminiscent of the Trivia books of Logan Pearsall Smith, at least to my mind. Both writers share a love of whimsical premises, beautifully rolling sentences, and self-deprecating humor. But Roditi is far more political than Smith ever was (was he ever?) and he possesses a wilder imagination.
An example of a whimsical premise: In "How to Live in Your Own Ear" Roditi raises the odd question of how to do just that, comparing the practice to a snail in his shell. He asks the reader how it might be done, which ear would be chosen, and so on, and imagines the cozy, dark comfort of the snug abode.
An example of a beautifully rolling sentence from "In Praise of the Status Quo": "Now that it has become relatively easy to change one's sex, we've begun to consider also ways and means of changing one's species."
An example of self-deprecating humor: In "A Program for Self-Improvement" Roditi speaks of ways to improve his appearance, leading logically from weight reduction and muscle toning to such thoughts as adding green tusks to his upper jaw and a tattoo of a boa constrictor around his torso. His thoughts end in confusion as he considers the question of "how to improve my mind. There seem to be, for instance, so many different ways of becoming a genius or a saint."
As I said, a wild imagination.
Only when Roditi strays into more political realms does he fall a tad flat. References to Reagan or the Nicaraguans seem too public and mundane for a book so obviously in its own private world of the imagination. And a writer who is so good at personal whimsy--possesses a genius for it, in fact--seems somehow unqualified to be speaking on such larger matters. Better to stay with the personal, the quirky, the delightfully illogical. That's where Roditi is an absolute, unquestioned master.
--Thomas Wiloch
by Edouard Roditi
Asylum Arts
Edouard Roditi is credited with being the first writer in the English language to use the word "surrealism." This was back in 1929, when Roditi was a precocious student at Oxford University and apparently one of the few people in England at the time to know much about that new artistic sensation from across the channel. In an essay entitled "The New Reality," published in the Oxford Outlook, Roditi gave what he later described as being a "naive" account of the surrealist experiment. Naive or not, the essay is still consulted by scholars today.
Roditi would later live in Paris, and throughout Europe, contributing his poems and essays to such magazines as transition and VVV. He earned his living as an interpreter for various government and business conferences, and for the Nuremberg Trials at the end of the Second World War. The 1960s saw Roditi's work published by the legendary Kayak Press and the New Directions Annual. The 1974 Black Sparrow collection Emperor of Midnight contained much of his early writings for surrealist magazines and his fantastical prose poems. The present Choose Your Own World gathers together 54 of his prose poems and short fictions from the past twenty years.
The collection begins with "New Old and New Testaments," containing eight glosses on traditional Bible stories and characters. These are, as might be imagined, neither morally uplifting nor particularly spiritual. Rather they provide ironic versions of Adam discovering Eve (he is distressed that she comes with no instructions) and Lazarus returning from death (he is not pleased with the change of scene). Closing the section is "The Temptations of a Saint," which focuses on the narrator himself and his life in a high-rise apartment building. He has a problem. Every night his dreams create new monsters and monstrous situations, ending with the narrator trapped within a giant teapot, the boiling water threatening to boil him as well.
The largest section of the book is entitled "A Choice of Worlds." The pieces gathered here are first-person narratives reminiscent of the Trivia books of Logan Pearsall Smith, at least to my mind. Both writers share a love of whimsical premises, beautifully rolling sentences, and self-deprecating humor. But Roditi is far more political than Smith ever was (was he ever?) and he possesses a wilder imagination.
An example of a whimsical premise: In "How to Live in Your Own Ear" Roditi raises the odd question of how to do just that, comparing the practice to a snail in his shell. He asks the reader how it might be done, which ear would be chosen, and so on, and imagines the cozy, dark comfort of the snug abode.
An example of a beautifully rolling sentence from "In Praise of the Status Quo": "Now that it has become relatively easy to change one's sex, we've begun to consider also ways and means of changing one's species."
An example of self-deprecating humor: In "A Program for Self-Improvement" Roditi speaks of ways to improve his appearance, leading logically from weight reduction and muscle toning to such thoughts as adding green tusks to his upper jaw and a tattoo of a boa constrictor around his torso. His thoughts end in confusion as he considers the question of "how to improve my mind. There seem to be, for instance, so many different ways of becoming a genius or a saint."
As I said, a wild imagination.
Only when Roditi strays into more political realms does he fall a tad flat. References to Reagan or the Nicaraguans seem too public and mundane for a book so obviously in its own private world of the imagination. And a writer who is so good at personal whimsy--possesses a genius for it, in fact--seems somehow unqualified to be speaking on such larger matters. Better to stay with the personal, the quirky, the delightfully illogical. That's where Roditi is an absolute, unquestioned master.
--Thomas Wiloch
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