Sophie Kemp - A hilarious, surreal, and devastating journey into the mind of Reality Kahn, a young woman on a quest to be the greatest girlfriend of all time

Sophie Kemp, Paradise Logic. Simon & Schuster, 2025

https://www.sophiefkemp.com/

A hilarious, surreal, and devastating journey into the mind of Reality Kahn, a young woman on a quest to be the greatest girlfriend of all time.

It was decreed from the moment she was born. Twenty-three-year-old Reality Kahn would embark on a quest so great, so bold. She would become the greatest girlfriend of all time. She would be a zine maker, an aspiring notary, the greatest waterslide commercial actress on the Eastern Seaboard. She would receive messages from the beyond in the form of advice from the esteemed and ancient ladies magazine, Girlfriend Weekly.

When she attends a party in Gowanus at a punk venue known as “Paradise,” Reality meets Ariel, who will become her boyfriend. She bravely works for his everlasting affection and joins a clinical trial created by Dr. Zweig Altmann to help her become a more perfect girlfriend. She stars in a new commercial. She learns how to become an indelible host. But Reality will also learn that sheer will and determination, and a very open heart, are not always enough to make true love manifest.

At turns laugh-out-loud funny, tragic, and jarring, Reality’s quest grows ever complicated as the men in her Ariel, her waterpark commercial agent Jethro, and Dr. Altmann himself prove treacherous. Paradise Logic is a thrilling, psychosexual breakdown of our obsession with authentic true love, asking whether that is even possible in a patriarchal world, and announces Sophie Kemp as a wholly original, transformative, and brilliant new voice in fiction.

"Paradise Logic is an astonishment, and the odyssey of Reality Kahn reads like the strangest, funniest, most profound, vibrant, and trippy dream you ever had, except it’s not just a dream, it’s a work of art, deeply real and dangerously alive. A great writer is bornth." - Sam Lipsyte, bestselling author of No One Left to Come Looking for You

“The 21st C heir apparent to Kathy Acker. Reality sets about her quest with a Quixotean determination. A wildly propulsive novel and delight to behold.” - Jen George, author of The Babysitter at Rest

“I read this book through a customized monocle because it was finally too bright, too intense, too wild and weird. Death to reality! Long live Reality!” - Ben Marcus, author of The Flame Alphabet

ON THE BACK OF my copy of Pnin (1957), there is a blurb from John Updike. Imagine that! As if Vladimir Nabokov needs blurbing; as if Updike spent his days fielding blurb requests in a spam-riddled inbox. In any case, here it is: “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written,” Updike says. “[T]hat is, ecstatically.”

The ecstatic. The crisp, staccato aliveness of language—the rhythmic syntax, irreverent wordplay, and cheeky rule-breaking that, somewhat paradoxically, reveals true reverence for the written word. Embodied characters wriggling with divine light. These are the marks of Nabokovian writing, the kind of prose lauded by Updike.

These marks are conspicuously absent from a growing subset of contemporary literature. After all, the pejorative categories of “internet writing” and the “internet novel” are, as Rhian Sasseen put it in The Baffler last spring, characterized by a droll “aesthetic flatness,” a post-ironic absence of enthusiasm or earnestness. Characters in the contemporary novel do not go on adventures or quests or suffer through long dark nights of the soul. They scroll. They uwu, per Grace Byron. They demure.

Somewhere in this anesthetic abyss, the e-girl emerged as the fictional hero of the day. She makes ends meet in a piecemeal way, stringing words together in a coffee shop. She has unremarkable, unfulfilling sex with a much older man (sometimes a woman—but mostly a man). Apparently, she’s obsessed with Hegel? As Emily Zhou noted a few months ago, the trouble lies in the narrow corner of the internet these protagonists seem to occupy; they never gain enough distance to make a point. “The authors writing these books never seemed all that certain whether or not they were writing cautionary tales, or satire,” Zhou writes. “[T]he characters were either cooly detached or hyperbolic caricatures of distorted personalities.”

Versions of various e-girls in different fonts have begun to swirl in my head—so much that I have begun to wonder if it is possible to write a novel that takes place on the internet and still conveys a sense of the ecstatic. Has the algorithm carried us so far from physicality that pleasure and whimsy are gone? Wasn’t there something of the ecstatic in the flashing lights and neon colors of Webkinz and Club Penguin—couldn’t an extra spin on the Wheel of Wow fill me with enough divine light to run circles around the house?

And so I turned to Paradise Logic (2025) by Sophie Kemp, which does not so much take place on the internet as spring from it. Freed from the mundane, or perhaps freed to transform the mundane into the absurd, the book thrums with energy, verging on ecstasy. It follows 23-year-old Reality Kahn, a denizen of Paradise (otherwise known as Gowanus, Brooklyn) in her quest to become God’s strongest soldier: a girlfriend.

Reading Paradise Logic, I felt suddenly transported back to the home screen of Dream Life, the console game that consumed so many afternoons of my childhood. In Dream Life, after building your hot-girl avatar and dressing her in your outfit of choice, you were presented with a few options for her daily activities. At school, she could participate in cheerleading, theater, and soccer. After, she could go to the Mega Mall and try on clothes to raise her fashion points, or study (boring!) to get good grades. And of course—joy of all joys, butterflies in my stomach aflutter—she could talk to her dreamy boyfriend in hopes of making him fall in love.

Paradise Logic takes that early aughts quest to its logical—and ultimately absurd—extreme, giving Reality just a few settings to traverse, including, à la Dream Life, the Atlantic Terminal mall. Surprise! A message from an NPC, the novel’s all-powerful orb of wisdom: Girlfriend Weekly, a magazine that advises and chastises Reality through every step of her quest. Press “A” to open.

“Hello, female,” Girlfriend Weekly says, “you are reading this because you are to be recently finding out you have a destiny. And this is a girlfriend. Yes. You are of a young age and are looking for something to do. This is a worthwhile cause.”

And just like that, a 21st-century Miltonian tale is (to use the novel’s sardonically elevated parlance) bornth. “Imagine now that the wings are fluttering.” We begin.

¤

The first picaresque novel was Lazarillo de Tormes, published in 1554 as European cities began to buckle under filth and poverty and corrupt governance by empire and church alike. Its protagonist, the little rascal Lázaro, gets into mischievous misadventures under the tutelage of the Friar, the Pardoner, the Priest, and the Squire. In a brilliant move so many satirists would later reappropriate, Lazarillo used the naive perspective of the child to skewer—in a sidelong yet no less piercing way—the institutions of power in Renaissance-era Europe. A few centuries later in Enlightenment France, Voltaire gave us Candide to rebut prevailing (and, so he thought, misplaced) social and political optimism. After him came Twain’s Huckleberry, and much later, the lovable weirdos of the 20th century like Fran Ross’s Oreo and Nabokov’s own Pnin (not a child, but nearly as innocent). At a most basic level, the function of these picaresque heroes is to bumble their way into social critique, to expose the absurdity of hierarchy and convention by bumping up against them in unexpected ways—or else flouting them entirely.

Kemp’s Reality may be legal (as most good girlfriends are), but her “low quantitative IQ” and inability to draw a cube put her in the picaresque tradition—to varying degrees of success throughout the novel. Her trials and tribulations? Working as an actress in waterslide commercials; getting the object of her admiration, the extremely mid grad student Ariel, to love her back; convincing the terrifying cabal of mindless girlfriend cyborgs to accept her as one of their own. In her quest for approval from all the wrong people, Reality betrays Soo-jin, her roommate and only true, clear-eyed friend. She participates in a clinical trial for a pill called ZZZZvx ULTRA (XR) and is transported to the vacuous hole of Mount Nothing. Like Eve, she speaks to a snake. And all of it, dear reader, all of it is for naught. She cannot, much as she wishes she could, convince Ariel to love her even by pulling a sword out of a rock, or wandering miles through the desert, or suddenly developing ESP. Add staunch disinterest to the long list of ways that girls are set up to fail.

It’s a bleak assessment of the landscape for heterosexual women, and one that seems to match Kemp’s own. Men are bored and hateful, enticed by the internet to think of themselves as entitled to sex by biological birthright and denied it by puritanical cultural norms—“Your body, my choice.” Women, she notes, are “exhausted by a certain kind of politics around consent.” True enough, but what to do in the face of it? Kemp seems to argue in recent essays that there is an inevitability to all of this depravity, and the only way to respond is to turn it into a game, to surrender to the absurdity just as Reality must in her diabolical version of Dream Life. Enough therapizing, Kemp tells us. Enough moralizing. It’s time to play!

The problem with this is that it creates a satire with missing teeth, a hilarious romp that points out the precarity, ridiculousness, and violence of patriarchy without a glint of a way out. I’ll grant that it’s not the task of this novel—or any, for that matter—to deliver an ideologically consistent praxis. But mourn with me, for a moment, the absence of hope, the death of agency. There are no good men in Paradise, and the only way to finish the game, to get over the guy, is to finally accept that “sometimes an antidote to sadness is being given a task.” The protagonist remains disempowered, returned to the title screen by the forces at play. Reality cannot cultivate her own garden like Candide, or whisper, like cheeky Oreo in the final line of Ross’s novel, “Nemo me impune lacessit.” She ends the novel unloved, cast out of Paradise, put back in her place by capitalist patriarchy to take her solitary way. Reality is thereby more Eve than Candide, more tragic than comic, more condemned by destiny than master of it.

¤

What, then, of the aforementioned ecstasy? Kicked out of Eden though Reality may be, Kemp’s book brims with an almost religious fervor, the too-familiar zeal of a lovestruck girl of 23. For months last summer, I was obsessed with two Bernie’s servers turned TikTok comedians, Marty Miller and Missy McIntosh, who speak in a sort of bot-generated cadence (“Hey my beauty golden girl, I am all for complete exhausted”). I couldn’t help but narrate the book in their voices; they match Reality’s freak down to a shared penchant for the phrase “special guy.” “Brain rot” was Oxford’s “word” of the year for 2024, and Paradise Logic reads accordingly, with Reality as mouthpiece and ambassador. She is “acting this way for a super normal reason, actually.” She gives her beau “a kiss on the lips featuring tongue.” When she falls in love with Ariel, she finally has “an apple of [her] eyeball.” Reality’s quirky antics are an endless surprise: her favorite cocktail is “vodka with egg”; at the cap store Lids, she remarks, “I did enjoy a nice chapeau.” This voice is largely refreshing, energetic, leaning far enough into the brain rot that it breaks out from the stupor of staid, vapid (read: boring) prose. Finally, an e-girl who wants things, who yearns and comes up short—a “hyperbolic caricature” doomed to discover that being respected and being desired are all too often at odds.

But sometimes the brain is too rotten; the joke becomes tiresome when it drones on for too long. The book is riddled with anaphora: “Due to all of the above, there was some talk of destiny, of a quest. Of jewel-encrusted swords coming out of stones. Of lizards […] Of magazines […] Of powder-blue-suit-wearing cowboys […] Of lessons […]” I don’t mind the device when it’s used sparingly. Yet as the book went on, I began to see a pattern. Here is the way the prose often works: There is a declarative phrase followed by a colon. There is a list. There is a list that builds on itself. There is a list that builds on itself by adding syllables until it trails on, breathless, into the end of the paragraph. And so on.

These constructions are repeated so often as to be formulaic—stalwart commitments to Reality’s naivete that become grating when escalated to their most absurd. I found myself losing patience with the voice as the plot pushed further into the surreal, wishing for a clearer tour guide. (This is not an impossible task. Take it from Pnin: just because your protagonist is a gullible screwball does not mean your prose need match.) Occasionally, Kemp is so committed to the bit that the narration treads into terrain wrapped in too many layers of irony to parse, stumbling into phrases like “bestest” and “boo-boo” that, I fear, even Reality is above.

“Puns, wordplay, standup-comedy riffs, menus, charts, tangents,” Danzy Senna wrote in the foreword for the 2015 reissue of Oreo, contending that “the journey to find the father is just a chance for Ross to meander through her wicked and free imagination, and to push us toward a hyper-awareness of language itself.” Though the multimedia, multirealm journey to win a boyfriend in Paradise Logic displays the same wicked and free imagination, that hyperaware precision is occasionally missing. Here and there, Reality slips out of the past tense and into the present; allusions to Milton and Joyce and Byron and Daphnis and Chloe are tossed out but not always carried through (to completion, if you will). By the end, my head was spinning, as if I’d also taken a dose of ZZZZvx ULTRA (XR).

Still, Reality is charming; we hope she will succeed in transcending Paradise altogether. Happy-go-lucky as she might seem, as with Pnin and Candide and Oreo, her chipper demeanor hides something sinister. After all, her quest to become Girlfriend and acquire Boyfriend is in part a means of self-defense in a world that is hostile to women and makes ravenous, greedy use of our bodies. “This was something I was trying to avoid: getting raped so much,” Reality explains. But this is not the best of all possible worlds. Even winning a boyfriend and approaching him with openness of heart and purity of spirit does not protect her from the violation of rape; on the contrary, it exposes her even more intimately on drunken, dissociative nights in his warehouse crate of a bedroom. “Here was the lesson,” Reality says, of being a girlfriend: “[S]ometimes when you love someone so much, you have to lie down and take it.”

In 2010, Updike sat down with Guernica to expound on his hero and blurbee, Nabokov. What did he mean when he said that thing about the ecstatic? “I think there is a rapture in Nabokov,” he explained, “which you can take to be a love of life, and also a love of consciousness; a love of the motions of the mind […] He was a contriver of chess puzzles. And that kind of joy and manipulation is there in a lot of the prose.” Paradise Logic is also a puzzle—a Dream Life–style game about the trap of patriarchy, and the absolute torture and rapture of being a young woman at 23. Nabokovian? Not quite. But enough to send the e-girl in a more interesting direction. - Leah Abrams

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/can-the-e-in-e-girl-stand-for-ecstatic/

Short Fiction

Solo Poly (Granta)

Yours Truly, Adonis (The Baffler)

The Provider (Forever)

Hands and Knees (Forever)

Luckiest Girl in the World (Chicago Review, Print)

Zines

Complete Control

to be in love, is it so uncool

Sophia Terazawa - a story of Lua Mater, an obscure Roman goddess who re-imagines herself as an assassin coming to terms with an emerging performance artist identity in the late-20th century.

 

Sophia Terazawa, Tetra Nova. Deep Vellum, 2025

https://www.sophiaterazawa.com/

Tetra Nova tells the story of Lua Mater, an obscure Roman goddess who re-imagines herself as an assassin coming to terms with an emerging performance artist identity in the late-20th century.

The operatic text begins in Saigon, where she meets a little girl named Emi, an American of Vietnamese-Japanese descent visiting her mother’s country for the first time since the war’s end. As the voices of Lua and Emi blend into one dissociated narration, the stories accelerate out of sequence, mapping upon the globe a series of collective memories and traumas passed from one generation to the next.

Darting between the temples of Nagasaki, the mountains of Tucson, and an island refugee camp off the coast of Malaysia, Lua and Emi in one embodied memory travel across the English language itself to make sense of a history neither wanted. When a tiny Panda named Panda suddenly arrives, fate intervenes, and the work acts as a larger historical document, unpacking legacies of genocide and the radical modes of resistance that follow.

At the heart of this production lies a postcolonial identity in exile, and the performers must come to terms with who may or may not carry their stories forward: Emi or Lua. Part dreamscape, part investigative poetics, multiple fragmenting identities traverse across time and space, the mythic and the profane, toward an understanding of humanity beyond those temple chamber doors.

In the opening to Sophia Terazawa’s Tetra Nova (Deep Vellum, 2025), an elephant knocks the narrator unconscious. He awakens to a soft skull. Ears on top of his head. The disappearance of his fingers and ankles. All anatomy rearranged. The narrator is a stuffed plush Panda. He falls back asleep, then awakens again: now she’s a human girl. No one warns you about this shape-shifting. Like the body of its stuffed plush narrator Panda, Terazawa’s writing removes the points of articulation in Western storytelling, elevating a joyfully disjointed sensibility in its place. Tetra Nova celebrates the multitude, proving there’s more room for every voice once you break the mold. Terazawa writes:

We might . . . argue against the temple of literature . . . How you choose, dear reader, to survive our story of colonialism and the complete cauterization of our written language, the irony of which is printed before you now, depends entirely on this story of separating everything you might know of grammar, the rules of storytelling itself, family, and national cohesion, with everything you know of yourself.

Tetra Nova is at once playful and devastating, “a manuscript of insurrection” against not only the “temple of literature” but also the erased histories of Vietnamese colonization. You could call Tetra Nova a polyvocal novel, except the voices speak at once, on top of each other, or with the same mouth. Time, place, and person shift from sentence to sentence. Terazawa creates a hybrid manuscript like a game of Tetris, its voices spinning rearrangements, reminiscent of Ende’s The Neverending Story against Diana Khoi Nguyen’s poetry against Marguerite Duras. To read Tetra Nova is to lean into nonlinear disorientation, flipping pages back and forth across time, scribbling in the margins of Vietnamese history. At times the process is frustrating. Your brain wants to bang the narrative into a linear shape and compartmentalize the voices speaking. Terazawa’s project trains you to resist and separate yourself from Western narration. When Tetra Nova breaks the fourth wall, the manuscript implicates you in its unfolding story, asking: How will you read? To find a familiar narrative? Or to rewrite history?

In 1995 Bến Thành Market, young Emi follows her Vietnamese mother. Chrysanthemum, and her Japanese father through its bazaar. Children play tag. A group of teenagers sings to new wave on a portable speaker. An elderly woman at a market stall offers Emi a toy horse. “You know me,” says the woman. The surrounding world sighs dreamlike. Even though the old woman’s mouth remains motionless, young Emi senses a chorus speaking behind her leathered face. The voices reveal a strange secret: Emi’s father found her as a baby, tucked inside a straw basket, surrounded by tanuki-raccoons dancing a divine ritual. Emi was “sent from somewhere else.” Then the boundary between the old woman and child dissipates, and Emi suddenly knows, “I was the old woman. My name was Lua.” Years later Emi’s son Tony reads this interaction in his mother’s writings. Now institutionalized, Emi is a poet with unfinished notebooks on her own mother and the history of Việt Nam. Tetra Nova is the anthology of Emi’s four notebooks, each titled after the four elements, and a multi-genre assemblage of photography, prose poetry, and endnotes. Like the woman from the market, Tony reads a host of voices speaking through Emi’s mouth: Chrysanthemum herself. The stuffed plush panda, appropriately named Panda. And a lesser-known Roman deity, known as Lua Mater. As Tony edits Emi’s writings, he hopes to rearrange her notes into a logical story and reorganize her sanity as well. Except her story grows dizzy as its chorus reclaims history and unshackles itself entirely from Western narrative structure.

Tetra Nova is Terazawa’s third full-length book after her collection of love poems, Anon, her debut collection Winter Phoenix, and her award-winning chapbooks, I Am Not a War and Correspondent Medley. With Tetra Nova, Terazawa returns to thinking about Vietnamese colonization, weaving pop culture and myth alongside ancestral history. Captain America meets shadow puppetry. Jigglypuff and high priestesses merge into one. Her characters dislodge well-known stories, putting themselves on the cast. When Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997) rolls, Panda stars right alongside Milla Jovovich. To describe Terazawa’s manuscript threatens to confuse her project by imposing Western logic on its structure. But Tetra Nova spears Western reason at the source, inviting a Roman goddess onto its cast. Lua crash-lands on Earth after her former husband, the planet Paul, slingshots her out of orbit. (She emphasizes former.) Lua’s presence presumes the promise of logic, as the other characters beseech her, “We find ourselves waiting for you, Lua, the record cosmic-keeper of steel and fire, so help us. Emi can’t render this production into one coherent draft. Our setting, the dates, and plot points switch all over the place.” True, time not only jumps, but folds, so that “[t]he year is 1963, 1975, or 1973, interchangeably.” And Emi looks for the lead voice, worrying, “Among your voices, I could / sense no center voice. It / dizzied me.” How do you make sense of a story when its plot, its time, its setting, and its characters keep moving? Terazawa shifts the center of the universe, deflating individualism. Yes, the firey Planet Paul, that former husband, proves hot with his “burning core of hydrogen, rock, and magma.” But when Lua stops revolving around him, much to his fury, he paces outside her house as Kate Bush blares from inside its walls. Tetra Nova decenters an arrogant sun for a collective of stars, all blinking their histories in simultaneous time. And anyway, why listen to a Paul when you have a Panda?

The beating heart of Tetra Nova relies on legitimizing its own telling, against what the West might diagnose as regression or dissociation. Emi’s medical staff say, “I like her stories. I don’t know why, but I do. . . . But when I listen to Emi in the courtyard, even when she’s turning them all around, I never know who exactly speaks, but I don’t pause to ask what makes sense or not.” Tony’s project to edit Emi’s work and restore her sanity is a failed one, but only insomuch as linearity or individual lucidity defines healing. If anything, Tetra Nova criticizes the asylum of both nation and psychiatry, privileging, rather than pathologizing the presence of collective voices. When Terazawa passes the microphone to minor Roman goddesses and stuffed plush toys, she opens the floor to deeply powerful storytelling. She writes, “How do we recreate our truth to access a different truth, the multiplication of a body and distance through genocide, betrayal, and martyrdom”? To read Tetra Nova is to read Tony editing his mother who writes her mother, chasing ancestry. But if Chrysanthemum is Vietnamese, Emi’s father is Japanese: colonized and colonizer. Emi says, Tony writes, “I’m a traitor for writing this; prone to the violence of myself, against myself.” Like the elderly woman in Bến Thành Market, Terazawa ventriloquizes a host of overlapping characters as an author—even you, the reader. And look: her mouth never moves at all.

If Tetra Nova criticizes individualism for collective storytelling, neither is this binary solid. In a 2025 craft lecture on mistranslation, Terazawa writes: “In Saigon, I’m . . . shaken by a similar motion sickness of speech. No public figure has said a word about Palestine here, not in the airports, not on the state television, not in the karaoke machines sprawled on concrete across the city’s centers, not even in the villages, where my cousins continue to dutifully plant joss sticks on unmarked graves. Genocide has become a marker of ongoing consciousness on Vietnamese soil, but one line splits between the silences of then and the silences of today.” Silencing persists, ostensibly everywhere, whether through erasure or revision. Terazawa writes, “Language perhaps conceals further harm. We hold vigil for those taken by the state. But which state?”

Terazawa deploys the hybrid form to restore unseen stories, stealing techniques from the state, encoding and erasing toward new ends. Tetra Nova plays bait and switch when you read, “For example, when you come upon the phrase, ‘unannounced, the feces,’ think about the gun once held against your mother’s head, also, her brother’s head.” Then you read “unannounced, the feces,” and you understand what has gone unsaid. When Panda stands in for the memory of a baby, held tight against Chrysanthemum’s chest, the toy heightens the devastation to follow. “Soon, in every story, the mother who looks like my mother will act out a choice, in her memory, no one should be ever forced to make, but here they do.” Every switch creates a bridge for communication, rather than its demolishing. The physical text in Tetra Nova lightens almost imperceptibly as its refugees flee Việt Nam, its clarity degrading until the words blur almost invisible. The fading creates an ache in literal and historical erasure, then acute loss when a few words scream black again: “the Vietnamese-American filmmaker Tiana Alexandra speaks / ‘Before,’ / ‘when I told you the story . . .’ / ‘in front of my eyes,’ / ‘I see no one.’” Tetra Nova is all the more devastating for this willingness to play. (For example, when you come upon the phrase “insurrection,” think revolution.) When Terazawa writes the grand insurrection in 1945 during the August Revolution, less than a month before Việt Nam declared independence from its colonizers, its people mirror Tetra Nova’s cast.

It always starts like this, at the rally. A man becomes his singular witness to the present moment of a war declared by his father’s people. He conjures up a sensation of Now, Now, Now, gasping from each filament of scenes before a world that does nothing, and even that which multiplies to ten, and if not so, hundreds and hundreds of testimonies splattered across time, moving collectively forward, a tide of angry, famished men as they march collectively onward, and, arriving at last to the front doorsteps of a grand opera house in northern Vietnam, these men go completely silent.

If revolution always starts like this, with many voices moving forward as a collective, Terazawa’s polyvocal book signals a grand beginning. Tetra Nova not only lights a path to reclaim lost histories but how to push onward in an uncertain present, now, now, now. - Erin Vachon

https://therumpus.net/2025/03/11/sophia-terazawa/

Sophia Terazawa, Anon. Deep Vellum, 2023

A collection of love poems addressed to an adverb, Anon meditates on the temporal “at once” between desire and language.

From the playful verses of Slovenia's Tomaž Šalamun to the brushstrokes of an Edo period painting, Two Gibbons Reaching for the Moon by Japan's Ito Jakuchu, a character for the displaced Beloved emerges in this tapestry of time and art across borders.

In Anon, the Beloved reflects: How might translating a human experience, from one language to the next, be an act of longing for the anonymous Other? Or how might this longing for beauty, and the wordless face, heal us both? How might Eros, in exile, respond? With these questions, Vietnam's Mekong delta becomes the book's central force. Endangered gibbons swing from the ruins of ecocide, and each image―rose, ape, and river―weaves itself into an undercurrent of postcolonial time.

In her sensuous second collection, Terazawa (Winter Phoenix) addresses a series of love poems to the adverb anon across four lyrical sections that meditate on themes of romance, colonialism, violence, and loss. The opening poem, “Stay,” begins: “For the muse could not/ light another city// with her eyes, you spoke/ anon, oil black like mine,// and whoever crossed/ that cobbler’s// bridge in Ljubljana/ would also speak of roots.” “Walk with me, anon,” she writes, taking this unnamed addressee to a garden “[o]vergrown with books” through “each decade of grief.” These deeply felt poems are filled with images of gibbons, rivers, and roses. Indeed, the speaker writes, “We could have dreamed of roses.” With haunting imagery, Terazawa describes a world where one’s “present tense arrived misshapen” in settings ravaged by war or climate change. “Kids are dying,// in your country and my country, too,” she proclaims. These poems tackle the challenges and atrocities of the present with an eye to the past and an insistence on beauty. Terazawa’s lush imagination gorgeously renders the interconnectedness of a difficult world. - Publishers Weekly

Sophia Terazawa, Winter Phoenix: Testimonies

in Verse. Deep Vellum, 2021

A book of testimonies in verse, Winter Phoenix is a collection of poems written loosely after the form of an international war crimes tribunal. The poet, a daughter of a Vietnamese refugee, navigates the epigenetics of trauma passed down, and across, the archives of war, dislocation, and witness, as she repeatedly asks, “Why did you just stand there and say nothing?” Here, the space of accusation becomes both lyric and machine, an “investigation" which takes place in the margins of martial law, the source material being soldiers’ testimonies given during three internationally publicized events, in this order―The Incident on Hill 192 (1966, Phù Mỹ District, Vietnam); The Winter Soldier Investigation (1971, Detroit, USA); and The Russell Tribunal (1966, Stockholm, Sweden; 1967, Roskilde, Denmark). Ultimately, however, Winter Phoenix is a document of resilience. Language decays. A ceremony eclipses its trial, and the radical possibilities of a single scream rises from annihilation.

"In her debut, Terazawa, daughter of a Vietnamese refugee, considers the colonial and linguistic legacy of the Vietnam war in a work comprising imagined testimonies in verse." —Maya Popa, Publishers Weekly

"What language can we use to describe atrocities mounting on top of atrocities? How do we organize the telling? What happens after? In Sophia Terazawa’s stunning and necessary debut collection of poetry, we begin with the letter A, we begin in Vietnam. We climb a hill. On our journey we encounter different systems and schema for representing the moment of slaughter' (the affidavit, the cross examination, the grease work and its diagrams, the Pleiades, the Q and A). But we do not progress as much as watch events disperse like light through a prism. 'Therefore, we direct that length of earth through weed then bone, using this meter of our killers…' writes Terazawa. 'Yes, we thus decompose to open gaps for breath…' Terazawa splinters, she reconstitutes, we witness the burn, the rise. There’s a limit to what can happen in a colonial language. In Winter Phoenix, Terazawa takes us beyond it" ―Susan Briante

"I envy you, who are about to experience Sophia Terazawa’s Winter Phoenix, for the jagged, life-harrowing testimony / the searing counter-autopsy performed on the overspreading shadows of human extremity / and the enforced contortions and yet finally free revelations of language / that are about to incite and irrevocably transform your mind and especially your heart. Terazawa’s poetry―trial, exhibition, demonstration, transfiguration, ballad of descendant unquiet―is the hardest won form of love. It is poetry as refoliation." ―Brandon Shimoda

"Violence looks back, tries to find quiet in its wake, but quiet chooses instead to slip away to a place Elias Khoury called Little Mountain. Toni Morrison took us to the clearing. Paul Celan followed ashes into the sky. Like them, Sophia Terazawa leans closer to the page, to its ink, deeper into the chest and throat, closer to the edges of her fingertips, so she can lift quiet into the imagination and thereby inaugurate a courtroom for reckoning, a chamber for transformation, a hill for a tattered flag, and a hill again, to run down, arms open, holding out an amulet of love."―Farid Matuk

"Sophia Terazawa’s profound debut collection Winter Phoenix invites us to seek out radical healing rituals as a means to persevere amidst the horrors of empire during the Vietnam War. Beneath its testimonies, exhibits, cross-examinations, and diagrams of war crime tribunals is the incantation of voices that can no longer remain unheard. The poet honors these voices that span 'between documents and justice,' along with the ancestral and astral, toward greater possibilities of repair. By conjuring an inquiry of these crimes, by subverting language of the empire, and by seeking new accountability, the reader is compelled to not look away but then to ask: where does complicity end and healing begin? This collection guides us to listen deeper and encourages us to consider who speaks and is allowed to speak, who jurors the justice and receives the justice, who can and cannot answer the questions to make us whole. In its refusal to 'Learn to / spēk / just how this / ˈkəntrē / speaks,' we are pushed further so that within these pages transformation becomes all the more possible."―Anthony Cody

"With Winter Phoenix, Sophia Terazawa conducts a symphony of voices, documents, and archives in the form of lyric testimonies which bring to mind precedent texts such as Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, Layli Long Soldier's Whereas, and M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! Incisive and microscopic, Terazawa examines the intimacies of the unnamed speaker's matrilineal line while cross-examining those who were complicit in war crimes during the Resistance War Against America, or American War, or the 'Vietnam War' (as it is referred to outside of Vietnam). Lush ecological textures and '[h]ills of lemongrass and eucalyptus' juxtapose against lyric redactions and source materials: 'Well, I've shot deer and I've gutted deer. It was just like when you stick a deer with a knife--sort of a thud--or something like this, sir,' culminating in searing treatise against and indictment of war. Terazawa is exacting in her visions of the personal and trans-national past. 'These facts are very simple,' she writes, and she's absolutely right--but the aftermath, the legacy--is far from it."―Diana Khoi Nguyen

Charles Cros - An indefinable polymath of fin-de-siécle Paris, Cros’s imagination had one foot in the literary currents of his time, and the other in the field of science.This amalgamation is fully demonstrated in this collection, which includes proto-science-fiction stories; his contributions to what was then the new form of the prose poem

 

Charles Cros, The Science of Love and Other

Writings. Translated, with an introduction, by

Doug Skinner 2024 

The Science of Love and Other Writings brings together for the first time in English all the literary prose of Charles Cros. An indefinable polymath of fin-de-siécle Paris, Cros’s imagination had one foot in the literary currents of his time, and the other in the field of science. This amalgamation is fully demonstrated in this collection, which includes proto-science-fiction stories; his contributions to what was then the new form of the prose poem; a sober, if fantastical, scientific study on methods of communication with other planets; and the patent application written with his brother for a (never-built) notating keyboard.

The literary imagination he was able to bring into the field of science was matched by the humorous scientific sobriety he introduced into his literature, which he did nowhere so effectively as in the title piece, “The Science of Love”: a depiction of a young scientist’s painstakingly executed seduction of a woman for the sake of scientific analysis, utilizing litmus paper and measuring releases of carbonic acid during maximized passion. Its humor led Joris-Karl Huysmans to include it in the rarefied library of À rebours, where the College de ’Pataphysique declared “An Interplanetary Drama” to be a “canonical text.” Also included are stories such as “The Newspaper of the Future” (which presents a nineteenth-century imagining of artificial intelligence) and “The Stone Who Died of Love.”

Charles Cros (1842–1888) was as much Renaissance man as he was poète maudit. A bohemian poet who drank with Verlaine and at one point provided housing to Rimbaud, he also developed the comic monologue as a theatrical genre and invented both the gramophone (which he named the “paléophone”) and color photography (though he failed to patent either before Thomas Edison or Louis Ducos du Hauron), among other such inventions as a non-metallic battery and a musical stenographer. “The freshness of his intelligence was such that no object of desire seemed utopian to him a priori,” André Breton wrote of him, adding: “The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.”

“For readers both interested in science and unperturbed by the aspect of casual fugues between consenting rocks and fissures and related phenomena, The Science of Love is your book. Hats off to Doug Skinner and his relentless quest to find and translate into English unknown and little-known gems from the French humanities.”—Tom Bowden, The Book Beat

Charles Cros, Principles of Cerebral Mechanics. Translated, with an introduction, by Doug Skinner. Wakefield Press, 2021

A visionary treatise on perception from the extraordinary polymath Charles Cros―poet, friend to Rimbaud and Verlaine, and inventor of color photography and the phonograph

Establishing the author’s standing as the inventeur maudit of his time, Principles of Cerebral Mechanics was first presented to the Academy of Sciences in 1872, but was not published until 1879, and then only in fragmentary form. Setting out to understand the mechanics of perception―the organs of which at the time were too small and inaccessible to be studied directly―Cros instead attempted to reverse-engineer the sensory organs. Whereas his previous inventions in the realms of audio recording and color photography had focused on technology for the senses, with this ambitious essay Cros turned to conceptualizing the technology of the senses themselves: rather than the transmission of color to the retina, here he instead attempted to conceive of how color was transmitted from the retina to the brain. By approaching the human brain as a “mechanism of registration,” Cros’ essay can be set alongside the groundbreaking work of such revolutionary figures who transformed modern vision as Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge.

Charles Cros (1842–88) was as much Renaissance man as he was poète maudit. A bohemian poet who drank with Verlaine and provided housing to Rimbaud, he also developed the comic monologue as a theatrical genre, and invented both the phonograph (which he named the “paléophone”) and color photography (though he failed to patent either before Thomas Edison or Louis Ducos du Hauron), among other such inventions as a nonmetallic battery and a musical stenographer.

Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando - Old Vienna Ad Absurdum. A strange, comic-grotesque novel that satirizes European bureaucracy (using absurdity, slapstick, parody and scatological humor), while also arguing FHO’s Austria/Germany-centric political conspiracy theories and also serving as something of an occult, Christo-Pagan primer cum southern European travelogue

 

Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando, The Masquarade of the Spirits, Trans. by Shawn Garrett. Strange Ports Press, 2025 [1958]

excerpt

THE MASQUERADE OF THE SPIRITS (Das Maskenspiel der Genien), appearing here for the first time in an English translation by Shawn Garrett, was originally published posthumously (in edited form) in 1958, with the full unedited version appearing in 1975. It is a strange, comic-grotesque novel that satirizes European bureaucracy (using absurdity, slapstick, parody and scatological humor), while also arguing FHO’s Austria/Germany-centric political conspiracy theories and also serving as something of an occult, Christo-Pagan primer cum southern European travelogue. Includes an Afterword by the Translator.

“Dejanira Bajatiani looked at him with iridescent eyes. ‘When you boarded this ship, Mr. von Pizzicolli, you said goodbye to the bourgeois, the very real part of your life... I am obliged to tell you that! Every person's life is a drama. The unreal part of your life's action begins now. Yes, once in every person's life comes the strange hour when he boards the ship that takes him to the other continent of his being... You have finished the real part of the school of life... the fantasy begins...’”

Cyriak stumbles into a mythic version of austria when entering a wardrobe. some call this novel the phantastical sister of musil’s man without qualities, while it's also distantly related to kafka. - Tom Ghostly

Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando, The Tragic

Demise of a Faithful Court Official. Trans. by

David A. Veeder, Ariadne Press, 1997 [1928]

Herzmanovsky-Orlando's 1928 novel The Tragic Demise of a Faithful Court Official tells of the romantic entanglements, inexorable decline, and subsequent tragicomic death of the rigid and proper Biedermeier bureaucrat Jaromir Edler von Eynhuf. In his unwavering efforts to gain the attention of his beloved Emperor Franz I and to further his career, Eynhuf loses sight of all propriety and embarks on an irreversible path of obsession leading into the netherworld of the diva Hoellteufel and to his eventual ruination.

Old Vienna Ad Absurdum

Fritz Herzmanovsky-Orlando (1877-1954) was an amateur, but not amateurish, author and graphic artist who retired as an architect in Vienna in 1917 for health reasons. He resettled in Meran (Merano) in South Tyrol, where he spent the rest of his life writing and drawing. His best-known work, Der Gaulschreck im Rosennetz (1928), a portrayal of the lower aristocracy in Vienna around 1830, is presented here as The Tragic Demise of a Faithful Court Official in a spirited and faithful translation by David A. Veeder, one of the very few American scholars working on this eccentric Austrian novelist and playwright.

The Tragic Demise of a Faithful Court Official is one of only two works that Herzmanovsky published in his lifetime, both in the twenties, but the noted Austrian writer Friedrich Torberg reintroduced him to the reading public in the late fifties by editing his collected works in four volumes. A further one-volume version of this edition and a two-volume paperback edition published in Germany in the early seventies by Ullstein testify to the author's continuing appeal, the reasons for which are clear after reading only one or two pages: Herzmanovsky is a funny, charming satirist with a bent for witty, often outrageous description and an ear for the sparkling vacuity of society conversation.

As Veeder notes in his afterword, Herzmanovsky considered this novel the first of an "Austrian Trilogy" that was to run from the early nineteenth century to the mid-1960s (p. 138). The other two novels, Maskenspiel der Genien (Masquerade of the Spirits) and Scoglio Pomo oder Rout am Fliegenden Hollaender (Scoglio Pomo, or Disaster on the Flying Dutchman), were not published by Herzmanovsky and have not been translated. They do appear in Torberg's edition, as well as in volumes 2 and 3 of the planned ten-volume edition of Herzmanovsky's works edited by the Brenner-Archiv that began to appear in the Residenz Verlag in 1983. Der Gaulschreck im Rosennetz appears in volume 1 of that edition (1983).

The Tragic Demise of a Faithful Court Official takes place during the reign of Francis I, sometime after the Congress of Vienna and apparently before Beethoven's death in 1827, for the composer is mentioned as being alive (p. 15). It tells the story of the Court Secretary Jaromir Edler von Eynhuf, who is employed by the Imperial Court Drum Depot and devoted to his position and his emperor with a single-minded intensity. For instance, although he is more attracted to Annerl Zisch, he would rather marry the daughter of the retired Court Dwarf Zumpi because of better social and professional prospects. Indeed, in spite of his tall, lanky figure, his secret dream has always been to be a Court Dwarf, so that he could be near the Emperor, "always having His illustrious attentive ear, always being permitted to cheer him up" (p. 41). Eynhuf's ultimate tribute to the monarch, however, will be a collection of baby teeth, "the largest and most complete in the entire Empire" (p. 11) arranged in a tableau in the form of a numeral commemorating the anniversary of the Emperor's accession to the throne.

This is where the plot gets underway, for Eynhuf needs one more tooth to complete his tableau. Having determined that it must be an especially beautiful tooth from the momentarily most-celebrated diva of the Viennese stage, Miss Hoellteufel, he begins to plot how to gain possession of this prize. With advice from his friend Grosskopf he decides he must use the anonymity of the carnival mask to approach the actress--in fact, he must dress as a huge butterfly so that he can secretly issue his delicate request in the shelter of his wings. This absurd and expensive stratagem ends in disaster, including but not limited to the wind blowing the hapless butterfly down the street, startling the nags for hire, which lends the novel its catchy but obscure original title: "The Horse Spook in a Snare of Roses." "Snare of Roses" refers to Miss Hoellteufel's costume as a bouquet of roses, and to the fact that in the course of their brief encounter Eynhuf falls desperately in love with her. The rest of the novel relates how Eynhuf's obsessive attempts to attain the actress lead him into the lower reaches of Viennese society, put him out of favor with his superiors, and ultimately send him on the run from the police. He finally meets a disgraceful end marked by horribly poetic justice.

The anachronism of writing a novel in the 1920s about imaginary, insignificant events of the 1820s--this is not a historical novel in any strict sense--raises the question, particularly for subscribers to the HABSBURG list, whether this novel is of interest to historians. There are, after all, plenty of contemporary and historical accounts of Biedermeier Vienna. Still, this modest novel delivers a sense of life in the imperial and royal city before 1848 that is based not only on vivid imagination, but also on scrupulous historical inquiry. As Veeder writes, citing research by Hubert Reitterer and Susanna Kirschl-Goldberg: "Interestingly, as bizarre as much of Herzmanovsky's picture of this Old Austria may seem to the reader, virtually every fantastic character, outlandish bureaucratic office, weird locale and strange historical event can be documented in fact" (p. 139).[1]

We are ushered into a world in which titles and rank mean everything, and therefore everyone has title and rank. We read of the "Royal and Imperial Supreme Candle-Snuffer Cleaner" (p. 2) and "Court Dwarf First Class," which corresponds to the military rank of major (p. 5). At one point Eynhuf considers taking the job of Commander of the "Imperial Christmas Creche Watch," which would entail three days of work per year and a summer residence, but "admittedly with few prospects for advancement" (p. 76). This is also a world hypersensitive to fads and fashions, where a popular confection that goes under the name "Bear's Dung" inspires a competitor to come out with a (less successful!) knockoff called "Chicken Doo-doo" (p. 17). Conversations about actresses and socialites seem more important than the occasional historical event that wedges its way into the busy awareness of this stratum of society that by virtue of birth has very little of importance to do, and lots of time to talk about it.

Particularly charming, but also informative, are the descriptions of Viennese locales and social habits. Upper-class apartments, a confectioner's shop, the Christmas market, a carnival ball, various districts and suburbs, the Prater amusement park, and streets and cafes are described in some detail and in an affectionate tone that moves between the teasing and the sardonic. Behaviors like the fixation on music and theater, the composing of occasional verse, Sunday coffees, Imperial bureaucratic customs, the Biedermeier mania for collecting, amateur chamber music, customs at theaters and balls, and exaggerations of dress and address are all here. The world of the minor aristocracy is presented as a slightly daft, highly stylized, and ultimately trivial milieu.

Things become less trivial, however, as Eynhuf's descent begins. The farcical but genial portrait of the leisure class of Biedermeier Vienna becomes a journey into gypsy shops, kitchens, back alleys, and brothels, as our hero seeks a love potion and cynically woos Hoellteufel's chambermaid to get near her mistress. A date with the maid, which he cannot refuse, takes him on Pentecost Sunday to the Volksprater, which Herzmanovsky describes with wry humor but no condescension. Further class differences arise as Eynhuf and his fellow aristocrats have to share their world with the wealthy but boorish bourgeois entrepreneurs such as the "Smoked-Meat King" Wuerstl (pp. 64-65). While refraining from any sort of political statement, Herzmanovsky makes it clear that the petit bourgeois is the cake upon which the aristocracy and nouveaux riches have the privilege of leading their whipped-cream existence.

There are curious echoes of motifs we've seen elsewhere in Austrian literature, which indicates not influence, but the consistency of certain themes in Habsburg and Austrian society. Thus the pointless commemoration of the emperor's anniversary recalls the Parallel Campaign in Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities. The rescue of a young archduke as the ticket to social position (p. 40) is reminiscent of Trotta's saving the emperor at Solferino in Joseph Roth's Radetzky March. A bureaucrat publishes a monograph "Melancholy Observations of an Imperial Civil Servant on the Last Judgment and the Accompanying Loss in Fiscal Liquidation Fees" (p. 109), whose financial response to Armageddon resonates with Jura Soyfer's The End of the World, where "the prospect of destruction proves to be the best boom for business yet."[2] Eynhuf's reaction to being bested by the bourgeois butcher Wuerstl (p. 78) resembles the paranoid desperation of Schnitzler's Lieutenant Gustl in his cloakroom struggle with a baker. A display of stuffed canaries that looks almost alive (p. 102) and the leitmotif of the baby-tooth collection would fit into Gerhard Roth's Reise ins Innere von Wien (Voyage to Innermost Vienna), which explores the generalized museum mentality of the Austrian capital. These resemblances do not place Herzmanovsky in the literary league of Schnitzler, Joseph Roth, or Musil, but they do place him in their social milieu and historical context.

Veeder's translation maintains the correct tone of hyperbole and near-hyperbole that Herzmanovsky uses to mock his characters' affectations, usually without crossing the line himself. The intentional rhetorical overuse of adjectives can easily get excessive, but here it merely adds to our amazement at this grotesquely self-indulgent world. Veeder maintains the sense of fun that is essential to Herzmanovsky's text, and he nearly always passes the test of a good translation: that it is convincing as literature in the target language.

There are two aspects of the original German that are unfortunately untranslatable: Viennese dialect and names, which usually have broad, satirical significance. Since American English lacks a dialect that is at once both (socially) upper-class and (grammatically) substandard, the delightful idiom of Eynhuf and his acquaintances is lost. I suppose one could have used an occasional British upper-class double negative to render this, but then it would have sounded like Wodehouse and not like Herzmanovsky, and the effect would still be missing. Veeder wisely does not translate the outlandish but always credible German names, but this means that their comic effect is lost. Hoellteufel, Zisch, Wuerstl, Grosskopf, Paradeyser, and von Unklar would not be convincing as Helldevil, Hiss, Weenie, Bighead, Tomayto, and Unclear, yet for better or worse their silliness is lost on the reader who knows little German.

On the other hand, the translator could have retained two instances of malapropism. "Kompletativisch" (sic) could have become something like "complentative" instead of the unexceptional "contemplative" (p. 23); and "Refmativisimus" (sic) might have been "rheumatiz" or "rheumaticism" instead of the correct "rheumatism" (p. 85). The word "bashkille" for "Bastille" (p. 17) is correctly preserved as a demonstration of the historical illiteracy of the aristocrats, but it should have been capitalized so the reader could immediately catch the reference.

But these are just a few details in a fine translation. The following passage from the Carnival chapter shows how Veeder can handle the challenge of a bizarre plot, linguistic complexity, and a style that is almost, but not quite, overcome by stiltedness:

Laboriously the butterfly steered his way toward this gleaming sun [Hoellteufel] and was nearly at his destination. Then suddenly something terrible happened. From out of the throng of masks leaped the beautiful Helena Kollokotronis with her dark page-boy locks, her puckish charm attractively complementing the disguise of a silvery pretzel-boy, and abruptly jumped up and sat astride Eynhuf's shoulders before he could indignantly fend her off. Joyously shouting, she spurred him onward with her shimmering high heels and steered him delightedly around by the antennae. Behind him popped champagne corks, the clouds of perfume and bright flashing of jewels totally bewildering his senses" (p. 65).

Such broad humor does not take away from the novel's increasing seriousness, which ends in Eynhuf's death. Thus The Tragic Demise is something like a small-scale version of Alfred Kubin's Die andere Seite (The Other Side), where, however, the mounting grotesquery leaves the realm of humor and ends in a disturbing apocalyptic vision in an exotic anti-Shangri-La. Herzmanovsky is able to achieve his minor revelation without going any farther out of Vienna than Mariahilf, and it is correspondingly less shattering, but troublesome nonetheless. Another parallel between Herzmanovsky and his lifelong friend Kubin is the fact that both illustrated their own books. It is therefore too bad that only two of Herzmanovsky's amusing drawings appear in the translation, but reproducing the twenty-seven plates with sufficient quality would likely have made the book inordinately expensive. Also like Kubin's unique novel, Herzmanovsky's seems to convert most who read it into solid fans.

It should be noted that this translation is based on Torberg's edition, and it contains chapter titles that Torberg supplied. Susanna Kirschl-Goldberg has produced a version more faithful to Herzmanovsky's manuscripts, which restores some particularly extravagant language,[3] but this has remained a scholarly version, and Veeder was right to translate the much more familiar one.

Anyone who is at all interested in Vienna and the Habsburg Empire since Maria Theresa will at least enjoy this book, and probably learn something as well. Herzmanovsky's novel, through David Veeder's translation, offers a sense of physical and social detail that may be the next best thing to a movie filmed in the streets of pre-March Vienna. And for all its period atmosphere, the novel's plot, with its social climber who is so obsessed with one perceived advantage that he abandons all other advantages, could be transplanted without much modification into a script of the television situation comedy Seinfeld (except that its "tragic" ending would not lead very well into next week's episode). This is meant as a compliment to a book that is lively, funny, well plotted, and ultimately poignant, in addition to being historically interesting. It deserves its place in Ariadne's ever-growing Austrian translation series. - Geoffrey C. Howes

Notes:

[1]. See Hubert Reitterer, "Oesterreichische Geschichte im Werk von Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando," Oesterreich in Geschichte und Literatur 30 (1986), pp. 275-284; Susanna Kirschl-Goldberg, "Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando: Wien als Fiktion und Realitaet," Literatur und Kritik, pp.191-192 (1985), pp. 60-72.

[2]. Horst Jarka, "Introduction," The Legacy of Jura Soyfer, ed. and trans. by Horst Jarka (Montreal: Engendra Press, 1977), p. 29.

[3]. Susanna Kirschl-Goldberg, "Kommentar," Der Gaulschreck im Rosennetz. Roman, vol. 1 of Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando, Saemtliche Werke in zehn Baenden (Salzburg: Residenz, 1983), pp. 143-233.

https://networks.h-net.org/node/19384/reviews/19615/howes-von-herzmanovsky-orlando-tragic-demise-faithful-court-official

Emil Szittya - I am delighted that I am the act of negation. The first prostitute in Greece. Aretino's unpublished writings. The pills with which de Sade spiced his festivals. I took Lautréamont to the madhouse. I have created Paris, Rome, and the Balkan brothels. I hate the giving that God put in us as a curse. I have created the fairy tale 1001 Nights.

 

Emil Szittya, The Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the Cards. Translated, with an introduction, by W. C. Bamberger. Wakefield Press, 2025 [1916]

Emil Szittya’s earliest known work of significance, The Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the Cards, was published in German in Budapest in 1916, yet it portrays the hallucinatory Paris the author had chosen for a temporary home at that time. It is a strange literary work as international and untethered as the author himself had been, a symbolic map of Montparnasse and memory that incorporates the visual world of the painters around him. It is a notational, hashish-infused dream diary in which Szittya plays with childhood legends and gender roles as he restlessly sifts through poverty and the underworld, splicing together and severing apart synesthetic sensations and visions.

Prose poems, for lack of a better word, Szittya’s “hashish films” were almost lost to time but can be recognized as sitting alongside the work of such contemporaries as Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire. They nevertheless read like an anomaly, reflecting the author’s lifelong refusal to ally himself with any literary or artistic movement.

The subtitle -- (A Novel against Psicho-Analise) -- claims this is a novel, but as the title itself -- The Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the Cards -- suggests, this is anything but a traditional novel. For all its claim of (presumably) presenting 'hashish films' this work from the early era of cinema -- it was first published in 1915 or 1916 -- is not particularly cinematic, either. (Henri Rousseau -- who, yes, was also a douanier in his time ... -- does, however, rate some mentions, as does Szittya-friend Blaise Cendrars (lauded as: "the only poet now living").)

There are seventeen chapters or sections to the 'novel', and most consist of numbered bits -- often just a single paragraph or sentence --, mostly half a dozen or so (though 'The Paintings' does extend for eighteen); a few pieces do without numbering. Many come with dedications and some with descriptions -- or both: 'An Indian Journey Pondered in Summer' is presented, parenthetically, as: "A Song for Emy Henings" (read: Emmy Hennings).

In his Introduction, translator Bamberger suggests: "there is something of the feel of "automatic writing" in Die Haschischfilms" and much here certainly is very free-flowing. At one point Szittya writes: "Now I cavort with visions", which can well be said to sum up his approach in much of this collection -- generally personal (the "I" is prominent throughout) and certainly fantastical, in the broadest sense (and, yes, one might feel much here is drug-induced -- with Szittya addressing at least some of its use in the section titled 'Gabriele's Opinion of my Hashish Hours'). More fundamentally, as Szittya notes in one piece: "I want to disperse boredom in metamorphosing-style formulas"; he certainly seems to give that a good go .....

There is little story here, yet much still is compelling -- from the very first piece, the opening of 'Sometimes':

Around 9 o'clock. An asylum in which, through no fault of my own, I lost Verlaine. A red-letter day. And Cendrars, in a drunken state, recounts tales of Russian monks, of women under bridges, of farmer Gaborwiegh. I just lie far below and look at the noses of Baudelaire and Villon. Some believe that we met out of love.

There is considerable personal reflection -- notably in 'Envy', in which he resignedly already finds: "And I am already so old" (despite not having yet reached thirty ...) and complains that: "Nothing has happened to me that was truly an experience" -- indeed, that: "I have never experienced most of my journey". (Amusingly, too, he notes here: "my big mistake was that I had too many professor friends".)

The reaches in the writing suggest the elusiveness of the 'experience' he seeks

Reestablish slavery ! The world should become a huge field where only poppies grow. Shatter every mirror ! -- In Nirvana the souls of the deceased become black birds. The snake is dead and the clocks and cars have broken down. And the wings of the eagles reek of manure piles.

He writes much of traveling far and wide, but there are no destinations that can deliver what he seeks; as he notes in 'Gabriele's Opinion of my Hashish Hours': "We seek Paris in vain" (even as he writes from and about there several times).

The subtitle suggests also a specific purpose to this work (and, presumably, approach) -- with Bamberger citing Walter Fähnders going so far as to say (in an Afterword to a collection of Szittya's writings) it is: "like a double-insult: not only aimed at psychoanalysis, but at 'the novel' as well". If insult aimed at 'the novel', it is curiously phrased; perhaps instead the focus should be on Szittya's insistence on calling it 'a novel' (and hence that it be read and considered as such). There is some structure here -- notably in the various pieces -- and some sense of a whole, but the form is very much Szittya's own, a far cry from most things novelistic. Self-reflection, in its various shades, dominates the work -- arguably as Szittya's own attempt at understanding and presenting (his) self, in determined opposition (or denial) of a psychoanalytic approach, most obviously in 'The Bordello', with its seven sections, each of which closes with the refrain: "I've already made my mother cry many times". (Elsewhere he admits: "And sometimes the nervous-sad eyes of my mother emerge from my dreams, like the autumnal image of a hospital"; one imagines that (especially) for all his protestations, psychoanalysts would have loved to have him on their couch.....)

Even as he reports here that: "now I have women and flowers and money", 'The Bordello' is a litany of disappointment -- though notably he also writes: "And I still dream poetry" (not least: rather, presumably, than dreaming Freudian dreamscapes). Not yet thirty, his isn't the usual youthful world-weariness, but he is physically worn out: "I am very, very tired", he notes, and: "I already have dull eyes and flabby arms" -- and:

I am already bent over, and I have never been satisfied by love. And my ankles hurt. And I know I am on my way to getting fat and having gout, and sometimes I get so weak that many tear the mask from my face. I still have only the idea of the desire for grass.

And, as he also notes: "And also, I no longer have a personal desire".

There are flights of grand personal fantasy, but even in these he is brought back down to earth and reality, as in the closing piece in 'Portrait of Jacques the Belly Slicer and an Evening in the Boudoir of Frau Dr. Geller':

And I am delighted that I am the act of negation. The first prostitute in Greece. Aretino's unpublished writings. The pills with which de Sade spiced his festivals. I took Lautréamont to the madhouse. I have created Paris, Rome, and the Balkan brothels. I hate the giving that God put in us as a curse. I have created the fairy tale 1001 Nights. It takes only a moment for me to make the women beautiful in love's frenzy. And at daybreak I sit broken in my room and play cards with my servant.

A nice summing-up comes in 'Morning', in the piece that reads:

I have stolen myself from a film. Now I am strolling along the ocean shore. And I still have not spliced my paragraphs into the proper order.

The disorder remains -- but then traditional order would have required and resulted in a very different kind of work.

Szittya returns to the cinematic identification later, as well, writing in 'Symptoms of a Nervous Shock':

I was the films in a suburban cinema somewhere behind the Bastille; sometimes young girls even tell me so in their sentimental and banal poems; and somehow I already must have been in all the charity wards of the world.

The Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the Cards is a very loose, odd collection(-cum-novel), of reflection and wondering, very much grounded in personal experience yet only so revealing. Szittya suggests: "The world is only beautiful when it has no purpose", and there seems to be a striving for that here. It's not the sort of thing all readers will have the patience for, but at barely more than fifty pages it is an unusual trip worth taking. - M.A.Orthofer

https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/austria/szittyae.htm

Emil Szittya was the most established pseudonym of the Hungarian-born Adolf Schenk (1886–1964). A vagabond in both his writing and his practice, his life intersected with everyone throughout Europe in the years of high modernism, whether he was setting up a publishing house with Blaise Cendrars in Paris, crossing paths with Lenin and Trotsky in Zürich, seeing the birth of Dada in the Cabaret Voltaire with his friends Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, or writing the first books on artists such as Chaïm Soutine and Marc Chagall. Szittya settled in Paris later in life, fighting in the Resistance during the war and working at the café Les Deux Magots before dying of tuberculosis. His many works, in Hungarian, German, and French, include novels, essays, art criticism, and a history of suicide.

Max Brod - Schloss Nornepygge, published in 1908, was hailed as "the most modern of modern books" and transports us into the world of Walder Nornepygge, a rich, civilization-weary, and overly refined young man in a desperate search for his identity.

Max Brod, Schloss Nornepygge. 1908

A meteoric rise with a rebelliously decadent key work: In the literary world of Berlin's bohemians, this novel made its young Prague author instantly famous and gave modernism its signature. Finally, the most important of the early, sensational texts by Franz Kafka's friend and estate administrator can be rediscovered.

Schloss Nornepygge, published in 1908, was hailed as "the most modern of modern books" and transports us into the world of Walder Nornepygge, a rich, civilization-weary, and overly refined young man in a desperate search for his identity. With each chapter, he commits himself to a new lifestyle, pursues different ideas, and throws himself into the arms of new loves. He thus traverses the entire spectrum of life plans conceivable at the time, between Eros and Satanism, Romanticism, adventurism, debauchery, and asceticism. In doing so, he not only changes styles like clothes, but also immediately disenchants them as mere illusions. How deeply was Kafka influenced by this early Brod, with his ingenious experiments and all-encompassing ironization of the world? This becomes clear only when reading this critical edition, which is supplemented by contemporary reviews, an afterword, and commentaries.

it probably wouldn’t buy you much, even if you really were the one who possibly wrote the first english review of max brod’s debut novel »schloss nornepygge« on the net. it’s the very same novel that brod published when he wasn’t even twenty five years old. at the same time, »schloss nornepygge« is a novel hardly anyone gives a damn about these days. still, i can tell you: it doesn’t feel half bad to be the first one writing an english language review of a forgotten novel and to clock in as number one from time to time, even though it’s not as cool as one might think, especially when writing in sloppy english. what i won’t be able to answer in the course of this review: why »schloss nornepygge« has not been reissued and could only be purchased as a relatively expensive reproduction or facsimile since it was included in the collected works of max brod, published by kurt wolff around 1918.

speaking of brod … did you know that some whizz-kid made up the term »brodernism« in an article featured in »the los angeles review of books« just days ago? although he didn’t explicitly refer to brod, he does seem to have literature like »schloss nornepygge« in mind, therefore making max brod something like the »godfather of brodernism«.

back to nornepygge: in this very castle, or more precisely in one of its lodges, walder, a noble descendant of the nornepygge line, socializes with the four club members johanna lock (a german poet and thinker), jean d’ormi (a police inspector/police spy), john rocketby (who in bourgeois life plies the trade of an assassin) and guachen (a hunchbacked dwarf and also a theater director who runs a »satanic varieté«). together they make up the »Differenzentierten-Loge«, the club of the differentiated. they are people of refined style, not necessarily in regard to fashion: what is taken for granted should not be done or said amongst them. therein, however, as guachen acknowledges, lies an ideal that they all strive for without ever achieving it. for walder, nonetheless, who has been writing a philosophical treatise on »freedom« for many years, differentiating himself from the ordinary is the only way to be free, as he let’s us know. below nornepygge castle with its parks and below the same hilltop on which schloss nornepygge and a handful of castles stand, lies the »city«, which, like kafka’s village in »the castle«, remains nameless and which walder nornepygge only knows from his elevated vantage point, as there is little reason for him, the nobleman, to enter the sphere of mortals. up to this point, it is almost an inverted version of kafka’s text, in that we experience a story from the perspective of the castle’s owner, who looks down on the village/city and holds rural or ordinary life in low regard. in brod’s as well as in kafka’s text, the city or village are nameless. but these are not the only similarities between the two novels, which were written roughly 15 years apart. guachen, with his dark driving forces, who in walder’s view embodies the completely distinct and ideal person, attracts walder nornepygge’s fascination, which at the same time leaves him in a clinch with his high father, who recognizes in guachen nothing less than a very bad influence. nevertheless, to say that the conflict between father and son is a specifically kafkaesque problem would be a misconception, as it is closer to a generational problem that was vividly reflected in literature at this particular time or epoch.

in the course of the first chapters, walder seems to succumb to the fascination of the hunchback dwarf (who also has to stand trial for an ominous death), while simultaneously expressing a certain contempt for women, at least right before his relatives from stettin appear: uncle alex and his two daughters, one of them the enchanting and gentle natured charlotte. it is only then that the novel quite unexpectedly and abruptly steers in new directions, as it will do over and over again within its 500 pages. walder leaves the club of the differentiated, undergoing his first of at least three transformations. for as the novel makes clear, walder nornepygge struggles with being a differentiated aristocrat and being a differentiated aristocrat only, as he would like to be everything and everyone at the same time, but seldomly a differentiated aristocrat only. at times it almost feels as if a close relative or ancestor of musil’s ulrich, the man without qualities himself, was to emerge right in front of you: walder, despairing on numerous occassions, offers us a glimpse into his fragile soul by telling us that he, in truth, is completely indifferent to everything in life, that everything is therefore of absolutely equal importance to him and that he would like to be everything and everyone at the same time.

it is precisely this arrangement that enables brod to (over the course of 500 pages) lead us through a broad panopticon of early 20th century society, including bon vivants such as polledi, or lovers of the orgiastic, as well as numerous other aristocrats, revolutionaries (such as oironet) or the ascetic friend from walder’s youth, lodolf. or reckleiner, who is presented as a commercial genius in exile. or counts, who gladly leave their wives to walder. in places, the novel can be said to bear resemblance to many nineteenth century novels and their realist or naturalist aesthetics. and indeed: compared to kafka’s novels, which almost completely refuse to be categorized or to be put into context in a literary-historical sense (due to their subject matter or language) and therefore seem to be quite timeless, »schloss nornepygge« shows a strong signature of its time — at least telling from its language. even compared to kafka’s first novel, »der verschollene« / »amerika«, the language at times seems loaded with pathos or interspersed with long monologues and observations that hint at a neurotic protagonist — quite symptomatic of modernist literature around 1900, also called »the literature of fin de siecle« or »decadence«. and yet »schloss nornepygge« is everything but a typical novel of its time, and despite similarity on the surface level is hardly comparable to mann’s »buddenbrooks« or schnitzler’s »der weg ins freie«. it’s due to its many satirical elements that the novel draws more parallels to flaubert’s »bouvard and pecuchet« than to mann’s or schnitzler’s novel, as bouvard and pecuchet tend to reinvent themselves from chapter to chapter, just like walder nornepygge. and it is precisely the humor, the ridiculousness with which the protagonist is portrayed, that gives this novel its peculiarity and its distinctiveness, which in the end make it stand out. even if it doesn’t quite match kafka’s novel in regard of its comedic value, it still is a darkly humorous tale. brod seems to delight in torturing and tormenting his protagonist, throwing him into downright absurd roles and constellations, and it is easy to visualize the author sitting at its nightly table and suffer from one laughing fit after another — just like his close pal kafka.

the ironic and sarcastic references are countless: especially when walder seems to finally find a form of freedom by leaving society, leading an ascetic life in a hermitage by then, at least until his friends pay him a sudden visit and land on his doorstep. they have turned into a handful of revolutionists, promoting walder to the rank of their consul, leader of their revolutionary movement, all against his will.

or when walder has become so indifferent in terms of making decisions that he judges every potential reaction as equally appropriate and thus falls into a state of terrible inaction, a paralysis, even when he is hit in the face, making him nothing less than a sad clown. his path to freedom has led him into a cul de sac, and what he once thought of as self-transformation ends in an anti-metamorphosis.*

there are more examples for the novel’s cruel jokes; i’ll spare you the grotesquely humorous ending.

if you’re more in the mood for nonsensical jokes and mildly comic situations, the novel’s got you covered as well: for example, when vicious guachen keeps insulting his “piano virtuoso” for not playing fast enough. or when differentiated club members argue that they’d have to act in a certain way as they can’t be compared to fictional characters in a novel. or when an acquaintance turns out to be an almost immortal insurgent who claims to have been involved with every major uprising on the entire planet in the last three hundred years, from europe to africa to india to the usa.

by now it should be clear that »schloss nornepygge« by no means takes itself too seriously or important, even if its language shows quite some pathos every once in a while (fear not, it’s not getting anywhere close to goethe-territory; some passages could even be called stream-of-consciousness-ish). this makes for an interesting contrast between histoire and discours, between the things that are portrayed in the text and its linguistic modus operandi (to simplify genette’s narratological categories).

but of course it’s not all nonsense. even in his early twenties brod was simply too clever for that. in fact, he repeatedly tends to add to the philosophical discourse of his time and his predecessors — especially schopenhauer — when he deals with the concept of »freedom«. for brod in his somewhat pessimistic worldview, »indifferentism«, a terminus he made up himself, is the only appropriate way to deal with living in a period that best could be described as »decadence« — which is why being indifferent to all the people and events surrounding you could be considered a way to one’s personal freedom. but it’s not as easy as that. the existentialist category, »freedom«, which brod had explored for years, definitely culminated in an impressive way in »schloss nornepygge«: while some of the novel’s staff unscrupulously celebrate orgies or downright give away their wives and thus indulge in a form of freedom that climaxes in a violent and bloody revolution, walder is the one who is trapped in his idea of freedom, compulsively trying to be a myriad of different walders at once. is this what the majority of us dream about? to be able to do everything at the same time, to see no obstacles in our way, to have no financial restrictions? the novel clearly states its point of view that this does not necessarily lead to freedom, or to progress. because if you want to go everywhere at the same time, you’re not going anywhere. you will tear yourself apart in mid-air like a rumpelstiltskin.

but maybe i wrote forth the novel in my head and it’s only half as brilliant as it seems. after all, there are supposed to be as many interpretations of texts as there are readers, they say. and anyway, the smartest people, people who are way more clever than me, write articles for the »los angeles review of books«, and they claim that novels of the brodernist kind aren’t worth much of your time and are only good for bragging on goodreads and the like. i don’t think people that clever — whizz-kids, whizz-kids — can be all wrong. or can they? - Tom Ghostly

Schloss Nornepygge, der Roman des Indifferenten : Brod, Max, 1884- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive