A man can’t sleep. Over the course of a night, he thinks, obsessively, about whatever flits through his mind. His housekeeper, for instance, who “drinks a lot and prays a lot.” Also the books in his library and the contents of his night table. About this aspiring sleeper the reader knows next to nothing: not his name, age, occupation, or general whereabouts. This man, our narrator, is a longtime insomniac. He has grown accustomed to living this way. He has developed various coping mechanisms and strategies. Sometimes he reads the telephone book. For a period of time, he would make telephone calls to some of the names he found listed there. Lest this all sound too harmlessly whimsical, consider the following: “Do you feel guilty, Mr. Huncke?” he says during one sample call. “Mr. Huncke, please listen to me now: they know everything, everything. Do you understand? I would advise you to leave now, while you still have time!” Hildesheimer (Marbot, 1983, etc.), who served as an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials, published the book in the mid-1960s. Appearing now for the first time in English, the work alludes darkly, cryptically, almost never directly to the second world war. “I exist in a world of monstrosities,” he admits in a rare moment of clarity. For most of his “monologue” (which Hildesheimer famously insisted the book was, not a novel at all), he is almost maddeningly elliptical. This makes the moments of lucidity all the more momentous. Trying to sleep, he picks up and reads an old Norwegian railway timetable. There he comes across the name of a town, a name that appeals to him, and from which the book gets its title. What is it that appeals to him?—or, as he says, “What should I expect from Tynset?” In Tynset, “there have never been any battles. No Battle of Tynset….There is nothing to document or depict.” By following his thought process, we witness the memories he tries to avoid, to repress. Whether he’s successful is no simple matter.
An opaquely powerful work about obsession, delusion, repression, and guilt. - Kirkus Reviews
Though a member of the outlined category on the basis of the representational strategies employed in his works, especially in Tynset and Masante, he approaches the Holocaust from a position of greater remove. In consequence of his having been exposed to its atrocities in a less immediate way, and having embarked on his writing career at a later stage, his work marks the point where individual and personal trauma crosses over into collectively transmittable (non-)‘memory’. It bridges the divide between the survivor generation and the age of ‘postmemory’. Hildesheimer’s texts no longer depict a traumatic aftermath specific to the Holocaust but present imaginatively recreated ‘generic’ placeholder effects. As such, Tynset and Masante are reflections not of and on the past but on the narrative processes involved where the impossibility of telling a story meets the necessity of transmitting it anyway. - Kirstin Gwyer http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198709930.001.0001/acprof-9780198709930-chapter-6
Hildesheimer's "Tynset" records a man's nocturnal ramblings, both in his mind and around his house, during one sleepless night. It has absurdist or surrealist moments -- a man frozen in his car, a narrator who used to dial people at random and tell them they should be afraid, a harmonium playing out of tune in a cavernous space, a Renaissance bed that slept seven people -- but those moments are rendered ineffective by the novel's framing: after all, a sleepless night, filled with miscellaneous memories, is going to be full of leaps and incongruities. If such a novel is going to work, then, it needs something other than playful absurdity or surprise to hold it together (or to demonstrate that it is fragmented, like its narrator's mind).
The title is the name of an actual town in Norway, a few hours south of Trondheim. The narrator has picked it a random from a train schedule, which he reads, along with phone books, as an engine for his imagination. It's a thin conceit by definition, and it never becomes poignant. The book has two or three long set pieces: a party, during which hymns are sung; an extended Boccaccian fantasy about seven people who one slept on the narrator's antique bed; and an inventory of the house.
The problem here is that set-pieces, especially in a narrative structure that will by its own definition be looking for coherence and thematic continuity, need to be magnetic: they need to work to pull the novel together (or to provide proof it is fragmented). These do neither.
"Tynset" is undecided between two promising poles: a purposeless, desperately lonely night spent with an anti-social insomniac; and an entertaining, stream-of-consciousness showpiece of the novelist's (and the insomniac's) thronged and bursting imagination. Or, to add a third: the novel could also have drawn us, hopelessly, toward the chimera of Tynset, the place that the narrator had never visited, which he continuously planned to visit, but would in fact never visit. It's too bad "Tynset" wasn't reworked in one of those directions, or in some other, because as it stands it's an indecisive mixture, afraid of deep despair, infatuated with colorful stories, inconstant in its allegiance to its narrator's empty life. - James Elkins https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2210336336
The Structure of Wolfgang Hildesheimer's "Tynset"
Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Marbot: A Biography, Trans. by Patricia Crampton, G. Braziller, 1983.
This book gives a very sensitive picture of the feelings and thoughts of an extraordinary english nobelman living in the early 1800s with a special place in history of art. Hildesheimer doesn't pretend to know more of Marbot than what's known out of his letters and comments of third persons (letters, diaries etc.) He always makes explicite when he changes to his (the authors) comments. Reading this book helps to understand the history of critic of art. One really wants to read the original book by Marbot, which is not available in the Amazon bookshop unfortunately. - Kurt Leodolter @amazon.com
WOLFGANG HILDESHEIMER'S ''Marbot: A Biography'' is a marvelous hoax; would that it were as marvelous a book. Mr. Hildesheimer, a German novelist, storyteller, playwright, biographer (''Mozart'') and painter, has made up Sir Andrew Marbot (1801-1830), an English art connoisseur, critic and minor man of letters, out of whole cloth. But it is quality cloth: fine batiste, sheer enough to let us see through it the spirit of the age and some of its prime embodiers, yet firm enough to take in an unwarned reader of considerable sophistication.
Andrew Marbot is the scion of Northumbrian Catholic gentry, educated by a worldly Jesuit chaplain in literature and languages, and by his maternal grandfather, Lord Claverton, a former ambassador to Italy and art collector, in the fine arts. He despises his unintellectual father, but is enthralled by Lady Catherine, his beautiful and refined mother. He is also enthralled by a Tintoretto painting of baby Hercules at Juno's breast and that, combined with his mother's response to his aroused 5-year- old's curiosity about her body - a passionate, though fully-clothed, hug - sets two mechanisms in motion: Andrew will grow up an inveterate lover of art and infatuate lover of his mother. Oddly enough, it is the latter passion that, upon his father's death, is consummated; but though he would give up everything (he does give up God) for it, his mother, equally impassioned, renounces it after two years for the sake of her religion and her younger children; to one of them Andrew cedes his estates as he goes off into permanent exile on the Continent. Lady Catherine, with whom he ardently corresponds, slowly, self-rendingly wastes away.
The love for art, though seemingly more rewarding, proves ultimately even less requited. For although Marbot gets to know many famous artists, gains access to numerous private and public collections and is further gifted with total recall (''stocks of whole museums were stored in him''), he feels devastated by not being an artist himself. He is deprived, he believes, of both the solace and the full understanding of creation. Dimly perceiving the connection between his incest and his passion for art, he becomes a Freudian avant la lettre, and the ''first to show a way toward psychoanalytically oriented aesthetics.''
Having already as a boy encountered Turner, De John Simon's latest book is ''Something To Declare: Twelve Years Of Films From Abroad.'' Quincey and probably Wordsworth and Coleridge, as a young man he meets Blake (whose art he deplores), Henry Crabb Robinson and others of note. Later, on the Continent, he amazes and irritates Goethe, is charmed by the art historian Baron von Rumohr (as much by his cuisine as by his connoisseurship), spends a rather disgruntled month in Pisa with the Byron- Shelley menage or menagerie, is impressed by the personality and then by the writings of Schopenhauer, delights in Corot the man and artist, likes Delacroix but is ambivalent about his work and is amusedly fascinated by his friend Berlioz.
All along Marbot keeps discovering more and more old masters and makes pert and pertinent comments about them, in letters to his tutor, mother and friends or in notebooks he keeps for possible publication. His special heroes are Rembrandt and Shakespeare, cer tain Flemish masters, Tiepolo and Watteau, and, farsightedly, Turner, in defense of whom he writes the only article printed in his lifetime. His art criticism is first published posthumously, along with personal memoirs, by his tutor; Mr. Hildesheimer, who promises to bring out a complete, unexpurgated version, quotes copiously from it.
There are lapidary observations: ''To breathe the spirit of greatness into a figure painted from behind calls for a greater artist than Tintoretto was.'' In ''The Death of Sardanapalus,'' Delacroix ''has created a petrified chaos.'' The dazzling mini-essays we also get are, alas, too long to quote. Continually, Marbot searches for ''the relationship between the artist's creativity and his command over his own life,'' not for ''the event depicted but the painter who made it happen.'' At the same time, however, he champions painting of ''such truth and dignity'' that we can ignore ''the abstract concepts from which the idea sprang.'' ''Nature,'' he recognizes, ''is the subject of beauty, but not its embodiment,'' and, in a passage that mysteriously occurs only in the American edition (the passage beginning at the bottom of page 102 and continuing through page 104 is not in the published German text), we find him even presaging abstract art. As Marbot grapples with his understanding of painting, he also strives to allay his love for Lady Catherine. He has brief, unfulfilling affairs with Goethe's daughter- in-law, the charming Ottilie, and with Byron's ex-inamorata, the vivacious Countess Guiccioli. He then settles down to live out his last few years in Urbino, where his landlady becomes his steady, caring mistress, yet is quite unable to displace his mother's image. He turns more and more to the great pessimists: He seeks out the poet Leopardi and cannot fathom why this unhappy man does not end his misery; he is visited by the German homosexual poet, August von Platen, and again fails to understand what keeps such unhappiness alive; he reads admiringly ''The World as Will and Idea,'' but cannot grasp Schopenhauer's rejection of suicide. One day, at age 29, he takes a gun and rides out into the woods. The horse eventually returns; the rider is never found.
The literary-biographical-historical sleight-of-mind is carried out magisterially. Mr. Hildesheimer, who has lived in England and various other countries, is at home in the world of all the arts as well as in the art of worldliness. (Marbot, however, as a contemporary salonni ere puts it, ''has two things to learn: how to show interest and how to conceal the lack of it,'' neither of which he cares to master.) In the German edition the author interlards his text with parenthesized passages in English, supposedly as Marbot wrote them and not susceptible of perfect German rendering . There is a recurrent dialogue in the book between Mr. Hildesheimer and an American, Frederic Hadley-Chase - the name is borrowed from the British author of ''No Orchids for Miss Blandish'' - Marbot's only previous biographer (1888), whose mistakes the present chronicler corrects, or whose hypotheses he sometimes confirms on the strength of newly revealed documents. Marbot, whose Dutch tutor taught him excellent German, nevertheless commits some spelling errors. And Mr. Hildesheimer ''cannot help regretting that (Andrew) did not know Caspar David Friedrich.'' The book is illustrated with paintings of its main characters and photographs of their abodes, which, though phony, are powerfully persuasive. Redmond Manor, the Claverton residence, is now, we are told, ''privately owned by an Arab.'' These and similar devices are always ingenious and sometimes amusing. The disquisitions on incest and other Freudianly tinged observations are sober and delicate enough to be inoffensive even if not particularly enlightening. The pronouncements on art, whether Marbot's or the author's comments on them, are often criticism of true distinction. There are vivid opinions on sundry subjects, from cookery through poetry (''A poet is great when . . . he is able to make his unhappiness so exemplary that the happy no longer understand him'') to promiscuity (''a substitute for the unforgettable beloved, whom one hopes to find in every fresh partner and yet never finds, since memory increasingly transfigures him'').
PERHAPS the best things are the dizzyingly deft sketches of renowned figures, such as this one of De Quincey: ''The life of a journalist imposed on him by material poverty had compelled him into a number of indiscretions and made him guilty of some striking demonstrations of disloyalty. This had meant the loss of his friends, at least those who were not dead already. Yet he seems to have got over this too.'' Unfortunately, such pungency and penetration are seldom extended to the main fictional characters, and the reader often feels that he is being led through the story blindly, by a remarkably intelligent seeing-eye dog miraculously gifted with speech. Since Marbot is forever worrying the mystery of creation - the cause and quiddity of the artistic impulse - it may be licit to wonder what made Mr. Hildesheimer, who began as an engaging fabulist and fantasist (in a typical story, a young man adept at magic tricks but uneasy with people turns himself into a nightingale), discard fiction as fiction for fiction costumed as biography - or, in the case of his ''Mozart,'' naked biography? As he said elsewhere, he considers the possibilities of fiction exhausted. He seems, consequently, to have transferred his concern to what caused it, or any form of art, to be created and how this was done, when it still could be done. But on this he does not shed conspicuous light; indeed, the book ends with Marbot's last diary entry: ''The artist plays on our soul, but who plays on the soul of the artist?'' It is a question, Mr. Hildesheimer tells us, that Marbot ''was the first to ask. . . . We are still waiting for the answer.''
Regrettably that last sentence is a mistranslation. It is faintly hopeful. The German says, ''The answer is still outstanding,'' which sounds much more discouraged. Patricia Crampton, despite general competence, is guilty of other misrenderings. Thus Marbot is made to say that the work of art ''is not a copy of nature, nor anything resembling it, but its likeness.'' That's nonsense: Gleichnis , her ''likeness,'' means simile, parable, or allegory. And the American edition adds a few smudges of its own, as when, say, ''communicate with them'' is misprinted into ''communicate them'' and loses all meaning.
AS a whole, ''Marbot'' is smaller than the sum of its parts, but collectors of incidental felicities will not emerge from it empty-handed. Some may even glean from it a secret significance, which one of its characters, Count von Platen, expressed in two famous verses that are not quoted in this book: ''Who with his own eyes has gazed on Beauty, / Is already forfeit unto Death.'' It matters little whether that beauty is the forbidden one of the mother's body or the elusive one of artistic perfection. - John Simon
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/10/09/books/a-passion-for-art-and-mother.html
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