Anna-Croissant Rust, Death, Trans. by James J. Conway, Rixdorf Editions, 2018. [1914.]
excerpt
To the fretful mother of a sick child it comes in the form of the long-awaited doctor. To a feeble old man it arrives as an obliging stranger who helps him to his feet and out through the garden gate. To the hapless workers of an overtaxed factory it is an industrial disaster with a paranormal dimension. Death comes to them all, yet the stories in Anna Croissant-Rust's cycle are charged with life. The ever-changing personification of mortality appears amid scenes of unexpected enchantment, full of light and wonder, of reverence for the mercurial passions of nature. An inventive revival of the medieval danse macabre, DEATH was issued in Germany on the eve of World War One. It is paired here with the author's earlier collection Prose Poems, which fused free verse and fragmentary narrative to create something sublime and entirely original. The intense emotional register and singular style confounded critics when it was first published in 1893, and by the time other writers were producing comparable work in the early 20th century it had been forgotten. This major English-language debut confirms Anna Croissant-Rust as a hugely powerful writer well overdue for recognition.
The Weimar era may be more renowned for German artistic production, but the Wilhelmine era—1890 to 1918—was perhaps a time of even more wildly prolific, path-breaking artistic creation. The Berlin-based publishing house Rixdorf Editions publishes translations only from that era, and its most recent release is Death, a bold work of prose by Anna-Croissant Rust, translated with skill and sensitivity by James Conway.
Widely respected and published in her day, Croissant-Rust is now largely forgotten, even in Germany. Her output varied as much in its style as in its quality, but she is worth remembering as a gifted formal innovator who paired lyricism with a keen sense of structure. She spent her youth and much of her adulthood in Munich, and was an important figure in the Münchner Moderne (a late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century artistic movement best known in English for the Blaue Reiter group), and a founding member (the only female member) of the Gesellschaft für modernes Leben (Society for Modern Life), an important literary club that promoted naturalism.
Death is a series of brief vignettes published in 1913 whose main characters all (you guessed it) die. In this volume, Rixdorf has also appended a collection titled Prose Poems, which was published two decades before Death, in 1893. These prose poems are fragmentary and highly emotional pieces that capture the tumult and sublimity of nature. Scenes coalesce in moments of pure lucidity:
Grey is the sky.
The little pond looks up at it like an eye glazing over, lacklustre, dull.
(“Autum Days on the Rhine”)
or
A few snowflakes tumble past the window, forlorn, lost. The white tower of Egern casts a sunlit glance over the lake, its bells begin their shy peal – winter Sunday morning.
(“Winter”)
These scenes are often driven along by fragmentary exclamations by the narrator, sometimes identifiably female, Croissant-Rust or a doppelgänger, expressing longing or joy or terror. Exclamation points abound:
No more!
Give him back to me!
Do you remember?
No more!
Never? … !
(“Nevermore”)
Their effect is meant to be rousing and occasionally it is. Some of the prose poems feature a tragic or supernatural storyline—in “Dream,” she even meets what today we would call zombies (“They had little shrunken hearts in their hands, and held them out to me”). Some aspects of Prose Poems have aged better than others—apostrophes to the seasons and personifications of forces of nature (e.g., a male storm that literally ravages the countryside) require more effort for today’s reader to appreciate. These anthropomorphic elements are used to inject drama into scenes that would otherwise seem impersonal, of too large a scale for human emotion. The most mature prose poem, “Wasteland,” is a carefully balanced tour-de-force of nostalgia, of the attentively observed life of a particular place and people’s relationship to it.
Croissant-Rust’s style is often praised for being unvarnished and forthright, but minimalism it is not. By merely bucking the expectation of female floweriness (sometimes in exchange for melodrama), she seems to have been ascribed an austerity that does not quite fit the reality of her works. Both Death and Prose Poems include many lush descriptions of nature, vertiginous emotional episodes, richly textured depictions of human life, and rapturous praise for the great forces of the universe, be they life and death or the seasons.
Early in her career, Croissant-Rust wrote in the naturalist style, a movement that arose around 1880 and persisted into the twentieth century. Naturalism stood for the precise depiction of human life and the world, often focusing on the grim details of poverty and human suffering. Writing about Croissant-Rust’s naturalism in the context of drama (she was also a playwright), Sarah Colvin notes in Women and German Drama: Playwrights and Their Texts 1860–1945 that the types of themes that were the focus of naturalism were often congruent with women’s domestic lives, elevating female care-taking experiences that once would have been thought unsuitable for literature. Croissant-Rust’s early works followed this mold, and she was sometimes criticized for being excessively negative—here naturalism was a double-edged sword because such negativity was seen as particularly unbecoming for a woman.
One of the more irritating features of criticism about Croissant-Rust—as pervasive in German as it is in English, in her time as today—is that it often affirms her talent by proclaiming how unlike other women writers she was. Colvin says: “In all cases the woman playwright is seen as the exception to a rule, and specifically as a phenomenon that crosses the bounds of gender. She is therefore in need of explanation or rationalization by critics. The quickest and easiest way to explain away dramatic creativity in women is to cross-assign the writer to the proper, male, gender category: to redefine her as a ‘masculine’ woman.” (Mea culpa: At an event at which I discussed Croissant-Rust with Conway, I heard myself affirm she was “one of the boys.” She was, of course, not; we never are.) In fact, we might easily read the “intensity” or “passion” of Croissant-Rust’s writings as a particularly female access to or mastery of emotion; and as noted above, naturalism opened up high-brow literature to particularly feminine themes, which Croissant-Rust addressed. In other words, her development and output were categorically female; they were also categorically the work of a gifted artist, and in this sense their bare, irreducible achievement is as distant from the sentimentality of “women’s literature” as it is from the chattering hordes of male poseurs whom she outshone. Such work always stands in its own light.
Croissant-Rust later distanced herself from her early naturalistic works, blaming their harshness on the “aura that enveloped all of us at the end of the eighties and beginning of the nineties,” which she (paraphrased by Bernhard Setzwein) attributed to the “naturalistic dictates of the time.” As her career progressed toward Expressionism, Croissant-Rust did not exactly abandon naturalistic approaches, but rather blended them with elements that are mythical or romantic. Though the two approaches may seem contradictory, in fact they work hand-in-hand to heighten the emotional effect of Croissant-Rust’s work—the sketches in Death being a perfect example.
Termed “an expressionistic gem,” Death’s hushed tone makes each story a tiny temple dedicated to the inevitable drama at life’s end. Often comprising only the last moments of each figure’s life, these stories are intense and unflinching spiritual investigations of dying as an experience that unfolds in life. Death is also a portrait of a society—like a medieval dance of death mural, it depicts people of all stations, urban and rural, old and young, male and female. In “Industria,” Croissant-Rust sketches the oppression of the factory floor before an accident:
The workers in the low, hall-like rooms are bathed in sweat. All day the sun has been beating down on the roof and making them limp, now in the muggy night they drearily drag themselves through the smothering air beneath the weight of sleepless hours. Row upon row of machines. All around there is a dull stomping, a quick thrusting and wheezing, a perpetual up and down of the heavy pistons; the wheels turn with a light whistle, and little lights skip and sparkle from the blinking metal cylinders and rods in the glare of the electric lights.
The atmosphere is as taut as the belt of a whirring machine, and like a machine, it is purposeful. As Bernhard Setzwein notes of her late work, “The stories are no longer bleak depictions from their first line, black on black; instead they slowly build their sense of menace, seducing the reader with an apparently cozy, droll narrative style, which then unavoidably veers toward catastrophe.” Careful, observant depictions of domesticity, poverty, the inner lives of characters, and natural landscapes create a kind of springboard from which the introduction of mythical-spiritual Death (as a beautiful woman or grim reaper, for example) can work its greatest effect; her naturalistic description is like crystal clear water before a gust of otherworldliness sends ripples across the pool. In “The Corn Mother,” a feverish child living on a farm sees death making its way toward her through her everyday surroundings:
Oh, she well knows who is coming wandering through the grain now. The corn mother! Her robe is purest gold and full of glitter and swathed in veils, she looks like a grey and white glittery shadow, says the old nanny, but only Sunday’s child, born with an invisible coronet can see her…She is already quite close. So large and so splendid, her golden hair like a gleaming glow about her head. She bends down toward the sick child who slowly sinks to her knees, bends forward, shivering with fever, but still she tries to look up into the glaring, sharp brightness until her eyes grow tired, so tired, and the little white body sinks into the grain.
In this case, death not only appears in an everyday context; it is of that context, made of the grain that is the family’s livelihood and environment. It is, in effect, the uncanny, in which the familiar is made strange. One of Croissant-Rust’s strengths is how quickly and deftly she builds up this familiar vision of life in each of the vignettes before unsettling it with the strangeness of death.
Conway’s afterword provides much excellent background information on this now-forgotten writer, but unfortunately tends toward the hagiographic. (This is the danger of being publisher and critic at once.) This is regrettable, because his afterword is probably the best overview of Croissant-Rust’s work available in English. Most problematically, Conway makes strong claims about Croissant-Rust’s formal innovations that obscure the genealogy of her writing. On Death: “Anyone unfamiliar with the earlier work might have assumed that Croissant-Rust had taken inspiration from the Expressionists who had arisen in recent years, rather than from herself”—as if, like a cartoon rabbit pulling itself by the ears out of a magician’s hat, she had invented Expressionism avant la lettre, then later inspired herself to take up the style again when it happened to be fashionable. And: “The style to which Prose Poems might have been assigned had not yet been invented”—in fact, prose poetry was a well-mined style being explored by many in her immediate vicinity and their predecessors—Detlev von Liliencron and Otto Julius Bierbaum being two examples.[1]
We can say with fairness that her tremendous technical skill and bold but judicious instincts enriched and matured the genre. Wolfgang Bunzel, whose monograph on the history of the German prose poem dedicates a sub-chapter to Croissant-Rust, identifies her contribution: “Gedichte in Prosa aims entirely at the utmost compression of literary expression, which up to that point had been reserved for poetry. The author carries out a targeted exploration of the terra incognita between verse and short narrative prose.” The adjectives “utmost” and “targeted” are significant here; their restriction is what makes the praise substantive. Innovation is not creation ex nihilo, as much as we love to tell ourselves fairy tales of complete originality; the people we remember as innovators tend to be people who were listening to the discourse of their time and trying to do what all their peers were trying to do—the difference being that innovators make innovation work where others fail. This is why we remember Croissant-Rust as a great writer; she had a raw, unalloyed talent that cannot be entirely correlated to particular achievements or innovations.
[1] See Wolfgang Bunzel, Das deutschsprachige Prosagedicht: Theorie und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung der Moderne (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2005); specifically on Croissant-Rust, see 177–188. Bunzel points to the larger historical factors that drove toward a widespread interest in prose poetry at the time: “The fact that naturalism first took note of this area as an untapped borderland owes to the dominance of epigonic Gründerzeitpoetry, which had completely automatized the formal signals of poeticism, particularly devaluing the visual markers that once functioned as the unmistakeable criteria for differentiation between ‘poetry’ and ‘prose.’ This is ultimately why Max Halbe could postulate the existence of a ‘prose poetry’: if it were possible to represent ‘prosaic’ contents in verse form, then there must logically also exist poetry in ‘prose form’” (180). - Amanda DeMarco
http://www.musicandliterature.org/reviews/2018/9/16/anna-croissant-rusts-ideathi
I’m accompanying my wife on a work trip to Salt Lake City, and the owner of our AirBNB (charmingly) waited until after we had checked in to notify us by text that the apartment is currently enduring a minor infestation of boxelder bugs. They are slow, ambling things around the size of a lentil; they clump around the outside edges of windows, trying desperately to find a navigable crack in the weatherstripping to escape the three-digit heat of July.
I’ve brought Anna Croissant-Rust’s Death with me, but have instead found myself engrossed in a book from the apartment’s shelf: Massacre at Mountain Meadows by Walker, Turley Jr., and Leonard. Taking cues from the 1950 Juana Brooks study, this 2008 work strives for a definitive, unbiased account of an extremely dark moment in Mormon history; truth-telling as a step toward reparations. Its authors enjoyed the uncommon combination of both unfettered access to the LDS archives and complete editorial independence; they exhibit a care for detail which extends into the realm of engaging a “a rare specialist in transcribing nineteenth-century shorthand” to examine court documents which they suspected were quoted inaccurately in John D. Lee’s 1877 autobiography (written in prison while awaiting his execution).
In the late 1850s, adjacent to the ominous churn of “states’ rights” in the South, a series of escalating conflicts between the theocratic leadership of the Mormon settlement in the Salt Lake Basin and Utah Territory’s federally-appointed administrators had strained tensions to a breaking point. The federal government cut lines of communication to the territory and sent an army westward, the beginnings of what would later be called The Utah War.
Seized by paranoia over the impending conflict and fueled by apocalyptic sermons from Brigham Young and other church leaders, the Mormon settlers in Cedar City were on edge when a California-bound wagon train passed through. The emigrants from Arkansas and Missouri brought bad blood and loose talk; rumors of cattle poisoning carried the situation to a head. Local militias began to discuss extreme measures, unwilling to wait for a dispatched postal rider to return from SLC with further instructions.
John D. Lee, a militia leader, enlisted the nearby Paiutes — thereby providing the needed cover of an “Indian attack” — to ambush the emigrant train outside of town at a grazing waypoint. The emigrants circled the wagons and dug in for a four-day siege, while militiamen from around the district mustered at the site. Finally, under a false promise of clemency, the 120 surrendering men, women, and children of the caravan emerged, unarmed. The Mormons waited until they were stretched into an indefensible line to start firing.
The book opens with an 1857 account by Brevet Major James Henry Carlton, later tasked with traveling from California, across the Mojave desert, to give the bodies a proper burial.
I’ve been thinking about death a lot. It’s hard not to when you’re carrying around a small, black volume wearing its name. Talismanic, handsome, compact — you can tuck Death snugly into your back pocket as you transfer from the bus to the underground rail. This book arrives courtesy of James J. Conway’s Rixdorf Editions, a young Berlin press dedicated to delivering inaugural English translations of material from the German Empire (1871-1918), showcasing the “unfairly neglected” works of progressive writers, “advocates for female emancipation, sexual minorities, lifestyle reform and utopian visions.”
Croissant-Rust’s writing career began around 1883, when her family relocated to the Shwabing district of Munich. After becoming acquainted with Michael Georg Conrad, in the late 1890s, she became a founding member — and the only female member — of the Gesellschaft für modernes Leben (Society for Modern Living). Together with this group, she worked primarily in the style of Naturalism, which “coincided in time and sentiment with the Modernismo movement in Latin America and Spain, and overlapped with the first phase of Anglo-American Modernism.”
Her works pushed the group further into the avant-garde, freely merging, bending, and breaking traditional poetic and prose forms — into a territory only a few scattered authors in her influence had before. Along with this literary experimentalism, she used her work (plays in particular) to advance women’s causes. When marrying in 1888, she chose to elide her surname with her husband’s, rather than replace it entirely; he supported her writing career, reading drafts and helping to secure publishing.
This book includes not just the titular collection of short stories, but also an earlier volume, Prose Poems, written between 1891 and 1893. Of the two, Prose Poems is the more radical and uneven: both within and between pieces, the style shifts chaotically from lucid paragraphs to unpunctuated abstraction. This earlier work explores the broad splashes of interest which would eventually distill in Death; many include a fascination with states of decay, both in nature and psychology. But we also receive uninhibited forays into female lust, psychedelic wanderings where the natural world melts into the personal interior, and a depiction of a storm overtaking the landscape explicitly rendered as masculine sexual violence — the text splinters into ragged edges which would eventually be sanded down with age into more subtle expressions.
Where Prose Poems succeeds — in haphazard, abbreviated ideas; words tumbling quick like drunk texts — it feels a good half-century ahead of its time. And its occasional contrasting stumbles — in overlong, samey passages once again lusciously painting meadows and streams in thick gouache — serve to highlight the interesting mix of ideas fueling its creation. That it was met with critical befuddlement seems almost a given.
Death was published two decades later, in 1914, as Croissant-Rust was into her 50s, and the Empire was holding its breath before the plunge into The Great War. It is a collection of 17 short stories, circled and jigging in the Danse Macabre. Death might arrive in his spoopy formalwear, a skeletal grin wreathed in black; or as a laughing wave of fire sweeping along the walls of a packed, panicked theater; or silently, invisibly, in terrifying realism, as the body simply ceasing to breathe — but death will always arrive.
With time, Croissant-Rust has folded her experimentalism into a more fluid syntax; though many of her passages still carry the wandering, unexpected flavor and satisfying waviness of poetry. The natural world remains ever-present; even in cities, it saturates the language, twisting up like vines between cobbles, sprouting like lichen on the brickwork; the page swirls alive with the acid nightmares of DeepDream.
Other stories veer into the morbid theatrics of black metal filtered through an early feminist lens. “The Ball” begins with “An elation of violins rid[ing] high on the drunken, giddy pleasure,” as a young belle is carried, in the vortex twirl of the waltz, inverted, to the ceiling. The lights “become suns… sizzle up like snakes, turn cartwheels like peacocks, rush up to the ceiling and tumble back down, red and hissing.” As the dance whirls inevitably into darkness, Death, tonight a gentlemen, thanks the belle “with a little swivel of his chapeau claque.”
“Shadows” is even more explicitly, cruelly allegorical. Returning from an evening out, a young woman becomes entranced by the hypnotic beauty of her own reflection; enveloped in a lust which morphs into self-worship. From the mirror, a pair of glowing eyes breaks the spell with sharp terror. Finally, “small, cowering, pleading, she lies on the floor and struggles with the shadow that casts its great cape around her, burying light, burying youth, burying beauty.”
But death meets others kindly, sweetly; in the overgrown gardens of fading estates; in an unending stream of messages encoded in the language of flowers (which, being unfamiliar with the German manuals of the day, remain, to me, opaque). Here, in “Midday,” the fading mind of a town’s last anachronistic noble flutters backwards to his golden prime, materializing ghosts of his passionate affairs in clouds of fragrant lilac.
Toward the end, a strange turn brings the book’s form into question. An ill wind, the Föhn, blows through three sequential chapters, the only such connection in the book. And as the Föhn’s twisting weirdness circles its unfortunate chosen, it also reaches into the text itself, bending the last two stories unexpectedly into first-person narration. A mother cradles her child in the last moments; tracing scenes from an unlived life in a downpour of impassioned, hallucinatory pleas; And an individual looks back on a night long past, where, in this very room, six children were taken by sickness — the adults who survive them remain broken, racked with guilt and bitter secrecy.
Death is a wild book. It’s wild — structurally, linguistically, sure; in particular, its mix of romantic 19th c. diction (torpor, imperious, etc) twisting into anarchic 20th c. syntax — but what I mean specifically is this: It reminds me of those rare encounters when you’re out for a run in the park, in the morning, and you turn down a path through the trees, and then, suddenly, there’s a coyote right there — You stop, the coyote stops, and you both just freeze, eyes locked, waiting for the moment to break, or something to break the moment, wrapped in a weird communication through mutual silence.
I carried this book around, ignoring it as it tailed behind me; now that I’m finished, it lingers, refusing to settle into finality. Refusing to turn back into the tangle of ferns below the slanting treeline. Instead we stay motionless, each waiting for the other to blink. I keep slipping it into my pocket when I’m heading downtown. - Devin Smith
http://www.full-stop.net/2018/09/20/reviews/devin-smith/death-anna-croissant-rust/
I’m accompanying my wife on a work trip to Salt Lake City, and the owner of our AirBNB (charmingly) waited until after we had checked in to notify us by text that the apartment is currently enduring a minor infestation of boxelder bugs. They are slow, ambling things around the size of a lentil; they clump around the outside edges of windows, trying desperately to find a navigable crack in the weatherstripping to escape the three-digit heat of July.
I’ve brought Anna Croissant-Rust’s Death with me, but have instead found myself engrossed in a book from the apartment’s shelf: Massacre at Mountain Meadows by Walker, Turley Jr., and Leonard. Taking cues from the 1950 Juana Brooks study, this 2008 work strives for a definitive, unbiased account of an extremely dark moment in Mormon history; truth-telling as a step toward reparations. Its authors enjoyed the uncommon combination of both unfettered access to the LDS archives and complete editorial independence; they exhibit a care for detail which extends into the realm of engaging a “a rare specialist in transcribing nineteenth-century shorthand” to examine court documents which they suspected were quoted inaccurately in John D. Lee’s 1877 autobiography (written in prison while awaiting his execution).
In the late 1850s, adjacent to the ominous churn of “states’ rights” in the South, a series of escalating conflicts between the theocratic leadership of the Mormon settlement in the Salt Lake Basin and Utah Territory’s federally-appointed administrators had strained tensions to a breaking point. The federal government cut lines of communication to the territory and sent an army westward, the beginnings of what would later be called The Utah War.
Seized by paranoia over the impending conflict and fueled by apocalyptic sermons from Brigham Young and other church leaders, the Mormon settlers in Cedar City were on edge when a California-bound wagon train passed through. The emigrants from Arkansas and Missouri brought bad blood and loose talk; rumors of cattle poisoning carried the situation to a head. Local militias began to discuss extreme measures, unwilling to wait for a dispatched postal rider to return from SLC with further instructions.
John D. Lee, a militia leader, enlisted the nearby Paiutes — thereby providing the needed cover of an “Indian attack” — to ambush the emigrant train outside of town at a grazing waypoint. The emigrants circled the wagons and dug in for a four-day siege, while militiamen from around the district mustered at the site. Finally, under a false promise of clemency, the 120 surrendering men, women, and children of the caravan emerged, unarmed. The Mormons waited until they were stretched into an indefensible line to start firing.
The book opens with an 1857 account by Brevet Major James Henry Carlton, later tasked with traveling from California, across the Mojave desert, to give the bodies a proper burial.
“The scene of the massacre, even at this late day,” he wrote, “was horrible to look upon. Women’s hair in detached locks, and in masses, hung to the sage brushes, and was strewn over the ground in many places. Parts of little children’s dresses, and of female costume, dangled from the shrubbery, or lay scattered about. And among these, here and there, on every hand… there gleamed, bleached white by the weather, the skulls and other bones of those who had suffered.”I think about this as I accidentally jostle a window frame, and a dozen stupid bugs tumble out into the sill. I ball up a paper towel, and slide it along the track, crushing their frail bodies into one another, before tossing it in the garbage. They don’t compost here.
I’ve been thinking about death a lot. It’s hard not to when you’re carrying around a small, black volume wearing its name. Talismanic, handsome, compact — you can tuck Death snugly into your back pocket as you transfer from the bus to the underground rail. This book arrives courtesy of James J. Conway’s Rixdorf Editions, a young Berlin press dedicated to delivering inaugural English translations of material from the German Empire (1871-1918), showcasing the “unfairly neglected” works of progressive writers, “advocates for female emancipation, sexual minorities, lifestyle reform and utopian visions.”
Croissant-Rust’s writing career began around 1883, when her family relocated to the Shwabing district of Munich. After becoming acquainted with Michael Georg Conrad, in the late 1890s, she became a founding member — and the only female member — of the Gesellschaft für modernes Leben (Society for Modern Living). Together with this group, she worked primarily in the style of Naturalism, which “coincided in time and sentiment with the Modernismo movement in Latin America and Spain, and overlapped with the first phase of Anglo-American Modernism.”
Her works pushed the group further into the avant-garde, freely merging, bending, and breaking traditional poetic and prose forms — into a territory only a few scattered authors in her influence had before. Along with this literary experimentalism, she used her work (plays in particular) to advance women’s causes. When marrying in 1888, she chose to elide her surname with her husband’s, rather than replace it entirely; he supported her writing career, reading drafts and helping to secure publishing.
This book includes not just the titular collection of short stories, but also an earlier volume, Prose Poems, written between 1891 and 1893. Of the two, Prose Poems is the more radical and uneven: both within and between pieces, the style shifts chaotically from lucid paragraphs to unpunctuated abstraction. This earlier work explores the broad splashes of interest which would eventually distill in Death; many include a fascination with states of decay, both in nature and psychology. But we also receive uninhibited forays into female lust, psychedelic wanderings where the natural world melts into the personal interior, and a depiction of a storm overtaking the landscape explicitly rendered as masculine sexual violence — the text splinters into ragged edges which would eventually be sanded down with age into more subtle expressions.
Where Prose Poems succeeds — in haphazard, abbreviated ideas; words tumbling quick like drunk texts — it feels a good half-century ahead of its time. And its occasional contrasting stumbles — in overlong, samey passages once again lusciously painting meadows and streams in thick gouache — serve to highlight the interesting mix of ideas fueling its creation. That it was met with critical befuddlement seems almost a given.
Death was published two decades later, in 1914, as Croissant-Rust was into her 50s, and the Empire was holding its breath before the plunge into The Great War. It is a collection of 17 short stories, circled and jigging in the Danse Macabre. Death might arrive in his spoopy formalwear, a skeletal grin wreathed in black; or as a laughing wave of fire sweeping along the walls of a packed, panicked theater; or silently, invisibly, in terrifying realism, as the body simply ceasing to breathe — but death will always arrive.
With time, Croissant-Rust has folded her experimentalism into a more fluid syntax; though many of her passages still carry the wandering, unexpected flavor and satisfying waviness of poetry. The natural world remains ever-present; even in cities, it saturates the language, twisting up like vines between cobbles, sprouting like lichen on the brickwork; the page swirls alive with the acid nightmares of DeepDream.
Cloud dogs race across the sky in a thick, grey-black pack; the hunt grows wilder, the pack grows larger and darker and thicker until it tumbles over itself in a confused bundle and collapses into black darkness.“Corn Mother” is the story I kept returning to. Racked with fever, a child watches the stalks wave and bow in the field beyond her window, as the rest of the world dozes silently in the white blaze of a heatwave’s afternoon. Here, Croissant-Rust freely intermingles the spinning flights of childhood with the reader’s growing anxiety at knowing how the story must end; the inescapable brightness of noon provides no cover for either of us, as the Corn Mother arrives haloed and fecund like the Waite-Smith Empress.
Other stories veer into the morbid theatrics of black metal filtered through an early feminist lens. “The Ball” begins with “An elation of violins rid[ing] high on the drunken, giddy pleasure,” as a young belle is carried, in the vortex twirl of the waltz, inverted, to the ceiling. The lights “become suns… sizzle up like snakes, turn cartwheels like peacocks, rush up to the ceiling and tumble back down, red and hissing.” As the dance whirls inevitably into darkness, Death, tonight a gentlemen, thanks the belle “with a little swivel of his chapeau claque.”
“Shadows” is even more explicitly, cruelly allegorical. Returning from an evening out, a young woman becomes entranced by the hypnotic beauty of her own reflection; enveloped in a lust which morphs into self-worship. From the mirror, a pair of glowing eyes breaks the spell with sharp terror. Finally, “small, cowering, pleading, she lies on the floor and struggles with the shadow that casts its great cape around her, burying light, burying youth, burying beauty.”
But death meets others kindly, sweetly; in the overgrown gardens of fading estates; in an unending stream of messages encoded in the language of flowers (which, being unfamiliar with the German manuals of the day, remain, to me, opaque). Here, in “Midday,” the fading mind of a town’s last anachronistic noble flutters backwards to his golden prime, materializing ghosts of his passionate affairs in clouds of fragrant lilac.
Toward the end, a strange turn brings the book’s form into question. An ill wind, the Föhn, blows through three sequential chapters, the only such connection in the book. And as the Föhn’s twisting weirdness circles its unfortunate chosen, it also reaches into the text itself, bending the last two stories unexpectedly into first-person narration. A mother cradles her child in the last moments; tracing scenes from an unlived life in a downpour of impassioned, hallucinatory pleas; And an individual looks back on a night long past, where, in this very room, six children were taken by sickness — the adults who survive them remain broken, racked with guilt and bitter secrecy.
Death is a wild book. It’s wild — structurally, linguistically, sure; in particular, its mix of romantic 19th c. diction (torpor, imperious, etc) twisting into anarchic 20th c. syntax — but what I mean specifically is this: It reminds me of those rare encounters when you’re out for a run in the park, in the morning, and you turn down a path through the trees, and then, suddenly, there’s a coyote right there — You stop, the coyote stops, and you both just freeze, eyes locked, waiting for the moment to break, or something to break the moment, wrapped in a weird communication through mutual silence.
I carried this book around, ignoring it as it tailed behind me; now that I’m finished, it lingers, refusing to settle into finality. Refusing to turn back into the tangle of ferns below the slanting treeline. Instead we stay motionless, each waiting for the other to blink. I keep slipping it into my pocket when I’m heading downtown. - Devin Smith
http://www.full-stop.net/2018/09/20/reviews/devin-smith/death-anna-croissant-rust/
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