Raoul Schrott - Fictional, but not a conventional novel, essayistic, but meditative in style, this book is an engaging blend of philosophy, mythology, the classical sciences, saintly heroism, and earthbound human romantic longing

Raoul Schrott, The Sex of the Angels, the Saints in their Heaven: A Breviary, Trans. by Karen Leeder, Seagull Books, 2019. [2001.]

Breviaries, books of standard religious readings for particular denominations, are a familiar genre with a long pedigree. But you’ve definitely never seen a breviary like this one. The Sex of the Angels is a playful, often ironic take on the breviary in the form of a collection of letters that begins by taking up early Christian cosmology and follows the Biblical mutations of the angel from Babylon to the present day. As it goes along, Raoul Schrott also weaves in a history which ranges from ancient Greek legends of the origin of light to the medieval darkness of the eclipse. But there is more going on here than meets the eye: the letters are addressed to an unnamed “other” and chart the course of an elusive affair. They are, we come to realize, a declaration of love—or, more accurately, of yearning—but also a far-reaching poetic essay which moves between etymological history, anthropological anecdote, philosophy, and disquisition on the nature of art. The text is supplemented by sumptuous illustrations by Arnold Mario Dall’O that chart the stories of the saints, and the result is a unique dialogue between literature and art: an extraordinary and rare book about love.

Raoul Schrott’s book, translated from the German, is a deeply philosophical story of the yearning of one for another. I refrained from saying ‘person’ because there is no clue relating the narrator to any life form. The book would make a great conversation piece but given that no reviews can be found in English and I suspect none in German either, I would have to wonder why.

Possibly reviewers are shying away from a book that takes so many viewpoints from so many sources. The opening statement epitomises the outrageous affirmations that the author makes. Clearly these are not meant to be true in fact but true in the universe the author is defining. “Dionysius the Areopagite was, I believe, the first to order the eternal night of the universe with angels…to the outermost sphere, the dwelling reserved for God, the primum mobile of the fixed stars, who assigned the Cherubim and Seraphim” (1). This reference is from the first ‘chapter’ which ends with a personal statement from the narrator to ‘you’ “simply the most wonderful thing anyone could imagine. Would it embarrass you terribly if I told you that you’re beautiful. Hardly, I suppose” (4). This is the language of a potential lover.

The next chapter informs us on the construction of angels, in particular the incredibly useful fact that their wings attach to their feet (I did not know that, I confess!). Full credit to the author for his use of language. Some of it, the great bulk of it, is incredibly beautiful – “like the breath between two sentences” (8), always there is mocking irony that is never hurtful or vicious – when speaking of the ‘exact sciences’ the reference is to astrology. “What there is nowadays of angels can be found under www.pfrr.alaska.edu/pfrr-/aurora” (8).

As the segments roll by each concludes with some reference involving the narrator and his ‘lover’, and one is therefore left with the most likely interpretation that this elaborate book is simply a love poem. It is a poem that amasses one outrageous idea after another, each building on the other and developing towards an acceptance by the reader that this dream universe might in truth exist. The whole concept is multi-faceted and very clever.

The book is festooned with anecdotes and illustrations, some barely comprehensible, most not at all. As representatives of the world of art their quality to me anyway is amateurish and devoid of interest. That having been said I think it important to divulge that my knowledge of art, my ability to make substantive judgments on the quality of an art piece or a collection of such is limited to a personal like or dislike. A gut reaction if you like/dislike. The cover calls the book “a unique dialogue between literature and art: an extraordinary and rare book about love” (inside dust cover). ‘Unique’ and ‘extraordinary’ resonate with me.

One cannot leave this book without asking, “What, then, is an angel?” and the answer is given over many pages of extraordinarily beautiful prose, but summed up in, “An angel is nothing but the personified meaning of the questions we ask” (106). What a let down! What images of spectres with wings of gossamer sprouting from ankles have crashed to the dust? The author continues:

In the gloom the gold gathers light against the coming of the night. Words, nothing but words, you see; the necessity of angels consist in being a metaphor for what is not revealed; the light that cannot be named; already halfway to the darkness of the solar eclipse that will happen soon…shadow-side of God, the dark side that he turns towards humankind (110 – 111)

Many readers will gain much from reading this book. It is most unlikely that what the book reveals to me will be revealed to you, but what you take from the book will be equally valuable. - Ian Lipke
queenslandreviewerscollective.wordpress.com/2019/03/12/the-sex-of-the-angels-the-saints-in-their-heaven-by-raoul-schrott/

If absence makes the heart grow stronger, absence tinged with the uncertainty of love returned can lead the heart and the imagination to wander into realms beyond the merely mortal. To contemplate romantic perfection. To be filled with a longing for something that may no longer exist. To attempt to counter the earthly with the heavenly. To trust in angels.

The wonderfully titled The Sex of the Angels, The Saints in their Heaven is essentially a series of missives from a lovelorn poet to a mysterious red-haired beauty from whom he has been separated by time, distance and, perhaps, some recklessness on his part. He is writing from County Cork in the south of Ireland, a place which is not his home, where he is exiled, or has exiled himself, sending into the nightly blackness a chain of love letters ever so loosely disguised as a sensual, passionate and mildly profane angelology accompanied by miniaturized hagiographies. Originally published in German in 2001, this extraordinary work by Austrian writer Raoul Schrott, with its arresting illustrations by Italian artist Arnold Mario Dall’O, is now available from the inimitable Seagull Books in Karen Leeder’s delicately rendered translation. Fictional, but not a conventional novel, essayistic, but meditative in style, this book is an engaging blend of philosophy, mythology, the classical sciences, saintly heroism, and earthbound human romantic longing.

Our narrator begins, as one would expect, with Dionysius the Areopagite—not the saint, but the fifth century Syrian Neoplatonist who, writing in the name and style of his sanctified predecessor was the first to craft a hierarchy of angels and demons, a celestial stepladder to God for dark times. Within Pseudo-Dionysius’ model of an angel-sustained universe, he locates himself and his own angelic entity:

For Earth he chose only a single one, which he placed in the lower arc of my ribs where I can feel it now, hard as a little planet. I carry it with me (even now in the train it keeps to its orbit) and sometimes I can see it before me: its mouth, black brows and a storm of red hair over its freckles, an incarnation of St. Elmo’s fire.

Captive and captivated, he writes as if possessed, bringing the Aurora Borealis, Samuel Johnson, Greek and Babylonian mythology and more into his musings as he tries to make sense of his fate, this spell of infatuation under which he is labouring. His thoughts never stray far from his beloved even though his letters have yet to elicit a response. He is continues his conversation into the silence, remembering their moments together. It is not entirely clear how much he really has to build on, how much they ever had, a quality that amplifies the sense of yearning:

Then as I sat next to you in the great hall, I heard you more than saw you beside me; I listened to you; wings folding shut. Do I bore you with all these sophistries and sentimentalities? It is only because the post takes so damned long, because I don’t know whether you will ever respond, not how; because I must eke out the little that I have to create a picture of you: little stones for a mosaic. The angels help me lay it out.

As he wanders the past and waits in the present, meditating on the nature of the role of angels in the affairs of humans, especially his own, our poet paints an image of a windswept remoteness, an isolation actual and emotional. He references local towns, harbours and natural features, like the aptly named Mount Gabriel. The ocean is never far away, and water is a major presence in his memories, his sense of loss, and much of the mythology he calls on. His heartache is pervasive, and achingly beautiful:I walk through the grass; it brushes against my shoes. All is still, and I wish your voice was with me now, whispered and low so that only I could hear it. Instead the moon starts off on a soliloquy. Where it stands, stubbornly apart, is the southwest and somewhere behind is where you are, as if only I had to concentrate to see that far, peer over the curvature of the earth. But where you are it is an hour later, I only wish I knew how to catch up that hour.

Because the distance that haunts him is temporal, in more than one sense of the word, trusting the angels, even if as he admits, he does not believe in them, has a certain logic. A comfort.

Turning to John Scotus Eriugena, the ninth century Irish theologian, best known for translating and commenting on Pseudo-Dionysius, the narrator reflects on the inverted balance existing between humans and their heavenly counterparts:

the angel finds its form within humankind through the spirit (intellectus) of the angel that is in the man; and man comes into being in the angel through the spirit of humankind within him and so on and so forth for all eternity without a single Amen being granted to us in Eriugenia’s scholastic permutations. We are nothing but the imaginings of angels; and angels exist only in our thoughts: that is our paradox not theirs.

He has entrusted his love and his beloved to the care of angels, to hold her for him in their thoughts. And yet, as her own distinction from the angels becomes less clear in his letters, one has to wonder how much she has begun to exist only in his thoughts. If she, in her epistolary silence is possibly not thinking of him, what existential questions does that raise? For him? For any of us who has ever loved hopelessly another who will never return our affection? At heart, he knows, it seems.

And: no, I am not writing for writing’s sake; no, if my letters were in any way beautiful, there were so only on account of you; no, they are not complete in themselves; all they do is beg for the answer and conceal best they can the question (they tiptoe in stealth as I know they are trespassing on your territory). No, your cheeks were so warm that it felt as if I could have woken up next to you; no, there is nothing that could possibly dis-appoint you from the rank of the angels; no, the Amores will never run out of arrows, although I make a rather unholy Sebastian; and no, the angels will not wear themselves out with words; writing to you brought at least a few hours relief, then you started up again humming in my ears.

The Sex of the Angels, The Saints in Their Heavens reads like an extended meditative conversational prose poem, a playful interplay between earth and the heavens, grounded in the inescapable humanness of romantic love. The rich illustrations and micro biographies of the lives and martyrdom of the saints accompanying the text work together to form a running commentary on the interrelationship between love, spirituality, literature and art. This book could almost be, if one didn’t know better, the work of the angels themselves. - roughghosts.com/2019/04/23/summoning-the-celestial-sex-of-the-angels-the-saints-in-their-heaven-by-raoul-schrott/

extract:

On the only stretch of road that runs straight along by the river, I sometimes turn the headlights off so that I drive for a second or two in the dark and see the earth turning towards the night. From the hill, and from the house then, the earth lies below me; the sea its stage, the stars extras, and beyond the clouds a handful of actors waiting for their cue to enter. Each one I give a different prompt: they always make a decent fist of it. In the orchestra pit between the islands the wind slowly tunes up; the beam of the lighthouse flashes the scenery before one’s eyes every five seconds, but audience there is none. The rows of seats are empty. I walk through the grass; it brushes against my shoes. All is still, and I wish your voice was with me now, whispered and low so that only I could hear it. Instead the moon starts off on a soliloquy. Where it stands, stubbornly apart, is the southwest and somewhere behind is where you are, as if I only had to concentrate to see that far, peer over the curvature of the earth. But where you are it is an hour later, I only wish I knew how to catch up that hour.
- http://www.new-books-in-german.com/raoul-schrott


Raoul Schrott, The Desert of Lop, Trans. by Karen Leeder, Picador, 2004.


A poetic love story, a reminiscence of countries and cities: Raoul Schrott tells a story about a man and three women, about a little town in the desert and about travelling on other continents. Once a week Raoul Louper catches the bus to Cairo, and having arrived there he starts telling stories... He tells stories about love and the travels that have led him to and away from the three women in his life: Elif, Francesca and Arlette. He talks about single moments and about time slipping by. He remembers 'singing sands', quicksand, coastal strips and deserts. Again and again his thoughts return to the three women and to the countries where he used to live. Raoul Schrott has written a book in the spirit of Baricco or Calasso, a novella with a hundred and one chapters that tells us about love in its many guises, about the allure of the exotic and the new.




Raoul Schrott is one of Austria’s most successful and prolific writers: a polymath, translator from ancient languages, poet, novelist, dramatist, polemicist, academic, critic, and explorer. His most recent story 'The Silent Child' appeared in 2012 and the poetry collection The Art of Believing in Nothing followed in 2014. His most recent work is his 850-page verse epic First Earth (2016) and a book of essays Politics and Ideas (2018).