Evan Dara – Holistic novel: promosexuals, expectatory therapy, paleo-optometry, a man who wants to sue his mirror for slander, forensic musicology...

Evan Dara, The Easy Chain, Aurora, 2008.

«Evan Dara's The Easy Chain is quite clearly a mess of a novel, but it's the kind of mess Jackson Pollock would have been proud to make. Beneath the glut of unattributed dialogue, stream-of-consciousness from non-sentient entities (the wind? rocks?), philosophical digressions dressed down in colloquial language, and a bracing, almost-empty abyss lasting forty pages lies a very intricately crafted and grandly conceived postmodern novel. The book concerns Lincoln Selwyn, a young man of British nationality and Dutch upbringing who comes to America in search of Enlightenment education, flunks out, and ends up being propelled to the top of Chicago's social and economic ladder. The narration, mostly from those around Selwyn, freely travels from character to character and scene to scene in a way reminiscent of Gaddis's JR, and like that book, The Easy Chain is obsessed with the logic of American capitalism. Dara cheerfully scatters dot-com excesses throughout a heap of digressions that all somehow tie back to our economic order: they range from riffs on Descartes's cogito and Derridean differance to a recipe for "perpetual economic motion,' an original critique of truth, and a slapstick bar brawl worthy of Pynchon. Throughout, Dara's fresh language continually turns up gems: in his all-too-accurate vision of America, art's "sovereign goal" is (to update Pound) "make it news," our "economonoculture" leaves us to open invasive forms of finance, "psychoacoustic maladies" are on the rise, and, indeed, the miracle of America's economy is based on our inbred capacity for "arriving at the most expedient error". Although we've had to wait a decade and a half for this follow-up to the equally inventive The Lost Scrapbook, it's good to know that writers like Dara exist, capable of bravely carrying the flame of American postmodernism bequeathed by Pynchon et al.» - Scott Esposito

«When Evan Dara’s first novel, The Lost Scrapbook, was chosen in a national fiction competition judged by William Vollmann, then published by Fiction Collective Two in 1995, the only review in the mainstream press compared the book to William Gaddis’s famously ambitious and demanding debut, The Recognitions. I wrote that review. Now Dara is back with his JR, a novel of fragmentary dialogue and compulsive monologue about a nonentity who mysteriously achieves sudden wealth and power. I’m not deterred from making this comparison by Dara’s e-mail denial to me that he has read Gaddis’s first two novels. No, The Easy Chain is so difficult to describe, I’ll stick with my analogy.
Right about now, you may be wondering why a reviewer has been corresponding with an author. Initially, it was to ascertain just what Aurora, the new novel’s publisher, is. According to Dara, he and at least one other person founded the press after Dara was strung along and then disappointed by a commercial publisher. Second, it was to find out just who “Evan Dara” is. The author would reveal nothing beyond the pseudonym except that he or she lives in Paris. Not even the media-shy Gaddis was that secretive, but in today’s fiction market he, too, might have needed to self-publish both The Recognitions and JR.
I know bakeries that will sell half a loaf, but until books are wholly electronic and readers can demand only those parts some trusted reviewer has recommended, we’re at the mercy of the binder. That’s unfortunate, because the first half of The Easy Chain is a pitch-perfect satire of what a character calls “promosexuals,” young moneyed urbanites who get an erotic charge from promoting themselves at the daily round of receptions promoting products and companies. The scene is Chicago during the very recent past. Dara’s method is “recording” the chatter of unnamed receptioneers, who are often interrupted mid-effusion when the author points his microphone at someone else.
Gossip centers around Lincoln Selwyn, a British citizen who grew up in Holland, came to the University of Chicago in his early twenties, left in his freshman year, got a job as a clothing salesman, and very rapidly ascended through real estate, banking, and lobbying to become an über-promosexual—with no apparent qualifications other than listening to acquaintances and wearing clothes well. In an early scene, Lincoln dons a mirrored disco-ball mask, a perfect representation of his seeming hollowness and of his ability to reflect others’ smug images of themselves.
Dara gives Lincoln no voice, but he has a heart (he’s searching for an aunt who immigrated to America and then disappeared) and he has a cough, which leads him to a series of physicians who diagnose his malady as a somatic response to “skonk,” defined as exposure to social deceptions. The doctors’ increasingly technical and nearly believable pseudoscience extends Dara’s relatively familiar social satire into original intellectual parody. As Lincoln’s wealth and influence grow, he attracts skonksters promoting their crazed moneymaking schemes, giving Dara further license for inventive mockery of entrepreneurial imagination and desperation. Lincoln also attracts a publicist, a woman named Auran, who manages his social appearances, tries to choose his girlfriend “brand,” and even drives him around while he has sex in the backseat with an admirer.
After Auran is either accidentally struck by a taxi or steps in front of one, Lincoln abruptly disappears from Chicago. Dara signifies his absence with forty blank or near-blank pages, and the witty talkathon of the first half becomes a highly literary mess. Through ever-denser prose, the hardworking reader can attempt to trace Lincoln’s movements: to Holland, where he locates his now-homeless mother but does nothing for her; back to the Midwest, where he buys a gun and prepares for an assault on the Mercantile Exchange; and finally to the office of his former private investigator, who delivers a forty-page closing monologue about his life as he tries to stop, or at least delay, Lincoln from shooting him.
In this half, Dara frequently occupies Lincoln’s mind, but as our protagonist plans his terrorism, Dara breaks into short-lined, singsongy, and largely empty passages such as:
'Ties that bind & ties in line &
Ties unwind & ties remind &
Repetition repetition repetition repetition'
While the style here may be intended to imitate an obsessive-compulsive consciousness, Dara imposes a very long stretch of this loosey-goosey stuff just when the reader most needs a tight chain of motivation for mass murder. Even the marginally relevant interruptions of Lincoln’s narrative—the vulgar voices of investigators, the e-mails of a journalist tracking him, a lecture on water privatization, extended passages told from the point of view of a shoe and, I think, the wind—would be tolerable if the emotions driving the narrative were plausible.
The first half of The Easy Chain is unspoiled by the slackness and missing links of the second, but clearly, Dara would have profited from an editor. She or he could have pointed out that Gaddis won a National Book Award for JR when he reined in the high-art impulses of The Recognitions. Dara frees those impulses in the second half, perhaps to imply “No easy book for you, reader.” A character says that “the principal product of the West is self-hate.” Dara seems immune, but publishing one’s own book can be an act of self-sabotage, even while it’s a gesture of self-assertion. Because of Aurora’s exceedingly low profile, Dara may garner few readers. That would be too bad, because The Easy Chain and Dara, whoever he or she is, merit at least half a loaf.» - Tom LeClair

«Evan Dara’s sophomore novel, The Easy Chain, published thirteen years after his outstanding The Lost Scrapbook, is likely among the most bizarre novels published in 2008; however, it also must be among the most compulsively readable (and re-readable) of them. The novel centers around the rarely-seen Lincoln Selwyn, a British citizen from the Netherlands who lived in a “top-floor former storeroom in a tiny squat on the Westerstraat until he crashed collidingly into all squats’ primordial problem, the bathroom.” Selwyn arrives in Chicago and quickly rises to the status of rich and famous socialite, seemingly for no other reason than his good looks and charm. Then he disappears. As one mourning his absence notes: “What can I say? He just appeared one day and then, wow, after doing like miracles, he was plucked away, he was suddenly taken from us. I don’t mean to stretch, but it was like Jesus, it felt like that.”
It’s a standard enough plot for a novel, except readers familiar with The Lost Scrapbook will know going in that almost nothing about a Dara novel is standard—or easy. The magic of his writing and what he accomplishes through it is, despite its difficulty, obscurity, density, and abstractness, manifested in how mesmerizing, hypnotizing, and just plain readable Evan Dara is.
The Easy Chain is written as a melange of voices, some in dialogue with one another and some first-person; in these passages the writing is so immediate that even the non-dialogue expository passages seem like they might be narrated via first person, too. There’s an omniscience to all the writing in the book that doesn’t typically go hand-in-hand with so much dialogue.
There are four or five basic styles that Dara uses throughout the novel, and a description of these will give a clearer picture of the novel and how it works.
One of these could be described as The Lost Scrapbook style—lengthy set pieces that sometimes have no endings and that create a sense of uneasiness, despite their often pedestrian subject matter. (They, for instance, recall The Lost Scrapbook’s lawn mowing/yardwork scene, although The Easy Chain doesn’t contain nearly as many instances of scene-jumping or shifts in first-person narration mid-sentence). One standout from The Easy Chain is the story of Lincoln’s transit from a Dutch company that dredges rivers and waterways for metal objects to the University of Chicago. First, Dara narrates Lincoln’s job at the company. This lengthy story then leads to Lincoln finding, in a purse that is pulled from the water, an IOU from an English-language bookstore; this leads to his enrolling in and attending the University of Chicago, which leads to him getting very sick, etc. Each segment can almost stand alone, and the way in which each is written would indicate a forthcoming climax or resolution, but the payoff for each piece is merely that it leads into the next segment of Lincoln’s life.
When he lands in the United States, we’re treated to this:
'Blinking dry under the seven hours of jetlag, waiting for the two knapsacks at the spinaround carrousel, he greeted all the skipdoodle of the airport with the grand gesture of a sneezing fit. Plus gurgly coughing. Huge outflushes of gases and sputa, tears leaping from every backwhip. Good four minutes, he said. First time in the U.S., he’s saluting it with mucus.'
A second style found in The Easy Chain would encompass sections written from the point of view of inanimate objects. This is a speck of dirt:
'Hup on an untied sneaker-lace on the unattached chin-strap of a bike helmet in a cig cough and then tumble-shoved by a snorting SUV contrail on an upstream of belched evaporating raspberry Fresca jolted by a home-returning marker-cap and'
The dirt (of course) ends up on the anus of a dog (a “roan-brown chow”), where it remains until the dog defecates.
In a third style, a restaurant is forced out of business when new landlords impose a quadrupled rent; this triggers the economic collapse of the city, which is finally taken back by nature:
'So applaud us, hail us, worship us for this, that the awnings are gone and the carpet cushions are gone, and the Portland cement and photovoltaic collectors and interdendritic spaces in the steel-substrate coatings, and the sheet carpet and the bintley lintels and the roller shutter frontages and the lead paint encapsulants and the piling, gone, they are gone, we are to be worshipped for this.'
But it’s dialogue—mostly centered around how much the speakers love Lincoln (and occasionally the speakers segue into set pieces about harebrained business ventures, like a health-food buffet where you pay based on how much weight you gained while you were there)—that makes up the bulk of the first half of the book. It is full of bits like: “Zenkofsky’s is a benign dysfunction of the semanto-neurological system, thought to be triggered by exquisite sensitivity to social nuance...” and, “Six people killed in a bus accident is a tragedy; in a plane crash it’s a miracle” and, “It’s only gotten to the point where it’s easier for us to imagine the destruction of the world than the changing of our economic system—” and, “The guys with the big eyes think it up, then the guys with the little eyes take it over.” This will inevitably bring about comparisons to William Gaddis, though I think Joseph McElroy would be more apt for Dara’s use of science, the denseness of the prose, and his refusal to give the reader any sort of a helping hand through the text.
But like Gaddis, Dara’s work is littered with dozens of things that get brief mentions: schemes and ideologies, ideas and jokes that populate the world of the novel and that would not at all be out of place in ours. Dara’s imagination is such that many of the items would make great pieces for further satire and examination, but they are simply steamrolled by the increasing weight of the text as more and more threads accumulate. Things like: “promosexuals” who have “an erotic accord with the advertisement”; “expectatory therapy”; “paleo-optometry”; a man who wants to sue his mirror for slander; forensic musicology (“he found Proof! that the Rosenbergs were Fall-guys for Stravinsky!—absolutely, that StraVinsky was the culprit, that he was encoding nuclear secrets in his tone rows!”); a scheme cooked up by the Catholic church to pay whores to mock and humiliate their customers, thus discouraging the solicitation of prostitution; “autaganda,” which is “the propaganda we feed ourselves, all the suggestions and exhortations and judgments and secular beliefs—you see what I’m getting at—that we accept as original and true, indeed as coming from our innermost essence—unmediated, as it were, arriving from eternity, and delivered with Godlike authority by our inner PA.” With so much accumulating everywhere, the only thing to do is keep pushing through to see where it’s going, though in the end all of these things do seem to work together, forming a sort of mosaic through which the action of the book takes place, as if the narration happens through the ideas of the novel rather than exposition.
But there is more! Anyone who flips through The Easy Chain will no doubt notice the forty-one-page textless gap, as well as the sixty-page section that is written in verse. (Upon closer examination it appears to be narrated by an autistic girl, although in one of many instances of unanswered questions, the clues could point to numerous other possible interpretations.)
The second half of the novel—post-lacuna—is comprised of the following: Lincoln’s search for an aunt who moved to America; a young journalist named Tracey Kassner, who is trying to sell the story of Lincoln and the mystery of his disappearance to magazines and agents (and whom we only see through her emails to those people); the team of investigators on Lincoln’s trail looking to nail him for various crimes, most of which seem to involve credit card scams (and who speak in hilarious, overblown language: “then the miserable fuck meets his inevitable destiny in some black-dark sweat-cell somewhere, living like the crawlspace-scum he really is, eating like a beggar in Bangladesh”). But Lincoln’s real crimes come later.
I could go on, but I doubt that these first 1,500 words, or even another 1,500 words, will give the experience of reading an Evan Dara novel. For those few who are familiar with The Lost Scrapbook, The Easy Chain is very different—but it’s clearly written by the same author, and, like The Lost Scrapbook, even when one is thoroughly lost and totally confused, there’s such a power and variety to the writing that it’s quite possible to read along until things begin to again make sense. In this way both books are also quite quick reads, surprising given their length and high degree of difficulty.
Elsewhere in The Quarterly Conversation I have referred to The Lost Scrapbook as one of the best novels of the 1990s; The Easy Chain should be remembered as one of the best novels of the 2000s.» - Scott Bryan Wilson

«when william gass was working on THE TUNNEL–which took him twenty-six years to finish–i remember some wag quipping in some interview : yeah, and wouldn’t it be great if, when it came out, it was like, 120 pages. (and i remember thinking, “shit yeah! that would be great!”)
and also carol maso making a joke about how these boys kept writing their “Thousand-page novels, tens and tens of vollmanns—I mean volumes.“
these big, ambitious doorstops, in and out of fashion–usually written (and i’m betting usually read) by men (though i noted with interest vanessa place’s 600+ page recent entry into the race)… a galaxy of books created eons ago by maybe an imploding melville somehow i think still revolving around a sun probably named bellow, though now with a newly identified farout planet named bolano.
generally i’m not so into them. they manage their arcana and pyrotechnics with either gimmicks or, worse, plotty plots–big canvass, ensemble pieces where we need either to keep flipping back to some family tree or hand-drawn map or to some cleverly necessary endnote page. and there’s also a suspicion of greediness, certainly self-aggrandizing is wondered about, in the so demonstrated over-sized ambition. maso may indeed be right that these vanities among vanities are particularly vain. and, loud as they try to be, just saber rattlings, whistlings in the dark…
still i admired the hell out of THE LOST SCRAPBOOK partly because it does manage to balance its length with extreme readability and a decent amount of narrative velocity. it also more importantly isn’t particularly plot driven, and it’s run less by a machinery of gimmick than by an original technique of narrative splicing–a kind of collage work done in series, rather than in space. or another way: dara works a parataxis of narratives rather than that of phrases or sentences.
THE EASY CHAIN operates in similar fashion and, like THE LOST SCRAPBOOK, is a political novel, one made of principally two things: ideas–witty analysis of our inept and corrupt culture–and yarns. dara’s specialty is in fact the yarn, the almost wholesome tale, ending with a zinger or even a moral. on their own they would be nice bits of entertainment, strung together in series they make something else, at best it makes a convincing group portraiture of our rattled time… it’s a strange accomplishment, and the only one i could think to relate it to was the reaction had after watching linklater’s WAKING LIFE, where a series of undergraduate-y philosophical discussions, in aggregate, has the larger wallop of showing that we are a species of similar concerns, with similar self-designed thought experiments, and indeed similar fantasies.
it is a slightly lopsided novel–though i don’t think it’s at all the half loaf that one review had it. the first half has a better-defined gambit, which then disintegrates it’s not quite clear how effectively… its lead is a character who happens to be extremely charismatic. that’s his super-power–given without an origin story. and in the first half of the book we get to watch him wield this power against wealthier chicago. Lincoln “vaulted to the top of the city’s social hierarchy, slept with the majority of its first daughters and racked up an unimaginable fortune.” the second half of the novel then significantly drops the story of Lincoln, concerning itself only obliquely with him and his unexplained reversal. this half has some admittedly outrageous and not-always-successful gambits, including odd punctuation to denote voice stresses, a poor attempt at some kind of echo-affected poetry, and what i think was a long narrative from the POV of a piece of dust. i’m not sure. it gets a little wacky.
but there are really fantastic parts throughout, setpieces, yarns mostly, unsmug moral tales that show us both the hypocrisies and possibilities for hope in our consumerist endtimes. a fantastic one near the end about how a hippie food joint gets taken over and saved by a “one man Information Counterrevolution,” that is: a man of silence (324). another hilarious story concerns a pair of unsavvy buddhists trying to go into business (to practice right livelihood) and getting all kinds of screwed.
other idea riffs are almost equally engaging as his stories. a few eloquent rants about our advertising-based culture where dara defines terms–the “skonk” and “conicons”–needed to make it run; one extremely prescient bit about how markets reward response, not value (187); and here is dara on how progress has us lose sight of fundamental values, the big picture, in our driven chase to get granular:
“In the libraries, he had also seen the affinity between progress and reduction. Day after day, in one library after another, he had noticed the cadenzas of rapt attention played to minutiae, as larger concerns grew foggy with neglect. Increasing acuity of perception driving wider blindness, evident & necessary visions falling on eyes without feeling. It was evolutionary: to continue, to flourish & prosper, whittle yourself to the barest functional minimum, then pass this on. Again, reason has produced its flipside, history has worked its dull revenge”.» - Eugene Lim

Steve Russillo's Easy Chain Page




Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook, Fiction Collective 2, 1995.


«It may be the defining irony of our time: just as we are coming to recognize our shared destiny and necessary interdependence, our culture seems to be fracturing along every fault line available to it. The Lost Scrapbook is a novel that passionately captures the contradictory richness of our historical slot, a time when feelings of belonging and exclusion can do bitter battle. Conjuring an unforgettable variety of voices, the book delves into lives touched by this tension, before it culminates in a confrontation between a trusting city and the local manufacturing company that both sustains and betrays it. Through the use of a prismatic storytelling form, The Lost Scrapbook finds a contemporary answer to the 19th century novel, evoking an entire world in all its richness and diversity. But by embodying the sense that we can best understand our world through witnessing the interworkings of whole communities, it is also something altogether new: The Lost Scrapbook may be the first "holistic" novel.»

«This artfully disarrayed first novel reads like literary channel-surfing over a multitude of characters' first-person monologues and casual conversations. Dara flings a cacophony of voices at his reader in a passionately nonlinear novel whose elements-be they characters, themes or dotted plot lines-come together only in the culminating narrative of a chemical company's accident and cover-up in a small town. When creating voices and characters, Dara displays extended range with a cast that includes a pirate radio deejay tracing his own signal, a schizoid eco-hermit on a rant and a tobacco-industry spokesman retorting to unspoken questions. For great sea-like expanses of the book, the only connecting links are thin leitmotifs-e.g., references to music theory or a running variation on a casual joke. Then the detached voices finally merge with the chemical-disaster plot; and this most conventional portion of this unconventional novel disappoints since the final environmental catastrophe, though intended to unite the voices in endangered and complicit community, does not so much integrate Dara's voices as overwhelm them. Dara is a talent with a clear gift for voice-throwing-some of his extended passages of dialogue approach the virtuosity of William Gaddis in their ability to implicitly advance action and character without benefit of narrative exposition. But he still needs a sturdier novelistic structure-even if unconventional-in order to redeem his obsessive themes and anxious variations from all that exhilarating white noise.» - Publishers Weekly

«Dara's first book, The Lost Scrapbook is one of the few American novels of the 1990s that I find myself returning to again and again, and his utterly distinctive voice is on show again here.» - Dan Visel


«The first thing the reader of Evan Dara's The Lost Scrapbook sees are two mottoes: from Kierkegaard, "To honor every man, absolutely every man, is the truth"; and from Blake, "O let me teach you how to knit again / This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf, / These broken limbs again into one body." We are tuned in, then, to the need to respect the individual and the need to "knit" the individuals together as a community. The first motto, we might suggest, underscores Dara's practice of letting his characters speak; the second the fact thatone character speaking is not sufficient. What the characters share is speech. And so, speaking is the first way in which Dara's people are "knit again": indeed, one voice morphs into another. And we cannot always be sure when the switch has occurred. Thus, the second way the people are "knit again" is through content (i.e., shared concerns).
The book begins in dialogue form, although it seems to be an imagined dialogue. A nineteen-year-old is faced with the question of what he wants to be. (The other side of this dialogue represents a high school guidance counselor guidance counselor Child psychology A school worker trained to screen, evaluate and advise students on career and academic matters .) The youth resists the straits of a career choice. He is interested in many things and abhors the narrowing of interest into an occupation. (In terms of the range of interests, I must say that Dara presents us with an impressive range--from composer Harry Partch Harry Partch (June 24, 1901 – September 3, 1974) was an American composer and instrument builder. He was one of the first twentieth-century composers to work extensively and systematically with microtonal scales, writing much of his music for custom-made instruments he built to linguist/political activist Noam Chomsky Noun 1. Noam Chomsky - United States linguist whose theory of generative grammar redefined the field of linguistics (born 1928)
A. Noam Chomsky, Chomsky , from archeologist Richard Leakey to photographer Eadweard Muybridge, among many others.) But community must be made. Witness how few eligible voters register to vote. And not even the young are immune: the difficulties faced by the first character have led him to run away from home. Unfortunately, what this action teaches him is unpalatable: "Now my sole function in this world is to serve as receptacle for the proof that I am inconsequential." Only an eviscerated community could come from such realizations.
He may feel inconsequential, but he is hardly alone. Indeed, this character soon becomes another character, late for an appointment. The appointment becomes an opportunity to catch fireflies to be filmed later for a commercial. Thence thence
adv.
1. From that place; from there: flew to Helsinki and thence to Moscow.
2. From that circumstance or source; therefrom.
3. Archaic From that time; thenceforth. a return to Dave's house (one of the firefly-catchers), where Dave talks about his son Michael and his interest in drumming. And so on. And so on.
Indeed, what is most striking about Dara's ambitious novel is that the narrative voice keeps changing. One narrator NARRATOR. A pleader who draws narrs serviens narrator, a sergeant at law. Fleta, 1. 2, c. 37. Obsolete. gives way to another with few rhetorical clues and no outward flourish. This can be a little off-putting--to find the situation one has been immersed in suddenly jettisoned for another. Moreover, not all situations are likely to strike a reader as equally interesting. Still, once the reader learns that the narrative voice is constantly morphing, the practice should not throw her. After all, the morphing of voices is a daring way for Dara to involve the reader with his concerns for differences and community. We might recall Bruno Latour's point in his recent We Have Never Been Modern: "Reason today has more in common with a cable television network than with Platonic ideas." Perhaps that is why the model of channel-surfing comes so readily to mind.
Yet, rather than dispersal, there is a strong impulse toward gathering in Data. In other words Adv. 1. in other words - otherwise stated; "in other words, we are broke"
put differently , the channels should add up to something. We might take a clue from Dara's words on Chomsky and suggest that what The Lost Scrapbook attempts is the "reconstruct[ion of] the crystal"; putting the shards of community back together. Thus, if so many voices--voices that register their gender differences, age differences, political differences, etc.--are transmitted through a common source, the materiality MATERIALITY. That which is important; that which is not merely of form but of substance. 2. When a bill for discovery has been filed, for example, the defendant must answer every material fact which is charged in the bill, and the test in these cases seems to of that source augurs sharing. Still, one voice may directly oppose the views of another. Yet they are transmitted (if we may put it that way) over a common source.
Though there are many incidents in the book, the last hundred-plus pages are concerned with one principal event: the dumping of pollutants into the environment by Ozark Corporation. This provides an occasion for the views to differ--principally, as to whether the danger of pollution is as great as some think, and whether Ozark has been aware of the dangers. It is hard not to read the pollution of the environment as referring to the pollution of the communication environment as well as pollution of the ground of the community. As such, this pollution comes down to a binarization that blocks both communication and community. (In this way, The Lost Scrapbook can be seen as one of our more timely books, considering the recent budget stalemate in Washington, D.C.) To speak out against the corporation is to risk one's livelihood. To remain silent is to risk one's health. Given the entrenched positions, where else can we go but silence? "Yes this definitive reclamation, this grand extreme regathering and reclamation into silence, for where else could this go but silence, yes silence: silence. Silence," as the book ends.
And yet the end is perhaps not as important as the journey. For it is a journey into the individuality and commonality of people living in contemporary America. As such, it is a book raising significant questions for our day--and, one suspects, beyond.» - Bruce Campbell

«So-called “experimental” fiction is often criticized for various reasons by both critics and readers: that it is somehow inhuman (i.e. unfeeling, cold) or too difficult or that only a realistic conventional plot structure can maintain a reader’s interest. Evan Dara’s first novel (and here’s hoping that there will be a second one, so far, 9 years later, there is no sign) can be considered an “experimental novel” and is called so by a number of the reviews I found. The experiment is in the form, the structure, the organizing principle of the work. Tom LeClair in his overwhelmingly positive review from the Washington Post (June 9 1996) (the review that got me really interested in the book) states “The Lost Scrapbook is not really a novel.” I’d have to disagree with his statement: a novel is more than just a story organized around a plot, but I’m not here to argue it. The Lost Scrapbook makes the point on its own.
The novel begins with a one-sided dialogue that turns into a monologue by a teenager who refuses to decide on a career path. He or she (I’m undecided in the end on the gender of the first narrator but will use she hear, as I hear the voice as female without any real evidence) half runs away from home — I say “half” because she stays in the same town and even returns home, leaving behind some indication to her mother that she is still there — and walks around town, sleeps in the park, and listens to a walkman (John Cage on Muybridge). Thirteen pages in, as we are becoming accustomed to this narrative monologue about the teenager’s drift into social invisibility and disconnection, the landscape shifts. A car? A late appointment? Subtly, at first unbeknownst to us, the narrator of the monologue has changed. The walking teenager becomes a man in a car on the highway. He meets with another man who is catching fireflies and filming them, planning to overlap the image of one over many others to create a swarm (of one). The man tells our new narrator about his son and the drum kit he bought for him. The son left to live with his mother, and the man leaves the drum kit in the middle of the room as a reminder of absence. It’s a monologue contained within the monologue. The second man is also a musicologist studying Beethoven’s variations:
“Beethoven’s late interest in variations had less to do with exfoliating development or controlled tonal fields, as is traditionally taught, than with procedures in problem-solving; in other words, for Beethoven variations were a way, musically, of thinking something through, a kind of ongoing, Popperian method for testing a Thematic conjecture’s aspects and implications and points of weakness from different angles; in other words, variations, much like my brooding, represent excursions towards some kind of higher understanding, repeated graspings-at and circlings-in towards some central truth; but variations also illustrate the cliché that the truth remains, ultimately, indeterminable; that’s why all the fancy footwork of variations is necessary: we never actually get to what we’re after, to where all the gropings, all the variation-searching, would no longer be necessary, to that point where there would be no longer be music–to which I say, All the better!; for the late Beethoven, then, better the beauty of struggle and futility than the illusion of accomplishment; for as we struggle, he would seem to say, so we are beautiful;”
I quote here at length for two reasons: one, because this passage illustrates a strong thematic relation to the structure of the novel itself and two, because it illustrates the way each section of the novel contains a microcosmic relation to the novel’s macrocosmic structure. The novel consists of monologue variations from many narrators, and each one seems to illustrate a smaller thematic relation to the work as a whole. It’s these relations that hold the work together, not any plot structure.
The monologues blend into each other, often in such a way that it is impossible to really say at what point one begins and the other ends, yet each remains it’s own story (which lack beginnings or endings). The stories often involve loss and a search, connections and disconnections between people, presence and absence. An animator discusses the way the separate images of a cartoon are made to look like they are a single movement. A man remembers the bond formed with a lost friend over old radio programs. A woman walks door to door trying to discuss with people why they don’t vote (in this case the setting is the first Bush’s election).
The monologues go on and on, and then, somewhere in the last 160 or so pages the change in voices become more frequent, every paragraph or every sentence (always denoted by a new dash at the beginning of a new line), and a story forms. In the Missouri town of Isaura, the Ozark Chemical company employs a large number of townspeople and holds a particular sway in the area. Through the numerous voices we learn about the chemical spill that is discovered and the subsequent events that stretch over a few years: the cover-ups, the attempts at political action, government investigation, flight, but mostly, the anxiety, anger, and confusion of the people. The story itself is nothing new, but the way it is told in a symphony of voices makes it new. The chemical spill and its effects on the environment and the people foregrounds the connection and disconnection of everything around us: hidden connections, unwanted connections, and unacknowledged connections but also individuality, isolation, and lack of communication. To return to my original paragraph, The Lost Scrapbook is a “human” work, filled with characters and emotions, overflows with them even, and it is through the form and style of the novel that this is successful. There is no conventional narrator (whether of the third or first person) to tell us the story, but rather a proliferation of narrators that show us dozens of variations on struggle and beauty.» - madinkbeard.com

Read it at Google Books

Is Richard Powers Evan Dara?

Eugene Lim intertwines elegant poetics with a fantastic plot, rife with love, mystery, malaise, and the supernatural

Eugene Lim, Fog & Car (Ellipsis Press, 2008)

"Fog & Car begins as a record of mundane behavior, cataloging the daily schedules and habits of two people now divorced and living in different states. Mr. Fog returns to his childhood hometown in Ohio to become a schoolteacher, while Ms. Car moves to Brooklyn, where she finds work as a freelance copyeditor. Both spend most of their newfound routines reminiscing, reexamining their lives, and reflecting on, if not where things went wrong, then on why things haven't gone right. And for the book's first hundred pages, the protagonists' names are the only signal that anything stranger might occur. In this first half, Lim skillfully captures a sense of the necessary loneliness that ensues following a breakup, demonstrating that he could have written a good but fairly recognizable realist novel. But then, with the introduction of a few more characters, the plot turns weird, and Lim peels relentlessly at his story's realism until it tugs loose, revealing much stranger happenings underneath. At first I held some concern as to whether Lim could pull it all off, but he does so wonderfully, transforming Fog & Car from a potential minimalist navelgazer into a disturbing mystery pitched somewhere between Mulholland Drive and City of Glass. Yet, to Lim's credit, as the novel enters its creepier second half, it never loses its appealing initial tone of aching loneliness, even as its characters and its goings-on grow increasingly supernatural. In another daring move, Lim refuses to answer every question that he raises, but by the final page he achieves a great deal by creating a state of troubled, yet calm, acceptance." - A.D. Jameson

"In this astonishing, assured first novel Eugene Lim intertwines elegant poetics with a fantastic plot, rife with love, mystery, malaise, and the supernatural. His gift for ingenious, startling permutations of language and plot make for a memorable, mesmerizing read. It was hard for me to put Fog and Car down; harder for me to stop thinking about." — Lynn Crawford

"The events of this novel take place in a space contrary to action, illuminating the silences of the page and the nothing that haunts the borders of 'doing something'. A beautifully paced and thoughtful work." — Renee Gladman

"In Fog & Car Eugene Lim scalpels deep into the loneliness of coupledom, into divorce, into obsession and stalking, into casual hookups, into homoerotic shocks. The book slowly heats its duos until they come to a rolling boil, blistering out surprises and unexpected complexities. Mr. Lim is definitely a writer to watch." — Steve Katz

"In Fog & Car, Eugene Lim renders the uncanny convergences of the lives of partners and strangers in a language entirely new. This is a deep, engulfing novel of breathtaking, even spooking precision—an altogether heady and heart-shaking debut." — Gary Lutz

"In this debut novel documenting the aftermath of a shattered marriage - its disintegration evident in the artifacts of memory and loss strewn across an abandoned landscape - Eugene Lim doesn’t as much collect and catalogue the fragments of lives shared, as artfully piece them into a puzzle reflective of players whose moves were induced by seemingly inconsequent forces.
Partitioned into four sections - “Mirror,” “Marriage,” “Mirage,” and “Merge” - Fog & Car renders, by way of an anticipation that heightens with every shift in point of view and characterization, an existence that has been shorn into unequal parts - each former-partner charged with navigating an unplanned and perhaps unimpressive future in the image of overwhelming bleakness it offers.
“Mirror” finds Mr. Fog and Ms. Car in separate physical and existential locations. Whereas Fog is left splintered by the loss of what their union signified, Car sees her reflection in the bathroom mirror, kitchen window at night, and the spoon she licks after stirring her coffee, as contorted and often narrow in form, but nonetheless blurry enough to preserve the possibility of eventual reshaping and sharpening. In a narrative as analytical as Fog’s is dissonant, Car’s sight is fixed on a future promising reclamation of the restless spirit that led her around the globe; prior, of course, to the idling proffered by a man whose own sense of wanderlust had long involved looking over a shoulder while attempting to reclaim a time-worn path.
Like a blank page of paper mailed from one ex-spouse to the other, the early image of Fog and Car is a reproduction of the severed ties between his ephemeral shaping and her assured lines. Fog back home in Ohio, Car starting over in New York, they find each other again only in the penmanship of characters whose influence on this once-couple’s relationship may seem minimal, if not altogether unidentifiable.
Whereas Mr. Exit’s presence in Fog’s life was once crucial, Car’s memory labels him a fat man, the embodiment of her aversion to laziness and a lack of control. Consequently, his appearance in a life that is now spent in motion between two ends of a swimming pool lap lane - every strike of an elbow into water propelling her body forward -- is debilitating in its ability to moor Car to a present centered on a run-in with an acquaintance much changed. Tackling the novel’s second section with a precision surgical in nature, Lim peels away the fleshy layer of skin from the wound of divorce, manifesting for the reader the visceral inner-workings of effectual relationships and how they may alter an image that takes shape.
Here Fog finds love with Judy, and Car discovers in the random sighting of a transformed Exit the multiplicity of choices a game’s player can be compelled to make. Dipping her head beneath the chlorinated water’s surface Car discovers alcohol: a propensity responsible for her evolution from passive proofreader to active writer of her own plot. Consequently, it is within Car’s personal cast of characters that Mac comes to life; his homeless, ragged form responsible for the inability to hold a pen confidently in fingers left robbed of memory, his smearing of black desperation across Car’s page an appeal for help. In his resolve to discover his identity, Mac takes to trailing Car, who is tracking Frank Exit. Whereas Fog finds himself bound with Judy in their newly purchased, painted, and decorated house, Car’s unraveling possesses implications that extend far beyond the uncanny or unexpected -- as reflected in Lim’s phenomenal ability to nestle revelatory gems in the corners of his muscular text.
Exit’s entrance induces lives to converge; the meticulous pacing and measured magnetism of this intersection no small feat. Giving way to the third division of the novel, “Mirage,” Fog reaches out to his ex-wife: now an often-inebriated stalker who wrestles with power and memory on a scale that extends far beyond unsigned letters, and deteriorates into illusory pages of crumpled ramblings left strewn about after frantic nights passed without sleep. In his communication, written six months prior to his second wedding, Fog hopes for “Ms. Automobile” to be directing a movie “in some place where they speak a language which [her] mouth can’t shape the sounds of.” His admission that he envies her, years after the collapse of their marriage, is offered, finally, by a man who understands that the past gives way to the future much as a paper boat succumbs to the spreading stain of river water that rises as the flimsy vessel sinks.
Arranged with the eye of an experienced puzzle-solver, the third section of Fog & Car suggests a unification of its edges that will materialize in the coda, yet an ultimate protection of its pieces’ borders that occurs when Lim brings Frank Exit, Mac, and Judy into the forefront of Fog and Car’s reflection. Like a series of concentric circles forming in the air when, with a quick scoop, burning coals are pushed inside a tin can that has attached to it a long piece of twine, the “whooping, dancing in and out of the circle [that] is made out of embers” is really the re-shifting of puzzle pieces; the center is identified and rejected over and again, as each time the shape of the image forming around it isn’t complete and shatters the possibility of depicting for the reader an image of intimate connection that is not only recognizable, but sought after in life relationships - those abandoned, or those reclaimed." - Erin McKnight

"Character names are often the most repeated words in fiction, so authors tend to freight them with allegorical meaning as a matter of efficiency. Christian labors toward the Celestial City in A Pilgrim’s Progress; Moby Dick’s Ishmael travels the ocean much like his biblical namesake wandered Levantine deserts; Beckett’s Watt is perplexed, his Krapp is retentive. The title of Fog & Car, Eugene Lim’s impressive debut novel, refers to Jim Fog and Sarah Car, a newly-divorced couple whose parallel stories compose the opening half of the book. Cars and fog, of course, are not complementary, so the likelihood of a reunion for these two seems dim from the start.
Beyond allegory, these names describe respective styles. In the wake of the divorce, Sarah Car pursues a mechanical oblivion consonant with her name. Grief and bewilderment are subsumed in tasks that require neither feeling nor reflection: she moves; she grouts tiles; she copyedits; she swims. The narration of her activities is correspondingly dry, remote, automated, as though a technical writer had been commissioned to record her every move. “She entered the shower and shampooed her hair. While her hair was sudded, she brushed her teeth. She would habitually spit her paste spittle onto her feet and dumbly watch the shower water sink it away. She soaped after this and rinsed.” Passages like this are near parodies of conventional realist fiction, and from time to time the prose’s enactment of the banal is itself banal. But in the end it is precisely the exaggerated pedantry of the style that allows it to transcend what it describes.
Conversely, Jim Fog wallows in a mist of disordered nostalgia and subject-less, object-less thought. The syntax is muddied, eroded, elliptical, tangential—the formal expression of an interior fog. It’s also some of the loveliest writing in the book, amounting to an extended prose-poem that reveals a sensibility of acute ambivalence and muted anxiety. “A hope for an end, or perhaps just a morbid fascination at the structure without foundation, still standing. Each limb cantilevering another and that in turn another, so that it stands on nothing but itself, an intricate flower that defying gravity, he rips apart to find only an empty center.”
Fog & Car alternates between Car and Fog, establishing a contrapuntal rhythm that incrementally resolves into a lucid, supple prose emblematic of their slow recovery from each other. Ironically, over the course of the novel they become more alike. And just as the reader is settling into what appears to be a subtle, penetrating meditation on contemporary relationships, everything is thrown into disarray by the appearance of a deus ex machina in the form of a third major character. There’s no doubting his ex machina nature; his name is Frank Exit. With his arrival, the novel abruptly swerves from its naturalist mode into surreality.
Fog & Car has the shape of a long turnpike that runs into an urban snarl of on and off ramps. Suddenly every incidental thread of the early, gently-paced narrative knots up into a supernatural tangle of a plot—souls are exchanged, coincidences multiply. But as Frank Exit remarks near the end of the book, “I realized that coincidence was just my generation’s name for magic, and that there is a discovery repeated by each generation, that magic is less extraordinary than it is hidden, and that once discovered, it becomes everywhere apparent.” Here, in a nutshell, is the book’s governing principle: The lack of coincidence in the novel’s first half is meant to illustrate the perceptual failure of both Fog and Car. Once discovered under the surface of incident, coincidence is not merely “everywhere apparent”; it’s inescapable.
Introducing dense plotting halfway through an otherwise plotless novel is an intriguing and daring formal gambit. To defy novelistic conventions is easy enough. The difficulty comes in custom-building new forms for a story, and new stories for these new forms. Suiting the action to the word and the word to the action is no easy feat, but it is one that Lim has achieved with his first tragicomic novel." - Oisin Curran

"Last night I sat down to start reading Eugene Lim's FOG & CAR, the other of the two debut books from Ellipsis Press along with Eugene Marten's WASTE, which I loved and talked about a while back, I hadn't meant to read for very long but found myself unable to stop reading the book. FOG & CAR is a strange amalgam of several ideas, it begins with a dissolved marriage from which both ends begin to branch and splinter and spread back into each other in weird ways. I was surprised to be so captivated by a book about a ruined marriage, which it is only on the surface, what it really is is a puzzle and a book of worming forms, sometimes the tense shifts or lines are layered and/or repeated, there is a lot of subtle innovation, refreshing.
The first section uses these calm and almost Lutz-like renditions of the two divorcees, Fog and Car, trying to smooth their lives out into something, Eugene Lim writes about the cleaning of houses, the method of a swimming routine, and all in this meditative, language-conscious but not overtly languaged and extremely absorbing way, the book also continues to evolve by stretching the forms of the way the words are delivered, but again, in calm and nuanced methods.
In grad school Amy Hempel had us read a Mark Richard story, I can't remember the name of it, I think it is the first one in THE ICE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD, Amy, in perhaps her only 'lecture-like moment' of the workshops talked some about how Richard was able to show the passage of time by using fields and dogs rather than talking about time, and how it opened the language and the feel of the words in this surprising way, I think Eugene Lim's descriptions here worked on me in that way, though rather than over the function of time it was over the function of distancing and grief, so much so that I couldn't stop wanting to propel through it, and I was so pleased to find myself reading a book supposedly about relationships about still feeling completely engrossed, as I hate relationships in books usually, for their wheel-spinning, I think people who get excited about Richard Yates would really enjoy the meditative stancing of the early sections especially.
Then there are two more sections in which Lim continues to open the way the story is built into an almost Paul Auster kind of maze, path-inducing manner, there is following and weird rooms and strange phenomenon that continue to be braided together but left open in other strands.
Here is a sentence from the book that maybe exhibits the balance of strange and familiar sense of both situation and language in FOG & CAR: "He forgot his name and became her bellybutton."
Then, in the last third of the book, which begins to develop into a really strange configuration of earlier elements and a linking of space, I hit a page, a strange development involving a man in an empty room and an elevator, and a little later, further linking, which made me stop and touch the book against my chest. I remember not knowing what to do having read it, it was very late by then and I'd stayed up longer than I meant to, and yet I wanted to keep reading, and yet couldn't the page had stopped me in a way that I felt I needed to think about rather than go on with the rest of the book right there, I went to bed. I could not stop thinking about the book in such a way that I stayed awake for several further hours, and when I finally did sleep I had a dream about writing about the book as I am now, and other dreams branching off from the book. When I woke I walked around for a while and then finished reading.
FOG & CAR is new in familiar ways and familiar in new ways, and altogether a thing that turned my mind on in such a mode that I could not turn it off.
Along with WASTE, if you haven't gotten on board already, both are available from Ellipsis as a package deal. I can't imagine an innovative fiction press with a better introductory one-two punch." - Blake Butler

«If divorce is a totaled car, then Eugene Lim’s Fog & Car is a multiple vehicle pile-up. Huge accidents tend to occur in rain or fog – the low-visibility tricking drivers into thinking other cars are further away than they really are. Throwing everything into darkness, Lim’s novel forces its characters, and the reader, to crane forward, to squint their eyes, to try get their bearings, just to keep from crashing. And all of this happens after an off-stage break-up.
Fog & Car’s chapters tick tock between Jim Fog and his ex-wife Sarah Car dusting themselves from the wreck of their marriage, licking their wounds, trying to make sense of their failures as individuals and as a couple, to redefine who they are outside of each other’s arms. Relationships often dissolve in order to escape boredom, chaos, or to avert some imagined disaster, but just like that car in a fog smashing into another car and that car smashing into another, sometimes a break-up leads to even further chaos and disorder. Mr. Fog and Ms. Car’s divorce leads to deep soul-scouring, mystery, chaos, some kind of redemption for one, and, for the other, dissolution, menacing darkness, and an augured, but still uncertain, end. Their surnames should have signaled that their relationship was doomed from the start, but Lim’s novel cannot be reduced to allegory.
Fog & Car is also about another marriage, namely, form and content. Lim has a poet’s eagle eye for resonant detail, an artist’s eye for symbolic representation. Throughout the novel, he plays with the book as an object, artfully “designing” his characters’ consciousnesses, their fragmentation, their confusion, their emptiness, on the page much like a painter would. Sarah Car, adrift and bereft, spends much of the novel’s first half figuring herself out, exploring things she’d forsaken, and ironically finds an anchor by learning to swim.
She swims with pleasure. The moment just previous to her entrance into the water is one of almost sexual anticipation. She thinks it may be a link to this other place, this relative place, one of body perhaps, except the anticipation seems to be not for any act but a void, or perhaps the body remembers something the mind, not being able to state, does not. In any case the actual swimming is also conscious, efforted, a process of learning. It is complex, in the end, and one which she enjoys participating in. The dive
into the water, the random slush and splish of first movement and then that sounds relaxation into a rhythm of arm and water, distance and turn,
turn and distance, forth
and back.
Lim’s use of paragraph breaks captures Sarah’s movement as much as it slows time down, compelling the reader to take in breaths, falling into Sarah’s rhythm. It’s simply breathtaking. Furthermore, a whole study could me made of how Lim employs ellipses, caesuras, sentence fragmentation, and pages of white space.
But Fog & Car is no lifeless formalist exercise. Every word serves greater concerns, that is, attempting to define what love means, what solitude is, how to heal, how to make sense of meaninglessness. Jim, while picking at his scabs, and digging the lint from his navel, takes enlightening philosophical turns. Reflecting on what it means “to live alone,” he decides it had meant “a life directed interiorly, shaved of all other perspective.” He’d set his house to be a “simple machine, a portal made of comfort and minimum decoration, to transport [him] to the nation where [he] had lived, named Mind, peopled by characters called Memory and Dream.” It is Jim’s depletion, forced by the huge energy expenditure of a hermit’s life, which ushers his awareness that he’s failed to realize his ambitions. And he ultimately learns that “self-knowledge was a myth of varying degrees of falsehoods.”
If Lim’s focus remained here, that is, on the contrast between Jim and Sarah’s ways of handling their divorce, Jim wavering between navel-gazing and nostalgia, Sarah allowing everything to fall apart, it would have been enough. But the narrative, in a manner at times astounding and often confounding, takes off in unexpected directions, much like the dream-logic of a David Lynch film. The mysterious twist begins when Sarah discovers a lost friend of Jim’s, named, appropriately enough, Frank Exit. Through a series of serendipitous encounters all threads somehow intertwine. How Lim manages to negotiate the reversals, to maintain believability, to take the reader with him, is only part of his success, for it is, ironically, the story’s lack of resolution that brings satisfaction.
Divided into three sections, “Mirror,” “Marriage,” and “Mirage,” Fog & Car masterfully navigates the subtext beneath dissolved relationships, paradoxically uses silence to create form. It balances, albeit in a detached tone, compassionate depictions of moral dissolution with Murakami-styled fabulist plot departures, dramatic reversals, and coincidental connections. It leaves the reader with a balled up jumble of narrative threads, but in such a sophisticated and befuddling manner as to force Murakami’s own mind into a tailspin. Fog & Car is an extraordinary debut.» - John Madera

Hans Henny Jahnn - The most terrifying author of the 20th century: writer of Baroque sexuality, of fleshiness and macabre desperation

Hans Henny Jahnn, The Ship (Scribner, 1961)

«Hans Henny Jahnn (1894-1959) is one of Germany's most controversial modern authors, in large part due to sharply diverging reactions to the depictions of sado-masochistic brutality, incest, and homoeroticism in his plays and novels. Jahnn's rank as a writer has long been a topic of intense debate between rival schools of critics, and his works have provoked extreme responses, both positive and negative, from a wide spectrum of scholars, writers, and critics, including such prominent figures as Alfred Döblin, Walter Benjamin, Thomas and Klaus Mann, Wolfgang Koeppen, Walter and Adolf Muschg, Wilhelm Emrich, Hubert Fichte and many others.»

«This book is devastating. Even in the fairly rough English translation, it lodged in my brain and I consider it one of the more powerful and disturbing works of the twentieth century. I first encountered Jahnn in the collection Black Letters Unleashed - an excerpt from The Ship called "Kebad Kenya," which can be read as a stand-alone story. "Kebad Kenya" is also contained in Thirteen Uncanny Stories. Try to find and read this story! I'll post some of it here soon.
Atlas Press published a translation of Jahnn's 1962 novella The Night of Lead. They say that it "shows Jahnn at his darkest: man is portrayed as the toy of supernatural powers, where his only certainty is a bodily existence which, in turn, is blindly bound to the laws of growth, death and decay and procreation - the major themes of Jahnn’s writing." This description can also apply to The Ship. Even after reading Lovecraft and Thomas Bernhard, I'm tempted to think of Jahnn as the most terrifying author. Bernhard can make me feel a little crazy (finishing Correction was one of the more masochistic things I've ever done, and I grew up on gore movies), but he's often hilarious. Jahnn isn't very funny. He's bleak and unrelenting bizarre.» - ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot

«the intro namechecks both melville and giorgio de chirico and the book indeed is an odd combination of nautical metaphysics and surrealism’s insidiously creepy emptying out.
an intense mystery story, not unlike the slow build-up of a bela tarr movie. in places it moves at a wild pace like a murder story’s final confrontation or a chase scene; other times it lingers endlessly over each character’s neurotics and guilt and anxiety–everyone in it an active raskolnikov. (and maybe the book is one long crime and punishment minus the denouement–just accusations and guilt.)
i did find myself a little struck by tedium midway through, waiting as the horror story set up itself–but then man, did i get walloped by the ending. it certainly leaves an impression…
and other than this overall, final and somewhat crushing impression, which is weighty and mysteriously achieved, the sentence-by-sentence style is what i think’s also most memorable about it. (even so, it’s a sum greater than its parts.) but here’s but one early example:
“We have witnessed the horrible again and again, a transformation no one could foresee. A healthy body is run over by a truck, crushed. Blood, once secreted, once feeling its way blindly through the body, pulsating in a meshwork of thin streams, spreading the chemically charged hormones and their mysterious functions like a red tree inside man–this blood now runs out shapelesssly in great puddles. And still no one grasps that, in a network of veins, it has form. But even more horrible–the death struggle itself, in which the innumerable organs, which we believe we feel, take part. Terror is stronger in us than delight”» - Eugene Lim

Some quotes from the book:

"And he discovered that he was inferior to these men. They had had experience in every direction. At fourteen they had already mistaken the joys of Hell for the bliss of Paradise, and, later, stood again and again with empty hands in a completely illuminated world . . . Gustave envied them, not for their miserable experiences, but for the particular smell of reality which would never be his because he didn’t have the courage, wasn’t sufficiently carefree, to let himself be torn to shreds for no good reason."

"He, Gustave, had seen him hanging in the thorny thicket of overpowering hellish hatred, at the mercy of a horrible heightening of his desires, a supernatural instrument of accumulated sterility, bursting upon all growing things like a shower of hail."

"The futile expectations of a condemned creature are without parallel; the hope of being allowed to cross the saving threshold of a miracle is the bedfellow of the fear of death."
Hans Henny Jahnn, The Night of Lead, Tran. by Malcolm Green (Atlas Press, 1995)

«This may be one of the most uncomfortable books of all time.
It's still in print, but only 300 copies were made, many of them reserved for subscribers.
Atlas's copy:
Self-revelations after time and death, an extraordinary novella from the oddest of the German Expressionists whose works are undergoing a complete revaluation in France at present where many translations are appearing.
Hans Henny Jahnn, (1894-1959) established his name as a major writer with his first publication, Pastor Ephraim Magnus, a play written in exile during the First World War which brought him the coveted Kleist Prize. It also revealed him as an highly uncomfortable writer; his style was and remained idiosyncratic, bearing the discerning influence of Expressionism and later Joyce, and containing the timbre of the antique tragedies. In both his writing and life he rejected society’s morals and institutions, psychological interpretation, dualism, and the enslavement of the world about us by homo faber, championing in their stead a heathen, pan-erotic return to the deeper strata of mythology, where time and place converge into one.
The Night of Lead, published in 1962, shows Jahnn at his darkest: man is portrayed as the toy of supernatural powers, where his only certainty is a bodily existence which, in turn, is blindly bound to the laws of growth, death and decay and procreation - the major themes of Jahnn’s writing. But in the compassion demonstrated by the novel’s central character, Jahnn points to the one possibility to gain some kind of liberty: turning one’s back on conventional morals and embracing creation in its fullness.
Jahnn has never enjoyed popular success, but he is often viewed as one of the most influential and important German-speaking writers of this century, his works are currently being re-evaluated in France, where the majority have now been translated.» - kebadkenya.blogspot

Hans Henny Jahnn, Thirteen Uncanny Stories; Trans. by Gerda Jordan, Peter Lang Publishing, 1984.

"The stories presented in this volume were selected by Jahnn from [his novels] Perrudja [1929] and Fluß ohne Ufer and published in a separate volume in 1954. Their collective title, Thirteen Uncanny Stories (13 nicht geheure Geschichten) is misleading and may have been chosen as a catch word for selling purposes. They are in no way 'uncanny' in the light of Jahnn's philosophy and of his entire work. In the two novels they appear in various contexts, for example, as reading of history, 'Sassanidian King'; as entertainment at a sick-bed, 'The Slave's Story'; as a memory, 'A Boy Weeps.' This selection shows a cross section of various themes, or rather of Jahnn's variation on one theme, as well as a cross-section of his varied styles, from terse, saga-like compactness to the highly ornamental language of the Baroque."
...."'He was a writer of Baroque sexuality, of fleshiness and macabre desperation [...]. The reader continuously stumbles over coffins and tombs, witnesses deeds of horror, awesome fear of death and the performance of the necessities of metabolism....'
Thus wrote Werner Helwig to his close friend Hans Henny Jahnn. It was not Helwig's own criticism of Jahnn, but that of a critic he had invented in order to show Jahnn what the public thought of his work. No invented critic was needed, however; Jahnn is known as 'the writer who uncovered the hells of the flesh and drives, the abyss of demoniacal passions and sinister licentiousness,' his writings are described as 'materialism of pure faith in the body,' his reader is 'numbed by the eternal drone of the hormone organ.' Polite euphemism calls him the 'uncomfortable' writer.
...The object of this and similar criticism, Hans Henny Jahnn, novelist and dramatist, misunderstood in his life time and since his death, is little known in his own country, not to mention the outside world..."» - Gerda Jordan

Hans Henny Jahnn, Perrudja

(Originally published in 1929, the book was never translated into English. The German is available from Hoffman und Campe (1985), José Corti publishes the French translation by Reinhold Werner and Jean-Claude Marcadé.)

«I’ll just start with this: Hans Henny Jahnn is the single most underrated writer of the 20th century. Oh, yes, no doubt about it. He has written 5 truly great and mind-blowing plays and a few more very good ones. He has written two mind-blowing, game-changing novels. He has written a handful of mind-blowing shorter prose pieces. Of all that, only one play is still in print in an affordable edition in German. What translations exist into English barely scratches the surface of this man’s great work. It’s a shame. I repeat: it’s a shame. To single out one book of all them is hard, because all of them deserve to be read, translated, and passed around. However, I do understand if translator are careful when it comes to translating his opus magnum, Fluß Ohne Ufer, a sprawling trilogy of over 2000 pages, unfinished, and hard to sum up. Granted, it’s the best German novel of the past century, but that doesn’t make it easier to translate or sell. I understand that. Keeping all this in mind, however, I definitely do not understand why Jahnn’s first novel, the burning meteor that is Perrudja, has not been translated yet. Perrudja is, like Döblin’s novel, about the conditio humana, and about the threats that modernity has to offer the individual trapped in its machinery. But it takes a very different tack. Instead of looking forward, it looks backward: it’s gorged with myth and history. In Perrudja, there’s a main story, a suspenseful story at that, but there are also numerous smaller stories inserted into the main story, who elaborate upon the topics of the main story. Jahnn is an obsessive writer, obsessed with sexuality, religion, history, and violence, and Perrudja can be described as an epic of the body as it deals with all these elements inasmuch as they form part of our culture. It’s one of the most potent novels about how homosexuality is affected by the repressive modern society. Jahnn examines how our culture, behavior, history are permeated with violence, but his book isn’t bleak or negative. Jahnn believes in the potential of humanity for good, and this belief runs through every page of this incredible book. This is a book that will swallow you whole, a genuinely great read, and a great novel. Jahnn writes in a style that is both mythic and modern, and the result is a great, mad, colorful dream. Perrudja is a challenging read but an engaging one, a book that you can’t and shouldn’t miss. Read Jahnn, translate him. It’s shocking that he hasn’t already been translated.» - shigekuni.wordpress

«This is novel crawling with sex and violence. It’s about modernity, myth and masculinity. Can you believe no-one wanted to buy this huge and brilliant novel when it came out originally? I can’t, but here’s the deal. I’m biased, I guess. I love, cherish and admire Hans Henny Jahnn like few other writers. I think that he is, along with Döblin and Feuchtwanger, the greatest German novelist of the first half of the 20th century. He was also an accomplished playwright (see this blog next week for more news on that). When he wrote and published Perrudja, he was known as the infamous author of two scandalous plays. Perrudja took a long while to gestate, and almost as long to get published. And when it was published, few people bought it. This and other minor issues, such as the Third Reich, stopped him from finishing a sequel.
After the war he then published the first installment of what turned out to be his masterpiece, the three-volume Fluß Ohne Ufer, which is in many ways a continuation of Perrudja, only with the weight of Germany’s darkest decade behind it. Thinking and writing about that heinous period is, for a German, as it should be, always tinged with guilt. It is our grandparents and their neighbors who committed these atrocities or failed to stop them. Shame is also an important part of Perrudja, but Jahnn is ashamed of his fellow human beings, not just (but especially) of his compatriots. And, to a large extent, it is about fear: this book throbs with violence, but it is theirs, it is always a violence experienced by the main character, not a violence acted out, and the shame that the protagonist feels towards his fellow human beings, is but fear of that part of himself that is like them, it’s a fear of his own abyss.
Perrudja is a Bildungsroman-ish novel about a character called Perrudja. Perrudja is an anti-hero, or as his wife says at the end: a “not-hero”. The book does not chronicle his exploits, it shows him making sense of the world, and at the same time, the novel itself uses him to make sense of its own world. The way it does that is by using all the means that precocious, makin’-it-new modernism had to offer. Perrudja is a novel of many voices and traditions. Unexpectedly, for a playwright, these voices do not include an array of different human voices, no demotic speech ‘a la Joyce et al. Instead, Jahnn digs deep into the coffers of literature and culture and constructs a mosaic of language. There are mythical passages, modern short stories, folk tales, Jahnn is equally adept at levity and gravitas, he can write a chapter about a Babylonian king in almost Lutherian style and shine, and a small Kafkaesque story about a lost boy and dazzle. All these are interwoven with the main story, they both comment upon the story and are commented upon again by the main story.
And throning above it all is Jahnn’s authorial voice, which is both visceral & direct and aloof & heavy. Jahnn can lead you through a Norwegian wood, making you afraid of the cold and the animals therein; he can make your spine tingle upon hearing the screams of hungry horses in a stable; he can make you feel the pain of illicit sexual desire and the mortification at being not merely turned down, but being violated and humiliated by the man you want. Reading this novel you feel that nothing is out of reach of Jahnn. This is, of course, one reason why people did not take to it: it can be overpowering, this is a novel about everything, it contains at least five different books, among them a treatise about economics and one about myth. Oh, and sheet music. In many ways, this is a ‘typical’ modernist novel, a project along the lines of the Cantos, Pound’s attempt to “write paradise”; even its fragmented nature, due to the aborted second part, fits the pattern. Much of the appeal of works such as the Cantos will also appeal to the reader of Perrudja, but this novel is far more than just a grandstanding attempt to capture mankind in a fictional maze.
The difference is its protagonist: Perrudja is a weak character, a broken, despairing man, who cannot manage the modern world. At the beginning of the novel we meet him in the woods of Norway where he buys a horse to go with a piece of land and a farm that he just bought. He is, as far as he knows, without parents. At this point we have no idea about his financial situation: we don’t know where he had the money from to buy animals and property, and we don’t care. Perrudja’s youth and other events that have led up to him settling in the remote Norway mountains are later told us in a few inserted stories. That first chapter, “The Horse”, introduces us not only to Perrudja’s horse, but also to the emblematic nature of many of the book’s natural references. Elements such as the horse are shown to be a constant in cultural history. The retreat into the woods is not a retreat from civilization, it is rather a return to what Jahnn considers essential about modern man. Perrudja is not exceptional, as a character, but in the end, he turns out to transcend mere mortals, by encapsulating not just the conditio humana, but also the general build of our society, as the book moves from an almost abstract deluge of concerns to real-world particulars, such as the intricacies of modern capitalism.
The beginning can be taxing since Jahnn throws everything at us that he has: the topoi of animals, violence and history are touched and elaborated upon, even before we get a chance to get to know this Perrudja better. Also, to reread these passages is, also, to see, how much of the novel is seeded there, how nothing is wasted, although the book seems, especially in the early stages, excessive and indulgent. Plowing through the beginning is like a deal struck with the writer, who demands of the reader to understand the parameter of the story that is about to follow before he hands over that story. However, if I have made reading the beginning sound like a chore, I can assure you, it’s not. It may be difficult but it’s not forbidding. In fact, the first two chapters are deeply intriguing and they have, some years ago, sold me on the man’s work. The best section of the book, however, is a story from Perrudja’s youth that is inserted roughly halfway through the novel; many early fans of the novel, such as Klaus Mann, remarked upon the emotional power and brilliance of that episode.
Perrudja is 14 years old when his sexuality awakens. He lives with his aunts in the country and he is a spoiled boy, who makes friends with a 16 year old farm hand, Haakon. We see immediately that there is a power imbalance between the two and it’s not just the difference in age that creates this imbalance. As Haakon starts to make Perrudja pay him small sums of money, he is also involving the boy in the nitty-gritty reality of farm life. There are two events that are particularly significant to Perrudja’s awakening. The first is Perrudja’s confrontation with violence in the daily slaughter of swine and cows on farms. Having to slaughter a pig himself opens his eyes to the darkness in his culture. This marked difference between knowing that atrocities happen and becoming a part of the system that produces them is repeated near the end of the novel, where Perrudja finds out that he is the richest man on earth and complicit in many modern atrocities. Perrudja is aghast to find out he’s the master of over “a hundred million slaves”. No matter how much we may retreat, we are always, to an extent, complicit in the things we don’t try to stop. Running away does not absolve you of these things.
The other event is even more significant: to accompany Haakon across the country, Perrudja saddles up behind him, clinging to his back while feeling the wild rhythms of the horse below him. Perrudja falls for Haakon, although he doesn’t know it. Haakon does, however, and tempts his young acolyte time and again, stripping him naked, daring Perrudja to move on him. Perrudja, however, is completely confused and helpless. He’s a typical teenager, he has no idea how to translate his confused desire into action. Thus, all he does is trail Haakon on his exploits until events come to a head when he witnesses Haakon rape a maid. Upon seeing Perrudja’s fear and befuddlement, Haakon threatens him into silence, beats him and humiliates him by urinating on him. This event forms Perrudja’s adult sex life. Perrudja turns into a man who has many desires but is afraid of acting on them. Being attracted to men is something he is never able to own up to, although he does have homosexual affairs now and then. He literally transforms his farm into a fortress against the society around him that is intolerant of his urges.
He is his own worst enemy, however, internalizing the prejudice. There is violence in his relationships with men, but it’s triggered by his fear and his way of coping (or not) with that fear. He’s also riving away people that love him, engaging in self-destructive behavior and giving himself, simply, up. Critics in Jahnn’s time have attacked Perrudja for being a novel of “flesh and death”, and it is between these two poles that Perrudja is caught, opting for retreat, quietude, until he cannot retreat any more because, as mentioned, he practically owns the world. He marries but his wife, Signe (pun intended, clearly), leaves him, reproaching him for “not having changed her world”. Critics, among them the editor of his collected works (see bibliographic reference above), have pointed to the way that she makes her short appearance in the novel and drops out again quickly enough. What they don’t understand is that the normative relationship within the novel is homosexual. They are violent, but because of Perrudja’s failings, not because of an inherent fault. The relationship to Signe is different: the patriarchal assumptions behind many heterosexual relationships are exposed in the rituals of courtship that are expected of Perrudja. The relationship is less important than its beginnings and its end.
Near the end, his former wife Signe runs in with a circus and it is this circus who encapsulates much of the world’s depravities and brutality, turning into another of Jahnn’s emblematic images. Jahnn’s novel charts the pessimism of a sensitive soul up against the world. There are two key phrases that people utter when discussing Perrudja’s humanity. Signe points out the fact that he is a “not-hero” (not anti-hero), defining a hero as someone who acts upon his desires and makes them come true. She closes with a direct address, telling Perrudja: “You are the human one.” In contrast, Haakon, when he dresses Perrudja down, tells the crying bundle of misery that 14 year-old Perrudja was: “You are a useless human being if you cry.”
Being a useless human being is not a bad thing in Jahnn’s book. Jahnn, similar to Hawthorne, has been founder of a spiritual community, which did not survive for long. This bitterness towards utopia, combined with such world-shaking events such as the Great War, which had taken place all of ten years ago and rising Nationalism, Antisemitism etc. among the Germans, clearly inform the abyss that opens up beyond Perrudja’s fortress and the abyss in his own heart. Reading the book one cannot help but think of the “uses” that a few years later his compatriots made of human beings. Perrudja is a harrowing novel that leads us deep not into the darkness behind civilization, but the darkness civilization is made of. Joyce, whose influence on Perrudja is palpable, might have been a paragon in this, as well. Jahnn, together with geniuses like Döblin, was clearly engaged in trying to create the conscience of his race. He did not forge it. Instead, as Perrudja testifies, he violently tried to break it from the stone quarry of Western culture.» - shigekuni.wordpress

The first time Hans Henny Jahnn's trilogy Fluß ohne Ufer came to my attention was in Reiner Stach's biography of Kafka. I noted that of the "five monumental unfinished ruins of modern German-language prose" that includes two by his subject, River Without Shore is the only one still to be translated into English. A few years later, China Miéville recommended The Ship, the first part of the trilogy that had been translated over forty years ago. Imagine a longer, more expressionist version of The Stoker and you have a good idea of what it's like. It made me wish the rest was available in English, not out of some generalised curiosity but an unfocused yearning, as if the German volumes resting on a bookstall stood for the generalised promise of all unread books, the fulfilment of which also remains untranslated.
It wasn't until I read Landscape as the Origin of Music, Noor de Winter's essay published in the first edition of Reliquiae, that the content of the trilogy revealed itself and suggested in part why it remains untranslated: "full of reflections on music, nature and the creation of art", Fluß ohne Ufer "tells the story of fictional composer Gustav Anias Horn and his friend Tutein, their travels and friendship". This is a long way from an uncanny thriller and much closer to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. No wonder publishers have shied away. "Anias" the essay explains, "is haunted by the possibility of permanent pain without salvation" to the extent that, on a trip to Norway, he empathises with the suffering of birch trees whose leaves are used to feed livestock. He develops "a supernatural longing" to "capture the melody of the soil, the song of the gravel on which the birches grew".

De Winter describes Anias as an artist-as-listener rather than "someone who imprints his vision upon his surroundings"; he is "someone through whom a vision of something else can be transported, translated, transformed". In this way the landscape is an unread book whose translation takes another form. The literal nature of this transformation is revealed when Anias discovers that birch bark looks very much like mechanical piano rolls whose growth rings can be transliterated into written music.
Ever-changing interpretations braided themselves into each other, appeared like a deluge of strange harmonies suddenly dissolving, falling apart to lamenting antiphonies. [...] When I had played this music I knew it didn't originate in me, it came to me. A miraculous telluric power of disclosure had used me.
However miraculous, the essay concludes by acknowledging that such music "can express only something of the wonder that [Anias] experienced in the birch grove" and that it is "perhaps the lot of the artist-as-listener to acknowledge the deficiency of any particular realisation of their theme".
This final point reminds us of the closeness we have to the book and distance to its object. While we read of Anias' project and perhaps become enchanted by his example and practice, what we read is the opposite of any epiphanic vertigo we might experience before a landscape or listening to a piece of music. Any lyricism the narrative might have is a result of the animation of the distance between itself and its subject. Music is its own unmediated presence; literature is entirely mediation. We are like Anias himself with the only difference being that our realisation of deficiency is itself the experience of art. An impoverished experience, we might think. So what does this mean for the novel if, as Walter Pater wrote, "all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music"?
The difference between the novel and music appears like that between sociology and sleep: the first only a matter of comprehension and density and, the second, a matter of their absence. The curious thing about "the condition of music" is its lack of content. Music can lead one to sense an elemental pressure irreducible to notation or lyric sheet. If we compare it to a vision of nature, the condition is equivalent to where a landscape leads: the blank horizon. From stoney escarpment and dense copse to lush meadow and glistening stream, the eye is drawn to the empty sky in the distance; an epiphany without manifestation. The urge to capture the experience can be seen in the incessant and forlorn posting of heavily filtered nature photographs.
In contrast, there is no visible horizon of the novel. The reader experiences the book by descending into a literary landscape: walking along a dirt path, sheltering in a dappled grove, paddling in a stream. The horizon is obscured. Poetry, which may be thought more tuneful, is elevated by being set to music – think of Blake's Jerusalem – while a novel turned into an opera has no bearing on the original. What's closer might be the Proustian epiphany in which time opens and collapses like a concertina, except, again, this is narrated like Anias' experience of telluric power. We might therefore assume that even closer is dreamlike, automatic writing taking precedence over conscious mastery, allowing the chance effects of music to occur. But this would seem to diminish the form, at best subordinate it to music and nature. Notice that the distance between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake is immeasurably greater than that between a Bach fugue and a Schoenberg piano piece. Yet what if you read novels to approach that horizon? Where is the horizon of narrative?
Perhaps merely asking these questions defines a particular experience of reading and indicates a fundamental disconnection with the prevailing mode of reading fiction, which focuses on the foreground and, if it is aware of something more, misplaces the horizon, like Bach admirers seeking the true Goldberg among all his variations. What's lacking from literary criticism is the expression and investigation of this experience and even though, for me, this must be its primary purpose. It's why Knausgaard's My Struggle is such a remarkable work. He is able to unite the banality of a life with the unaccountable experience of art. So perhaps indirection is the necessary future of the form, although, as Fluß ohne Ufer demonstrates, it has always been the form, waiting to be translated, a song waiting to be heard, a clearing waiting for daylight.
- Steve Mitchelmore

 Posts about Jahnn at flowerville

Thomas Freeman, The Case of Hans Henny Jahnn: Criticism & the Literary Outsider

Read it at Google Books