Friedrich Dürrenmatt - Kafka’s greatest heir: searing, tragicomic explorations of the ironies of justice and the corruptibility of institutions

Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Possible is Monstrous: Selected Poems, Trans. by Daniele Pantano, Dzanc Books, 2010.

"Much the way Dürrenmatt himself reclaims in verse the psyche of the Minotaur from the ancient labyrinth, so Daniele Pantano brings down from the Alps and the secret land of bank vaults the poetry of Switzerland’s most important writer of the twentieth century. The fidelity of these translations not only owes itself to Pantano being one of Dürrenmatt’s countrymen. He is a poet as well, one with a real ear and eye for Dürrenmatt’s sardonic imagination that is peculiarly Swiss and pan-European at the same time." - James Reidel

"What was the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt, author of The Visit and one of the greatest and most inscrutable dramatists of the 20th Century, really thinking – about life, love, drama and politics? Here, in The Possible Is Monstrous, a tremendously revealing and stimulating German-English dual language volume of his selected poetry, is a perfect place to find out. For in his poetry Dürrenmatt reveals sides of himself not readily discernible in his plays. In addition to providing English-speaking readers with new access to Dürrenmatt and his work, The Possible Is Monstrous will be of great interest to scholars of the dramatist.
Daniele Pantano's translations of Dürrenmatt's poems into English are themselves a significant achievement in poetic translation. His translations of Dürrenmatt's poems are a model of the elusive and delicate balance between accuracy and readability that makes The Possible Is Monstrous so satisfying." - Dr. Victor Peppard

"This collection is long overdue. Long acknowledged as a master playwright and novelist, Dürrenmatt is at last presented as one of the great poets of the last century. Daniele Pantano's excellent translation captures all the wit of a writer frustrated by the times he lived in - balancing at once the personal and the political to produce work that is genuinely vivid and exciting." - Rob Shearman
Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Assignment: or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers, Trans. by Joel Agee, University Of Chicago Press, 2008.

"In the Swiss playwright's wracking, brilliantly conceived new novel (published in German in 1986 and resourcefully translated by Agee), nothing is what it seems. Otto von Lambert, a well-known psychiatrist, gives F., a filmmaker, the "assignment" to follow the trail of his late wife, Tina, and learn why and how she was murdered in an unidentified Middle Eastern country, her raped body thrown to the jackals at the base of a mysterious Shi'ite shrine. F. accepts because she is mesmerized by Tina's journal, which is filled with hatred for her husband and intensified by a charged note: "I am being watched." In Durrenmatt's blasted, menacing landscape everyone is being observed by everyone else literally, by field glasses, telescope, camera's eye; and figuratively, by the stealthy, obsessive scrutiny of each by each for purposes shrouded in ambiguity. The closer F. approaches some answer, the more it eludes her as mysteries are further coiled and compounded with false leads and shifting or mistaken identities. Out of these mazes within mazes the author extrapolates an arresting metaphysical mystery in 24 brief chapters, each cast as a single, spinning, convoluted sentence, each leading to further enigmas in the jagged, highly pictorial tale. Kierkegaard, who is cited repeatedly, is a presiding spirit; and philosophical, theological, mythic elements, instead of distracting, add depth and resonance to this remarkable tale." - Publishers Weekly

"Tina von Lambert lies violated and dead at the foot of the Al-Hakim ruin. Her husband feels he drove her to this sordid end, and in guilty recompense hires F's film crew to document the mysterious circumstances surrounding Tina's death. Against her better judgment, F pursues the trail to a desert hotel where appearances begin to crumble, testing her ability to distinguish reality from perception. In this tightly crafted thriller, his first American publication in nearly 20 years, Durrenmatt demonstrates considerable virtuosity: each of 24 chapters is a single sentence. We may all be "under observation," but the question is, Whose observation? The answer informs this novel's puzzle. Highly recommended" - Paul E. Hutchison

"In Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s experimental thriller The Assignment, the wife of a psychiatrist has been raped and killed near a desert ruin in North Africa. Her husband hires a woman named F. to reconstruct the unsolved crime in a documentary film. F. is soon unwittingly thrust into a paranoid world of international espionage where everyone is watched—including the watchers. After discovering a recent photograph of the supposed murder victim happily reunited with her husband, F. becomes trapped in an apocalyptic landscape riddled with political intrigue, crimes of mistaken identity, and terrorism.
F.’s labyrinthine quest for the truth is Dürrenmatt’s fictionalized warning against the dangers of a technologically advanced society that turns everyday life into one of constant scrutiny. Joel Agee’s elegant translation will introduce a fresh generation of English-speaking readers to one of European literature’s masters of language, suspense, and dystopia."

“The narrative is accelerated from the start... As the novella builds to its horripilating climax, we realize the extent to which all values have thereby been inverted. The Assignment is a parable of hell for an age consumed by images.” — New York Times Book Review

“His most ambitious book... dark and devious... almost obsessively drawn to mankind’s most fiendish crimes.” — Chicago Tribune

"Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s short novel The Assignment, originally published in German in 1986, is written in twenty-four long sentences (Dürrenmatt’s model for the novel’s structure was said to be the twenty-four sections of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier I). It is about a filmmaker, a woman simply referred to as F., hired by a famous Swiss psychiatrist named Otto von Lambert who has written a well-known book on terrorism. F’s job is to solve, and document via film the solving of, the mystery of the death of von Lambert’s wife Tina, assaulted and murdered at the foot of a ruin in Egypt called Al-Hakim. It is soon revealed that von Lambert’s reasons for commissioning the documentary are deeply rooted within his intrinsic selfishness and desire for fame (indeed, within the novel the investigation into the death of Tina von Lambert is followed closely by the international press). The psychiatrist feels a sense of responsibility for his wife’s murder, but only because he treated her as “a case, instead of a person.”1 It was this maltreatment, which Tina apparently discovered through his notes on his observations of her, that made her flee their home. Now the psychiatrist would like to have his voyeuristic actions toward his wife documented, partly as an ostensible warning to others against such an unethical doctor-patient relationship but primarily so that he might pacify his own conscience while still expanding his fame within his field, even when it is at the sake of his reputation.
Before her death, Tina von Lambert kept her own diary—which F. reads with great interest—in which she observed the attentions of her husband (whom she describes as a “monster”). In fact, she has observed her husband as much as he has observed her. Of particular interest to F. are two passages in Tina von Lambert’s diary in which she has written, chillingly, “I am being watched.” It is a statement that casts a long shadow over the narrative. Who had been observing Tina von Lambert? And if not only her husband, for what reasons did the other observe her?
It is an extremely open-ended question, and one that suggests a mimetic quality between F. and the way in which the reader of the novel “observes” F. unraveling the story of Tina von Lambert. The narrative is written in the third person subjective, and as it follows F.’s descent into the world of intelligence gathering, The Assignment considers the degree to which the roles of observer and observed define the reader’s place within society. It is interesting to note that Tina, who is both observed and observer, elicits both sympathy and contempt. Even F., one of the most The Assignment’s sympathetic characters, directs her creative energies toward wholly voyeuristic ends: Otto von Lambert has come across her while she is filming the funeral of his wife. The film is being made as part of a documentary project F. undertakes toward the “still vague idea of creating a total portrait, namely a portrait of our planet, by combining random scenes into a whole.”
In fact the preposterous, even monstrous impetus of both F.’s and von Lambert’s projects within the novel—the “total” portrait of the planet, as if such a thing were possible, and the solving of one person’s murder not out of any sense of justice but as an act of self-abnegation—are indicative of the futility Dürrenmatt expresses in The Assignment: the futility of any attempt to reach a point of certainty and origin in a search for absolute knowledge, and the madness with which human beings nevertheless try to accumulate such knowledge in the face of the destructiveness that such an accumulation inflicts on others.
For example, after accepting von Lambert’s proposal F. travels to North Africa to investigate Tina von Lambert’s death and falls into a world in which surveillance is used to gain political power, even when the knowledge gained from surveillance is nearly always flawed and warped in its transmission. The victims of this knowledge are haphazardly punished in order to reach a point of conclusion and certainty: at one point F. comes across a man who is imprisoned and then summarily executed as the supposed murderer of Tina von Lambert. (It is later revealed that the man, who is innocent of the crimes he is accused of, has simply been used as a political symbol.) It’s a telling point about how reaching a conclusion is often more important to the person who uses knowledge as a form of control than whether that conclusion contains any sense of justice.
Two other characters, both of whom become profound symbols within the novel, share F.’s and Otto von Lambert’s desire to pursue self-created, Sisyphean tasks in order to give themselves the impression of self-agency. One, known only as D., is a logician who has chosen his field because logic is “beyond all reality and removed from every sort of existential mishap.” D. feels that a very suitable definition of contemporary man might be that he is man under observation —observed by the state, for one, with more and more sophisticated methods, while man makes more and more desperate attempts to escape being observed, which in turn renders man increasingly suspect in the eyes of the state and the state even more suspect in the eyes of man
Despite this philosophy, D. professes that the act of being observed is something profoundly desired by mankind, “that [people], too, felt meaningless unless they were being observed, and that this was the reason why they all observed and took snapshots and movies of each other, for fear of experiencing the meaninglessness of their existence in the face of a dispersing universe.” Here humanity is on a pivot point between existence and non-existence, and balancing these two positions drives D. into madness; without observation it is as though human beings are cast into the darkness of non-existence.
Another character, a photographer named Polypheme (after the cyclops in the Odyssey) has built a career out of doing surveillance work for governments and weapons-manufacturing companies. Polypheme also who takes pictures of operatives being assassinated, utilizing technologically advanced cameras that allow him to divide time into infinitely small pieces, far beyond what human perception is capable of capturing. He tells F. (with the certainty that D. has used in describing the privileged place of logic as a tool in assimilating reality) that “reality [can] only be comprehended by means of a camera, aseptically, the camera alone was capable of capturing space and time within which experience took place, while without a camera, experience slid off into nothingness, since the moment something was experienced it had passed and was therefore just a memory and, like all memory, falsified, fictive.” Even the methods of the logician and the photographer, however, do not preclude the idea that, were they granted a glimpse of “reality,” they would only understand that reality through the limitations of human perception.
As in the opening segment of Citizen Kane —where a newsreel detailing a man’s death is unable to encompass the breadth of his life, giving way to a detailed narrative that is still unable to capture him—The Assignment, construes time and memory as things that are constantly fading into darkness, while humanity deludes itself into believing that the darkness is conquerable.2 In fact, the darkness’s enormity—the darkness of oblivion, time, and space—is (quite literally) unimaginable by the human beings who attempt to grasp it, and use it for their own ends. - Jordan Anderson
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion, Trans. by Joel Agee, University Of Chicago Press, 2006.

"This volume offers bracing new translations of two precursors to the modern detective novel by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, whose genre-bending mysteries recall the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet and anticipate the postmodern fictions of Paul Auster and other contemporary neo-noir novelists. Both mysteries follow Inspector Barlach as he moves through worlds in which the distinction between crime and justice seems to have vanished. In The Judge and His Hangman, Barlach forgoes the arrest of a murderer in order to manipulate him into killing another, more elusive criminal. And in Suspicion, Barlach pursues a former Nazi doctor by checking into his clinic with the hope of forcing him to reveal himself. The result is two thrillers that bring existential philosophy and the detective genre into dazzling convergence."

"Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990) was best known as the author of clever, morally inquisitive plays such as ''The Visit'' and ''The Physicists.'' In the early 1950s he also wrote three short, spellbinding mystery novels, which the University of Chicago Press has reissued in paperback with new translations from the German by Joel Agee: The Pledge and The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman & Suspicion. The latter includes a thoughtful foreword by Sven Birkerts, who praises Dürrenmatt''s talent as a captivating entertainer who could also ''play through complex moral issues with a speed-chess decisiveness and inexorability.''
. . . These are slender tales. But they have the weight and texture of classics. Mystery readers should be grateful to the University of Chicago Press for bringing these gems back to life." — Richard Lipez

Read it at Google Books

Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Selected Writings, Volume 2, Fictions, Theodore Ziolkowski Editor, Trans. by Joel Agee, University Of Chicago Press, 2006.

"The Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–90) was one of the most important literary figures of the second half of the twentieth century. During the years of the cold war, arguably only Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a presence in European letters. Yet outside Europe, this prolific author is primarily known for only one work, The Visit. With these long-awaited translations of his plays, fictions, and essays, Dürrenmatt becomes available again in all his brilliance to the English-speaking world.
This second volume of Selected Writings reveals a writer who may stand as Kafka’s greatest heir. Dürrenmatt’s novellas and short stories are searing, tragicomic explorations of the ironies of justice and the corruptibility of institutions. Apart from The Pledge, a requiem to the detective story that was made into a film starring Jack Nicholson, none of the works in this volume are available elsewhere in English. Among the most evocative fictions included here are two novellas: The Assignment and Traps. The Assignment tells the story of a woman filmmaker investigating a mysterious murder in an unnamed Arab country and has been hailed by Sven Birkerts as “a parable of hell for an age consumed by images.” Traps, meanwhile, is a chilling comic novella about a traveling salesman who agrees to play the role of the defendant in a mock trial among dinner companions—and then pays the ultimate penalty.
Dürrenmatt has long been considered a great writer—but one unfairly neglected in the modern world of letters. With these elegantly conceived and expertly translated volumes, a new generation of readers will rediscover his greatest works.
Friedrich Durrenmatt, Selected Writings, Volume 3, Essays, Kenneth J. Northcott Editor, Trans. by Joel Agee, Introduction by Brian Evenson, University Of Chicago Press, 2006.

"Dürrenmatt’s essays, gathered in this third volume of Selected Writings, are among his most impressive achievements. Their range alone is astonishing: he wrote with authority and charm about art, literature, philosophy, politics, and the theater. The selections here include Dürrenmatt’s best-known essays, such as “Theater Problems” and “Monster Essay on Justice and Law,” as well as the notes he took on a 1970 journey in America (in which he finds the United States “increasingly susceptible to every kind of fascism”). This third volume of Selected Writings also includes essays that shade into fiction, such as “The Winter War in Tibet,” a fantasy of a third world war waged in a vast subterranean labyrinth—a Plato’s Cave allegory rewritten for our own troubled times.
Friedrich Durrenmatt, Selected Writings, Volume I, Plays, Kenneth J. Northcott Editor, Trans. by Joel Agee, University Of Chicago Press, 2006.

"Dürrenmatt’s concerns are timeless, but they are also the product of his Swiss vantage during the cold war: his key plays, gathered in the first volume of Selected Writings, explore such themes as guilt by passivity, the refusal of responsibility, greed and political decay, and the tension between justice and freedom. In The Visit, for instance, an old lady who becomes the wealthiest person in the world returns to the village that cast her out as a young woman and offers riches to the town in exchange for the life of the man, now its mayor, who once disgraced her. Joel Agee’s crystalline translation gives a fresh lease to this play, as well as four others: The Physicists, Romulus the Great, Hercules and the Augean Stables, and The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi.
Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Pledge, Trans. by Joel Agee, University Of Chicago Press, 2006.

"Set in a small town in Switzerland, The Pledge centers around the murder of a young girl and the detective who promises the victim’s mother he will find the perpetrator. After deciding the wrong man has been arrested for the crime, the detective lays a trap for the real killer—with all the patience of a master fisherman. But cruel turns of plot conspire to make him pay dearly for his pledge. Here Friedrich Dürrenmatt conveys his brilliant ear for dialogue and a devastating sense of timing and suspense. Joel Agee’s skilled translation effectively captures the various voices in the original, as well as its chilling conclusion.
One of Dürrenmatt’s most diabolically imagined and constructed novels, The Pledge was adapted for the screen in 2000 in a film directed by Sean Penn and starring Jack Nicholson."

"The Swiss essayist Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-90) was a prolific writer of detective novels with a low regard for detective fiction. ''You set up your stories logically, like a chess game: all the detective needs to know is the rules, he replays the moves of the game, and checkmate, the criminal is caught and justice has triumphed. This fantasy drives me crazy.'' Dürrenmatt''s tale doesn''t so much alter the rules as sweep all the figures to the floor. Three young girls, each with blond braids and red dresses, are found dismembered in the woods. A pattern seems to emerge, yet the attempt to catch the killer develops into a fruitless obsession which drives the head of the investigation insane. Dürrenmatt incorporates fairy-tale archetypes to distort the typical conventions of a psychological thriller—when little girls in red dresses skip off into the woods, should the investigation team focus their enquiries on a big, bad wolf? Not a book for anyone who likes a tidy conclusion, but as Dürrenmatt says: ''The only way to avoid getting crushed by absurdity, is to humbly include the absurd in our calculations.'' — The Guardian

"A stark essay in crime and pursuit, as terse and assured in construction as the best of Simenon." - John Coleman

Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Visit, Trans. by Joel Agee, Grove Press, 2010.

"Dürrenmatt once wrote of himself: “I can best be understood if one grasps grotesqueness,” and The Visit is a consummate, alarming Dürrenmatt blend of hilarity, horror, and vertigo. The play takes place “somewhere in Central Europe” and tells of an elderly millionairess who, merely on the promise of her millions, swiftly turns a depressed area into a boom town. But the condition attached to her largesse, which the locals learn of only after they are enmeshed, is murder. Dürrenmatt has fashioned a macabre and entertaining parable that is a scathing indictment of the power of greed."
Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Physicists, Trans. by James Kirkup, Grove Press, 1994.

"The world’s greatest physicist, Johann Wilhelm Möbius, is in a madhouse, haunted by recurring visions of King Solomon. He is kept company by two other equally deluded scientists: one who thinks he is Einstein, another who believes he is Newton. It soon becomes evident, however, that these three are not as harmlessly lunatic as they appear. Are they, in fact, really mad? Or are they playing some murderous game, with the world as the stake? For Möbius has uncovered the mystery of the universe—and therefore the key to its destruction—and Einstein and Newton are vying for this secret that would enable them to rule the earth."

"Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Physicists is one of many physicist-centered dramas written in the 1950s and 1960s. At that time the potential that scientific innovation held was largely seen in the awesome destructive power of the atomic and hydrogens bombs. Science seemed to have outstripped man's ability to utilize it for the betterment of humanity. The Cold War, the arms race, and policies of mutually assured destruction suggested that instead science was too easily being used for bad - indeed, literally world-threatening - ends. Man could not be trusted with the knowledge that physicists were able to discover.
Dürrenmatt's physicists take one of the few options available to them to keep the knowledge they have from falling into hands ill-prepared to do what is best with it: they get themselves locked up in a mental institution.
The Physicists begins with a murder. A patient has murdered a nurse at the sanatorium. Because he is believed to be insane the criminal investigation is a largely superficial one. But the inspector does note his annoyance: three months earlier another patient had murdered another nurse.
Three physicists live together in the wing. One believes he is Einstein, one believes he is Newton (but occasionally tells people that he is in fact Einstein, though "in fact he really believes he is Newton"), and one understands that he is Johann Wilhelm Möbius but believes King Solomon talks to him. In fact, however, the three physicists are all sane.
Möbius feigns insanity because he discovered the "Unitary Theory of Elementary Particles". And he doesn't feel mankind is ready for the consequences:
'The result is - devastating. New and inconceivable forces would be unleashed, making possible a technical advance that would transcend the wildest flights of fantasy if my findings were to fall into the hands of mankind.'
The men who pretend to be Einstein and Newton are physicists in the employ of intelligence services, representing the Western and Eastern powers of Cold War times, sent there to get Möbius' great discovery.
The murders of the nurses were necessary, because each grew too convinced that the patients were, in fact, sane. At the end of the first act Möbius finds himself with the same dilemma and sees murder as the only way to protect his secret.
Things are further complicated, in the form of the founder of the sanatorium, Fräulein Doktor Mathilde von Zahnd, who is the only one who appears truly mentally unstable. She too knows more than she originally let on, and before they know it the physicists find they have dug themselves a hole out of which they can not easily escape.
Dürrenmatt's comedy is very clever, and the situation he puts his characters in an ingenious and amusing one. The moral dilemma of the modern scientist no longer excites quite as much as it did at the height of the Cold War, but it is still a very effective play." - The Complete Review

Dürrenmatt’s Fiction, Introduction by Theodore Ziolkowski

Dürrenmatt’s Drama, Introduction by Kenneth J. Northcott

Dürrenmatt’s Essays, Introduction by Brian Evenson

Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990)

Uwe Johnson - He wield his language(s) with a virtuosity surpassed by no other German writer, and makes no concessions to the tastes of public

Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries (Jahrestage), Trans. by Leila Vennewitz, Harcourt, 1975.

"It is - among many other things - a book about the city as seen by a poet with a wayward eye and prose to match. Lingering on the texture of a surface, he can turn the most familiar sight into a revelation. (...) Johnson's prose defies translation: that he survives at all is a minor miracle. One would desperately wish for a major one, because Johnson in the original can be superb. (...) Reading Uwe Johnson in English is better than not reading him at all, because even in this less than perfect version he comes across as an uncommonly original and provocative voice." - Ernst Pawel

"(T)he publication of this fascinating, infuriating, inchoate jumble is something of an event in postwar German literature (.....) Johnson's way, although no doubt tiresome and gimmicky at times, is that of an admirably uncompromising and impressively earnest inventor. Not only does he wield his language(s) with a virtuosity surpassed by - arguably - no other German writer of his generation (God help his translators); he also makes almost no definable concessions to the tastes and habits of the novel-reading public. There's no sex for a start" - Times Literary Supplement

"Clearly, therfore, despite its lighter moments, its superb (and for the most part defensible) waspishness, its grand, ingenious design, and the linguistic subtlety, versatility, and inventiveness which are among Johnson's hallmarks - despite all this and more besides, there is no likelihood Jahrestage will wear well. It is a highly allusive work, addressed much of the time to insiders (.....) If it is much respected and little read, embalmed in academic libraries as a remarkable but increasingly inaccessible relic, no one should be surprised." - G. P. Butler

"[Note: this review refers to and relies on the original German edition, and all translations of quotes are our own. The English translation is an abridged version (authorized by the author), and of the 367 chapters, 64 were cut entirely and only 130 are translated in their entirety.]

Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries (Jahrestage) was originally published in four volumes between 1970 and 1983, but it is a single, unified work. The literal translation of the title is, indeed, 'anniversaries', but can also mean 'days of the year', and it is as both of these meanings that Johnson presents his text. The novel covers, day by day, a year in the life of Gesine Cresspahl, beginning 21 August 1967, and concluding 20 August 1968. Johnson anchors the narrative in the present-day, making Gesine a dedicated and somewhat obsessive reader of The New York Times, and so there are many references to the stories of the day, most every day, and often longer excerpts from the newspaper. At the same time, Gesine is providing a (more or less chronological) account of her past to her ten-year-old daughter, Marie, and there are also present-day domestic scenes from their lives.
Gesine was born 3 March 1933 in Jerichow in Germany, in a part of the country that would become East Germany. She is a single mother who moved to the United States when her daughter was four and who works for a bank. They live in Apartment 204 at 243 Riverside Drive (three rooms, all with a view of the Hudson, for $124.00 a month ...).
Marie is a precocious and independent-minded ten-year-old who has readily and completely adopted New York as her home and who only speaks German (sometimes) with her mother. Gesine's on-going account of her past is delivered in part on tape, to be listened to later by Marie, as well as in their conversations (allowing for interjections and questions by the child): it is often straightforward narrative but occasionally tortured in trying to deal with a difficult past (shifting from recounted history to conversation to letters, etc.).
It's Marie that requests her mother record much of this: "What you're thinking now, what I'll only understand later. Complaints, too." There's a wariness on both sides, about what might be revealed or the sheer weight of it all, but typically they're comforted by their agreement:
- For when I'm dead ?
- Yes. For when you're dead.
Gesine's past covers much of Germany's most troubled times, from the rise of Nazism to the war years to the occupations first (briefly) by the British and then, more permanently, by the Soviets. Her focus in the early years is very much on her parents: a father who had settled in England and was doing well there but then married and followed his wife back to Germany when she wanted to give birth to their child there.
Cresspahl marries into the Papenbrock-family, but he remains an outsider: known as 'the Englishman' (despite being German) he remains friendly with the local Jews even as ugly nationalism rises around them. Tolerant, careful, he tries to keep a low profile and do his best to get through the difficult years: Gesine is able to say "Mein Krieg war gut versteckt" ("My war was well-concealed"), and not just because of Jerichow's remote location. Arguably - Marie has her doubts - he was also an agent for the English, and when they occupied the town after the war the British did make him mayor - a position he filled capably, and one the Soviets (who then were awarded the territory) kept him in (before eventually tossing him in jail).
The flighty, depressive Lisbeth, Gesine's mother, was complicated in different ways, and never made the situation better. She was unhinged enough to watch and do nothing as infant Gesine threatened to drown (Cresspahl happened to witness the scene and plucked her out of danger), and if her violent death isn't a suicide, there's certainly enough reason to believe she would have done herself in eventually. As is, she dies when Gesine is still a small child; fortunately Cresspahl is up to the challenge of raising the girl more or less on his own. (Gesine does remain haunted by the mother-figure: when Marie asks her for her New Year's resolutions 1968, one of them is: "That I don't become like my mother" -- and even though her dread is obvious it's a remarkable admission to make to the child; it throws even the generally unperturable Marie, who tries explains it away for both of them: "You have fever, Gesine.")
Johnson began writing the book on 29 January 1968, and he lucked into quite a year. It's more than back-drop: the period is front and centre, omnipresent. The war in Viet Nam obviously dominates - the first sentence of the first dated entry refers to it ("Clearing weather in North Viet Nam permitted Air Force raids north of Hanoi", etc.) - yet it in its almost daily constancy becomes an almost repetitive drone: Johnson's choice to refer to weather conditions in his opening salvo are apt, since the Viet Nam-reports (much as the daily reports of American fatalities in Iraq have become in 2005 and 2006) resemble nothing as much as the daily weather report, with what (in print if not real life) amount to only small varying details. 1968 would also be the year of the shooting of Rudi Dutschke and assassinations of Martin Luther King jr. and Robert Kennedy (the latter two events that hit Marie harder - or at least more demonstratively - than Gesine), as well as the Prague spring. The Czech connexion is of particular importance, because Gesine is taking Czech lessons, and the book moves towards a planned trip to Prague (indeed, that is where they are set to be the day after the book closes, on 21 August 1968 (a date and place that should resonate for what else was to happen there and then, the Soviets putting a brutal end to the Prague spring)).
Anniversaries is also very much a New York-portrait, with Gesine still a part of immigrant culture while Marie is a full-fledged New Yorker ("Mit New York: sagt sie siegesgewiß, verächtlich: damit legst du mich nicht herein" ("With New York: she said, certain of prevailing, contemptuously: with that you can't fool me") Marie proclaims, knowing that she knows the city better than her mother). It's also a city that isn't doing that well: crime-ridden (their Upper West Side apartment is in what isn't - at that time - a great neighbourhood, and it sounds like they're lucky only to be robbed once over the course of the year), with racial tension, as well political unrest.
Race figures prominently too: Gesine won't stand for any racism, and proves more open-minded than most of the locals - an attitude similar to that of her father, and which she passes on to her daughter. Among the many sub-plots is Francine, the token black girl who winds up in Marie's class at the exclusive private school she attends. Unlike her classmates, Marie feels an obligation to assist the child who is completely out of her element. Johnson's girl is, at times, arguably too precocious, but even something as difficult as this he handles well, convincingly having Marie express her frustration at the injustice perpetrated on Francine, who has, for example, never been taught how to learn.
Francine and her family are types - snapshots of a world largely beyond his ken - but for all that Johnson handles them well, without condescension (largely by describing it through Marie's experiences, and never having, for example, Gesine try to be buddies with Francine's mom or anything like that). Even brave Marie has difficulty in venturing more than once to Francine's tenement home; later, Francine's mother is injured in a violent incident, and it's only natural for the Cresspahls to take in the girl (as the other children are scattered in foster homes and elsewhere), a reaching out that mirrors Gesine's fathers attempts to reach out to strangers and locals when Gesine was a child (even as it probably strikes most American readers as utterly absurd). Again, the unlikely situation works because Johnson does not paint an easy idyll, but rather suggests the actual difficulties such an arrangement would pose: it is here that Marie is presented at her most childish (and thus, in some ways, most believable), fundamentally decent and trying to be helpful but also irritated by this foreign presence who herself feels so very much out of her element. Hands-off Gesine offers a secure environment that allows Francine the space to adapt, and Johnson captures this transition well -- and without forcing a happy end: Francine goes home again (and is ultimately a lost child), the status quo barely changed (and, yes, even Marie sighs somewhat in relief).
It is a political time, and while Gesine does not shy away from it, she almost tries to keep it at a certain remove. (Ironically, the reader sees her hurtling towards one of the decisive historical moments of the age, knowing the trip she is long planning - Prague - and knowing the date on which the book ends, one day before the fateful and dreadful 21 August 1968.) It's no wonder she prefers the black-and-white accounts from the day after as provided in the newspaper, refusing even to get a television despite Marie's frequent appeals. (It's after RFK's assassination that Marie decides enough is enough: she needs her mother's signature on the rental agreement, but she's the one that hires a television (and pays the $19.50 cost) - and has it set up in her room.) It's Marie, too, that is the more active, louder with her outrage, eager to go to the marches and parades, caught up in the immediacy of things in a way that Gesine, who has seen and lived through so much, is not. On 1 May 1968 Gesine looks to Europe, but Marie has left that long behind, caught up in the here and now in a way that her mother can't seem to keep up with: - Was geht's dich an ! du hast bloß mal da gewohnt ! sagt Marie.
- Da hab ich bloß mal gewohnt.
- Hier aber haben wir eine Revolution, bloß zwanzig Blocks von unserer Haustür !
- Hast du sie gesehen ?
- Den fünften Nachmittag heute ! Selbst du solltest es wissen aus deiner Zeitung. Müßte deine Tante dir doch gesagt haben.
(- What concern is it of yours ! you just lived there once ! Marie says.
- I just lived there once.
- But here we have a revolution, just twenty blocks from our door !
- You saw it ?
- The fifth afternoon today ! Even you should know it, from your newspaper. Your aunt should have told you.)
(The 'aunt' of course being the old grey lady, The New York Times)
Even Gesine is a bit shocked at Marie running underfoot at the Columbia-protests, and admittedly the girl's unsupervised gallivanting across town is one of the less believable elements of the book. Canny and wise beyond her years, the girl is still just ten and it's hard to believe any mother would let a child that age run about (and take the subway) as freely as Gesine does.
Eager to protest and make her objections to injustice known, Marie nevertheless has wholeheartedly embraced America. She is, for all intents and purposes, an American girl, and among the few things about her that seem to annoy Gesine is the girl's unquestioning anti-communism. It's not that Gesine necessarily disapproves of the attitude itself, but rather that Marie has bought into that party line unthinkingly: communism is simply an evil, enough said -- but Gesine knows from experience that it's all more complicated than that. Gesine is also far more ambivalent about the America she has made their home. Marie can protest the war in Viet Nam and the military-industrial complex and still live happily within the system, but Gesine is nowhere near as comfortable. "Wo ist die moralische Schweiz, in die wir emigrieren könnten ?" ("Where is that moral Switzerland to which we could emigrate ?") she asks herself only half-jokingly - as experience has taught her that there is no place that allows such neutrality (hence also the question referring to a "moral Switzerland", rather than Switzerland itself, a country that can stand for neutrality without actually being that).
Some men do vie for Gesine's attention, but she's careful about letting anyone get too close. She doesn't reveal much about Marie's father, and admits on one of those tapes that she leaves for when she's dead that she can't let anyone (save her daughter) close for fear of losing them: "Ich will diesen Schmerz nicht noch einmal" ("I don't want that pain again"). The scientist Erichson - known as D.E. - is a frequent visitor and close friend, but as much an uncle-figure to the child as lover for Gesine.
Among the playful asides are some swats at German literati: Hans Magnus Enzensberger's open letter in The New York Review of Books (explaining why he resigned from his appointment at Wesleyan), picked apart over half a dozen pages, or a report in The New York Times on West German author 'Günther Glass' (his name more readily misspelt pre-Nobel prize) - and there are even some Uwe Johnson sightings, including an awkward question-and-answer session at a Jewish American Congress event.
Anniversaries is a very long book; remarkably, it hardly ever flags. The variety of narrative techniques - quotation, different voices and perspectives - help keep the reader focussed, and the different storylines (Gesine's past, Gesine's present, Marie's present, the world at large) are woven together well. It is a history of Germany, 1933 to ca. 1953, as well as of 1968 America. It is about the experience of being a European emigrant, and about being an almost-teen in the late 60s. It is about past and present and, emphatically, morality in its broadest senses. It is about society -- German and American, and society under Nazi, communist, and capitalist systems - and works as such because it isn't a moralising text and offers little forced philosophical exposition and debate: Johnson shows by example and experience. The major characters - father Cresspahl, Gesine, Marie - act, and while they don't or can't always do right, and can't always be sure of what they do, they are, in their different ways, exemplary.
Johnson mixes things up enough to keep readers alert - tossing in a grocery list (on snowy 29 December), notes for a school-essay on RFK (6 June), even variations on the colour yellow (in New York - 1 August). But it's with the effective repeated use (but not over-use) of newspaper-detail - all those bits of reality which can never be kept at bay - as well as, especially, the mother-daughter back-and-forth that Johnson achieves so much momentum. Much of the story is most powerful when Gesine is not, in fact, front and centre: especially the parts about her parents and then her father are more interesting than when she figures more prominently in her own story of childhood and youth. But in the present, and especially in her dealings at work and at home, Johnson presents a remarkably full character-portrait - enlivened also by the challenging semi-equal, Marie (who, after all, doesn't call her 'Mammi' or anything of that sort, but simply: Gesine).
There are some lapses: an odd kidnapping episode seems out of place, and much of volume three seems off-pace, but overall it's a remarkable and consistent accomplishment. For what looks like a diary-book it's, in fact, a compelling novel, and in the three generation-representatives of Cresspahl, Gesine, and Marie a book with three superbly rendered characters. For insight into life in Germany in the 1930s, and in New York in the 1960s - admittedly both times from a particular vantage point - it bears comparison to the best literary portraits of those eras and places.
It is a lot to tackle, but it is a book that is in every sense substantial, and ultimately very much worth the time. (The effort, too, one might add, but it doesn't really require much effort, readily engaging the reader.) Certainly a book that will endure, deserving of a place beside the best of the most ambitious post-World War II German novels (such as The Tin Drum, The Aesthetics of Resistance, and The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice as Chronicled by her Minstrel Laura)." - The Complete Review

"Uwe Johnson never quite knew what to do with the self-satisfied authority of superlatives. He was interested in the inconclusive, the ambiguous, and preferred observing things from the edge. The texture of a frame seemed to him more revealing than the painting, the smell of ink on one’s fingers more revealing than the content of a newspaper article. He had originally wanted to call his novel The Third Book about Achim something different: Description of a Description, which would have been the more apt title. Thus, he would only have quietly shaken his bald head and tapped out his pipe ashes when confronted with a statement like: Anniversaries is the best novel ever written about America in the German language. Nevertheless, it is true.
Anniversaries was conceived as a book of normal length, but became a life’s work, in the true sense of the word. Johnson worked for fifteen years, and sometimes he was defeated. It would take him 1,900 pages to finish, and in reading one quickly realizes that even a single page less would have been a problematic simplification. (It is all the more inexplicable that there has only been an abridged version published in English.) After the last of its four volumes appeared, he died at the early age of 49. He was very lonely in the end; life on the edge had turned into solitude. He was found in his house in England three weeks after he died.
For all its bulk, though, the book doesn’t give you much time to decide against reading it. Two long sentences, to be precise:
Long waves sweep slanting against the beach, hump muscled backs, raise trembling combs that tip over at the greenest summit. The taut roll, already streaked with white, enfolds a hollow space of air that is crushed by the clear mass as if a secret had been created and destroyed there.
Yes, I will read you, I thought, as I finished these lines last summer. I would begin Anniversaries on an anniversary – August 20th, 2009 – and planned to read its 365 entries in 365 days.
Anniversaries follows the form of a diary. It begins on August 20th, 1967, at the New Jersey coast, and ends exactly one year later, when Russian tanks invade Prague. To describe what happens in between seems almost out of the question; the book is more of a literary landscape than a novel, and a mountain wants to be climbed, not surveyed. Once, when Johnson was asked to summarize the plot before a reading, he talked for one and a half hours (no time was left for the reading itself) not because the plot was so extravagant, but because some books are long for a reason, and because some novels about the passing of time need time to pass instead of just claiming that it passes. One needs to actually read them in order to respect them, just as Hannah Arendt wanted to call a life a life only after it was lived.
The particular life we follow in Anniversaries belongs to Gesine Cressphal, who works as a translator in a Manhattan bank. She was born into Hitler’s Reich and grew up in East Germany, where, in many offices and classrooms soon after the war, pictures of Hitler were simply replaced by portraits of Stalin. Gesine has learned early on how to lie; when she arrives in New York, “freedom” isn’t much more than a word. She has left behind in Germany a dead husband, Jakob. He didn’t exactly die peacefully. (In fact, Jakob has been the protagonist of Johnson’s earlier novel Speculations about Jakob. As with Faulkner, whom Johnson admired almost more than any other writer, Johnson’s books are intertwined over decades, full of connections, rumors, and secrets between people and places, like an old neighborhood. Johnson refused to bring characters into life just to have them suffocate between the boards of a book. During his time in New York, Johnson would sometimes say to his acquaintances that he just ran into Gesine Cressphal at Grand Central. He was actually serious.)
From August of 1967 to August of 1968, at a rate of one entry per day, Gesine tells her daughter the story of her life and asks – as Johnson does in all of his writing – What brought us here? She talks about her father who, in his hometown of Jerichow in Mecklenburg, saw the evil of Nazism approaching but nevertheless accommodated himself to it in order to not lose his family. She talks about her mother who once tried to let little Gesine drown in a rain barrel. She talks about time and guilt and why one passes and the other doesn’t. She also deals with religion, Vietnam, and America as the fetish of our world – but only marginally. Throughout, a larger question looms: Is it possible, after all, that the truth doesn’t have an essence, only edges?
Long before it became the duty of cultural theorists to damn it, Johnson was mistrusting “truth.” For him, it was no more palpable than memory, which Gesine likens to a cat: “independent, incorruptible, intractable. And yet a comfortable companion, when it puts in an appearance, even if it stays out of reach.” Perhaps one learns this automatically, growing up during a dictatorship.
And yet, as a reader, I can’t let go of truth – not for moral reasons but because nothing else touches me. The truth I look for in a novel has little to do with what is depicted, with the characters or historical details. It lies instead in what one might call the tone. Over time, I forget much of what I read; only this tone stays with me. But when is a tone truthful? When is it authentic? I suppose the answer has something to do with what is personal and peculiar, with what Nabokov called, when he spoke about exhilarating reading and writing experiences, “looking through glasses which will fit no one else.” The dialect of a text, something between the lines, more audible than actually readable, its volume, its acoustic color… The hidden lust for life in Thomas Mann’s books. The curiosity and angst (those twin sisters) in Kafka’s. With people, too, one knows after a few sentences whether one wants to show them one’s favorite café.
Many North Germans feel more familiar with the English temper than with, say, the Bavarian temper. Johnson’s language has much of this polite and confident restraint, which, in every sentence, hides as much as it displays. He barely dares to say “I.” To mistake this for frigidity, however, is a popular misunderstanding, about Johnson as much as about North Germans.
When Max Frisch, one of his few long-term friends, said that it’s not the writer who finds his language, but vice versa, it was especially true for Johnson. He approaches his sentences carefully; he doesn’t triumph over them by stretching them into long technically obsessed hypotaxis or by brutally shortening them into bossy staccatos (both of which we Germans know how to do very well.) Sometimes he inadvertently falls into an English syntax shorter and more flexible than German, a syntax that flows where the German constricts. He seems to let the sentences have the shapes they chose for themselves. This has nothing to do with the trivial concept of the “death of the author.” Johnson always remains tangible in the background, but discreetly, like a concerned father who secretly hides in the car when his daughter goes to her first party. He believes in narrative, but wants neither the dubious dominance of an omnipotent narrator nor a visa into the anonymous universe of texts and textures. For where there’s no narrator, there can be no responsibility – and of course writing was for Johnson an act of social conscience.
In the Sixties, in Germany, literature and politics were still strongly looking to communicate with each other; the “Gruppe 47,” in which Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll and many others grew as writers, was regarded as a moral authority. Johnson was perhaps the most intellectual among them; certainly he was the quietest. In a time of heated debates, his tone was laconic. Lacking the vanity required for outright outrage, he analyzed where others barked. He didn’t have to be politicized by loud agitation; the infringement of political power on private life had already shaped him in his youth, when he refused to denounce “hostile elements.” It is said that the division of Germany first came into literature with Johnson, that he was a representative for the people whose lives were, like his, shaped by living in East Germany. But nothing was farther from him than to draw a line under German misery. He didn’t want to conjure up a “zero hour” or a new beginning which was as clamorous as it was convenient. The present, in his work, is too full of the past. Gesine Cresspehl always hears the voices of the dead and calls upon them when she needs them, just as Johnson’s calm and serious tone resembles someone remembering those forgotten by time. Anniversaries, then, is a singular monument to justice, unraveling the fates of dozens of people over a span of forty years along the eternal conflict of assimilation and protest.
As I’ve moved through it over the last several months, it has been the curious unity of thoughtfulness and definiteness, of irony and moral seriousness that has fascinated me most. Alone, each is more often than not hard to bear. But Johnson both respects and distrusts language. He plays with it and, in the next moment, forces it to be austere. If he gets carried away with a pun, a dramatic turn or even just a jaunty image – for example with a waiter who “tucks a smile into his mustache” – then it seems as if he wants to apologize for it in the next sentence, as if he needed to put a stop to what mustn’t get out of control.
Johnson is a moralist, but not a polemicist who would lose his authority by putting himself above his topic, even for the sake of a laugh. His sentences are humorous in themselves, but don’t tell jokes; they’re chucklers, not kneeslappers. He knows better than to celebrate the violence of a Nazi-gang with rhetorical drama, and he portrays them instead as a pathetic but brutal amateur dramatic performance. One is almost relieved when he suddenly describes a Nazi official as a pig, only to be brought up short by the ironic twist that follows: “Not in any metaphorical sense, simply on the basis of physical similarity.”
Admittedly, he isn’t easy on his readers: He rushes them through places, times and several narrative levels, at times – dauntingly, within one sentence. The frame of the plot is complex; the structure of the journal is porous. Sometimes Gesine is the narrator, sometimes she is being narrated. She merges into the narrative and surfaces again, unexpectedly. Sometimes she is in dialogue with the author himself – in Plattdeutsch, the Low German dialect. Perhaps this, too, has roots in an adolescence defined by state power, when not being too direct can save one’s life.
But the unity is greater than that; it’s as if the peculiar was only made discernible by the random. The more complex a truth is, the harder it is to bind it into sentences, and one will be more successful looking for it in the margins. Johnson approaches the truth like a partisan, indirectly; but where postmodernity often circles narcissistically around an empty center, Johnson fulfills his self-imposed task – depicting the embrace of political history and personal biography - by sometimes losing sight of it. Gesine, for example, is addicted to reading The New York Times, which she respectfully calls a “stubborn old aunt,” and which doesn’t only report the number of crosses erected on American military cemeteries during the Vietnam war, but also what wood they were made from and where it was cut.
As with a picture that loses its sharp contours as we move closer, one can get dizzy in the face of this abundance of details and episodes, the branching out of coincidences and allusions, a cocoon in which (hi)story lies like a larva. But Johnson’s language is always both concrete and allegorical. As smooth as the surface seems, there is above it a large space for reverberations.
Anniversaries is, above all, a novel about guilt. I have never read a book that dissects guilt with such precision and empathy without ever losing the clarity of its point of view. Evil is not personified in Johnson’s novels; it remains nameless, and thus threatening. Characters are people, not incarnations, and they are all entangled in their own time, their own space. That Johnson avoids a quick verdict doesn’t weaken his judgments. On the contrary, his moral questions gain power precisely by being less flexible for the lookers-on and hangers-on: the readers, us. The attraction of accusing others, which often lies in the suggestion of one’s own innocence, is what Johnson denies us; we are drawn closer already during the process of reading, by gazing into the abyss – just like Gesine’s mother, who sees synagogues burning and a Jewish girl dying during the Kristallnacht of November 9, 1938, and hours later goes into the flames herself.
Any kind of over-dramatization seems to embarrass Johnson, and yet his prose is distant and serene only as long as we stubbornly swing from one word to the next while the seething has started beneath us. No sentence in itself gives in to the fury of horror―but just as every bright photograph has a disturbingly dark negative, so also is the beauty of Johnson’s language one that chokes on itself. It describes an execution as indifferently as it describes the ocean “crocheting delicate fringes to the land.” And seemingly all of a sudden, the stores of the Jewish cloth merchants in Jerichow are burning.
Here is what’s most disturbing about Johnson’s language: that the barbarism takes hold of it so gradually, just as with people, where it may have hidden in all-too-familiar notions of envy or fear or pain. The idea that evil rages with unmistakable thunder right from the start provides us, in the present, with a false reassurance. When Hitler’s soldiers marched into Poland, Mein Kampf had been standing on German bookshelves for 14 years already.
Anniversaries studies Germany from the viewpoint of New York for a reason. Martin Luther King is shot in Memphis, and one week later the revolutionary leader of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke, is shot in Berlin. In 1968, the New World present merges with the Old World past. Wrong wars are being fought. Capitalism falters, but Communism also fails. There have been worse times than ours to rediscover Uwe Johnson.
It is worth noting, in this connection, that Anniversaries is a Heimatroman, a “home-novel.” The word Heimat, which can be your home or home country, bears a burden, a patina unlike any other German word. Its proximity to Unheimlichkeit (uncanniness) is definitely appropriate. Origin always needs the gaze of someone looking back or coming back in order to become Heimat; it only exists with distance, loss, and in the realization of the past. For Kafka, only death was a true Heimat, the actual good place.
The fact that his beloved New York didn’t need to embrace or suffocate him like a homeland was a relief to Uwe Johnson as much as to Gesine. “True,” he wrote,
our home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side is imaginary. The process of addiction to the area has been solely on our side, we cannot expect the others to reciprocate. And yet, an hour’s walk through the neighborhood inoculates us for years against moving away.
To read Anniversaries in New York, in its own rhythm, over the course of one year, has been like looking doubtfully at long-hidden pictures from the wild youth of an old lady. One will see her with different eyes from now on. And like hearing at least one familiar voice every day.
Like Anniversaries, New York is “crowded with the past, with presence.” The dialectic of freedom and constraint has always been more palpable here than anywhere else in the world. Freedom and promises can rise like water up to one’s neck; where everything seems possible, the road to nothingness seems very short. (Tell me your city, I’ll tell you mine.) But since reading Anniversaries I feel more at home in this foreign land – as if I had returned after a long time and as if Gesine Cressphal’s presence were my past and Johnson’s sentences the echo of my memory. Whoever recognizes something is at home. I’ve been here before." - Fridolin Schley

Kurt Fickert "Names and Themes in Uwe Johnson’s Jahrestage"

Brian Conn - Hallucinogenic, absurd & funny, horrifying & brutal, a startlingly original cross between SF and innovative prose

Brian Conn, The Fixed Stars: Thirty-Seven Emblems for the Perilous Season, FC2, 2010.

"Juxtaposing barbarity and whimsy, Brian Conn’s The Fixed Stars has the tenor of a contemporary fable with nearly the same dream-like logic.
At its heart is the John’s Day celebration and the interactions of a small community afflicted by a mysterious plague. Citizens—the infected and healthy alike—are routinely quarantined and then reintegrated into society in rituals marked by a haunting brutality. In a culture that has retreated from urbanism into the pastoral, a woman who nurtures spiders and a man who spins hemp exist alongside the mass acceptance of sexual proliferation. Conn delivers a compelling portrait of a calamitous era, one tormented by pestilence, disease, violence, senseless ritual, and post-late-capitalism. An unflinching look at a world impossible to situate in time, The Fixed Stars is mythic and darkly magical."

“Brian Conn’s wonderfully perilous crossbreeding of SF and innovative prose reads like what might result if Dhalgren and A Canticle for Leibowitz engaged in salacious acts with The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Fixed Stars is a funny, absurd, and beatifically strange book, one in which you simultaneously have the feeling that not one word is out of place and that everything that language brings to us opens onto a void. The Fixed Stars is the future of the future, and it is a truly outstanding debut. - Brian Evenson

“With bits of machinery culled from post-apocalyptic science fiction, gothic horror, and ancient myth and ritual, Brian Conn has built a beguiling puzzle box of a novel. The Fixed Stars is a thorny, disjunctive fable that unfolds like a night-blooming flower. This is strange, intoxicating stuff.” - Jedediah Berry

"I just participated in a MindMeld where I didn’t take the assignment about new movements that seriously, except in the entry entitled “Next Wave”. However, another bit, while played for humor, also had a serious component:
Connpunk: Stealthvirus Brian Conn will rewire all of our brains by 2015 and connect them to the Mother Spider that we may power the engines of his narrative monsters. No book not written by Conn will exist by 2020. All hail Conn. (Damn you, Conn.)
Although a joke, I was also referring to Conn’s excellent debut novel, The Fixed Stars, which came out earlier this year to much less fanfare than it deserved. It’s one of the most original novels I’ve read of late, and it deserves more attention. - Jeff VanderMeer

“The late capitalists named that sea the Sea of Giants,” the tender of herbs said: “the Giants’ Sea. Why did they name it thus? They named it thus because those who inhabited this coast were giants: not that they were larger in their bodies than you or I, but that they kept a boundless faith in their hearts, even as they doubted all things; and therefore their hearts were thought to be large, ineffably so, in order to accommodate the immiscible and indissoluble multitude of their visions, as well as the other phantasms which forgathered there. In our civilization, we too must become giants, and admit all things into the ever-expanding chambers of our hearts.”
The Fixed Stars is definitely one of my favourite releases of the year. Conn creates a world that is almost dreamlike and ephemeral despite his concrete and sometimes forceful skilled prose. The narrative is almost impossible to describe, it involves a contagion, kidnappings, festival celebrations, ritual building, amongst others things that bear no relation to each other in a narrative sense. Instead Conn weaves together a series of vignettes that become sort of post-modern fairy tales or folk lore of an impossible to place pastoral post-late capitalist future. At times absurd and funny, and at others horrifying and brutal, it is a startlingly original cross between science fiction and experiential literature that defies any comparisons that I can think of.
I wanted to be able to say more about the novel, but it is difficult to talk about, it is illusive and evasive; Conn purposely makes it difficult for the reader to be able to grasp on to anything that is going on in the traditional sense. At one part, the story launches into a “historical play” about a marriage set to take place on Venus with a traditional narrative, only to be cut short by ellipsis. It is a rather astonishing debut, and for those of you who like that sort of thing (which I expect considering the books I tend to talk about is most of you, my readers) I highly recommend it as one of the highlights of 2010." - Paul Charles Smith

"Brian Conn’s debut novel is called The Fixed Stars: Thirty-Seven Emblems for the Perilous Season. It is such a singular achievement that I would urge him to never publish another novel again – or at least to do so under a pseudonym – lest the idiosyncratic distinctiveness of his achievement be burdened by associations with and comparisons to his future – and in all likelihood, one would hope, quite distinct – output. I often think of how sullied Anthony Burgess’ oeuvre has been by A Clockwork Orange – I don’t particularly like the book; undoubtedly, many find that the pall of his most successful novel only heightens the appeal and effectiveness of his other works, imbuing them with unseemly potentials that might not otherwise therein exist – and I do not want this to happen to Conn.
I mentioned, just several clauses ago, that “one would hope” that Conn’s future works be distinct from The Fixed Stars; this is not because the territory that he has explored here has been mined to its fruitfully-mineable extremes. Quite the opposite: he could continue with such similarly elusive works forever, and it would undoubtedly find him a place – a niche, at the very least – in the twenty-first century literary canon; he could very easily, I imagine, pursue the myriad narrative innovations he has made with his debut for the rest of his life. I say this merely because The Fixed Stars reads to me as so entirely distinct from anything currently being published that, for entirely selfish reasons, I would not want the uniqueness of the work to become part of a “club,” so to speak, even if it were a club whose sole members were Conn’s other publications. I imagine that, had I been a canny enough prepubescent to read CivilWarLand in Bad Decline when it was first released, I would have wished the same thing for George Saunders; had I had the wherewithal and unprecedentedly premature birth to speak to Don DeLillo after he published Americana, I would have told him to quit while he was ahead; had I been born before the release of Lydia Davis’ first collection, The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories, I likely would have urged her, too, to give up writing entirely. But, like Saunders, and like Davis, and like DeLillo, Conn is likely to only further develop and engage with his Weltanschauung, and The Fixed Stars will soon appear merely a spotty blueprint for the more considered and masterly work of his literary maturity. I look forward with immense impatience to this period, for it is his alone to pursue, and, unless he reins himself into less unique territory, whatever it yields will prove as exploratory and exciting and unforeseeable as Pastoralia and In Persuasion Nation, as Samuel Johnson Is Indignant and The End of the Story, as The Names and White Noise.
What has Conn done to deserve such anxious considerations of his future as a writer? He has written a remarkable, unique book. It exists in a largely timeless and placeless environment – references to time and place come not infrequently, but they render the world only more limitless and unfathomable – delineated in a prose style that reads as though in literal translation from some mock-Slavic language. The narrative – peppered with pronouncements and aphoristic statements that are absent, to the reader, of any easily relatable or fully comprehensible meaning or consequence – proceeds with a fascinating inscrutability comparable to a largely forgotten folk tale for which contemporary Americans can summon little immediate empathy. The prose is clear and concrete, and everything reads as solemn and forceful; yet the clarity and concreteness only make the world more foreign and incomprehensible, as the reader may find little correlation between the clarity and cohesion of the novel’s world and his or her own.
The world is intensely insular and circumscribed, yet it is difficult to get a precise sense of it, so that, to the reader, it has an opaque expansiveness and breadth that feels entirely distinct from its characters’ experiences of it; we are consistently at odds with the characters’ understandings of the rules of their world, and yet we are able to gather a certain intuitive sense of what fits and what does not. Occasionally, the narrative ventures into areas and expands certain sections in ways that seem out of place with my intuitive understanding of his world; I would imagine that other readers’ intuitive senses of the limitations of the novel’s space are wider than mine, and that such allowances would seem entirely in order. Conn does not make any demands on the readers’ understanding of this world; he merely makes inferences, which we can find fitting or out of place. Conn’s responsibility to remain arduously attuned to his intuitive understanding of the world becomes all the more important, then, as does the meticulousness with which he expands it; there is an almost palpable sense that Conn restricts his narrative from his wilder impulses, so as to maintain the intuitive clarity of his structure.
The narrator’s inability, unwillingness, or unconcern in expressing or articulating precisely what is happening and where it is happening, or to cogently convey a deeply involved image – the essential incompatibility between the clarity of the characters’ comprehension of the world and the opacity of the reader’s – ultimately works quite well, uncomfortable though it may be at times. The reader is invited into this world merely as an observer, albeit a somewhat blinded and deafened one; to gain any sense of this world means relying on senses not usually required – at least not foremost – while reading a novel: one feels as if one must touch and smell what is being given – merely reading it leaves one cold, unmoved, and exasperated, because any standard articulation and evocation – of how things and people interact, of the meaning of their interactions, of the sense of all of this – seem perennially just beyond the capacity of the descriptive passages.
There is much talk of love, particularly in extremes: characters often profess that they love something more than they do or have anything else; but what does this love mean? What is the sense of this love? We only get pronouncements; we rarely get articulated meaning. This creates an emotional divide between the characters and the reader, for we cannot quite empathize with their fears, loves, jealousies, and sadnesses; that two of the final sections are very moving is then entirely unexpected, and it is because, within this unempathic yarn, Conn has fashioned a sneakily subtle method of conveying feeling – it is quite unlikely that, were I to have read these sections earlier or separately from the novel, I would have done so with the same lump in my throat that Conn’s slow, indoctrinatory storytelling method coerced me into having.
He seems to address the discrepancy between meaning to the reader and meaning to the novel's characters early on, speaking to the attempts of representing a road in mosaics: “no two mosaicists could agree what the new road looked like. Perhaps indeed it was many new roads, a different one for each of us.” Conn makes the enlivening suggestion that his is merely one interpretation of this world. It is to me a novel proposition; usually, the worlds of writers of, for lack of a better signifier, speculative fiction are distinctly their own; no one understands the worlds of Philip K. Dick more than Philip K. Dick, and no one can represent the worlds of William Gibson more accurately than William Gibson. Conn is more inclusive: his representation, he seems to suggest, is merely one of an innumerable many; he has no more mastery over his allegorical world than any realist author does over those in which we all ostensibly live. It is an invigorating proposal.
There is a certainty not just to the prose but also to the way in which everyone approaches and understands their surroundings – this is a staple of fairy and folk tales: everything is governed by rules that, no matter how seemingly inscrutable or superstitious to the reader, are true and irrefutable within the tale. There is a fixity to everything that lends the novel a certain intractability. It is only the presumption that Conn’s telling of this story is a mere one of many that saves it from become somewhat tiresome: this is a world more malleable than the one suggested by the rigidity of the prose.
The numerous stories told within the novel bear structural similarities to those specific to fairy tales, such as foreshadowing and resolution, but Conn refuses to strictly adhere to them, often leaving a tale largely unresolved, or resolving it in a manner not dependent upon any presumed foreshadowing. They read like last-minute dismissals of, or departures from, the styles to which they are otherwise indebted. Tropes are used for the purpose of abandoning them. While this may seem a tired postmodern trick, the progression of the novel, and the characters’ seeming unconcern for any such fairy tale-esque resolution, serves only to further bolster the idea that this is a world comparable to but far from compatible with “ours”: resolution is neither expected nor necessary. There is an effectively unnerving lack of clear consequence to anything, an unrelenting weightlessness to each part of the novel; even when events are endowed with a consequential flavor, the significance is supplied through a sheer exposition that beguiles far more than it informs. When the final two chapters of the novel build toward a resolution of sorts, it feels anticlimactic and unnecessary: we have long since abandoned the world of resolution.
It would be difficult to discuss this novel without at the very least addressing its postmodern elements. Conn takes a nearly Mannerist approach to his telling, but there is a sincerity to his tongue-in-cheek style – indeed, this sincerity is all that allows the work to sustain itself; otherwise its already considerable self-imposed limitations would only further encroach upon the connotative expansiveness of the work, and it would collapse under its own self-conscious cheekiness. This is not to say that the work is not cheeky: the syntax is of a kind of mongrel fairy talese, and references to “post-late-capitalism” abound. This latter term beckons the likes of Frederic Jameson and Francis Fukuyama, and in many ways these invocations are the weakest part of the novel: such allusions seem out of place to my increasingly intuitive understanding of it, even while it was precisely these allusions that initially allowed me to feel as though I had gained access to any such understanding. The term seems designed to create a framework for understanding the novel as a kind of post-postmodernist work, as a take on Robert Coover’s take on fairy tales – a return to the source, in a way, but a return dependent upon discursive postmodern departures.
Is a description of the novel’s plot necessary? I don’t believe that it is; at the very least, my enjoyment of it was not dependent upon the plot – indeed, many of the more plot-oriented passages were for me the least engaging –, and many of the finest passages – most notably, a simply terrific short “historical” play, which details the events surrounding the marriage of the Commander of the starship Theseus, Duke of Athens to the daughter of the ambassador from Neptune – do little to advance the narrative. Suffice it to say that there is a plague, an annual celebration of great import to the society, considerable preparation for a pageant, kidnappings, messenger-delivered children, quarantines, efforts on the part of the society's children to accumulating knowledge about their society’s history and culture, and a great much more: people get lost, people get in fights, people have sex in unusually pungent or asensual ways, people grow jealous and suspicious of each other. The events take place in some distant future, after all that we have taken for granted in some fashion or another leads to the destruction of contemporary civilization. Wonderfully bizarre aphorisms – “Let peace erupt within you” –, beautifully unexpected descriptions – “The binder of brooms leapt into the room and struck the boar-bristle woman behind the ear with a young pumpkin” – and hilariously stilted dialogue – “'I am only playing a haunting melody in this dell, in order to frighten the children’” – abound, but, after the abundant quirks and whimsies pass and fade into memory, what is left is a singular portrait of an obtuse, alien, and impossibly knowable society. There is a distinctly patriarchal quality to this largely collapsed society, despite certain efforts to place female characters at its forefront; but Conn does not use this to offer any analyses or interpretations of patriarchal societies, as perhaps he shouldn’t – it would read entirely at odds with the style of the rest of the novel, even as it might make it a more comfortable or comforting read.
Conn’s achievement is not so much in his fantastical and stoic fabrications as it is in the unexpected inclusiveness of his telling of them. The frame of the narrative is so tenuous and its contents so weightless that any story held solely within it seems to evade memory; those that extend beyond the narrative frame – the play, an early passage between two girls on a river, a later passage between two men and a corpse – are indelible in their alternately funny, sweet, and chilling singularity. The vagueness of this world is charted in concrete terms and phrases, but, between the limited and wonderfully awkward vocabulary and syntax and the incomprehensibly meaningful pomp of everything, Conn lets his readers in to roam and make of it what they will. This world isn’t Conn’s; he’s just its messenger." - Benjamin Gottlieb

"The Fixed Stars takes place after the end of the world. The causes are not clear, though you can feel them always pressing. Much of it takes place in a community at the brink, threatened by plague and scarcity. The people are alien, their culture is strange -- at times they seem admirable in their love, their selflessness, their generosity. At times they are opaque. Negotiating with them, imagining them, feels good. And there are many other stories -- romances, terrors, monsters, weird scientists, etc. The tone vacillates and slithers. It is rich, complex, at times difficult to read, at times compulsively readable. It is, like the magazine Conn co-edits, a brilliant example of the power that lies in taking science fiction seriously as a way of making art. You should buy it and read it.
I have to admit I've been puzzled by the apparent lack of buzz about this book. I've talked to people who loved it and I've read as much in scattered comment threads, etc. Brian Evenson has done his best to talk it up on his site and when I saw him at AWP, and in interviews, and presumably elsewhere. I don't know if it just hasn't found the right hands or what. Maybe it's selling like hotcakes and it just hasn't inspired a lot of coverage. I've got no idea. But one of the reasons I want Uncanny Valley to become something big is writers like Conn - the ones that don't obviously fit a niche even in the weird little ecosystem of indie lit, but whose writing is so compelling that I believe they could be huge, if only they were given the chance. FC2 has given Conn the chance. So why hasn't the 'net wised up yet? What do I have to do to get you to read this book?" - www.uncannyvalleymag.com

"In the tone of language, The Fixed Stars reads like something that has dropped out of the 19th or maybe even 17th Century. In content it is anything but. It’s an hallucinogenic head/road trip through a ‘post-capitalism’ future, a world where new industries have grown to include breeding spiders for their specific threads. It’s tragic and funny and at times utterly repugnant and ghastly and not a word is out of place. It sits somewhere strange between Delaney’s Dhalgren, Ben Marcus’ The Age of Wire and String and a Grimm’s fairy tale after they’d eaten far too many magic mushrooms. But what is particularly stunning, given it is Conn’s first book, is the sheer mastery of language. It is perhaps not for the squeamish. At one point a malevolent doctor files a women’s toe-nails and the collects the dust. Soon after we encounter this:
“In the afternoon she observed the doctor to sprinkle the dust from the cotton envelope onto his snails before he ate them. He stared across the river as he munched, bearded in snail slime: sprinkled and munched, sprinkled and munched.
“The snails alone are not sufficient nutrition, she thought.”
It is essentially a book of dystopic science fiction. Despite the somewhat retarded, semi-rural community, when their eyes fail they can be replaced. But, apart from a strange segue into a Space Opera performance in the centre of the book, Conn’s world is one of herb farmers and weavers of reeds, a world where children are mysteriously delivered by messengers carrying boxes on wagons drawn by oxen. It is a world where only the mildest hints of post-capitalist architecture remain, the denizens having fled the cities for reasons that are only darkly hinted at. It is a world rife with contagions – Conn hints at zombies and a werewolf-like creature with inhuman strength called “the boar-bristle woman” and what could be radioactive or chemical fallout. It is also very much a world of violence and when blood spills, Conn, to chilling effect, makes a point of counting each drop.
I was made aware of The Fixed Stars by Brian Evenson, a man who seems to have a satellite dish directed to detect new talent. He also blurbed the book, stating that: “Brian Conn’s wonderfully perilous crossbreeding of SF and innovative prose reads like what might result if Dhalgren and A Canticle for Leibowitz engaged in salacious acts with The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Fixed Stars is a funny, absurd, and beatifically strange book, one in which you simultaneously have the feeling that not one word is out of place and that everything that language brings to us opens onto a void. The Fixed Stars is the future of the future, and it is a truly outstanding debut.”
Author Jedediah Berry also weighed in, commenting that: “With bits of machinery culled from post-apocalyptic science fiction, gothic horror, and ancient myth and ritual, Brian Conn has built a beguiling puzzle box of a novel. The Fixed Stars is a thorny, disjunctive fable that unfolds like a night-blooming flower. This is strange, intoxicating stuff.”
In some ways Conn’s world is not unlike the post-apocalyptic pastoral depicted in Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney. Until the contagions really start to take over there seems a potentially more-or-less idyllic aspect to the weird world he portrays.
Conn’s brief biography on the book stated that, along with being co-editor of the on-line and hard-copy literary journal Birkensnake, he studied mathematics in southern Rhode Island. “The bio actually became incorrect a few weeks after I sent it to the publisher,” he admits. “I no longer study mathematics, at least formally. Long story. I do still roam country lanes thinking up new ways to doubt various notions of infinity, but that’s on my own time. I am likely to study mathematics again someday.”
Literary/mathematical crossover has bred some strange offspring over the years, most recently including David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More, a factual history of Infinity and Neal Stephenson’s handling of the mathematician Alan Turing in Cryptonomicon.
“I love David Foster Wallace, but I’m not convinced by his math,” Conn says. “I think he doesn’t always know what he’s talking about. I once brought this up with a professor whose abstract algebra class I was auditing, and he said, ‘Yeah – that guy...’ and then got a troubled look and sort of trailed off. The same professor said that the most mathematically inclined writer he knew was Borges, which I think was astute.”
“You mentioned ‘less practical’ mathematics. At heart math is just a method of radical abstraction. What quality does a line of iambic pentameter have in common with the constellation Cassiopeia? Answer: they are sets of five things (feet, stars). A lot of math deals with numbers because numbers are easy to abstract from many different situations. But non-numerical qualities can also sometimes be abstracted. Math is just the impulse to abstract whatever qualities you can and manipulate those abstractions. If you think of it that way you can see why Borges makes sense as a mathematical writer.”
But if his musical tastes are anything to go by, Conn is far from your straight-laced professorial type. When Conn was asked by the editor of Sybil’s Garage to attach a piece of music to the short story ‘Six Questions about the Sun,’ Conn cited the German Industrial-Punk band Einstürzende Neubauten.
“[That] story prefigures The Fixed Stars in many ways,” Conn says. “The editor of Sybil’s Garage, where that appeared, asked me what music I associated with the story, and it happened that there was something that I had been listening to and that seemed to have influenced my writing. This is sometimes the case for me, but not often.
"When I was finishing up The Fixed Stars I did for some reason listen several times a day to the Stone Roses’ first album, which might seem like a strange choice, but somehow it always brought me back to the state in which I’d left off writing the day before."
“I don’t like to have a writing ritual. I start to feel like it is the ritual doing the writing instead of me, which would be okay except that I can’t imagine a ritual writing anything interesting.”
The Fixed Stars is, strictly speaking, a ‘post apocalyptic’ novel and while such a mode is far from new, has become increasingly common in recent years.
“Maybe it is necessary to prepare for the approaching apocalypse?” Conn suggests. “Maybe it is necessary to reconcile ourselves to the apocalypse that is even now occurring? Hard to say…. It could also be that ‘post-apocalyptic’ is a way to frame a certain kind of fantastical material so that it becomes acceptable in mainstream literary discourse. Things that happen to fairies and things that happen on Mars are hard to sneak out of the genre section, but the same things can often happen in a post-apocalyptic setting and qualify as real literature.”
Indeed, the apocalyptic library grows apace. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Brian Evenson’s Dark Property, not to mention Ballard’s Hello America, Delaney’s Dhalgren, Atwood’s Oryx & Crake and Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro, to mention just a few, suggest that Conn could well have been lumbering into well-tread regions.
“I think of The Fixed Stars as post-apocalyptic only by accident. I didn’t set out to write a post-apocalyptic novel. I had an old man who didn’t like to talk about cities or fire, and I set out to learn what was up with him. As I went on it became clear that some kind of dramatic event must have intervened between the world we live in and the world this man lived in, and so then the book was post-apocalyptic. But I actually find the old man’s world quite pleasant, barring certain features of course.”
Despite its futuristic time-set, there is also something distinctly timeless about The Fixed Stars, something it shares most clearly with Dhalgren.
“Dhalgren was definitely on my mind. Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics was on my mind. Ballard was not on my mind but probably should have been. Gene Wolfe’s book The Fifth Head of Cerberus (the whole book is worth reading; do not stop with the title novella) also should have been on my mind, but unfortunately I only read it last week and discovered it included most of the interesting features of The Fixed Stars."
“Maybe The Prisoner also was on my mind. I mean the Patrick McGoohan TV show from the ’60s. Idyllic but somehow off. I confess I always thought I’d be pretty content in that village Patrick McGoohan wanted so much to get out of.”
“I find it very hard to know what really inspires anything I think, do, or write. There are certain obscure or unexpected books that I read a long time ago that somehow became so deeply rooted in my mind that I can no longer tell where their influence begins and ends. For example, The Glass Harmonica, by Barbara Ninde Byfield (republished, stupidly and unattractively, under the title The Book of Weird) – I think of that book at least 300 times a day, and when an idea comes into my head I don’t know whether it is mine or Barbara Byfield’s.”
Conn begins his book with a strange, slightly rambling, monologue from an old man to his daughter and his apocalyptic scenario is laid out as though it is an ancient fire-side story. “I think it just emerged in the process of unpacking the voices of various characters, primarily the first old man,” Conn says.
But halfway through the book there is a strange shift, a theatrical play dubbed the “John’s Day Drama” – a move into space operatics that seems overwrought to some extent, almost as though the author were poking fun at himself for writing a ‘science fiction’ novel.
“I’m glad that you mentioned that. I’ve had relatively little feedback thus far from readers, so I still don’t know what likes, dislikes, and interpretations will emerge. Several other readers have singled out the John’s Day Drama as their favorite part, which worried me slightly: I would like the book to be like a tarot deck, with different sections that speak like different cards, some to some people and others to others. Of course everyone is sort of interested in Death and few people spend much time thinking about the Emperor (right?), but I hope the book will to a certain extent act as a mirror, or maybe a Rorschach blot.
“I think of the John’s Day Drama as the result of future historians’ conflating of largely unrelated discourses. Shakespeare and Star Trek (more or less) – in these people’s eyes they were contemporaneous. I guess in a way it does poke fun at science fiction, but no more than it pokes fun at Shakespeare.”
In his blurb, Jedediah Berry refers to “machinery” culled from Sci Fi and Gothic Horror, however The Fixed Stars is, in many ways, unclassifiable. “I spend a lot of time wondering what is going on with genre,” Conn admits. “Fantastical content does not seem to be the primarily determinant of whether a work is considered SF or not. Nor does language. SF does sometimes seem less tolerant of a certain kind of ambiguity than does conventional literature. For example, Dhalgren is experimental in form and language, but in the end I think its experimental features are subsumed in a relatively coherent authorial statement – and it’s SF. Contrast to, say, The Age of Wire and String, where even articulating what the book is ‘about’ is perhaps more a creative than an interpretive act – and it’s not SF. I don’t think this is a universal test for distinguishing SF from non-SF; it’s just a very general and oversimplified observation, or maybe proto-hypothesis.
“I also notice that genre fiction tends to be more exciting than other fiction and less like school. So maybe the difference lies there somewhere.”
“Genre is ghettoized by the kind of people who ghettoize genre. In my world John Steinbeck is ghettoized. I think genre is a primitive way of bringing readers together with the books they might like to read, flawed but not entirely useless. Goodreads and Amazon and the like seem to fill the same role more effectively, and may eventually kill genre.”
Conn utilizes a strange lilting language in both his short stories and his first novel. There’s a strong touch of the Brother’s Grimm (there’s a quote from The Six Servants prefacing the book), the Shakesperian and even potentially Biblical or religious language embraced.
“Depends on what you mean by ‘religious,’” Conn says. “I’ve actually read very little of the Christian bible in any version, although I agree that the language in The Fixed Stars often seems biblical. It’s secondhand biblical. My mother, with whom I lived until I was 11 (I think?), is a California New Ager who is into the Church of Religious Science. My father and my stepmother, with whom I lived after I was eleven, were Scientologists. Note that Scientology and the Church of Religious Science are not the same thing, and neither one is the same thing as Christian Science. Each has its own language.
“I was reading a great deal of both Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm as I wrote. The Grimm’s book actually has some very strange linguistic features. Their goal was not only to collect German folktales, but also to present them as the basis for a German national character, and so the tales are heavily and often clumsily redacted as a means of dictating that character. A typical example: in most versions of Rapunzel, the witch finds out about the prince when Rapunzel becomes visibly pregnant; the Grimms instead have Rapunzel make a bizarre and implausible slip of the tongue that tips the witch off, in order to avoid mention of pregnancy. Once you know that this kind of thing is going on, the language, and the way it’s particular about certain things but glosses over other things, begins to seem like an elaborate apparatus for concealing what the characters are actually doing.”
Towards the end of Fixed Stars, Conn makes the reader clearly complicit. The children speaking seem to be afraid of us, the reader; the pre-post-capitalist. In this regard The Fixed Stars can be read as a warning to the contemporary world.
“If it’s a warning, it seems to warn us against things that would be difficult to abandon: our acceptance of hierarchies, our notions of success and comfort, our attachment to personal identity. I don’t see those going away any time soon. We used the term ‘post-apocalyptic’ before, and that implies a disaster, but a disaster is only a disaster when you’re on the wrong end of it. The people in The Fixed Stars seem to see the event not as a disaster but as a change. The thing to remember about a change, even a big change, is that something does come afterwards.”
With this, his first published novel, Conn clearly remains a fairly humble writer: “I read a lot of books when I was a kid,” he says. “Thought I could write some pretty easily, and was stubborn enough to continue trying even when the truth became evident.”
But Conn is decidedly off the mark there. The truth is that his first book is something of an instant – albeit decidedly odd – classic." - Ashley Crawford


"The Nothing is the only ground—or background—against which we can apprehend existence. It is existence. It is existence's potential of absence and nullity, but also of energy...In this sense, things only ever exist ex nihilo. Things only ever exist out of nothing." —Jean Baudrillard, from Impossible Exchanges

Brian Conn's debut novel The Fixed Stars is a fable, a myth, an image, a rant, a mantra, a spell, a vision of a time past time. What it is not is a game. At first read, it is tempting to try to puzzle out cause and effect, to suss the gimmick of this fragmented, episodic novel from its scant, but tantalizing, clues. There are repeated characters (Molly and the man like a bear, the children and the builder, both young and old,) repeated settings (the bathhouse, the arachniary, the proscenium meadow, the river and the road) and specifically structured chapters which descend from category to subcategory like a scientific catalog. At about the mid-point of the book, when the vast majority of the characters are celebrating in an orgiastic summer festival, there is even a take on Hamlet's play within a play, but with characters who faintly echo Demetrius, Helena and the rest of the players in A Midsummer Night's Dream and whose action is performed on the Starship Theseus, Duke of Athens, in case one missed the joke. Yet, for all the referential, self-referential and linguistic play it is only when the reader relaxes, stops trying to mash together pieces of a puzzle that cannot and will not fit, that the true work of Conn's novel becomes apparent.
At its most fundamental level, The Fixed Stars is an anti-capitalist manifesto. The setting, in as much as there is a specific setting, is located in a post-apocalyptic, anti-Promethean world. Here humanity has simultaneously descended to "life...solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," as Thomas Hobbes would have it, and ascended to a utopic agrarian existence where the needs of the community are provided for, sexual appetites are freely satiated and the people neither mourn the past nor fear the future, as violent as that future often turns out to be. Whatever happened to the world of the reader, the world from which this one is descended, happened out of human memory or record keeping, long enough in the past to have distilled into powerful myth. The structures, habits and mores of the "late capitalists," as they (as we) are called are feared and scorned, and yet the society of the novel habitually operates on a sophisticated pseudo-technological platform that involves genome manipulation and bacterial cultures, spiders who weave elemental metals, spores which are capable of transmitting messages instantaneously and over great distance. However, far from being a simple romp through the tropes of sci-fi parody or a dystopic alarm-system in the style of 1984, Conn has chosen to defamiliarize his novel on all possible levels in order to create a larger anti-structure: that of the void.
There is no narrative cohesion in this book. By this I do not simply mean that the narrative is fragmented, elliptical, intermittent or written in any other mode of Modernist or Post-Modernist method. Rather the pieces of this novel actively resist any sort of logical organization, and do so with a gleeful insistence. Every time the reader seizes upon a repetition that might serve to create story-line, the structure of that story is dashed so thoroughly its original existence actually serves to underscore the empty center of the novel instead of to build scaffolding upon which Conn's clearly joyful sense of language could hang. For example, in the first chapter, Molly and the man like a bear (who are not main characters but merely named characters in a novel largely populated by interchangeable folk described through their duties to the community: the sorter of the larder, the nurturer of cabbages, the deliverer of infants, and so on), are tricked into a level of the bathhouse from which it is often impossible to return. Much later, however, these two do return to the novel and, what is more, after a long journey of impossible circumstance, they return to the same valley at the foot of the same mountain from which they originally were cast. This is known because Molly recognizes the goats they encounter on their way down the ridge and unearths several items she herself buried there long ago; yet, when Molly and the man like a bear do descend into the valley they find it empty of people, the landmarks familiar but somehow wrong, a strange dust in the air, a strange track on the ground. "Perhaps we are in a place not quite the same," Molly says, and then, "Can it be that the same goats are here,..but not the same people?" In this book, that is indeed possible. When Molly and the man like a bear take abrupt leave of the novel shortly thereafter, their brief, haunting, but ultimately anti-epiphanic resurfacing underscores for the reader how little can be counted on to remain consistent in this world. Not characters, not place, not even the goats can be trusted to remain what they appear.
The seemingly multi-dimensional wandering of Molly and the man like a bear, as well as the strange calamity that befalls the society of children at the book's climactic peak, calls to mind a very early description of one of the society's central landmarks: the bathhouse.
"Just so," said the man like a bear. "But the chambers of the bathhouse climb so innocently, and curve so cunningly, that we misperceive them, and, stepping within, believe ourselves in a suite of ordinary rooms; but in fact we stand in a spiral chamber, and similar chambers lie above and below us; for in this shape each chamber lies at once above and below every other chamber."
This nautilus, Escher-like shape—with its echoes of both fractal theory and the Fibonacci Sequence—is a guiding metaphor for the book as a whole. Time does not progress on a line, but rather in a spiral. The future does not supplant the present, but exists in tandem with both the present and the past. Identity is not fixed because it is not singular and the rituals that keep the spirits of darkness at bay are, at another point on the spiral, the same rituals that call them down.
If capitalism at its most basic level can be defined as a system in which production of a good or a need is carried out to generate and sustain profit, then it clearly follows that the reality necessary to maintain this production must be essentially entropic. If energy—manpower, horsepower, fossil fuels, or, in The Fixed Stars, spiders—were inexhaustible or available without manufacture, then the product itself would be innumerably accessible, so common its value would be as nil. Capitalist philosophy hinges on the idea that energy can be expended until it is used up, at which point another source of energy must be discovered or, in the case of western theology, resurrected. What Brian Conn's novel does is reject this idea on every possible level. Time is renewable, helical. Identity is dependent on use and thus fluid. Gender, even as it pertains to procreation, is unfixed, often hermaphroditic. There is no ownership of goods, dwellings or sexual partners, and even the binary relationship of children and adults is turned on its head as, in this world, the children seem to be much older than their adult counterparts, though they are neither "other" than the members of the community nor, as they mature into sexual beings and strike out onto the road, do they appear to be fixed in some loophole of time.
For whatever authority any static determination of meaning holds over this fluid, slippery novel, by the end of the book, it is clear that the Fixed Stars is about language as much as it is about anything else. Conn writes simultaneously about the joy and the void of the word. When the word is sundered from its role as a commodity to be meted out in limited quantities for specific tasks, when it can be equally, simultaneously, and interchangeably used to signify any character, any place, any unfixed point in time (and the sweet plum woman and the lemon peel woman can be the same; the green olive woman and the string bean man can be the same) the result is a language that flashes rather than beams, that sways rather than builds. The sign and the signifier do not divorce each other so much as they tease each other and the novel is unbidden by its form.
"The Nothing does not cease to exist as soon as there is something. The Nothing continues (not) to exist just beneath the surface of things," says Baudrillard. Ultimately, he concludes that, without a mirror held up to the world, without a kind of verification he determines to be impossible, there can be no such thing as reality. The constructs of our familiar society—economic, political, legal, aesthetic, and so on— have no meaning outside themselves and thus, in the true spirit of the capitalist agenda, no value. Yet, within this seemingly grim pronouncement Baudrillard finds the potential for a surprising kind of happiness. "The world was given to us as something enigmatic and unintelligible," he says, "and the task of thought is to make it, if possible, even more enigmatic and unintelligible."
"For we prefer that all images consist side by side in our minds, none dominating any other, but each gathering to itself the singular strength that belongs to it, that we might enjoy them all equally and all at once," says Brian Conn. I believe he is saying something very similar to Baudrillard. In The Fixed Stars joy and fear, grief and love, ritual, superstition, doom and salvation exist in the same moment. The result is a book as remarkable for the sheer joy of its voice as it is for the implacable terror of its emptiness." - Diagram

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Literary Geometry: an interview with Brian Conn by Jedediah Berry