This is a beautiful book. It’s about a monomaniacal Italian, Josef Mazzini, who becomes obsessed by the Weyprecht and Payer expedition of 1872 whose mThis is a beautiful book. It’s about a monomaniacal Italian, Josef Mazzini, who becomes obsessed by the Weyprecht and Payer expedition of 1872 whose mission it was to discover the fabled Northeast passage, a route hugging Northern Europe through the Arctic Sea to the proverbial spice islands. That expedition failed. But Josef is fascinated by it and in 1981, more than a hundred years after the original expedition, he sets off for the arctic and vanishes.
Parallel to Mazzini’s story is the harrowing tale of the Weyprecht and Payer expedition itself with the officers and crew wondering when the ship will be crushed like tinder in the pack ice. They eat by shooting polar bears and seals; they suffer from scurvy and unimaginable cold; when their fingers freeze they cut away the dead flesh with garden shears. They end up being stuck in pack ice for two years. Yet—miraculously—many survive. The novel’s structure is post-modernist but its deft handling generates none of the usual annoyances of this overly self-conscious form.
At one point the reader is told: “In the next century [20th] it will be ascertained that the polar ice cover varies between two and five million square miles. The polar cap is a pulsating amoeba and the Tegetthoff an annoying splinter in its plasma. The ice increases now. Everything increases. The darkness, the pressures on the Tegetthoff, the fear for their ship—they prefer not to fear for their own lives yet. . . .” (p. 90)
And one wonders, extratextually, how much ice is left now? The book was published in 1984.
Mazzini is not a thinker or much of a talker. If he were, perhaps he’d know how clueless his journey is. When he does speak, in response to a chatty ornithologist, it’s to say “I don’t understand you. Be quiet.” He marches to his own drummer. His fascination with the polar expedition is a lamentable throwback behavior which blinded generations of men in an absurd quest for glory.
As Weyprecht says, polar exploration is a “game for martyrs . . . exhausting itself in the . . . ruthless pursuit of new latitude records for the sake of national vanity.” (p. 216)
My favorite part is the section late in the book in which Mazzini learns how to handle a dog sled and team.
It’s all here, friends. Thomas Bernhard’s hatred of incompetence in all its forms. His hatred of physicians, who, after all, are complete hacks; his hIt’s all here, friends. Thomas Bernhard’s hatred of incompetence in all its forms. His hatred of physicians, who, after all, are complete hacks; his hatred of government functionaries, those blasé fuckers up of private lives; and let’s not forget hatred for the black hole that is the Austrian bourgeoise. All of these people, and more, should be taken out at dawn and shot. It would be a gift to all thinking people, of which there are few. Distressingly few.
And the way widespread criminality has limited all forms of private existence! It’s no wonder Konrad here, a Bernhardian madman in all respects, has chosen to spend the last pennies of his vast fortune on a defunct lime works, where he goes in order to think about his book, which he’s been thinking about for 25 years. The lime works is in a town called Sicking.
“...[There was the fact that] nobody grew old in Sicking. Although everybody gave the impression of being old, nevertheless. Wherever you went in Sicking, you would see nothing but old people, he said, even the children; if you looked at them hard enough, you were struck by the way they exhibited the repulsive mannerisms of the old.” (p. 50)
Bernhard was thirty-nine when he published this. He died at forty-seven after a life of suffering from acute pulmonary disease, which certainly speaks to his hatred of the medical profession. His work is unique in the harshness of its vitriol. This one seems typical. It starts with mild expostulation and grows in time to a hysterical rant....more
Fascinating in the early going here with regard to Empress Maria Theresa and her machinations once named monarch to restore provinces snatched away byFascinating in the early going here with regard to Empress Maria Theresa and her machinations once named monarch to restore provinces snatched away by greedy usurpers. How dare Austria name a woman to lead their country. Well, Maria Theresa in time regained Bohemia, Moravia and part of Silesia after hard bargaining with the Hungarians for military support. Quite a story. This is the first I've read of this monarch's exploits and its proving entertaining. Maria Theresa, or some farsighted advisors, saw the importance of crushing some feudal institutions such as the robot, which gave the nobility control over the working lives of the peasantry, and the tax-free status of the nobles themselves. So, as the authors of Why Nations Fail would say, she decreased the "extractive" burden on the peasantry, believing they and the state would be far better off if they were left to promote their own self-interests. This "began to undermine the very logic behind traditional social hierarchies," i.e. feudalism. Moreover, after the loss of her most commercially active region, Silesia, to Prussia during the War of the Austrian Succession, she made Triest, Fiume and Brody all tax-free zones as a means of spurring trade. ...more
Well, here we are again in the land of obsessive compulsive disorder, suicidal rage and death panic. It's like Bernhard has one channel and one channeWell, here we are again in the land of obsessive compulsive disorder, suicidal rage and death panic. It's like Bernhard has one channel and one channel only: sturm und drang, but without the post-Enlightenment restraint. How did Richard Hugo put it: "hatred of the various grays / the mountain sends...." Bernhard's satirical narrators are against everything: especially mountains, in this case the Alps, nature, people, society, art, any and all institutions, the church, the state, you name it. No culture, usually Austrian, can have a single redemptive aspect in its favor. One might think: 'Oh, the mountain air is great! I love to hike. Might take in a movie later.' For Bernhard's characters, there can be no such trivial daily existence. If we do hear about it, it's acidly deprecated. Death is inevitable; birth was never asked for. One is simply hurled into the "existence machine" by one's parents, probably drunk at the time. How dare they subject one to life and death! They should be put up against a wall and shot! If there's humor in Bernhard, it's of the gallows variety. Whistling in the graveyard. Bernhard's novels are voice novels, not surprising for a playwright, his other literary stronghold. They are almost entirely interior monologues with little or no description. Almost always one ranting narrator, pent up, unloads as if from a stage. This can be entertaining, but the cumulative effect is gloom. You can't get intimate with Bernhard as you would, say, with Styron. That's how consuming his negativity is. Like a horrific spectacle from which one cannot avert one's eyes. Bernhard may be a complete original, I'm not sure, but take heed. His art is dark, blackened by madness, numbing like opium....more
Thomas Bernhard's novels constitute perhaps the most enigmatic prose reading experience of my life. His novels are brilliant puzzles, and a single reaThomas Bernhard's novels constitute perhaps the most enigmatic prose reading experience of my life. His novels are brilliant puzzles, and a single reading will probably not vouchsafe you all of a given novel's secrets. Correction seems a prime example. Here we are again with the typical first-person Bernhard narrator, a highly unreliable, socially connected but insensitive individual, who's circular in his reasoning, repetitious in his verbal style, almost monomaniacal in his focus, and whose torrent of words cunningly excludes subjects about which we would like to know more.
At the start of Correction, Roithamer, the polymath, an Austrian-born scientist teaching at Cambridge University, has just committed suicide shortly after the completion of a massive, rural architecture project, known as the Cone, for his beloved sister. The unnamed narrator, a peer and boyhood friend of Roithamer, presents a hagiographic overview early on of the late man's work; though in fact it is remarkably devoid of specifics. This fellow was named by Roithamer as his literary executor. The book starts when he shows up at a house of a taxidermist by the name of Hoeller, another boyhood friend of Roithamer, whose new home on the Aurach gorge contains the garret in which the great man did most of his intellectual work. It was here, inspired by Hoeller's daring new house, that Roithamer devised the Cone and planned and executed its construction over six years.
It is never made clear what the narrator, who seems an eerie doppleganger of the dead Roithamer, or the deceased genius himself for that matter, are supposed to be famous for. All we know about Roithamer is that he's in the natural sciences, and that he both teaches and studies at Cambridge. Of the narrator we know even less, except that he was once upbraided by Roithamer for following his (Roithamer's) ideas with too slavish an allegiance. No one but the unnamed narrator is even allowed to speak in the novel, except Roithamer himself, and then only through the texts he's left behind. There's no dialogue per se, no real-time verbal exchanges. This is very strange, and suggests a kind of jealous guarding of the narrative by the narrator. Hoeller is not allowed to speak even when spoken to, nor his wife, nor their children, nor are recollected friends and acquaintances ever allowed to say anything. So we're left with a single ranting voice, page after page, dense pages without paragraphs. The novel is in fact a single unbroken chunk of text.
Anyway, slowly, up there in Hoeller's garret, like Roithamer before him, our narrator begins to unravel. Is he, in his dopplegangerness, intentionally repeating the pattern of behavior that took Roithamer's life? Is he that much of a sycophant? Or is he being subjected to the same stresses that drove Roithamer to take his own life? Will the narrator soon take his life? The setting of Hoeller's house on the edge of the Aurach gorge, amid the rush of turbulent waters, and the craziness not only of building a house there, but of living in such a house, is a large part of the narrator's, as it was Roithamer's, fascination with the place. It's when the narrator begins to go bonkers in the garret himself that the doubleness and connection of narrator and acolyte seems to crystalize.
Moreover, Roithamer has built his Cone for his sister in the depths of the Kobernausser forest without ever talking to her about either her willingness to live in such an isolated structure, or even if she wants such a place, even as a occasional retreat. He bases his design, he tells us, on his lifelong "observation" of his sister's character. Apparently this does not include one-on-one conversation. Right after this revelation, which left this reader astonished and a little breathless, he turns right around and lambastes contemporary architects for their inability to "investigate" their clients. The suggestion is that some kind of intellectual assessment, apart from anything a client might have to say, should be the overarching design criterion; though this something is never explicitly named.
This section seems to resolve itself into a statement on the prerogatives of the artist or creator and the manner in which the artist or creator should think and process his thoughts. Roithamer's approach is idiosyncratic, to say the least. For instance, not only should his sister not be consulted about the construction of the Cone, to which, we soon learn, she is averse to living in. But Roithamer must undertake the actual construction of the Cone, not on-site where the building will rise, but from Hoeller's garret, because this is where his thoughts can most readily reach fruition. A large portion of the posthumous writings are dedicated to a rant-filled recapitulation of injustices done by his parents to Roithamer during childhood. Each offence, it seems, is remembered. Each is deplored at length. Here is someone who never got over his dysfuctional childhood. He's stuck with a chip on his shoulder. He has never undergone the growth of character necessary to put those early experiences behind him, something I believe all adults must eventually try to do. He is self-pitying. This is tragic and pathetic. 'Get over it,' one thinks. But Roithamer cannot. He was long ago arrested in his emotional development, and his inability to move on--to recognize the fundamental imperfection of daily life and yet to live it fully and purposefully anyway--kills him. Character is fate.
Highly recommended, but brace yourself for a dark, dense, sexless, misogynistic, icy-hearted read....more
This biography of Archduke Wilhelm Franz of Austria — later (post-WWI) Wilhelm Franz von Habsburg-Lothringen — is a compelling read. Ostensibly it's aThis biography of Archduke Wilhelm Franz of Austria — later (post-WWI) Wilhelm Franz von Habsburg-Lothringen — is a compelling read. Ostensibly it's about the Prince's embrace of Ukraine as a personal mission with implications for the dynasty. It covers discrete moments of the Habsburg Empire's rise and fall with a brevity reminiscent of A.J.P. Taylor's The Hapsburg Monarchy, 1809-1918. Though that is more of a survey text, while Dr. Snyder's book is a history-laden biography. Cleverly devised....more
This severe, judgemental little book is solely about the politics -- internal and external -- of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary in the years This severe, judgemental little book is solely about the politics -- internal and external -- of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary in the years stated. There is nothing in it about wars fought, just passing references to their having occurred. There's virtually nothing in it about cultural life. The biographies of those involved are kept slender. The focus is exclusively on the Emperors' courts at Vienna and the many permutations that the monarchy went through -- who its ministers were and what their mistakes and successes were and who they dealt with abroad -- to manage a vast, polyglot state which eventually collapsed along nationalist and cultural lines. Lacking descriptive color, it can be very dry. On the other hand, I know of no more condensed survey of all the socio-historic trends and economic pressures the state was subject to in that period. Especially recommended for those with an interest in how Austria handled the Revolution of 1848 and it's run-up to the first world war....more
A portrait of Hapsburg Vienna about a generation before its dissolution. The monarchy is a class-driven machine producing much punctilio but apparentlA portrait of Hapsburg Vienna about a generation before its dissolution. The monarchy is a class-driven machine producing much punctilio but apparently little in the way of strategic planning. The growth of nationalism among its polyglot population is viewed by Emperor Franz Joseph with trepidation, but ultimately the official attitude is wait and see. We as readers know these nationalist pressures will tear the Empire apart in 1914 when, in Sarajevo, Serb Gavrilo Princep blows a hole in Archduke Franz Ferdinand's neck. But in 1888 the monarchy seems either oblivious or in denial, perhaps a little of both. Only Crown Prince Rudolph and those of his immediate circle possess insight into the unsustainable imperial trajectory.
The Crown Prince is a fascinating paradox. He's well educated and liberal, a noble who's at heart a republican. His fondest wish is to see his kind expunged from state affairs. He knows the government is in desperate need of reform. Yet despite his lofty rank, his legions of admirers, he possesses no real power to effect change. The emperor employs his intelligence apparatus to spy on him. Agents follow him about and monitor his telegrams. The burden of protocol is overwhelming, but Rudolph seems to bear up well until the visit of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. The occasion is Emperor Franz Joseph's fifty-sixth birthday. Rudolph, who prefers the company of the so-called commoners to the moribund aristocracy, despises Wilhelm for his empty pan-German rhetoric. Yet he must toast him, must follow him about like a puppy, so the Kaiser won't grandstand at this or that reception about the virtues of the Greater Reich. He's stuck in this empty diplomatic role, smiling and toasting a man he despises. He's good at it. His manners are Old World. Understandably, he grows depressed.
There can be no question of Rudolph taking a mistress from among the nobility. His marriage to a cipher was a function of politics, not love. The noble ladies set their sights on him but he is emphatically not interested. Things look bleak indeed. Then he sees Mary Vetsera at one of the few social events where commoners and nobles can intermingle. At the new Court Theater they observe each other with opera glasses. Mary is 18 and Rudolph is 30. He's heard of her, of course. Mary's mother is a skillful social climber who's handed her gifts on to her daughter. Mary's a "lady of fashion" whose every new ensemble makes the society pages. Their liaisons are complex, arranged by a Vetsera family friend. There is much scuttling about labyrinthine corridors, much zigzagging about town to shake persistent tails.
Soon they are both dead from a suicide pact. Mary's corpse is spirited away by family members and buried without ceremony. Rudolph is given a funeral the likes of which are perhaps no longer seen in our day. His death rocks the empire. Of his final messages for others, he leaves not one word, not a syllable, addressed to his father.
The book is a portrait of a vanished era as much as it is a tale of star-crossed lovers. Along with Rudolph and Mary's story we're given a look at the cultural life of Vienna. The artist bios are beautifully compressed. We peek into the young lives of Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo Wolf, and Sigmund Freud--all in their twenties--as well as older established artists like Aaron Bruckner and Johannes Brahms. Vienna is a vast overwrought Baroque wedding cake. Morton brilliantly transforms the boulevard of braggadocio, the new Ringstrasse, into a fitting central metaphor for the posturing and decorum of a vast, fragmenting empire oblivious of the ticking clock. Wonderfully vivid and highly recommended....more
This is a wonderful novel. The title is ironic. The writing dazzles. Occasionally, just occasionally, I come across a book that wallops me into silencThis is a wonderful novel. The title is ironic. The writing dazzles. Occasionally, just occasionally, I come across a book that wallops me into silence. . . . ...more
This is about a European walking tour begun by the author in 1933. He was 18 at the time and his budget was £4 a month, sent poste restant to him alonThis is about a European walking tour begun by the author in 1933. He was 18 at the time and his budget was £4 a month, sent poste restant to him along his route. The book’s unusual intellectual depth derives from the fact that he did not write the memoir until much later in life. This first volume, of three, appeared in his 62nd year.
Leigh Fermor’s departure from London takes the form of a lengthy description of his steamer, the Stadthouder, pulling away from Irongate Wharf under Tower Bridge on a rainy night. His literary technique here is to slow the moment down through excess description as if to savor it. This is just the first spate of very rich description that one gets throughout.
He naps in the pilot house and is in snowy Holland in a blink. Here everything reminds him of Dutch painting. On the third or fourth night he sleeps above a blacksmith's shop. Promptly at six he’s awakened by the clanging hammer, the hiss of hot metal in water, the smell of singeing horn as a horse is shoed. Heading for the German border, he comes across a belfry and, almost reflexively, climbs it:
The whole kingdom was revealed. The two great rivers loitered across [the landscape] with their scattering of ships and their barge processions and their tributaries. There were the polders and the dykes and the long willow-bordered canals, the heath and arable and pasture dotted with stationary and expectant cattle, windmills and farms and answering belfries, bare rookeries with their wheeling specks just within earshot and a castle or two, half-concealed among a ruffle of woods. (p.34)
His trek across Germany comes at the very start of the Thousand Year Reich. Hitler has been Chancellor just nine months. The people he meets are wonderful. He picks up two fräuleins in Stuttgart--he was strikingly handsome--who don't let him go for days. The parents happen to be away at the time.
There's a funny evening when one of the girls must attend a party held by a business associate of her father. The German host is a Nazi and a man of high, conspicuous style. His ghastly modern villa is deprecated at length. Leigh Fermor watches as the host hits on each young woman in turn, cornering them in his study, and is rejected by both. This does nothing for his standing among other guests. (He styles himself the young woman's cousin, named Brown.) His host introduces him around as the "English globetrotter," which PLF resents. Most amusing is their departure. To protect the girls' reputation he must tell the host he's staying at a nearby hotel, when of course he's sleeping on their sofa:
We had to take care about conversation because of the chauffeur. A few minutes later, he was opening the door of the car with a flourish of his cockaded cap before the door of the hotel and after fake farewells, I strolled about the hall of the Graf Zeppelin for a last puff on the ogre [his host's] cigar. When the coast was clear I hared through the streets and into the lift and up to the flat. They were waiting with the door open and we burst into a dance. (p. 80)
Then he's in Bavaria wrestling strapping peasants on beer hall floors for fun, losing his precious notebook, his walking stick, and waking "catatonic" with hangover, or, as it's called in Germany, katzenjammer. The holidays pass and on 11 February 1934 he turns 19.
He undertakes a recapitulation of his reading at the time, much of it Latin and Greek, which left me envious of his failed classical education. Though he was a terrible student — a scrapper and practical joker it seems — he ended up a formidable linguist, who, only a few years later during the war, along with his unit--he was in uniform by then--successfully kidnapped a German general in Crete. This would make him a national war hero, but I rush ahead.
In Austria, as in Germany, he has occasion, between his nights in peasants’ stables and hutches, to find himself lodged amid extraordinary grandeur. He had the foresight to arrange a number of introductions on the continent. In Austria he fetches up at the schloss of K.u.K. Kämmerer u. Rittmeister i.R., Count Gräfin of the late dual monarchy.
The count was old and frail. He resembled, a little, Max Beerbohm in later life, with a touch of Franz Joseph minus the white side-whiskers. I admired his attire, the soft buckskin knee-breeches and gleaming brogues and a gray and green loden jacket with horn buttons and green lapels. These were accompanied out-of-doors by the green felt hat with its curling blackcock's tail-feather which I had seen among a score of walking sticks in the hall. (p. 137)
We move on to an assessment of the quintessential Austrian schloss. Its myriad details are considered, as well as certain regional variations. The disquisition on German painting (Cranach, Bruegel, Altsdorfer, Dürer, etc.) has the righteous authoritative tone of Robert Hughes. Especially interesting is the author’s point about the lush technique of the Italian Renaissance hardening into a grotesque and visceral style in the north due to the brutal wars of the period. (See C.V. Wedgwood's fine The Thirty Years War which he extols in a note.).
We also get details of the Danube's history, its flora and fauna (including a predacious 15-foot catfish known as the Wels). The author's not infrequent late nights at the various inns along the way are colorful. The one five miles from Ybbs "was made of wood, leather or horn and the chandelier was an interlock of antlers."
A tireless accordionist accompanied the singing and through the thickening haze of wine, even the soppiest songs sounded charming: 'Sag beim Abschied leise "Servus,"' 'Adieu, mein kleiner Gardeoffizier,' and 'In einer kleinen Konditorei.' . . . The one I liked most was the Andreas-Hofer-Lied, a moving lament for the great mountain leader of the Tyrolese against Napoleon's armies, executed in Mantua and mourned ever since. (p. 170)
The section on the migrations of peoples I found particularly dense. One thing you have to say for PLF, he does not write down to his reader. He assumes you have much the same knowledge or educational grounding as he does, and for those of his generation this was by and large true.
Always hovering is the horror of the Holocaust to come. It's 1934 after all. But it's not until he enters Köbölkut in the marches of Hungary, and finds himself among the roughhewn peasantry in a local church on Maunday Thursday, listening to the Tenebrae, then, in search of a bed for the night, when he finds himself talking to the local Jewish baker, that the weight of the inevitable hits the reader and the effect is is one of deep dread.
The church had lost its tenebrous mystery. But, by the end of the service a compelling aura of extinction, emptiness and shrouded symbols pervaded the building. It spread through the village and over the surrounding fields. I could feel it even after Köbölkut had fallen below the horizon. The atmosphere of desolation carries far beyond the range of a tolling bell. (p. 299)
I gave the book four stars because the style is very dense and I never quite acclimated to it. I find PLF here at times too humorless and didactic. There's a smell of the lamp, true, but there’s also much that’s wonderful. He's clearly drunk on the history of the Danube basin and he has a gift for making languages interesting on the page even for those who do not speak them. That cannot have been an easy task, but he does it. Particularly interesting was how one almost watches him pick up German, writing about the change of dialects along the way.
There’s so much more I’m not touching on. Bratislava and his friend there, Hans, the banker; the last-minute train trip with Hans to Prague in the snow, a backtrack to the only city on his 2000-plus mile route he does not enter on foot; his discussion the following morning with the Jewish baker's Hasidic heritage; the time he's held at gunpoint on the Austria-Czech border when he's thought to be a smuggler; his contemplative loitering on the bridge between Slovakia and Hungary, the Basilica of Esztergom looming overhead, the Danube rushing below.
But for all it’s verbal richness A Time of Gifts can be at times a bit of a slog. One never careers happily through it. One is always aware of the great erudition, the trumping vocabulary, etc. It is in the end like a cloying, too rich desert. If you’re inclined to indulge, as many will be, (for the book is very highly regarded), so much the better for you....more