Art, God, and Madness – Jon Fosse’s Melancholy I-II

Jon Fosse’s novel Melancholy, through four linked episodes, makes a forceful argument for what being a certain kind of artist actually means and feels like. Taking the real 19th century Norwegian painter Lars Hertervig as its central figure, a man who was released from an asylum as incurably mad and who ended his days destitute in a poorhouse while still having created many masterpieces, Fosse finds Lars’ artistic power to be inextricably linked to his ability to see what others could not and place it on the canvas. He was great precisely because he was mad, mad because he was great. This special sight, his gift, in both its glory and its terror is presented not only through what Fosse writes, but also how he writes it. Preceding those extraordinary works Septology and Aliss at the Fire, Melancholy is every bit as extraordinary as them in its use of language. It’s a truly beautiful work.

Four episodes comprise the novel, each giving us a new angle from which to observe Lars himself. In the first and longest, we follow Lars for a single feverish afternoon in Düsseldorf in 1853 as he gets kicked out of his rented rooms and wanders between them and a pub frequented by others from the art academy where he studies. The second sees Lars in 1856, already trapped within an asylum and still less in control of his mind than he was even in the first section. The third deals with a writer, Vidme, who in 1991 is trying to write about Lars, and decides to visit a pastor to enquire about returning to the Norwegian Church. The fourth and final section follows one of Lars’ sisters, Oline, shortly after Lars’ death in 1902, as she tries to hold onto life in the present as memories and age keep her drifting back mentally into the past.

Lars is there, forcefully, for the reader from Melancholy’s very first words – “I am lying in bed…” The man we get acquainted with strikes us immediately by his strangeness and his child-like vulnerability. He is in love with his landlady’s daughter, Helene, a fifteen-year-old girl, and by the novel’s beginning has already had a moment of rapture with her. Not sex, but something stranger – “And then Helene Winckelmann stood there and looked at him, with hair falling down from the centre part over a small round face with pale blue eyes, with a small little mouth, a small chin. With eyes that shined. Hair flowing below her shoulders. Pale, flowing hair. And then a smile on her mouth. And then her eyes, that opened towards him. And out from her eyes came the brightest light he had ever seen”.

This is chaste, the kind of thing that is reminiscent of a saint’s vision. Lars is innocent in other ways too. For one, he’s incredibly susceptible to others’ words. At the inn, Malkasten, the other artists taunt him, saying Helene is hiding there waiting for him, and he believes them as readily as he believes himself when he convinces himself that she has telepathically called him back to the house where he has just been thrown out onto the street. He seems petulant rather than upset at being mistreated, mentally tapping his feet while he waits to be allowed to go and find Helene again. At the same time, we notice the purity of his belief in his own artistry. Over and over, he remarks mentally that he is an artist. It’s not as if he fears he is not one, rather it is the fixed core of an identity that is otherwise totally unstable.

For Lars is, admittedly, barking mad. Just as he has these beautiful visions with Helene, he has visions of a darker sort too. He sees black clothes hovering and trying to smother him. His anger is ferocious, and he declares an intention to kill every single other painter on a regular basis. His mood swings from elevation into despair. He loves Helene with every tick but with every tock believes, wholly without any textual evidence, that she is actually trying to get rid of him to pursue a sexual relationship with her uncle.

These negative qualities become still more pronounced once Lars is incarcerated in the asylum in Melancholy’s second section. Where in the first section he referred to how Helene’s uncle would “do things” to her, now he expresses a hatred of all women as mere whores and spends a considerable amount of the section touching his penis against the guard’s explicit instructions. Deprived of his art, all of Lars’ worst qualities are magnified. Unsurprisingly, ripping out the core of someone’s identity is no way to bring them back to anything approaching sanity. While the novel at no point makes any suggestion that Lars is even several kilometres away from sanity, it presents those who challenge his mild delusions as only making things worse – whether Helene’s uncle, the guard at the asylum, or the workers of the poorhouse in the final section – and reminds us of the dire state of mental health treatment in past centuries.

In some sense though, it doesn’t matter what personality Lars has, or what the external world does to him. What matters is only the implicit argument of Melancholy that being an artist (of a certain sort) can bring us closer to God or, if you prefer, something higher. To some vision of the sort Lars experiences with Helene, which can provide succour for a whole life. Perhaps the best way of exploring this, however, is to shift from the content of the text to how that content is itself presented, the texture of it. For all of the oddities of Fosse’s style – the shifting times, the shifting perspectives, the repetition – turn the novel into something more like a picture than a prose work, and bring the reader to the borderlands of something she would be hard pressed not to call mystical in nature.

Melancholy is a book that drifts from the now into the then, and the real into the unreal. Even without considering the black clothesthat attack Lars, he travels in his mind while remaining physically in one place – to Helene’s transfiguration, to his departure from Stavanger on the boat, to images of his father and sister Elizabeth underwater. Vidme, the writer, drifts between what he expected of his meeting with the pastor, and what he actually experiences. And Oline, in the final sections, drifts between the drudgery of her aged life (emphasised by repeated struggles to maintain control over her bodily functions and trips to the outhouse) and the wonder of her childhood with Lars in the Norwegian countryside. Overall, the technique is less advanced than it is in Aliss at the Fire, but still, we might go from now to then with only an “and” to warn us.

The impression of such shifts is that life is turned into a thing of layers, a little like those transparent sheets we place and shift around for an overhead projector. It gains a wholeness and interconnectedness from the prose which in its lived moments it can seem to lack. Even as the present moment is devalued, something we see most concretely in the way Lars will often talk to people who aren’t there, or fail to talk to those who are, individual experience is placed on a still higher plane.

Something similar happens when we think of the novel’s willingness to shift between the first and third person within the sections. It’s almost like the characters in Melancholy decide from time to time to turn away from their embodied lives and talk directly to us, reflecting on themselves and their fates from a strange new distance. Here again, loosening themselves from the physical world, the emphasis seems to be placed on life seen as flux rather than constancy. This is something that is in evidence also from Lars’ shifting moods and liquid identity. Perhaps I can venture to say that if the text presents the leap from first person to third as no great jump, it implies the leap to another perspective or other life is no great challenge either.

Perhaps the most unique aspect of Melancholy’s prose in comparison to other fiction is, however, its use of repetition. Many writers aim at the telling detail or the careful avoidance of cliché as they craft their images, so that their works build up huge beautiful flat scenes like artful, intricately layered watercolours. Fosse does not even work from the same paints. He uses oils. That is why it is so hard to quote him. Not just because he writes long flowing sentences, but because taking individual pieces from the work is like chipping off some paint, no, varnish, and expecting it to tell us something about the picture it was trying to represent. Fosse’s works are thick, lumpy, textured things. He builds up impressions through repeated words – “white” and “black”, or “eyes”. Perhaps this is closer to how the world really comes to us moment to moment – wave after wave of the same vision with only slight differences each time.

What matters here is the effect: the reader is forced to confront a kind of loosening of the bond between text and meaning. We sense that here what is important is not what is in the text but what lies behind it, the “silent language” Fosse refers to in his Nobel Prize speech. No text tells us how to interpret this. There’s no evidence for the pub Malkasten being like Hell other than the overwhelming impression on my soul caused by page after page of Fosse’s prose. In the same way, God isn’t a character, but the text brings us closer to the mystical way of thinking by showing us what it looks like, what it feels like. We see things as an artist, a particular artist, perhaps saw them. The light and dark, the magic and wonder of shifting impressions, shifting times, intense visions – these things make us look up from the page to see the world as being closer, perhaps, to the kind it is to a believer.

Vidme, in the third section, is ultimately rejected by the pastor. She says she has read one of his books and dislikes the mystical inclinations in it. Lars himself is raised a Quaker, a group that look for their own inner light rather than waiting to be told how to live. The emphasis on interconnectedness made me think a little bit about Spinoza, who saw the everything as one substance, and his successor Schopenhauer, who believed that if we could “still” our will, we could notice that all things are interconnected and simply manifestations of the same single longing. Reading Melancholy I certainly felt the strange connections it seemed to want me to find.

In the end, Fosse himself did not return to the Norwegian Church, neither when Melancholy was written in the late 1990s, nor later. Instead, around 2012 he became a Catholic, a church which has historically been far more accommodating to mystics. Reflecting now as I come to the end of this post, I realise I have perhaps given the wrong impression when I wrote about the role of God in this novel. Rather, Melancholy expresses a longing for God, but not yet a success in finding Him. We are still far away from the awesome beauty of Septology, where God is right there on the page and the single salvatory force holding the painter Asle’s life together. This lack makes Melancholy a sadder book, as its title implies, but still far from a hopeless one. It remains a beautiful, wonderful, if occasionally insane, novel, and perhaps the best vision of what it means to be an artist that I have yet read.

The Best Kind of Modern Life – Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection

I now cannot recall how I came across Perfection, a short novel by the Italian Vincenzo Latronico translated this year by Sophie Hughes, but once I, an uprooted cosmopolitan type in Germany, learned it was about some uprooted cosmopolitan types in Germany, I considered myself duty-bound to read it. In fact, I’ve already read it twice. (Occasionally I have to stop imagining I am the hero of a Russian novel and instead admit my real-world reflection might be a little less flattering.) What we have here is a short novel – but this word feels wrong, when the work feels more like an extended observation, almost anthropology – of a couple who move to Berlin to work in the creative sphere when young, watch the city and themselves change, and wonder with a little sad dismay at the shape their lives have taken. And all this without a word of dialogue, in a style that is numb yet perfectly, patiently, observant. 

For these are the heroes of Perfection – style and detail. The goal of this book is not to turn Anna and Tom – our couple – into people we might shed a tear for as individuals, but to display their life choices and their consequences with such clearsightedness that any implied assessment of their lives, whether by themselves or the author, has the crushing finality of a prison door clanging shut. From the first section, where we see an image of their existence as a series of snapshots on a holiday rental booking for their Berlin apartment, the details are so overwhelming that we feel they must be true. The houseplants are named, the furniture, the board games, the magazines. The impersonal narration itself – “the life promised by these images is clear and purposeful, uncomplicated” – seems to suggest we look no further, that the objects of a life are sufficient for extracting all its meaning.

Things. I do endless, hopeless, battle against them. Perhaps I fear that I myself can be identified in my entirety by them. Perfection is not some anti-materialist novel, but by leaving out the dialogue and individual scenes – the habitual “would” is an extremely important word in the novel, giving a weightless generality to any event and action it mentions – we as readers are forced to find meaning in these details, rather than in those things that otherwise might be the key to understanding character, intention, and novelistic work.

Often with literature we talk about the dichotomy of “show” versus “tell”, and Perfection provides an example of why this is a simplistic approach. The novel tells us everything in declarative paragraphs dully consistent in length and weight, yet enhances the telling by showing it through the details chosen. It tells us who Anna and Tom are and then finds its proofs in the materiality of their world, whether it’s the details of what they do at the weekends, their sex life, or the social media they consume. Whole sections might have been lifted from some report with titles chosen according to the part of their lives that are in focus: “gentrification”, “money”, “sex”, “social groups”. Only vaguely do we sense that in the background time is passing.

Talking about the book sensibly is hard because the action and characterisation is so light. There are no ambiguous gestures to interpret, no action to set our heart hammering, nor even any real personality on Anna or Tom’s part to make us care about them. We care, if we do, because they are like us, and not because they have earned our love. The narrator, observing them from behind the glass, does not try to make us feel for them too much. Another key word in Perfection is “if”, used in a kind of characterisation by absence. “If they had ever thought it through” – but the couple had not. Or else “…looking like a young professional couple in Berlin, which is exactly what they were.” Brutally, mutely – because all dialogue is differentiation – they become the types that they are. Even the country in Southern Europe that they are from is not named.

Without cares, without interpretation or ambiguity, we can only judge – them and their world. This is how such an anthropological novel works, and it seems that this is how Perfection aims to work, given its narrator speaks with enough distance to encourage us to judge them. Anna and Tom are uprooted, just as passive as the narration of their lives. They live in Germany, but do not speak the language or work with German clients, and their social circle is a series of people like themselves passing in and out of a revolving door. “They inhabited a world where everyone accepted a line of coke, where no one was a doctor or a baker or a taxi driver or a middle school teacher.” They are ultimately isolated. Reading, it’s like we are following these two people as they push their way through a thick fog, clinging mutely onto each other.

Isolated as they are, they are also part of a kind of community. Except that it is a community of appearance, rather than reality. Loose connections, comings and goings. The scene shown in an Instagram post is more significant than the memories of a bad day that the photo came from. They live in anxiety about their sex life, because they are not polyamorous or getting off at sex clubs or using toys when they know that others are. They have to lie to their parents about how much money they make. As the city becomes ever more gentrified, they realise that they haven’t got the money to keep up. At the same time, they have no idea how to change things because they have never worked in an office.

There is a dark well at the centre of Perfection which it slowly lowers us into alongside the characters. Things start well enough, then get steadily worse. Young and in Berlin in the early-mid 2000s, Anna and Tom have a good life. But using only clients from back home, not integrating or learning the language, they become trapped. When an opportunity for real action appears during the beginnings of the European refugee crisis in 2015, Anna and Tom discover that the lives they have led have not given them anything that would actually allow them to help. They use their house as a base for gathering donations for onward movement to the refugees camps, but when they try to help at the camps themselves they learn they have no in-demand skills, nor even enough German to communicate properly with the police.

At last, they try travelling, but find that the world they left behind is simply following them. In Portugal helping a new hotel set itself up they realise they are just importing the same design aesthetics from Berlin with only the slightest Mediterranean twist. Even the people they find on the street, the early harbingers of gentrification, are like ghostly echoes of the people they knew when they first came to Berlin. The people they themselves were when they first came to Berlin. Travelling lets them see nothing new, and there’s a real hopelessness that settles in on the text as it approaches its end.

Then, just when we are fearing the worst, they have a moment of luck. In a section entitled “Future”, using that tense rather than the “would” of the rest of the novel, we witness a redeeming vision. Anna and Tom inherit a farmhouse in their country, and are able to turn it into a large holiday rental. Using a PR agency they are able to get influencers to stay the first few nights, and positive initial reviews ensure that theirs will be a going concern. Away from Berlin, which they had outgrew, or which perhaps had outgrown them, the ending seems to promise something new, solid, rooted, compared to what came before.

That the novel ends with what is just a stroke of good luck is not unreasonable within its own rules. Throughout it we get a sense that Anna and Tom have not the agency or fortitude to lead lives that are not determined for them. Without language, without enough money, without enough strength of will to fight against conformity, they are blown around by chance, helpless against their changing world. Even their choice of career is an accident – something formed from “teenage obsession” with the early internet and then monetised, rather than coming from any real intention. This ending, too, comes from things happening to them, not because of them. But at least this thing is a positive one. A little bit like the changing fortunes of Frédéric Moreau in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, driven by the randomness of the stock market, here too do we have a sense that one of the essential features of modernity is precarity, a total exposure to forces, good and bad, that we do not influence ourselves.

Anna and Tom’s “good life” is not the “perfection” of the novel’s title, and there is much missing in it. But it is interesting for me, as a young mildly rootless person myself, (albeit admittedly one who speaks German at a high level and volunteers locally partly to ensure I integrate), to see its overlaps with my own life and those of my friends. While it’s easy enough to dismiss the two Berliners’ lives as failing because of, say, their failures to integrate, the evidence of my own circle of friends and acquaintances, spread across many countries and professions, seems to point much more towards a more general malaise, rather than some gentrification-specific one.

People coming out of good universities and feeling entitled, perhaps, to good jobs, when they have missed the silent signals that the pathways to such jobs are the “spring weeks” and internships. People who have come from good families and are determined to maintain the positions of their birth by forcing themselves into jobs they hate in law or banking. People refusing all that and working in the fields only to feel a growing distance from everyone they knew before, without being able to replace them with anyone else. Even my own employment contract lasts until the end of August. Everywhere is precarity, not enough money, mute misery. In between the two gods – money and authenticity – nearly everyone decent is stranded somewhere, and few in the right place for their own happiness. Anna and Tom are not living entirely authentically, which we are told but also notice ourselves, by the way they are living always in the shadow of images – others’ and their own. But neither, typically, are we.

Modern life is tiring – witness My Year of Rest and Relaxation, whose narrator wishes to check out from the world for a year. It’s also strangely fragmented, as in the novels of Sally Rooney, where often we find ourselves constantly needing to shift between times in order to give interactions weight because by themselves individual scenes just feel light, airy. In the past I would have complained – have indeed on this very blog complained. Perfection’s numb descriptive style, without its dialogue, without its differentiation of character or action into scenes, is not enjoyable in the way that a rollicking drama is. But now, getting up each day to go to the office, struggling in the chinks of time when I’m not working to find space for authentic life, I can no longer criticise something that seems so manifestly true.

It’s not the writers who are wrong – it’s life itself. If you want good fiction today you need to change the world.

(this is referring to tales of middle and upper-middle class professional lives. I am aware that good fiction about other lives, and by other lives, continues to be produced on a regular basis)

A Midlife Crisis Novel – Martin Walser’s Runaway Horse / Ein Fliehendes Pferd

Based on the way I was taught German, it was hard to avoid the manifestly silly impression that Germany is made up entirely of old people and people “with a migration background”. This novella, Runaway Horse (Ein Fliehendes Pferd), by the German author Martin Walser, does admittedly deal with the first of these groups, so at least my knowledge of Germany’s aging society was not entirely wasted. As societies everywhere are aging, I suppose we simply have to get used to the increasing ubiquity of the midlife crisis novel. This one, from 1978, considers the effects of meeting someone whose life choices are completely different to our own not quite too late for us to turn things around if we decided theirs were actually better.

The novella follows closely a schoolteacher, Helmut Halm, and his wife Sabine as they enjoy a holiday on Lake Constance. There, an old schoolfellow of Helmut, Klaus Buch, likewise on holiday with his own much younger wife Helene, encounters them one day. This sets the stage for a clash of values, because the two couples, in particular the two male figures, have very different ideas of life. Both, however, are middle aged and having to consider the shapes of their lives, both what has passed and what is to come.

The Halms are bourgeois. Helmut has brought a five-volume set of Kierkegaard’s diaries with him on holiday, and he and his wife can think of nothing better to do of an evening than drink wine and smoke. He is detached from the world, “his dream became to be unreachable”. There’s a sense that he enjoys the irony of the difference between his inner world, which filters the novella’s action, and the perception of him that others have. The Halms as a pair do not represent passivity so much as a resignation from the ambition of trying to sit at the centre of the world. Gladly on the margins, they enjoy what life has to offer them – good food, good wines, predictable holidays (they have been visiting Lake Constance for eleven years), and the life of the mind.

Klaus Buch and his wife are the opposite. Successful writers, they seem all action and good health. They avoid sugar, only drink water, and are always out running. They embody that German passion for aktiv holidays and the great outdoors. Several of the book’s set pieces take place on the boat that Klaus sails, or else in nature. If the Halms have given up on participation in life in their middle age, Klaus Buch resolutely refuses the same course. He memorably describes having “had to part with [his first wife] because he did not want, like a plant, to keep growing in a pot that was too small for him.” His new wife Helene, eighteen years younger, serves to keep him younger.

Seeing Helmut and Sabine at a café, Klaus and Helene decide to join them (and ruin their holiday). Helmut remembers next to nothing about the past, which in Klaus Buch’s telling becomes “more alive than the present”, and where Helmut was a considerably more impressive a figure than he has now become. (“Klaus Buch said… how happy he was to see that Helmut was no petit bourgeois. / Helmut thought: if there is anything I am, it’s a petit bourgeois”) Thus begins a story of incredible awkwardness, of sailing trips, hikes, and dinners, as Klaus Buch explains who Helmut was and how amazing he was, and Helmut is forced to keep up a kind of mute pretence that it was indeed so.

One of the elements of ein Fliehendes Pferd’s formal mastery is that this is all that the story works with, this opposition of worldviews and two couples. There literally are only these four characters with speaking roles – Helmut and Sabine, Klaus and Helene. Yet the whole thing becomes rich through an intensity of language created out of its apparent simplicity. The word “adventure” is repeated like a mark of shame for Helmut, whose life lacks so much of it. Likewise, the mineral water that the Buchs drink versus the wines of the Halms are obvious symbols of their two attitudes to life. “You don’t like me anymore, eh?” Klaus says to his wife so many times that eventually it becomes more performance than affection, and then there are the references to “flight” or “trotting” that mark Helmut’s own thoughts, as the fleeing horse of the title.

By being so normal in content – a fairly standard lakeside holiday – the text elevates what it does say into something almost mythical. Everything becomes intense and symbolic. The German here relies heavily on reported speech, which is its own grammatical construction in the language, requiring no “he said” or similar verbs to keep us aware that we are deep within someone else’s words (and world). Like in Thomas Bernhard, we are immersed in another’s world for pages at a time, but unlike in Bernhard, (with the possible exception of Correction), we are shifting from consciousness to consciousness as they battle. First Klaus Buch will speak for pages, with us trapped in his vision, then Helmut will go home with Sabine, and spend a few pages musing in his own mind. Finally, near the novella’s end we get to see a little of Helene’s thoughts too.

The ruination of the Halm’s holiday is less significant than the shaking of their world, once Klaus and his wife step onto the scene. With their enthusiasm, zest, pep, or however you want to call it, the Buchs are dangerous. Klaus talks a lot about sex – Helmut and his wife don’t even do it anymore. (“How often do you bang your wife, eh?” Being one of the more crass things Klaus says when he and Helmut are alone.) At first Helmut is just grumpy, but gradually he realises there is real danger here. He quite likes Helene, whose breasts he keeps stealing furtive glances at, just as he realises Sabine quite likes Klaus. There’s no risk that either of the Buchs is interested in an affair, but there is a risk that just by being there they reveal the weaknesses of the Halms’ lives. Beauty and energy always have their attractions.

For me they certainly do. At first, it was hard not to prefer Klaus, with all that inner drive. Perhaps he will get Helmut out running and ditching the fags and booze, I thought. Sure, Klaus is annoying, but he’s not wrong to be living life the way he was. (Just as Helmut wasn’t wrong either, just less exciting to read about). When Klaus quite literally leaps onto a wild horse dangerously attempting to flee a field, it’s an obvious representation of him saving the moping Helmut. Why seem and be passive, I thought, as Helmut does, when you can be?

It may be true that Klaus undermines himself by seeming something of a parasite. He claims he needs Helene to remain physically young, just as he eventually admits he needs Helmut to remain mentally young. However, ultimately, when he and Helmut go on a sailing trip alone and the weather becomes stormy, the overall impression is that Klaus is a heroic, Nietzschean (a name mentioned in the text) figure, while Helmut is a coward who wants to go home. As the weather worsens, Klaus “laughed and danced towards the mast”, truly Dionysiac. Then, moments later, the waves catch him and he is lost overboard, leaving Helmut to make his way back to shore however he can. So much for the other’s worldview, eh, triumphantly though it is lived even at the end.

The final chapter of the novella provides the necessary correction to our idea of Klaus. Helene joins Helmut and Sabine the next day and she decides to drink as much wine as she can with the other woman. Now, for the first time, the dominant consciousness of the novella is not Klaus or Helmut’s, but rather Helene’s, as she presents the private version of her husband. In this portrayal, Klaus is obsessed with his writing while utterly unsuccessful at it, controlling towards his wife (he practically tries to turn her into his daughter and literary inheritor), and a total “fantasist.” While readers go through ein Fliehendes Pferd thinking that it is Helmut who loves the distance between his inner world and appearance, ultimately Klaus seems the one who lives this disjuncture. Until they saw Helmut and Sabine, Helene says, Klaus talked about his idea of living far more than actually living it.

While all this is going on, Helmut himself is wracked with guilt over Klaus’s death, even though he bears no responsibility for it. He doesn’t drink with the women, and before Helene had turned up he had actually gone with Sabine to get activewear so they can change their lives. In other words, taken as a clash of ideologies, it appears that Klaus, dying, had won.

But then he actually turns up, having miraculously survived the storm at sea in something like a tragicomic moment of brilliance, and drags away Helene back into the hell of her life with him. Sabine and Helmut throw off their sports clothes and light up new cigarettes. It’s a very strange ending, insofar as it leaves us right back where we began. This connects the story to the novella’s epigraph from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, where Kierkegaard, behind one of his typical masks, asks whether we could write a story between clashing worldviews where an “event” is not used to provide the grounds for the victory of one or the other of them. Because the story ends up right back at the beginning, with the Halms and the Buchs separated, and neither pairing having changed their views, we can say that Walser has delivered just that.

The problem is that nobody likes reading a story only to get back to the beginning. Even if the externals are the same as before, many cyclical stories imply a kind of internal revaluation of things. But here we have two worldviews that clash, are bruised, but then reconfirmed on each side. There’s not really a sense that anyone has learned anything. The novella has this obsessive normality to it – you can sit on a bench at a national park, like I did yesterday in my part of Germany, and imagine the whole thing playing out among the middle aged couples you see walking past with their dogs – and then at the last moment Walser delivers Klaus incredibly from the jaws of death. It’s quite silly.

The idea of stasis or stagnation is one that I think does make for interesting literature, and the topic of how our decisions shape our lives, including from middle age onwards, can never not be important to people who have to deal with questions like that during their own time on earth far more than they have to consider, for example, how they would react if they woke up one morning and discovered they were a bug. But I find Walser’s treatment of his topic here, his sudden renunciation of the exploration of the ideas, a little sad in the end. To go back entirely to where we began as perfectly as Ein Fliehendes Pferd does, (whose last words are the novella’s first words), at least when trying to tell this story, all seems to say the story was not worth telling to begin with.

It’s a sharp contrast with the obvious mastery of the nuts and bolts of writing which Walser displays, from his careful use of symbols to his powerful portrayals of contrasting consciousnesses in the narration, and does leave a bit of a bitter taste in the mouth. I am glad it was only a novella.