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Selections from Graveyard of Bitter Oranges: The Torch

Art credit Anthony Cudahy.

This week, we will be running a series of excerpts from Josef Winkler’s Graveyard of Bitter Oranges. Inspired by the author’s stay in Italy after leaving his native Carinthia, the novel was first published in 1990 by Suhrkamp Verlag and its English translation will be published by Contra Mundum Press in 2015.

The monk from Assisi, who had removed his upper and lower dentures on Holy Saturday so that his cheeks would look as sunken as the tomb of Jesus after the resurrection, said repeatedly: Don’t give the dogs the gnawed leg bones of the Easter lamb, bury them in the cemetery, do not even think of giving them to the dogs!

At six-thirty in the morning in a café in Stazione Termini in Rome, when I was about to catch the train to Austria, I espied a dwarf who stood as tall as my knees and carried with him a gilded stool, to be able to sit down whenever he wished, and one of the bar patrons ordered him a cappucio. He leaned down to hand it to him, and I turned back and stayed in Rome. I believe the dwarf will be particularly beautiful in heaven, the painter said.

Once again I surprised myself as I thought how much I should have liked it had the boy, whom a passing car had grazed, been run over instead, so that I could lift up his body, still warm and bleeding—the boy’s body and mine, a pietà—and together, already adorned with cross-shaped funeral bouquets, we could have waited for the hearse to arrive.

I opened my chest with a scalpel, extracted my slippery heart, sliced it into shreds so that, with this red rag, as I called it in my dream, I could wipe off my ink-stained fountain pen, which lay atop a poem by Robert Musil: The sister sweetly separates / The sleeper’s sex and swallows it / Leaving in exchange her heart / in the same spot, soft and red.

In the Via dei Condotti, a dwarf, deformed from thalidomide, pushed with her short naked legs a shoebox half full of lira bills. Tourists threw money into the box, passing indifferently all the while before the gypsies loafing about, nursing their children with their breasts exposed. To call the attention of passersby, a beggar banged his cane repeatedly on a sacred image unfolded on the ground where the head of John the Baptist was portrayed.

For three days, in the shop window of a farmacia, the mummy of an Egyptian child was left on display in an old-fashioned cradle. Vera mummia! read the piece of paper pasted to the crib.

If you can’t hide, I’ll kill you! I said to a rainbow trout swimming in a wooden vat filled with honey. Before I was able to stare a bit longer and more closely at the trout, the body of Jakob rose before me, pulled the death shroud from his breast, and showed me his heart, white as snow.

Recently I have begun to see on packages of sweets numerous Austrian landscapes that were in fact long ago destroyed by industrialists, politicians, and their agents of environmental dissection. While the chocolate confection melts slowly on my tongue, I can contemplate, more or less conscientiously, the landscapes on the wrapper of the package. The brains of the Austrian politicians have been extracted by means of hooked instruments in the shape of swastikas, and maimed ex-combatants in wheel chairs have seasoned them with lemon juice and served them, in the manner of a Last Supper, to an actor who portrays Jesus in a passion play at Eastertime, on a silver platter, just before his crucifixion.

In Piazza della Pace in Rome, a vagrant lay for weeks in front of the doorway of the church, wrapped in a blanket atop cardboard boxes, until a boy and a girl approached him on a moped, drew to a halt, doused him in gasoline and set him alight. Agonizing, he burned like a torch before the portal of the church.

The young man on roller skates cursed when he got stuck in the earth of the grave mound of a suicide, then jumped onto the paved walkway of the cemetery and wiped the gummy soil from his skates with a paper napkin.

I was not even ashamed when I awoke with a shudder from a dream in which I had kissed the right cheek of a young boy, his hands blood-spattered from his first murder. I only asked myself if, had I not woken up, I would have stabbed the young man lying at my side in my sleep and returned, none the wiser, to bed and lay down, my hands spattered in blood.

In the Messaggero I found a photo and pasted it in my notebook, which is filled with images of the dried cadavers, arrayed in their vestments, of the bishops and cardinals from the priest’s corridor of the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo. A Turkish mother knelt with her arms outspread before the five corpses of her young children who had been killed in an earthquake and were lined up one beside the other. And another time I tore out a photo from the newspaper in which a young man had doused himself in gasoline and set fire to himself in Italy. The carabinieri and onlookers stood helpless around that torch, which continued to live for a few moments.

Josef Winkler (b. 1953, Austria) is the author of fourteen books and winner of numerous literary honors, among them the 2008 Büchner Prize. His major themes are suicide, homosexuality, and the corrosive influence of Catholicism and Nazism in Austrian country life. His novels When the Time Comes and Natura Morta are currently available from Contra Mundum Press, who will also be publishing Graveyard of Bitter Oranges in 2015.

Adrian West is a writer and literary translator whose works has appeared in numerous publications including 3:AM, McSweeney’s, and the Review of Contemporary Fiction. His book-length translations include the novels of Josef Winkler as well as the long poem cycle Alma Venus by Catalan poet Pere Gimferrer.

Anthony Cudahy is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. He is currently an artist-in-residence at Artha in the Brooklyn Navy Yards.

Friedhof der bitteren Orangen. Copyright (c) Josef Winkler, 1990. English translation copyright (c) Adrian West, 2012. Translations published by permission of Contra Mundum Press.

 

Start 2014 with a Dual Subscription to McSweeney’s and The Paris Review

This new year, bury the hatchet, broaden your horizons, and shock your friends with a dual subscription to McSweeney’s and The Paris Review.

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Faulkner’s Cocktail of Choice

In honor of the new year, we are bringing you some of your favorite posts from 2013. Happy holidays!

When I first started working at Kings County Distillery, in the summer of 2010, I was delighted to find the job provided ample time to read. Whiskey making has its own peculiar rhythm. Each batch begins in a flurry, as one juggles a series of tasks like a line cook, but ends in a hush, with little to do but watch the languorous drip of the stills.

This was in the wobbly-legged days of the company’s infancy, before we moved into the grand old brick paymaster building in the Brooklyn Navy Yards. Back then we were based out of a studio space on Meadow Street with wooden floors and five-gallon steel pot stills that had to be emptied, scaldingly, by hand. (This, as our former downstairs neighbors can attest, would prove an unfortunate combination of circumstances.) During that first summer, we worked singly, in nine-hour shifts, so there was a lot of alone time. So, unless one wanted to lose one’s goddamn mind in that little room, one read.

Perhaps it was the environment, but I soon became keenly aware of how an author’s drink of choice could perfume the pages of a novel. Fitzgerald’s very language is redolent of the gin rickey; Kerouac stinks of tequila; Chandler of gimlets; Hemingway of mojitos and red wine; Poe of cognac; Wilde fumes with absinthe; while Burroughs somehow manages to isolate the weird chemical frequencies in a vodka and coke. Anne Sexton drank straight vodka, whereas Sylvia Plath wrote about vodka but mostly drank wine. Carson McCullers was coldblooded, so she drank sherry mixed with hot tea in the morning and straight bourbon at night. Bourbon was also the poison of Sherwood Anderson, Dylan Thomas, Walker Percy, and Ring Lardner. Steinbeck preferred brandy, but when he couldn’t get it during Prohibition, he once appeared at a Stanford–Berkeley football game wearing an overcoat lined with vials of grain alcohol, pilfered from a chemistry lab where he worked.

And then there is Faulkner, the poet laureate of corn whiskey. I read Light in August over the course of about seven shifts that first summer. A significant portion of the book concerns the exploits of a pair of bootleggers—a topic with which Faulkner was familiar, having run boatfuls of illegal whiskey into New Orleans during Prohibition. There are lovely passages describing the act of drinking whiskey, which goes down “cold as molasses” before beginning its slow, warm uncoiling.

Sherwood Anderson recalls that when he first met Faulkner in New Orleans, in 1925, Faulkner showed up wearing an overcoat that “bulged strangely, so much, that at first glance, I thought he must be in some queer way deformed.” Faulkner informed Anderson that he intended to stay for some time in the city, and asked if he could leave some things at Anderson’s house. “His ‘things’ consisted of some six or eight half gallon jars of moon liquor he had brought with him from the country that were stowed in the pockets of the big coat.” For breakfast Faulkner would eat beignets with a glass of corn liquor, and as he wrote, he kept a jug or three under his desk. Hemingway once remarked that in Faulkner he could detect the “boozy courage of corn whiskey.” (He meant it as an insult, but Faulkner likely wouldn’t have taken it as such.)

Kay Boyle wrote in The New Republic in 1938 that there were two Faulkners, “the one who stayed down south and the one who went to war in France and mixed with foreigners and aviators.” The former was elegant, a bit rambly, and “almost ludicrously authentic”; while the latter, inspired by the modernism of Joyce, Eliot, and Stein, was dense, allusive, Guernica-contorted and Guernica-grim, but always (Boyle remarked sharply) “a little awed, a little unsure, provincially aware of the chances he is taking.”

I like to think of these two Faulkners as embodied in his two favorite cocktails: the toddy and the mint julep. The julep is High Faulknerian. Taking in the dense, lush language in his most lauded works—As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Absalom, Absalom!—is precisely like burying one’s nose in a tangle of fresh mint and sipping a strong bourbon. But the other Faulkner, the one who stayed down south, exemplified by the Snopes trilogy and Sanctuary and Light in August, is more like a cold toddy: light, citrusy, superficially graceful, yet deceptively complex.

Faulkner’s favorite drink is often listed as the julep, which is probably correct: his house in Oxford still displays his beloved metal julep cup. But his old standby was the toddy, which he describes “compounding … with ritualistic care.” It comes in two forms, hot and cold. Faulkner’s niece, Dean Faulkner Wells, clearly recalled her uncle making hot toddies and serving them to his ailing children on a silver tray. But unlike today, the cold toddy seems to have been the more popular in Faulkner’s day.

Recipe:

2 ounces of bourbon or white whiskey
4 ounces of water (cold or boiling)
If cold, 1 lemon slice; if hot, 1/2 lemon, both juice + rind
1 teaspoon of sugar

The key to a toddy, according to Faulkner, is that the sugar must be dissolved into a small amount of water before the whiskey is added, otherwise it “lies in a little intact swirl like sand at the bottom of the glass.” (One of Faulkner’s short stories, “An Error in Chemistry,” hinges on this point: a northern murderer, pretending to be a Southern gentleman, mistakenly mixes sugar with “raw whiskey”; the Southerners recognize his faux pas and immediately pounce on him.) Once the sugar is dissolved, the whiskey is poured over it. Top it off, to taste, with the remaining water—preferably “rainwater from a cistern.” Add lemon and serve in a heavy glass tumbler.

Robert Moor is a writer currently living in British Columbia. Read his other work at robertmoor.com. This piece has been adapted from The Kings County Distillery Guide to Urban Moonshining: How To Make and Drink Whiskey (Abrams). Please feel free to attend the book’s launch party at the Powerhouse Arena on October 23.

 

Selections from Graveyard of Bitter Oranges: The Blood of Saint Januarius

Art credit Anthony Cudahy.

This week, we will be running a series of excerpts from Josef Winkler’s Graveyard of Bitter Oranges. Inspired by the author’s stay in Italy after leaving his native Carinthia, the novel was first published in 1990 by Suhrkamp Verlag and its English translation will be published by Contra Mundum Press in 2015.

One day I asked my mother how she had found out that her three brothers, eighteen, twenty, and twenty-two years of age, had died in the matter of a year during the Second World War. Adam’s coming home too, but different! my grandmother seems to have said to my then sixteen-year-old mother, who had just returned home from an exam in Home Economics. His body was brought by train from Yugoslavia to Feistritz, where one of the other siblings transported his brother Adam, who was already lying in his coffin, in a horse carriage over the still unpaved road home to Kamering. My mother got word of her second brother’s death as she was climbing a hill, a rake on her shoulder, in the direction of the cemetery, and saw my grandmother standing in prayer in the distance over her brother Adam’s freshly dug grave. The sacristan’s wife, who was also in the cemetery, approached my grandmother and asked her why she was crying. Stefan is gone! my grandmother said. Stefan is gone! my mother heard as she walked, a rake over her shoulder, along the cemetery wall. She was informed of the death of her third brother by the mail carrier at the time, who herself lost her only son, more than ten years back, on Golan Heights. She brought to my mother’s sister, who was resting against the garden fence, a letter that my grandfather had written to his son Hans at the front. Over the envelope was a handwritten message: fallen for greater Germany! According to my mother, my grandfather’s legs shook when he read this note, and his wife, my grandmother, collapsed unconscious at his side.

When we arrived in the early morning to Stazione Centrale in Naples, two ten-year-old orphans, who had spent the night under the stars, were still lying in a field across from the station. At the cross streets were naked children from six to ten years of age, holding buckets of water and squeegees and waiting for the traffic lights to turn red so they could wash the windows of the stopped cars and stretch their filthy hands through the cars’ windows. A woman with one breast exposed, nursing her child in the passenger seat, pressed a hundred-lira coin into a boy’s hand. A vendor was hawking buns on wooden skewers that he carried around in a basket. Over one of the impaled buns was a page of a newspaper in Arabic with the photograph of a dead child. An inflated white balloon covered with characters from Walt Disney came to rest on the ground in a poor neighborhood. In an alley in Naples, a child played a red harmonica imprinted with the word Camorra. From a clothesline hung a towel with the crude outline of a map of Rome. When I saw the fingernails of the barman squeezing out my orange juice, I immediately cringed and asked if he would serve me a mineral water instead. I was afraid that the orange juice would stream over those unsavory looking nails and that, disgusted, I would be incapable of drinking my juice. A Neapolitan coffin vendor: All passengers getting off at the last stop, show your tickets please! On my way to the cathedral where the spectacle of the liquefaction of Saint Januarius’ blood was to take place, I stopped in the courtyard of a building and lifted my camera to eye-height when a man stepped toward me resolutely and said: The museum is up there, up there Michelangelo, not here, capito? In the candy stalls in front of the cathedral they were selling busts of Saint Januarius in various sizes, of glass and marble, but also of sugar and marzipan. In the sugar glass ampoules in the marzipan statues made to resemble reliquary vessels, in place of the blood of Saint Januarius, was a strawberry preserve that melted over the tongues of the children. A priest made an acolyte holding a candle light up the vessel that was said to hold the blood of the patron saint of Naples, waved the ampoule back and forth numerous times, shook his head, and said: It’s still solid! Another priest mounted the pulpit and shouted: “Not only was Saint Januarius surrounded by savage animals, but we are as well! Wherever we are or wherever we go, they roar and gnash their teeth! But we do not see them! you will tell me. Woe unto you if you do not see them! Those animals are the passions in our breasts, which you should exterminate like vermin that eat away at your souls! You should cut off their heads, as they cut off the head of Saint Januarius!” Look, said a young monk, speaking in Neapolitan and holding his head in his hands, I am just a poor man, it matters not whether I live or die, but if the blood of Saint Januarius liquefies here once again, I will cave in my head at your feet this very minute, so long as you promise me to return to the breast of the Mother Church and profess the Catholic faith. San Gennar, screamed the crowd, fa il miracolo! Faci la grazia di far il miracolo! San Gennar, dove sta la tua fede? Dormi o sei morto? As the blood still refused to liquefy, they cried: Sei andato o Mavozzo? Sei crepato santuccio? Maledetto, se non fai il miracolo! When at last the blood liquefied, the archbishop lifted the relic aloft, swung it from one side to the other, and shouted: È fatto! and more than a thousand people applauded. Women and men embraced one another weeping, and the bells sounded in the cathedral, so that the people out in the street would also know the miracle had been wrought once more, and for a year, Naples would be spared from earthquakes, eruptions of Mount Vesuvius, outbreaks of cholera, and other catastrophes. I salute you, venerable blood, that sprang from the rib of Christ and was spilled to purge the sins of the world! Oh blessed blood, bless me! Oh pure blood, purify me! Strong blood, give me strength! A woman, whom the caribinieri refused to let approach the archbishop, who was protected behind a screen, faked an epileptic attack and threw herself onto her back on the floor, flinging saliva all around. The caribinieri watched her calmly and took her under the arms to help her up when she tried to get back to her feet. Another woman grasped the hand that the archbishop held to his breast and kissed it as he walked over the red carpet of the church in the direction of the sacred blood of Saint Januarius. “The relic may be kissed from 4:00 P.M. onwards,” read a sign hanging near the altar steps. A bishop who held the relic—escorted by caribinieri with submachine guns—said to a child who was kissing the silver vessel that contained the ampoules said to hold the blood of the patron saint of Naples: Don’t kiss the silver housing, kiss the glass, that’s where the sacred blood is!

Josef Winkler (b. 1953, Austria) is the author of fourteen books and winner of numerous literary honors, among them the 2008 Büchner Prize. His major themes are suicide, homosexuality, and the corrosive influence of Catholicism and Nazism in Austrian country life. His novels When the Time Comes and Natura Morta are currently available from Contra Mundum Press, who will also be publishing Graveyard of Bitter Oranges in 2015.

Adrian West is a writer and literary translator whose works has appeared in numerous publications including 3:AM, McSweeney’s, and the Review of Contemporary Fiction. His book-length translations include the novels of Josef Winkler as well as the long poem cycle Alma Venus by Catalan poet Pere Gimferrer.

Anthony Cudahy is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. He is currently an artist-in-residence at Artha in the Brooklyn Navy Yards.

Friedhof der bitteren Orangen. Copyright (c) Josef Winkler, 1990. English translation copyright (c) Adrian West, 2012. Translations published by permission of Contra Mundum Press.

 

Enlightened: Schiller at the Hohe Carlsschule

In honor of the new year, we are bringing you some of your favorite posts from 2013. Happy holidays!

In 1784, a twenty-five-year-old Friedrich Schiller, then Germany’s most famous playwright, published a notice announcing his new journal, the Rheinische Thalia. “It was a strange misunderstanding of nature that condemned me to the calling of poet in the place where I was born,” he wrote, reflecting on his path to fame. “To be inclined towards poetry was strictly against the laws of the institute where I was educated, and ran counter to the plan of its creator. For eight years, my enthusiasm struggled against the military rules, but passion for poetry is fiery and strong, like first love. What those rules should have smothered, they only fanned.”

These bitter words were written in memory of the Hohe Carlsschule, the military academy founded by Carl-Eugen, Duke of Württemburg, where Schiller spent his teenage years and young adulthood. In Germany the duke was known for his autocratic rule, wasteful spending, and eleven illegitimate children. At the same time, Carl-Eugen was deeply interested in statecraft and, above all, in educational reform. Decades into his rule, he decided to found an academy whose goal was to create a bureaucratic class free of the aristocracy’s tangled family loyalties. The only criterion for entrance was merit. Accordingly, students from bourgeois backgrounds (like Schiller) vastly outnumbered the noble-born.

Schiller was fourteen when he was sent to the Carlsschule, and he was not happy to be there. Visits from family were strictly regulated; female relations, particularly sisters and cousins, were forbidden entirely. Worse, Élève 447, as he was now known, had to wear a uniform, march in formation to meals, and sleep in a dormitory that was kept lit even at night to make sure the students weren’t masturbating. Any violation of the rules or attempt to flee resulted in the student’s having to write out his crime on a red card, which he wore pinned to his chest at mealtimes. As the students ate, the duke would work his way around the tables, read each card aloud, and give the student a slap. Serious offenses were punished by imprisonment or caning.

What distinguished the Hohe Carlsschule from other European military academies was its founder’s deep fascination with the progressive pedagogical ideas of the French Enlightenment. From a young age, the students learned Greek, Latin, French, philosophy, and were set on a professional path as doctors, lawyers, or civil servants—all extremely enviable positions. They studied rhetoric and contemporary literature and learned, through style exercises, to write poetry. The teachers were scarcely older than the students, and instead of lecturing held informal chats in which the students were invited to participate. The Carlsschulers were encouraged to look on them as their friends and confidants, to whom closely guarded secrets could be trusted. Schiller enjoyed a particularly close relationship with Jakob Friedrich Abel, a philosophy teacher only seven years his senior. He credited Abel with the deep moral and aesthetic convictions that would run through his plays and his poetry, even as Abel reported on Schiller to the duke.

Despite the school’s professional emphasis, Carl-Eugen stressed that students’ primary area of study was the knowledge of man, the most cherished of Enlightenment values. To that end, classes were given regular essay assignments like “Which student among you has the worst moral character?” Time was set aside for the students to write detailed studies of another’s characters and habits. The first existing piece of Schiller’s writing is one such essay, written when the poet was fifteen years old. Asked to analyze an older student named Karl Kempff, the young Schiller pulls no punches. With an astonishing mix of eloquence, astuteness, and coldness for a fifteen-year-old, Schiller accuses Kempff of mediocrity, egotism, crudeness, envy, malice, and false modesty. Schiller’s brutal honesty is particularly shocking in light of the fact that students could be punished for infractions revealed in the studies. Practically, the reports had the effect of undermining the students’ sense that they were victims of authority by turning them into co-perpetrators. The duke would stand by as the essays were read aloud and chide the students if he felt that they were being insufficiently specific.

Making the Carlsschule experience still more oppressive was the suffocating Oedipal atmosphere that reigned there. Separated from their families—and all contact with women—the students were encouraged to look on the sixty-year-old duke as their adoptive father, while for a mother they had his twenty-three-year-old mistress, Franziska von Hohenheim. Difficult as it is to imagine now, this too accorded with Enlightenment ideas about pedagogy. In her unattainability, Franziska was to serve as an ideal, intended to help the boys realize that pure love is more important than immediate sexual gratification. As a reward for good behavior, they could ride with her in her coach, or eat a meal with her in her English park. Predictably, she loomed large in the students’ imaginations. Schiller’s first known poetic effort is a poem written for a graduation ceremony, equating Franziska with virtue itself. Peter-André Alt observes that the poem’s meter, cadence, and rhyme scheme prefigure “Ode to Joy,” now the unofficial anthem of the European Union.

After several years at the Carlsschule, the medical profession was chosen for Schiller, much to his chagrin. Late one evening, while Schiller was manning the infirmary, his friend Joseph Friedrich Grammont showed up and asked for some sleeping pills. Sensing that something was wrong, Schiller prodded Grammont until his friend confessed that he planned to kill himself. Schiller was able to dissuade him and dutifully reported the incident to the duke, who assigned Schiller to cure his friend—effectively, Schiller was to be Grammont’s psychoanalyst. Schiller’s diagnosis, which he tuned in several weeks later, was that the painful headaches and stomach pains plaguing Grammont were psychosomatic symptoms of a psychic disturbance brought on by his deep hatred of the school. (Later studies of the case attribute Grammont’s condition to depression brought on by compulsive masturbating.) Displeased with the results, the duke told Schiller to convince Grammont that staying at the academy was his only chance of being cured, a task Schiller went about with understandably little enthusiasm. Eventually the case had to be given up and Grammont was discharged from the academy.

Schiller’s time at the Carlsschule was a trauma he would reflect on for the rest of his life. Rape, patricide, the abuse of power, betrayal, imprisonment, and suicide would remain themes in his work until he died of tuberculosis in 1805. His characters seem most themselves either in prison or under surveillance, as in Mary Stuart or Don Carlos. In those, his best plays, the tightly metered verse conveys not so much the desired sensation of dignity and grace but of speech straitjacketed by tyrannical authority. Even his personal life reflected the extent to which he was never able to move on. Remembering the strict hygienic rules of the institute, Schiller rarely shaved as an adult, hated wigs, and would receive guests in his bathrobe. The crowds at the Mannheim Theater could never understand why he wore such a shabby coat. Several friends commented on its likeness to a military uniform.

Later critics of Schiller like Theodor Adorno and Friedrich Kittler, who knew how easily his works had been repurposed by the Nazis, never tired of pointing out that Schiller’s passionate pleas for human dignity were at heart totalitarian. Someone who presumes to speak for humanity secretly wants to subjugate it, writes Adorno: someone who sees people for what they can be will inevitably hate them for what they actually are. Knowing the details of his time at the Carlsschule, the least that might be said for Schiller is that his evocations of freedom are so unconvincing because he never knew what it was to be free, a painful fact he would reflect on again and again. He might have had his young self in mind when, in a letter defending Don Carlos to a critic who found it improbable that a Spanish nobleman would have openly criticized the Inquisition to King Phillip II, Schiller answered that, though the scene was probably historically inaccurate, it was not so improbable as it seemed. “After all,” he wrote, “it’s in the deepest dungeons that the most beautiful dreams of freedom are dreamt.”

Michael Lipkin is a student who lives in New York City.

 

Selections from Graveyard of Bitter Oranges: The Dead Children

Art credit Anthony Cudahy.

This week, we will be running a series of excerpts from Josef Winkler’s Graveyard of Bitter Oranges. Inspired by the author’s stay in Italy after leaving his native Carinthia, the novel was first published in 1990 by Suhrkamp Verlag and its English translation will be published by Contra Mundum Press in 2015.

In the wine cellar, the ash from the volcano disgorged the wine from the bottles and barrels and filled them back to the brim. In the tombs, it displaced the ashes of the dead, settling down their place. The mouth, eye sockets, and skulls were filled by the rain of ashes from the volcano. A stream of lava, fifty meters wide and two meters deep, descended the slope of Mount Etna at seventy meters per minute. The lava flooded the stone houses as well, where pious images were hung, and flowed over the black crosses on the roadsides commemorating murders that had taken place. At night, the ash fell over the neighboring villages and the next day, the air was dull brown. Monks wore on their breasts the image of an erupting volcano, and stopped before each window, waiting until they’d received alms for the homeless. Boys ran through the shadowy side streets with lanterns on sticks, looking for cigarette butts that smelled of the fires of Purgatory. Street urchins hurled oranges and lemons at a train covered in with a film of hot ashes. Peasants leaned sacred images against the still-undamaged trees to stanch the searing flow of the lava. A tourist led an ass to the summit of Mount Etna to hurl it into the lava’s dreadful deluge. As it fell, the animal let out horrible cries before it burst into flames and blackened like a thicket of broom. The tour guide cooked the tourists fresh hen eggs in the scorching cinders from the volcano. English tourists pressed coins bearing the head of the queen into the hot lava, cleaned off the bits of lava that clung to the molten matter, and took them back home as souvenirs.

Against which wall of the farmhouse did they lean the large black lid and the two small white lids of the coffins? In an old house in ruins, in a pile of magazines, I once again found wedged in a copy of Bunte Illustrierte a photo essay that I had torn out as a child and kept for years in the drawer of my night table. In one of the photographs, an old woman dressed in black, with white gauze cradling her chin and a rosary threaded through her hands joined in prayer, had been placed in a black coffin. To her left and right, in two smaller white coffins, were two children, their hands joined together and interlaced with rosaries, and their jaws likewise held shut by a white cloth tied around their heads. In front of the three coffins, at the old woman’s feet, a small family altar had been raised. To the left and right of a cross on a pedestal, to which a white Christ was nailed, two votive candles burned. On the catafalque that held up the coffins, comprising two tables pushed together and covered with a white cloth that hung down in copious folds, sprays of periwinkle had been affixed with pushpins. Johann Pignet, a farmer from Dreulach in the Gail Valley in Carinthia, was returning home from a funeral with his wife Maria when he was met in his yard by a group of onlookers that had been waiting for him. “What’s going on? What’s happened?” the farmer shouted, then mounted the steps to the hayloft, entered the granary, which was more than half-full of fresh corn, grasped the bodies of his four-year-old son Hermann, his eight-year-old son Wilhelm, and their grandmother, carried them out of the granary and into the yard with the help of his brother-in-law Johann Mörtl, and tried to resuscitate them. The two children and the grandmother had choked to death on the toxic fumes in the granary. Standing before the corpses of his two children and his mother, the farmer Johann Pignet shouted in tears: If I hadn’t gone to that funeral, none of this would have happened, I always kept the boys close by me, but out on the cornfield, I had two cartloads left to fill, and then this burial came up! Hardly had Johann Pignet left his farm, in the company of his wife Maria, to attend the burial of an acquaintance, when Hermann, his little boy, had said to his siblings: I’ve got an idea, let’s go up to the granary and trample the corn! Hermann climbed up to the high edge of the granary and jumped down onto the fresh, fuming corn, lurched after a few seconds, intoxicated by the gas in the granary, hit his head against the cement wall and collapsed. His little sister Elisabeth began screaming and went for the help of their handicapped grandmother, who sent the girl to her uncle on the neighboring farm. In the meanwhile, Wilhelm, the oldest child, had jumped into the granary to help his brother. When the grandmother had climbed with her crutch up the steps of the hayloft and saw the two boys laid out unconscious in the granary, she entered in turn, hoping to pull the two boys out. Little Hermann, whom she wanted to save first, had his arms around the neck of his grandmother, who was laid out on her stomach. The three bodies lay exposed in the main room of the farmhouse: the grandmother in the middle, the eight-year-old Wilhelm to her left, and the four-year-old Hermann to her right. Over the body of the old woman they had stretched a translucent black funeral shroud, and over the bodies of the two boys, a white sheet, also translucent. Two years before the Pignet family lost their sons Hermann and Wilhelm, both of whom choked to death on gases in the granary, their son Leopold had died of leukemia. A year later, a reckless driver killed their son Andreas.

The parents would tie a rope around the naked corpse of their child and lower it down into the mass grave, among the hundreds of cadavers and skeletons rotting there below. In Naples, if the deceased were poor, they were brought to the Campo Santo della Pietà, a cemetery bereft of any sort of ornamentation, composed of 365 numbered pits in which, according to the date, the dead who arrived that day were buried, without coffins and completely nude. On the first of January the following year, the mass grave marked with gravestone number 1 was opened back up, and the newly dead were scattered over the decomposing corpses and skeletons from the first of January of the preceding year. Naked children and old people were piled one atop the other. Instead of a few fistfuls of earth, quicklime was shoveled over the dead. In Naples, beggars sold the clothing that had been stripped from the deceased in the cemetery. An exposé described it as a dung heap where the daily harvest from the ondachi, the hospitals, and the prisons was strewn. When this means of burial was abolished, an orange grove was planted over the dead and the former Campo Santo della Pietà was rechristened Campo Santo delle Cedrangolette, the graveyard of bitter oranges. Today it is known as Cimitero delle Fontanelle.

From my hotel room in Palermo, which lay across from their house, I had watched, for days on end, three girls take off their clothes and slip naked under the cover of their bed at the exact same hour every night; but one day, in the late afternoon, when I had returned to my hotel, excited once again to see the girls taking off their clothes, I approached the window and looked at the house across the way, and in the lit bedroom, I saw the corpse of one of the three girls, with a rosary in her joined hands and a wreath of flowers around her head, stretched out on her large bed. Smoking candles burned all around her. Lying down in my own bed, looking out the window, until early morning, when I fell asleep, I contemplated the dead girl’s half-bare and already yellowed feet.

Sunbathers smelling of tanning lotion on Nettuno beach, seeing that a Japanese man had drowned not far from where they lay, walked over and stood around the body. A young woman, who had covered her breasts with a T-short that read Bravo Benetton! in large letters, walked back and forth in curiosity before the corpse, her tanned buttocks shifting. Fully dressed teenagers arrived, dropped their motorcycle helmets in the sand, sat down over their skull-like helmets and began to talk, some cordially, others snickering at the dead body. After a while, they picked up their skull-like helmets and disappeared, but then others came, mostly people twenty-five to thirty years of age. What happened? How did this happen? After more than an hour, a doctor showed up and covered the upper half of the cadaver. Immediately a number of gawkers appeared, but the police, with the help of the man who rented parasols on that part of the beach, pushed them away. Una salma sulla mira spiaggia! The dead man was lying in his place, for free, beneath a parasol. The man who rented parasols jumped from one foot to the other, turned back and forth from the policemen and the cadaver, and arranged to have barrier of boards erected, so that no one but him could see the dead body, whose wounds and face he stared at eagerly while the doctor determined the cause of death, wrote out the death certificate, and afterward, feeling relieved, stretched himself out over a beach chair to catch his breath, before commencing to chat good-humoredly. Smiling, the doctor shook the hand of the official who arrived from the court. The court official lifted the towel momentarily from the face of the deceased before letting it fall in disgust. Then the undertaker’s lackeys showed up, sporting fashionable bathing suits, carrying a metal coffin. They took off its lid, then unfolded a large sheet of plastic and laid it in the open bottom of the coffin. They pulled back the large beach towel, lifted the corpse up with the sheets it had been lying over on the sand, and let it drop into the coffin. Grasping the coffin by the handles and lifting their legs to avoid slipping in the sand, they walked up the dune toward the hearse—Bravo Benetton!—in their fashionable bathing suits.

Josef Winkler (b. 1953, Austria) is the author of fourteen books and winner of numerous literary honors, among them the 2008 Büchner Prize. His major themes are suicide, homosexuality, and the corrosive influence of Catholicism and Nazism in Austrian country life. His novels When the Time Comes and Natura Morta are currently available from Contra Mundum Press, who will also be publishing Graveyard of Bitter Oranges in 2015.

Adrian West is a writer and literary translator whose works has appeared in numerous publications including 3:AM, McSweeney’s, and the Review of Contemporary Fiction. His book-length translations include the novels of Josef Winkler as well as the long poem cycle Alma Venus by Catalan poet Pere Gimferrer.

Anthony Cudahy is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. He is currently an artist-in-residence at Artha in the Brooklyn Navy Yards.

Friedhof der bitteren Orangen. Copyright (c) Josef Winkler, 1990. English translation copyright (c) Adrian West, 2012. Translations published by permission of Contra Mundum Press.

 

Almanac

All this week, we are bringing you some of your favorite posts from 2013. Happy holidays!

“What would Ben Franklin make of this, if he were sitting here right now?” mused my father. We were driving on the West Side Highway. I was living with my parents following a breakup. This was fairly typical, topic-wise.

“I’d have to explain, Dr. Franklin, you are sitting in a conveyance known as a ‘car.’ These horseless carriages you see are also cars. They operate via combustion engines. Those lanterns you see there are powered by something called ‘electricity.’ And then, of course, I’d have to explain about movies. Dr. Franklin, those large posters you see are advertising something we call ‘films.’ You go into a large room and see a talking picture projected onto a screen by means of—”

“Why do you have to say ‘talking picture’?” demanded my mother irritably. “Why can’t you just say ‘movie’?”

“That would be too confusing. I have a lot of ground to cover, acquainting him with the modern world. And I’d say, Dr. Franklin, perhaps I shall take you to a moving picture. Would you like to see a comedy? A romance?”

“Take him to see a period piece,” I put in eagerly. “Then you could acquaint him with some of the historical events that occurred in the intervening period!”

“Good idea,” he said. “Now, Dr. Franklin—”

“Why are you calling him doctor?” said my mother.

“He was given an honorific by the Royal Academy!” said my father impatiently. “It was what everyone called him. It was what he preferred to be called! That’s common knowledge, Priscilla!

“Okay, okay.”

I suppose you could call this a low point. I lived in my childhood room. I commuted to and from my job every day via MetroNorth and spent most of my free time with my family. For the first time, I went to see a therapist. This was kind of a big deal, since no one in my family really did therapy. Once, in the eighties, my mom and dad had gone to a marriage counselor, who suggested they get divorced. Anyway, this woman and I hated each other on sight, and she told me I should disengage from my parents. This seemed impractical, under the circumstances.

“How long,” said Dad, “do you think it would take Dr. Franklin to adjust to the modern world, to grasp the rudiments of modern technology, Priscilla?”

“I have no idea.”

“Come on, guess. How long?”

“I don’t know. Two minutes.”

“Two minutes? Are you joking? To grasp electricity—television—the Internet—are you out of your mind?”

“I don’t know! You made me guess!”

“Two minutes.” He shook his head.

The therapist said I should connect with joyful things. I tried my hand at children’s fiction. “There once was a doll,” I wrote, “who rejoiced in the name of Carol Lynn Krouk.” (Krouk was a name I used a lot in my writing.) “Krouk was a loud doll with a disproportionate head.” This is as far as I got.

“Dr. Franklin would doubtless like to pay a visit to that establishment,” said my father. We were passing a billboard for Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club. “He was a notorious ladies’ man, of course.”

For a few days, I thought a great deal about where rage sits in the stomach, as opposed to contempt, guilt, self-loathing, and grief. This much I knew: they were all close, like the sinuses and the teeth, and it is easy to confuse one for the other. But I was not sure  whether they lay in strata, or were instead compartmentalized. This is the sort of thing people knew about in the Middle Ages, but now it felt like a lonely path. Once I thought I’d do an abstract watercolor of the concept, as it struck me as suitably artistic. But then I couldn’t find a brush, so that was that.

The therapist decided I needed medical help, so I visited a psychiatrist instead. She was right; also, as noted, we had hated each other.

“Well, he was a man of science,” I said now. “He’d probably grasp concepts relatively quickly. But, Dad, don’t you think it would be better if you had someone who actually understood all the technology explain it to him?”

“We don’t have that option. He’s appeared in this car.”

“But I mean, he has the capacity to understand the basic science, probably.”

“Well, I could call Cy,” he said, referring to a second cousin who is a doctor. “Cy, guess who I have here. No, guess.”

“Harry, this is tedious,” said my mother sharply. 

“Well, you won’t guess. Ben Franklin! Yes, the Ben Franklin! I’m putting him on. Here, Ben, speak into this.”

“Hello? Yes, this is Dr. Franklin—”

“Harry, stop it,” said my mother. 

 Sometimes I think that was the happiest time of my life.

 

For Seamus

All this week, we are bringing you some of your favorite posts from 2013. Happy holidays!

Impossible.

And yet, of course, not impossible: of course, too possible, too much the reality of what we would always have to face one day, one morning waking across time zones, stumbling upon radio tributes, answering the phone to the have you heard, to the gut-punch, to the heart-bolt: he is gone.

Our laureate. As though that could ever be a word which could get at the marvel of him. There is, probably, no single word for the marvel of him. Only perhaps his name, alive today on countless lips, uttered with sadness and fondness and gratitude and disbelief; sparking and flaring across countless status updates, countless tweets, in countless slow nods and headshakes in shops and schools and kitchens and hallways and forecourts and farmyards. I know of a wedding in Wicklow today where his will be the name on the air as the guests wait for the bride to arrive; of a gathering in Rathowen this weekend where his poems will be read aloud in hushed pubs; of a music festival in Stradbally where lines studied at school twenty years ago will be traded like—well, like the kinds of things that are more usually traded at music festivals. (And he would be in the middle of them if he could, you know, marveling—for that was his register—at Björk and St. Vincent and David Byrne, with a sage word about My Bloody Valentine lyrics, with a wink and a buck-up for the young lads from the Strypes.)

(A tree must have fallen somewhere in the night. In the August darkness, a star must have flickered its warning.)

He was loved. Beloved. Whether he was met with as a name on a page, or as a voice from a podium, or as a cherished friend or fellow artist, Seamus Heaney moved into the lives of those who encountered him—those countless lives—and he made a difference that will matter forevermore. The difference, for many, was poetry itself. The difference is in those lines, the way they come to mind at moments of worry, or of beauty, or of heartache and of sorrow; today they come to mind like prayers learned in childhood, his lines, so many of them, rushing in as breath is caught, as mind reels and whirls. On Facebook all morning they have been appearing like cut flowers laid at a gable wall, the poems and the lines that have been, for so many people, talismans, carried close to the heart.

Conscience. Guardian. Wisdom itself; kindness personified. Like so many, I have precious memories of him. For a few years, I ran a poetry festival in Dublin, a job which mainly involved writing to great poets and asking them to come and read from their work. Not a week after I started the job, it was communicated to me by a third party that if I needed help reaching anyone, or with any other aspect of the festival, Seamus Heaney would be delighted to help in any way that he could, but only if I wanted his help; he did not wish to impose. By reply, I wrote a fairly formal letter—keeping my lines straight, my grammar careful—and posted it from New York; then worried that I had not put enough postage on the envelope, and wrote another letter and posted that one. The reply came in a text message from the man himself, wry and funny and vivid with generosity, and making the point, above all: I’m here. I text. I’m nothing if not approachable. It’s no big deal.

But it was a big deal. And it was a bigger deal still that his warmth and his accessibility made it seem almost normal. Everywhere he went, he was known; everywhere he went, he was approached for a handshake, or an autograph, or a hello. For a long time, until a stroke in 2006 necessitated a slight easing-off of public appearances, public availability, he gave everything he had in this regard; he shook every hand, signed every title page, smiled for every unsteady camera, listened to every story of common acquaintance or of attempted poetry or of moments found and recognized and treasured in his lines; moments, say, like that childhood morning with his mother he wrote of in “Clearances”: “When all the others were away at Mass / I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.” Or that clamor of siblings, in “A Sofa in the Forties,” all playing at train on top of the furniture, “Elbows going like pistons … Our speed and distance were inestimable.” Or, maybe, darker moments, like the day of a young brother’s death in “Mid-Term Break,” a poem, with its tight fist of sorrow, its “angry tearless sighs,” learned by almost every Irish child in school, or the “neighbourly murder” of “Funeral Rites,” a poem pressed deep into the skin torn by sectarian warfare in his native Northern Ireland, in which the speaker talks of how

we pine for ceremony
customary rhythms:

the temperate footsteps
of a cortège, winding past
each blinded home.

Over the years that I ran the Dublin festival, Seamus was always there; attending every reading, himself giving wondrous readings or introductions to other poets, giving glowing encouragement to the younger ones (I recall Paul Batchelor, the English poet then on his first collection, shaking with happiness and incredulity after being taken aside for an admiring word from the great man), spiriting some of them away, even, for secret jaunts (I have, somewhere, the photos Henri Cole and C. D. Wright sent me afterwards of their laughing, windswept morning in Glendalough), bringing the whole lot of them, all twenty or twenty-five of them, plus partners and newborns and hangers-on, to his house on Strand Road for Saturday morning coffee. On one such morning, I rested my hand on the top of an armchair and found myself touching a fur pelt, part of an animal’s coat; “Oh, Ted Hughes brought us that one time,” said Marie, Seamus’s wife, and I looked at my hand, tingling at the fingertips, and I looked around the room and I saw it, with a master at its center: poetry, living, and layered, and level to its task.

“That there’s such a thing as truth and it can be told—slant; that subjectivity is not to be theorized away and is worth defending; that poetry itself has virtue, in the first sense of possessing a quality of moral excellence and in the sense also of possessing inherent strength by reason of its sheer made-upness, its integritas, consonantia and claritas.”

That was how Seamus Heaney answered the question of what poetry had taught him—a question asked, in the brilliant 2008 book-length interview (a conversation and an autobiography) Stepping Stones, by the late poet and critic Dennis O’Driscoll. If there is a heaven, there will—to coin a phrase familiar to anyone who has been to an Irish poetry festival—be pints there today, with Hughes and Miłosz and O’Driscoll and all the others, and even before a glass is lifted, Seamus Heaney will have put line and incantation on all he sees. Raise your own glass to him this evening, if you feel so inclined.

Oh, Seamus. Thank you: a thousand thank yous. And codladh sámh.

Belinda McKeon’s debut novel, Solace, won the 2011 Faber Prize. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in Brooklyn.

 

Completely Without Dignity: An Interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard

All this week, we are bringing you some of your favorite posts from 2013. Happy holidays!

Of the two people who have written books called My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard is the less notorious. In Scandinavia, where the tradition of memoiristic writing is less prevalent and self-exposing than it is in America, he wrote, for three years, twenty pages a day about himself, his friends, his wife, and his kids. When the first of the six books was published, reporters called everyone he’d ever met. It sold half a million copies.

But unlike most literary controversies, this one’s less interesting than the work that provoked it. Knausgaard has written one of those books so aesthetically forceful as to be revolutionary. Before, there was no My Struggle; now there is, and things are different. The digressiveness of Sebald or Proust is transposed into direct, unmetaphorical language, pushing the novel almost to the edge of unreadability, where it turns out to be addictive and hypnotic. A man has written a book in which a man stays at home with his kids, and his home life isn’t trivialized or diminished but studied and appreciated, resisted and embraced. An almost Christian feeling of spiritual urgency makes even the slowest pages about squeezing lemon on a lobster into a hymn about trying to be good.

Book One ends with that impossible thing: an original metaphor for death. The last sentence of this interview may do the same for writing.

On the line here are both a man’s soul and his ass. The work has pissed off his fellow Norwegians, including the one he married. But the biggest risk is, in a single work, expending all the unconscious material of forty years of life. He calls My Struggle his authorial suicide, and after talking to him last weekend, I believe him, but I don’t think it means he won’t write another book. Here’s Jonathan Callahan doing for The Millions one of the best essays on Knausgaard: “My Struggle provides the reader with a portrait of an artist whose sometimes-quixotic-seeming-endeavor to narrate his struggles with life and art in their entirety consumes, possesses, captivates him, in that last verb’s literal sense, and thereby sets him free.” 

Mr. Knausgaard lives in Sweden and doesn’t know how to use Skype. We tried to get the video to work, but in the end, we spoke to each other through black rectangles. Occasionally, I could hear his kids in the background, and the tap of a pen or his fingers on the desk, which made me terrified that I was boring him. His accent in English sounds Austrian—Sacha Baron Cohen doing Bruno—and he’s plainspoken and self-doubting. “So,” he would conclude after talking for a few minutes, “I’m afraid that’s another stupid answer.” It was the only time he really got something wrong.

Did you keep diaries when you were young?

Yes, I did, but I burned them when I was twenty-five or twenty-six.

Why?

I was so embarrassed, I couldn’t stand it. It’s the same with Min Kamp, I can’t stand it. If I could I would burn that, too, but there are too many prints, so it’s impossible.

Life develops, changes, is in motion. The forms of literature are not. So if you want the writing to be as close to life as possible—I do not mean this in any way as an apology for realism—but if you want to write close to life, you have to break the forms you’ve used, which means that you constantly have the feeling of writing the first novel, for the first time, which means that you do not know how to write. All good writers have that in common, they do not know how to write.

But isn’t burning a novel different from burning a diary? Burning a diary is repudiating a former version of yourself.

It’s one thing to be banal, stupid, and idiotic on the inside. It’s another to have it captured in writing. When I started to write more systematically, I just couldn’t stand that bastard diarist-self, and I had to get rid of it. So I did, alone in my student apartment, page after page.

But as anyone with the least knowledge of literature and writing—maybe art in general—will know, concealing what is shameful to you will never lead to anything of value. This is something I discovered later, when I was writing my first novel, when the parts that I was ashamed like a dog to have written were the same parts that my editor always pointed out, saying, This, this is really good! In a way, it was my shame-o-meter, the belief that the feeling of shame or guilt signified relevance, that finally made me write about myself, the most shameful act of all, trying to reach the innocence of the now burned diarist—self.

Scandinavia doesn’t have a tradition of tell-all memoirs, but it does have diarists. Olav H. Hauge, the Norwegian poet, wrote a three-thousand-page diary which was published after his death, when you were about twenty-six. Did you have a strong reaction to it?

Yes, I did. I read it very intensely over a short period of time, during a kind of crisis in my life. I was obsessed with it. And it was very strange because he wrote his diaries from 1916, or something, until 1990, so it covers his whole life. And he was basically only on his farm. Nothing happens in his life at all. And he really writes about nothing. Nothing is going on there except for him thinking, and harvesting apples.

It’s a kind of hypnotic writing, which really should be boring. I mean, there are a lot of examples of it. Lars Norén, the Swedish playwright, published a diary just recently, which I read during the writing of Min Kamp, and it was the same thing. Fifty pages about gardening, and it should be really awful, really boring. But there’s something magic in it, something hypnotic, and it’s the same with Hauge. He’s repeating himself all the time. It’s not good if you consider it as an essay, it’s not good if you consider it as storytelling, but it is still hypnotic. And I think that has to do with you feeling that you are very close to a self.

The crisis you experienced while reading Hauge—was it artistic or personal?

I had been unfaithful to my then wife and for a year succeeded in not telling her. Then, one day, someone called and said he wanted to talk to “the rapist Karl Ove Knausgaard.” My wife handed the receiver over to me and looked like a ghost. The caller said if I didn’t admit that I was a rapist, he would come over with some friends and beat me unconscious. That marked the beginning of the crisis.

A few days later, I went out to an island, where I had been before to write, and lived there for two months, again trying to write. It was a small island, miles out in the open sea, with only three other inhabitants. One of them actually died when I was there, I saw the ambulance boat coming, and the medics carrying him, covered, onto the boat in the snow. I thought of suicide every day, and read Hauge’s diaries, which was such a comfort, such a good thing, it was me and him, and the wide open sky over the sea, and the stars at night.

It reminds me of something in your book—“What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person.” But you hadn’t really written about yourself until Min Kamp. Your second book is about a fictive angelologist from the sixteenth century.

When I started out on Min Kamp, I was so extremely frustrated over my life and my writing. I wanted to write something majestic and grand, something like Hamlet or Moby-Dick, but found myself with this small life—looking after kids, changing diapers, quarreling with my wife, unable to write anything, really. So I started to write about that. During that process, I realized that this was material, I didn’t like it, but still, it was something, not nothing. If you read Hölderlin or Celan, and admire their writing, it’s very shameful, writing about diapers, it’s completely without dignity. But then, that became the point. That was the whole point. Not to try to go somewhere else than this. This is how it is.

It’s not like writing in a diary, though. A novel opens space between a writer and his or her material, the space of literature. There’s less distance between writer and diary than between writer and novel.

It’s all the difference in the world. I had tried to write from the age of eighteen, but didn’t succeed at all. Then, when I was about twenty-seven, I changed my language. This is difficult to explain. You can write a radical Norwegian or a conservative Norwegian. And when I changed to a conservative Norwegian, I gained this distance or objectivity in the language. The gap released something in me, and in the writing, which made it possible for the protagonist to think thoughts I had never myself thought.

But it isn’t only about language. There’s a kind of objectivity in the form itself. It is not you, it is not even yours. When you use the form of a novel, and you say “I,” you are also saying “I” for someone else. When you say “you,” you are simultaneously in your room writing and in the outside world—you are seeing and being seen seeing, and this creates something slightly strange and foreign in the self. When you see that, or recognize that, you are in a different place, which is the place of the novel or the poem.

In Min Kamp, I wanted to see how far it was possible to take realism before it would be impossible to read. My first book had a strong story, strong narration. Then I would see how far I could take a digression out before I needed to go back to the narration, and I discovered I could go for thirty or forty pages, and then the digressions took over. So in Min Kamp I’m doing nothing but digressions, no story lines. Language itself takes care of it. The form gives something back.

Can you talk about how you remember the past when you’re writing?

Writing is recalling. In this matter I am a classic Proustian. You’re playing football for the first time in twenty years, for example, doing all those movements again, and it makes the body remember not only the strangely familiar movements, but also everything connected to playing football, and for some seconds, a whole world is brought back to you. Where did it come from? I think that all our ages, all our experiences are kept in us, all we need is a reminder of something, and then something else is released.

When I started the novel, I imagined our house, myself walking towards it, it was snowing, it was dark, inside was my father and my mother, and I remembered the feeling of snow, and the smell of it, and the feelings I had toward my father at that time, and toward my mother, and there was the cat crossing the road, and on the other side of the river, the lights from a car. The silence in the woods. My friend, Jan Vidar, he was there somewhere, and the girl I was mad about, and the way I thought of him and her, and the light from the window kind of glowed, and I remembered an episode from the ski slope, and opened the door, and there, on the floor, the shoes from that time, the smell, the atmosphere.

My memory is basically visual, that’s what I remember, rooms and landscapes. What I do not remember are what the people in these room were telling me. I never see letters or sentences when I write or read, but only the images they produce. The interesting thing is that the process of writing fiction is exactly the same for me, the only difference is that these landscapes are imaginary. These images are related to the way you think of a place you never have been, where you imagine everything, the houses, the mountains, the marketplaces. Then, the second you are there and see how the place really is, the weight of its reality crushes your imagined version. But where did that version come from in the first place?

Your father and Jan Vidar are characters in Min Kamp. Do you feel that a memoir or realistic essay has ethical obligations to its subjects?

Yes.

What about writers more generally? Do you agree with Faulkner, who told this magazine that “‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies”?

A great Norwegian poet, Georg Johannesen, one of the leading intellectuals in the sixties and seventies, got a similar question once. If the house is burning, and you can only save one thing, what will you take with you, the Rembrandt or the cat? He would have taken the cat. I would do that too. Literature is about people, not books, as paintings are about people, not canvases or colors.

The notion of humanity can be dangerous, and is easy to misunderstand, because all works of art that we praise and think of as a part of humanity, the culture, the great collective, were created by individuals who had to fight for their individuality, to go against the very same culture.

You can’t put the we, the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” before the self, the old lady. This was what the Nazis did, thinking that the best of the we made it reasonable to kill some individuals on their way. But then again, becoming independent and free, which is a premise for all art, means to go against the social, the we, and since it is in the social that morality is located, writing often is, and has to be, immoral. That’s your different moral obligation, I guess.

Is there any point in thinking of Min Kamp as a kind of confession in the Augustinian sense, like a spiritual autobiography?

There certainly is a longing in the book for that dimension. But it’s never something I thought of stylistically.

So maybe I’m wrong about Augustine, but you’ve studied the Bible, right? You translated some of it. Your second novel concerns a pretty traditional theological question—can the nature of the divine change? I can’t help feeling that you have a deep realtionship to religious writing, something beyond the typical modern longing for a “spiritual” dimension of life.

This really is difficult to talk about, I have to say.

For two years, I worked as a kind of adviser on a team that translated the Bible to Norwegian. It was there I learned to read. The gap between the two languages was a shock, and made it possible to experience, not only to recognize, the gap between language and the world, the arbitrariness everybody talked about in the eighties was all of a sudden visible for me.

Another lesson was that in the Old Testament, everything is concrete, nothing is abstract. God is concrete, the angels are concrete, and everything else has to do with bodies in motion, what they say, what they do, but never what they think. No speculations, no reflections. Even the metaphors are connected to bodies. I became especially interested in the story of Cain and Abel, when Cain’s countenance falls and God says, “Why is your countenance fallen? Lift up!” Cain doesn’t look anyone in the eyes, and no one looks in his. This is to hide from the world and from the other. And that is dangerous.

In the sixth book of Min Kamp, I wrote four hundred pages on Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Hitler was a man who lived a year without seeing anyone, just sitting in his room reading, and when he left that room, never let anyone close, and stayed that way, intransigent, through the rest of his life, and one characteristic thing with his book, is that there is an “I,” and a “we,” but no “you.” And while I was writing about Hitler, a young Norwegian who had stayed some two years all by himself, and written a manifesto with a strong “I” and a “we,” also without a “you,” massacred sixty-nine youths on an island. In other words, his countenance fell.

The gap between the language and the world, the emphasis on the material aspects of the world, and Hitler writing Mein Kampf led me to Paul Celan, because the language he wrote in was destroyed by the Nazis. He couldn’t write blood, which circulated in his veins, or soil, which he walked on. Suddenly neither word represented something general, which implicated a we, for the we in this language was not his we.

So his final poem about the Holocaust is a poem where every word seems to be created for the first time, all singular, for the we is lost, from an abyss, a nothingness, and in this, something other than history is visible, namely, the outside of language, which really is unthinkable, because thoughts are language, but it’s still present, still there. It’s the world, out of reach for us, and it is death.

Cover art for Book Two of My Struggle, by Asbjørn Jensen.

What do you see as the difference between yourself and a writer like Celan?

My book is very much about what experiences are and what they’re good for, but it isn’t one of those experiences in itself. It’s a secondary thing. It’s a secondary book. A book about experiences that doesn’t produce those experiences, if you understand the difference. That’s why I’m writing about Celan instead of trying to write like Celan. It really is second best. I know this, and not a thousand good reviews can make me forget. In the end, I want to write a book that is the thing itself. That is the ambition, of course.

Can you envision what that would be?

No. That’s impossible. I just have to start to write and hope that something will happen during the first thousand pages.

Mood is a big part of your work, the little shifts in how it feels to be yourself from one moment to the next. Feeling fine one minute, and the next thinking, What a pile of shit this was. Is that your experience of life, or is it just something the form gives back?

It’s a result of following situations very closely. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t existential consequences! In a novel, as in real life, moods and atmospheres, these small changes in the mind, are a part of thinking and reflection.

We have an idea that pure thought exists. It doesn’t. In my world, all I see are hidden agendas, more often than not hidden even from ourselves. People know nothing of themselves, why they do the things they do. They think they know, but oh no, they don’t. For example, Adorno defends reason in The Jargon of Authenticity, and attacks the phenomenologists. This is only a few years after the war, and his arguments are full of rage, but he doesn’t recognize it himself. Unreason, feelings—these belong to Heidegger and his followers. But Heidegger, for his part, did discuss mood, and found it central to the way we relate to the world, because we are always in a mood, like there is always weather.

Mood affects thinking. It makes it much more complex. And because I have over three thousand pages, I can use the essayistic digressions in a narrative sense. I have essays representing myself at twenty-five, which are really, really stupid, and say a lot of things that are purely infantile and idiotic. Then, five years later, I’ll have another essayistic part that relates to that, but is a bit more sophisticated. Something has happened. There is a kind of narration in the essayistic things which you don’t do as a straight essayist. As an essayist, you just write. You don’t use yourself in that sense. You don’t provide the stupid essay to show how age changes your thinking, for example.

I was in Germany, I was talking to my German editor, and we were talking about this because in the last book there is that long essay on Hitler, treating Hitler as a human being, and this is a very delicate and sensitive matter in Germany, of course. So what shall we do with it? Shall we have some historian read it and modify it, treat it as an essay? Or shall we just treat it as a madman from Norway writing whatever he thinks?

What did you decide?

To keep it as it is.

Do you care what people think of you?

I want to write how I really think things are, instead of how I think you should think I think things are. For me, saying how I really think things are turns everything into banality and stupid things, almost all the time, and that’s the risk of the project for me. But then it’s a realistic depiction of a man, forty, from Norway. If you read the book you can see how these opinions—about Hitler, for example—came about. What produced them.

When you say “a realistic depiction of a man, forty, from Norway,” are you comfortable with the narrative that goes, “Karl Knausgaard’s book is the greatest account of our generation?” That’s what the Culture Minister said of you.

I am really embarrassed about it. I find it hard to deal with, really, so I’ve decided not to think about it, not to go there, not to read those things. I can’t read about this project.

Are your children old enough to have read it, or read about it?

They aren’t old enough to have read the books, but they have searched their own names on the Internet, and they come running into me, “Daddy, why are we on the Internet?” I say, “Because you’re in this book,” but I’ve never explained what it is. Very soon, I’m going to read something to them, to make it sort of undramatic.

Are you worried it will hurt them?

Maybe they’ll be troubled by it when they’re teenagers. But I haven’t only taken things away from them, there’s something given to them as well. My life would certainly have looked different if I had gotten something like that from my father. 

It seems very normal for your kids to be Googling themselves. Do you?

It fucks my mind completely up if I go in there. The first two years, when I wrote it and published it at the same time, I avoided everything, because it was so intensely massive in Norway I had to just avoid it. But now I see where something’s written, so I just have a picture of where I’m coming up. Okay, that’s from Australia, I’m being mentioned there, but I don’t read it.

It’s like following the stock market or something, going on Amazon and seeing where the books are. It’s a technical, mechanical thing, but I can’t go in and read even a very good review. I can’t stand the thought of being this figure and having done this thing. And every time I talk about it, or give interviews about it, it eats my soul, and it’s getting worse and worse every time I go out there, and I have to stop. I’m going to stop. But it’s such a temptation to do it, because it’s a confirmation of something, and something is happening, and all that, but it’s really poison. I have to stop. I’m going to stop.

When we were e-mailing to get ready for this interview, you said you’d never used Skype before. Can I ask what you think of it?

I really hate it, I have to say. I dislike the fact that we are letting go of our local places, in the sense of what surrounds us, not just restaurants or shops. What has happened in the last thirty or forty years, I deeply despise. The physical world is gone.

Young Knausgaard.

It reminds me of how you write about Lucretius, loving him for his awareness of the world’s physical presence. It’s interesting, because your books address that problem theoretically, but at the same time their texture is very physical. You run your hands over every object—toast, bottles, cigarettes, tablecloths.

That was something I was thinking about all the time during the writing. It’s central to me. But as you said, it’s a paradox. It’s writing, it’s not a real thing.

The sixth book really does end in Norway, with Anders Breivik killing sixty-nine children on Utøya Island. This happened while I was writing. And it really is this situation where he has these images of the world. And then he goes in there and he kills those people. And that’s a physical act. One of the things he said in court was, “It was so strange, shooting maybe seven teenagers, they were standing at the wall, and they were not moving. Why weren’t they moving? I would expect them to be moving, trying to get away, but they were just standing there while I was shooting them.” It didn’t correspond to the images he had in his mind.

And the novel ends there, in that place, in that collision of the abstract heaven we have above us and our own physical earth. Which is what Breivik’s killings were. This is the same thing that happened in the Nazi era, when Hitler imposed an abstract image upon the physical reality of the world. That’s what interests me about daily life, when this happens.

While Breivik was shooting all of those people, he was listening on headphones to the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. He played Call of Duty obsessively. He inhabited virtual worlds.

Breivik did play a lot of computer games. He played professionally for years. This is the interesting part of what happened, the boundaries between what’s imaginary and what’s real. It’s totally blurred in him. That was the thing that makes it possible for him to kill. Because normally it’s impossible to kill, or at least impossible to kill more than one or two.

If you’re in the U.S. Marines, you’re trained in this dehumanizing process. You’re trained as a professional, and you do it with your friends, you do it for them, and even then it’s difficult. But Breivik did it all by himself, so it shouldn’t be possible, but it is possible, and that’s one of the things I reflect upon in the last book.

Marines, Nazis—these things seem so much larger and more ideological than the small, everyday events in Books One and Two.

My book is completely anti-ideology, in all senses. It is about the opposite of ideology. It’s about the little and the small, where in life we are. But it ends with the collision of that world with ideology, which is why I wrote about Nazism and those kinds of things. That’s why it ends there.

Did you ever play video games?

Yes. This was in 1992, ’93. I played Doom and those kinds of games. Where you just shoot people. I could play twenty-four hours, no problem. I was completely addicted.

Do you still smoke?

Yeah, I do.

Because you’re addicted, or do you enjoy it?

I do enjoy it, unfortunately. There is a writer in Sweden called Stig Larsson, not the crime writer but another one, a modernist, a fantastic writer, and he was a drug addict for the last twenty or thirty years, and he had a heart attack so he had to stop. It was speed he took. But he said, If smoking helps me, it’s my duty as a writer to smoke. And if speed helps me, it’s my duty as a writer to take speed. In a way it’s true. But I have to stop it one day—I mean, I have kids.

What about alcohol?

I’m so restricted as a person, and not very good socially, so drinking is a kind of a freedom for me. But the consequences are big for me. I can’t stop. I get extremely drunk.

We had some friends over three weeks ago, and I was the only one who drank, and I get so extreme I can’t remember anything, really. This was a disaster, you know, a dinner party and the host is the only one who’s drunk! One half bottle of spirits. I was just—I can’t stop. I don’t fall over, I don’t go to sleep, I can just drink and drink and drink and drink, and you can’t really see it on me, but inside I am just totally messed and fucked up. And as I have kids, I have to have a certain kind of dignity in my behavior, and that’s not what I do when I’m drunk. So I try to be very careful, that’s what I’m saying.

Can I ask how the novel has affected your marriage? It’s so extreme, what you’ve done. It’s like you invented a new kind of marriage, where half the couple is transparent and has no secrets.

I didn’t think of that when I was doing it. I didn’t think of the implication at all, in that sense. I was so frustrated that I didn’t foresee the consequences. I thought, If the consequences are that she’s leaving me, then okay, she can go. That was how it was. There was a certain desperation that made it possible. I couldn’t do it now.

But still, there is much more to a relationship than what you can say. You just take one more step back into yourself. I’ve never understood psychoanalysis. Mentioning things doesn’t change anything, doesn’t help anything, it’s just words. There is something much more deep and profound to a relationship than that. Revealing stories and quarrels—that’s just words. Love, that’s something else.

Did the writing of Min Kamp give you what you were hoping for?

I can’t speak for other writers, but I write to create something that is better than myself, I think that’s the deepest motivation, and it is so because I’m full of self-loathing and shame. Writing doesn’t make me a better person, nor a wiser and happier one, but the writing, the text, the novel, is a creation of something outside of the self, an object, kind of neutralized by the objectivity of literature and form. The temper, the voice, the style. All in it is carefully constructed and controlled. This is writing for me—a cold hand on a warm forehead.

 

This Is Growing Up

A panel of Adam and Eve in Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise.

All this week, we are bringing you some of your favorite posts from 2013. Happy holidays!

I had only been in Europe for two weeks when I started to feel homesick.

I’d decided to study in Florence on a whim, after having vaguely planned my entire sophomore year on traveling to Prague to study film at the famed FAMU. But while for FAMU there was a separate application I would have had to fill out, Florence was a simple checkbox on the registration website. And student housing in Florence was even cheaper than at my university in New York.

The general idea was to get a handful of my general education requirements out of the way and maybe even try to pick up some Italian while I was at it. I flew over to Italy with my mother, who was looking for a few days away from Chicago to take in, as she called it, la dolce vita. “I want a gondolier to sing to me, like in the movies,” she said. The gondolier spoke on his cell phone the entire time.

We arrived at the Florence Airport mid-morning. On the cab ride into the city, the driver informed us that one of the city’s time-honored traditions was complaining about the tourists, and, even worse than the general run of tourists, the hordes of visiting college students. I soon found myself in a large apartment off via Guelfa introducing my mother to ten other college students and an Italian RA. My mother quickly pulled me aside. “Please don’t get into any trouble. You know what the driver said.”

We walked around the city for a few hours, opting for the main roads and a map and rather than  weaving through narrow, crowded streets and alleyways with no names, until we found ourselves at the Ponte Vecchio, lined with its multitude of shops on stilts, and made our way up the steep winding path from Porta San Niccolo to the Piazzale Michelangelo. We joined the multinational swarm moving through the rows of buses, cameras in one hand, water bottles in the other, and found ourselves a spot along the balcony and a view of the entire city, framed by distant hills and highlighted by the bright Tuscan sky.

“You sure you’ll be okay here for three months, so far from home?” my mother asked.

“I haven’t been home for over two years,” I said, dismissively.

“Well, I got you a present, just in case.” She said it was at her hotel.

We made our way back, not able to find the path we had taken but never feeling lost. She handed me a package and told me not to unwrap it until I was at my apartment. I opened it the second I walked out the hotel doors.

I glanced at both sides of the street, groups of people coming and going, sure of their direction and moving with remarkable ease. I felt lost for the first time in the city–it only took half a day in the Old World–and I looked around for a sign that would orient me. The box set of The O.C. Season Two in my hand offered no assistance.

Like many teenagers my age, I had been swept up by the teen soap opera that was so much better than it had any reason to be. The show’s creator, Josh Schwartz, was only twenty-seven, the youngest person in network history to create and produce his own one-hour series, and for a budding filmmaker like myself, it was hard not to fawn. It filled in the void left by Dawson’s Creek only a few months prior, and everyone has to have a guilty pleasure to escape to on the worst of days. However, I had no intentions of revisiting the spray-tan excesses of Southern California when I had the opportunity to immerse myself in, as the program director constantly referred to Florence, the “cradle of the Renaissance,” and I promptly hid the DVD set in my desk’s bottom drawer.

For the first few days, my new roommates and I wandered the city with no set plans, hitting the sights. We visited the Duomo, with the largest brick dome ever constructed, and the Uffizi Gallery, where George Emerson carried Lucy Honeychurch in A Room with a View after she witnessed a murder in the Piazza della Signoria (“Oh, what have I done?”). We ate at a restaurant right off the Central Market that opened at noon and closed whenever it ran out of food. Mary McCarthy once called Florence “a city of endurance, a city of stone,” but we found it wonderful all the same.

Classes started, but it still felt like an extended vacation, and most nights we frequented the bars (a luxury for those of us who had yet to turn twenty-one). It wasn’t hard to locate the ones targeted to foreign college students, hawking ten-euro cards good for three cocktails.

One night a friend and I wandered into a bar on via del Proconsolo and quickly chatted up the bartender. He wanted to know what was a special American cocktail, and I explained all the mixes that went into a Long Island Iced Tea. He was confused by the name, and asked me how I would describe the drink in one word. I told him it was “strong” and that name stuck for the rest of the semester. We closed out the bar and our new friend, Mario, led us to a late-night dance club. I didn’t know what time it was as we stumbled out the doors into the cool evening air. We walked along the Arno, where Mario promptly stopped to relieve himself. “Fuck the Arno!” he yelled, then tried to explain some story about the love-hate relationship Florence has with the river, after several floods. Sharp flashes of light greeted us as we walked into the dance club, and I quickly drifted into the crowd. Sweaty bodies, hands reaching for the ceiling, the scent of cheap cologne, and the bass vibrating my entire body. Plastic cups filled with anonymous liquor, someone shouting in my ear, repeating the same phrase over and over. I didn’t understand a single word.

I found myself back on the street, walking along deserted streets, supporting myself on stonewalls, until I found myself back at the Arno. Huddles of people walked past, speaking foreign languages. “Fuck the Arno!” I yelled, but the words felt empty.

* * *

This cycle continued for the first few weeks of school. We would go to class, then either grab dinner off the Market or cook pasta in the apartment. Someone would go out to the Chinese restaurant around the corner and buy each of us a euro bottle of wine. Then we’d walk the fifteen minutes to the bar on Proconsolo. Mario gave me three drinks (Strongs) for every one he marked down on my card. Our RA was never home.

Classes were harder than I anticipated, and my poor Spanish crept in during my Italian sessions. One day, I walked into the McDonalds and ordered whatever the cheapest thing on the menu was. The rancid oil from the burners smelled like home. I sat down in a plastic chair with my grilled cheese, which was composed of a slice of cheese between two inverted hamburger buns. I picked at my fries. I raised my eyes and glanced at the tourists around me. I was the only person eating alone.

One night, we came home early and in my mounting inebriation I suggested we watch an episode of The O.C. There might have been a couple of seconds’ silence as my roommates looked at each other, bewildered, before they nodded their heads. “That sounds like a great idea.”

The second season, as any devotee knows, begins with the Cohen household in shambles, under renovations, a dull metaphor for the torn relationships amongst all the show’s main characters. A married couple not on speaking terms; one son on a sailboat to Portland;  the adopted son moving in with an ex-girlfriend who may be pregnant with his baby; the show’s two main couples no longer together.  While the first season focuses on the past of our lovable brute from the mean streets of Chino, Ryan Atwood, who is adopted by the well-intentioned Cohen family of hoity-toity Newport Beach, season two attempts to answer the question of how Ryan is to plan for his future and leave his past behind.

Some nights we still found ourselves on Proconsolo, but other times we were content with a bottle of wine and the show’s doe-eyed stare offs and indie rock soundtrack. We sang along to the theme song. We felt homesick during the Chrismukkah episode. You would think we’d never left New York.

Spring break was approaching, and all our conversations revolved around all the cities we could visit. A train though the Alps into Switzerland; a cruise over to Croatia, only ten years from its War of Independence. Istanbul was on everyone’s wish list, with our parents pleading, “Is it safe?”

I received an email from my father to call him immediately. When I reached him, he was quiet for a while, but I could hear the television in the background. “Your grandfather has cancer.”

A scene from episode fourteen was up on my computer screen, Seth Cohen freeze-framed at Summer Roberts’s bedroom door in a Spiderman mask because he doesn’t own a raincoat and looks stupid in hats.

“What’s the weather like there?” I asked.

“It’s getting warmer,” my father replied.

I flew out at the beginning of the spring break, staying overnight in London with my girlfriend. We sat around her flat, talking about this and that, avoiding the reason for my trip. I landed in Chicago and it felt fitting that it was raining. I stood outside the terminal without a jacket on. I hadn’t been home in over six months.

We drove to the hospice. My grandfather had decided to reject any treatment and had quickly taken a turn for the worse. The only thing I can remember from that day is his eyes, barely in place in his emaciated face. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but I held his hand for an hour. My aunt placed her hands on my shoulder. “He missed you.” Mostly, I heard from my family, “You don’t visit enough.”

That night, I took my father’s car and drove around the neighborhood, past the public library I used to walk to every day on my break from school, and turned left to the late-night Baskin-Robbins, where the drive-thru was backed up with high school students leaving the football game. I drove past my alma mater and into Libertyville. I turned left onto Milwaukee Avenue, past Mickey Finn’s, where a friend saw Vince Vaughan once. I drove on to the Independence Grove Forest Preserve and parked the car on a side road. I climbed over the fence and made my way through the damp grass toward the Des Plaines River, a mist rising from the darkness ahead. I remembered coming here some weekends during high school. Occasionally, we’d swim in the lake, but mostly we just walked around, relishing the fact that we weren’t supposed to be in the park after dark. The air was sweet. I lay on the grass, the wet blades cool on my back. I should have never left Chicago.

That was how the week continued. I never called any of my friends in the city; I didn’t know what to say. My grandfather’s health deteriorated, but my flight neared. By this time, he was intermittently awake and too weak to speak. My family sat around in silence, holding vigil; occasionally someone told a story from our past. “When you were born, Justin, your grandfather was at a bar and told everyone, ‘I have a Stones.’” I never shook the nickname.

Some of the stories were more recent, stories of parties and weddings and random dinners that I wasn’t able to attend. It had seemed easy to decline these invitations from nine hundred miles away, and while my family repeatedly told me how much I had been missed, it was hard to shake off the knowledge that at times I may have been forgotten. I tried to follow the stories, but too much had happened since I left for college, and I didn’t have the energy to ask them to repeat what everyone else already knew.

Visiting hours ended. I hugged my grandfather good-bye. I felt how thin he had become; he gave me a faint smile. “What am I, an orphan?” he whispered, one of his favorite Rodney Dangerfield catchphrases. I hugged him again.

I imagined this is what hell would be like, the silent corridors reeking of piss and moldy clothes, the drone of the television sets filling the oppressive air, the occasional jello plate or pudding cup served on a plastic tray. I looked back at my grandfather, motionless, floating among the blankets and clothing that engulfed him.

The evening passed, the morning came. The sun rose. I didn’t sleep a minute.

Driving on I-94 to O’Hare, my mother decided we should stop at the hospice once more, since it was only a few minutes off the highway. I pleaded that I would miss my flight.

I wish I could tell you I don’t remember the details of that day, but every moment feels as though it were yesterday. My grandfather’s contorted face as he gasped for air, the convulsions, the few seconds when he lay motionless only to sit upright once again. My family cried–wailed–and I tasted the salt of my tears on my lips. Who was I to sob along with my family, who had been by my grandfather’s side the entire illness? I was an outsider, a fraud; why was I the one holding his hand as he took his last breath? Our eyes met, only for a moment, his pupils growing as blood vessels burst. I wanted to apologize for leaving, for all the missed phone calls and unannounced visits. The last time I saw him I hadn’t even said good-bye, pissed off over my family’s comments that I should cut my hair.

It was selfish; I knew that none of that mattered. I kept my eyes on his face, even as his grip loosened and his mouth settled. Even as the doctor called time of death.

A week later, my mother pulled up to the curb at O’Hare. As I said my good-byes to my family, she whispered in my ear, “He waited until you came home to die.”

* * *

The second season of The O.C. never came close in quality to the first. There was the occasional great moment, sure, but how long can you really sustain depth in an environment defined by its superficiality? Everyone loves the promise of a new beginning, but, once settled, you’re relieved as much as saddened by something’s demise.

I returned to Italy. I barely passed my classes, but otherwise everything was back to normal. We went to the bar on Proconsolo most nights until the last week of school, when Mario mysteriously disappeared. We finished the DVD set of The O.C., and just as the first season had ended with a wedding, the second closed with a death.

The last night out in Florence, I lost my camera. I wandered for an hour, retracing my steps, down each dark and quiet alleyway, passed the train station and the closed market. I realized I had left my keys in my bedroom and I sat on the front steps, waiting for someone to return home. I wondered about the person who had found the camera, who may have clicked through the contents of its memory card. There was comfort in knowing that there was someone somewhere who for a moment, only a few moments, acknowledged my existence, each and every out-of-focused photograph, mistakes meant to be deleted.

What would a coming-of-age story be without a few fuck-ups?