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fastidious SS officer, who scarcely wet his lips with alcohol—said it wasn’t strange, if one cast a dispassionate glance over the great deeds of history (even the blank deeds of history, although this, of course, no one understood), that a hero should be transformed into a monster or the worst sort of villain or that he should unintentionally succumb to invisibility, in the same way that a villain or an ordinary person or a good-hearted mediocrity should become, with the passage of the centuries, a beacon of wisdom, a magnetic beacon capable of casting a spell over millions of human beings,
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Chanson de Roland.
Czechs or Koltchak or Yudenitsch or the Allied troops and he was told that all of them had
And those affairs were reading and visiting museums, reading and walks in the park, reading and the almost obsessive attendance at all kinds of concerts, theatrical evenings, literary and political lectures, from which he drew many valuable lessons that he was able to apply to the freight of lived experience he had accumulated.
The girl is ten years older than the boy, or in other words twenty-four, and although she has a number of lovers, including the boy, she doesn’t want to fall in love with anyone because she believes that love will use up her powers as a hypnotist. One day the girl disappears and the boy, after searching for her in vain, decides to hire a Mexican detective who was a soldier under Pancho Villa. The detective has a strange theory:
Ivanov’s fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one’s efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a
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The Return from the Conference
They talked about books, about poetry (Ingeborg asked Reiter why he didn’t write poetry and he answered that all poetry, of any style, was contained or could be contained in fiction),
Around this time Reiter finished his first novel. He called it Lüdicke and he had to roam the backstreets of Cologne in search of someone who would rent him a typewriter,
He believed in progress and of course he believed in the intrinsic goodness of human beings. I too believe in the intrinsic goodness of human beings, but it means nothing. In their hearts, killers are good, as we Germans have reason to know. So what? I might spend a night drinking with a killer, and as the two of us watch the sun come up, perhaps we’ll burst into song or hum some Beethoven. So what? The killer might weep on my shoulder. Naturally. Being a killer isn’t easy, as you and I well know. It isn’t easy at all. It requires purity and will, will and purity. Crystalline purity and
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You may say that literature doesn’t consist solely of masterpieces, but rather is populated by so-called minor works. I believed that, too. Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wildflowers. I was wrong. There’s actually no such thing as a minor work. I mean: the author of the minor work isn’t Mr. X or Mr. Y. Mr. X and Mr. Y do exist, there’s no question about that, and
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I spent the time observing him in detail, his hands, for example, bony and energetic, his old man’s neck, like the neck of a turkey or a plucked rooster, his faintly Slavic cheekbones, his lifeless lips, lips that one could slash with a knife and from which one could be sure not a single drop of blood would fall, his gray temples like a stormy sea, and especially his eyes, deep eyes that at the slightest tilt of his head seemed at times like two endless tunnels, two abandoned tunnels on the verge of collapse.
When this was done she handed Archimboldi a list of twenty publishing houses, the same as the number of days he’d spent typing his novel, which was surely a good sign. But the problem was that he had just the original and one copy of the manuscript, which meant he could choose only two places.
The carbon copy he sent to a house in Hamburg that had published books of the German Left until 1933, when the Nazi government not only shut down the business but also tried to send its editor, Mr. Jacob Bubis,
Bubis! Archimboldi’s publisher from part 1!
“I get the idea perfectly, Mickey,” said Archimboldi, thinking all the while that this man was not only irritating but ridiculous, with the particular ridiculousness of self-dramatizers and poor fools convinced they’ve been present at a decisive moment in history, when it’s common knowledge, thought Archimboldi, that history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.
“So this Udet killed himself because of Göring’s salon intrigues?” he asked. “So he didn’t kill himself because of the death camps or the slaughter on the front lines or the cities in flames, but because Göring called him an incompetent?”
adding that incidentally the notion of destiny wasn’t something that could be separated from the destiny of an individual (a wretched individual), but that the two things were essentially the same: destiny, ungraspable until it became inevitable, was each person’s notion of his own destiny.
Archimboldi described the publishing house; Mr. Bubis; Mrs. Bubis; Uta, the copy editor, who could correct the grammar of Lessing, whom she despised with Hanseatic fervor, but not of Lichtenberg, whom she loved; Anita, the bookkeeper or head of publicity, who knew practically every writer in Germany but liked only French literature; Martha, the secretary, who had a literature degree and gave him some books from the publishing house in which he had expressed an interest; Rainer Maria, the storeroom attendant, who, despite his youth, had already been an expressionist poet, a symbolist, and a
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He wasn’t fat, but he wasn’t thin either, and he dressed in the fashion of the professors of Heidelberg, who never removed their ties except in situations of true intimacy.
When she took the handkerchief away from her mouth the stain of blood was like a giant rose in full bloom.
Hans,”
Reiter
“All this light is dead,” said Ingeborg. “All this light was emitted thousands and millions of years ago. It’s the past, do you see? When these stars cast their light, we didn’t exist, life on Earth didn’t exist, even Earth didn’t exist. This light was cast a long time ago. It’s the past, we’re surrounded by the past, everything that no longer exists or exists only in memory or guesswork is there now, above us, shining on the mountains and the snow and we can’t do anything to stop it.”
“An old book is the past, too,” said Archimboldi, “a book written and published in 1789 is the past, its author no longer exists, neither does its printer or the ones who read it first or the time when it was written, but the book, the first edition of that book, is still here. Like the pyramids of the Aztecs,” said Archimboldi.
That evening, before they left the village, the baroness insisted on driving up a mountain from which there was a view of the whole area. She saw winding paths in shades of yellow that vanished in the middle of little leaden-colored clusters of trees, the clusters like spheres swollen with rain, she saw hills covered in olive trees and specks that moved with a slowness and bewilderment that seemed of this world and yet intolerable.
The place consisted of two small rooms, separated by a plaster partition, and a bathroom,
Last
or they talked about some writers who had no ethical sense, self-confessed and happy plagiarists who hid expressions of mingled fear and outrage behind a cheerful mask, writers prepared to cling to any reputation, with the certainty that they would thus live on in posterity, any posterity, which made the copy editors and the other employees laugh and even prompted a resigned smile from Bubis, since no one knew better that posterity was a vaudeville joke audible only to those with front-row seats, and then they started to talk about lapsus calami,
Thanatos had come to Hamburg, a city he knew like the palm of his hand, while Bubis was in his office reading a book by a young writer from Dresden, a viciously funny book that made him laugh until he shook. His laughter, according to the publicity chief, could be heard in the lobby and the bookkeeper’s office and also in the copy editors’ office and the meeting room and the reading room and the bathroom and the room that served as kitchen and pantry, and it even reached the office of the boss’s wife, which was the farthest away of all. Suddenly, the laughter ceased. Everybody at the
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fall of the Berlin Wall
1989
Sometimes, in an excess of sentimentalism, the baroness asked him to come back to Germany. I have come back, Archimboldi answered. I’d like you to come back for good, answered the baroness. Stay for longer. Now you’re famous. A press conference wouldn’t hurt. Though perhaps that might be too much for you. But at least an exclusive interview with some top cultural reporter. Only in my worst nightmares, Archimboldi wrote her.
Until then no one had told Klaus anything about his uncle. After his grandmother’s death he asked Lotte about him. He wasn’t really very interested, but he felt so sad he thought it might take his mind off things. It had been a long time since Lotte thought about her brother and Klaus’s question came as something of a surprise. Around this time Lotte and Werner had gotten involved in real estate, which neither of them knew anything about, and they were afraid of losing money. So Lotte’s answer was vague: she told him that his uncle was ten years older than she was, more or less, and that the
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A few days later, and with no little astonishment, she discovered that she had a knack for languages.
Not on p 882 of an 894 page book!
While she waited at the Frankfurt airport for the flight to L.A., she went into a bookshop and bought a book and a few magazines. Lotte wasn’t a good reader, whatever that means, and if every once in a while she bought a book it was usually the kind written by actors when they retire or when it’s been a long time
You’re the goddamned author, you tell us what it means!
