Posts Tagged ‘Robert Musil’

8 Jun

‘Intimate Ties’ by Robert Musil – DO NOT READ the second Novella, ‘The Temptation of Silent Veronica’

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘Intimate Ties’ by Robert Musil   (1911) – 206 pages                     Translated from the German by Peter Wortsman

 

In my continuing quest to read more fiction by the German writer Robert Musil who wrote one of the most brilliant long novels of the twentieth century, ‘The Man Without Qualities’, I stumbled upon this short work called ‘Intimate Ties’ consisting of two novellas. A short work by Robert Musil – what more could I ask for? His short novella ‘The Young Torless’ is also excellent, and I was hoping for another one of that caliber.

It turns out I should have done some more research on ‘Intimate Ties’ before diving into it. What did the critics say of it?

Michael Hoffman dismisses the entire work.

“Intimate Ties is one of those regrettable publications that hurts the reputations of everyone connected with it: Musil’s own, the translator’s, and even the luckless publisher, Archipelago. The novellas themselves are very strange: very slow, very interior, minutely analytical, and revolving around frankly pornographic subjects: being sodomized by a stranger in “The Culmination of Love,” a childhood recollection of bestiality in “The Temptation of Silent Veronica.” But we are not talking Anaïs Nin here. Musil’s overall effect is about as untitillating as the contemporary paintings of Gustav Klimt (themselves described as so unerotic, they were an argument for chastity), and indeed the author might have set himself the challenge or exercise of rendering such material opaque, decorative, somehow theoretical. His lens is so thickly smeared with verbal Vaseline that if there is any “action,” the reader can barely follow it.” – Musil’s Infinities, Michael Hoffman, NYBR

“One might describe Intimate Ties as weird, finical, oversubtle, probably misconceived, and in the end barely readable, one of the stranger and chillier blind alleys in literature. It is also shockingly badly translated. This is the more upsetting as Peter Wortsman is not a beginner but an experienced operator. (He has even translated a book of Musil’s before: Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, back in 1987.)” – Musil’s Infinities, Michael Hoffman, NYBR

While the critic Hoffman dismisses the entire work, J. M. Coetzee only dismisses the second novella and finds much to like in the first novella, ‘The Culmination of Love’.

“Musil’s later attitude toward this story—which appeared in company with the much inferior “The Temptation of Quiet Veronica” in 1911—is an interesting one: though it remained the only one of his works he could bear to reread, he dissuaded friends from venturing upon it. It was so obscure he said, so much a matter of “the artist’s arcana,” that the ordinary reader was all too likely to respond with “revulsion.” – On the Edge of Revelation, J. M. Coetzee, NYBR

I totally agree with Coetzee’s attitude toward both novellas. The second is much inferior, and I will dismiss it from further consideration. However I do agree with Coetzee that the first novella has considerable merit. It is written from the point of view of the young married woman Claudine.

“She loved him, even as she contemplated how to hurt him in the worst way possible.”

Claudine is traveling by train to visit her 13 year-old daughter whom she had before she met her husband. She starts remembering that time before she was married. In her early days, she remained “under the sway of any men who crossed her path, for whom she was then prepared, to the point of self-sacrifice and a complete abandonment of will, to do anything they asked of her”.

After she met her husband, that all changed.

“All she had done and suffered in the past was repressed the moment she met her present husband. From then on, she lived a life of quiet and solitude.”

However this train trip is bringing her previous life back to her. There is a sales man sitting across from her who is giving her the eye.

“And suddenly she felt a dark longing for her life before, that time of mistreatment and exploitation by strangers.”

There is a snowstorm, and the passengers on the train are snowed in at a small hotel for several days.

The translation of the first novella is just clear enough for the reader to follow and the translation of the second novella is near incomprehensible.

 

Grades :

First novella : ‘The Culmination of Love’ –      A-

Second novella : ‘The Temptation of Silent Veronica’ –      D

 

 

 

21 Dec

Remember the Penguin 60s?

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: , .

 

Back in 1995, in order to celebrate their 60th Anniversary in business, Penguin Books issued a series of very small books by famous authors called Penguin 60s which contained only around sixty to eighty pages. These books are tiny, only 4 inches by 5 inches, 10 centimeters by 12 centimeters.

I really liked this idea, because I am one of those who believe that a true genius can show her or his genius in 60 pages as well as in 100, 200, or 900 pages. They sold for only $.95 here in the United States and I wound up with about twenty of them. However here I am 26 years later, and nearly all my Penguin 60s remain unread.

So I decided to read and review a couple of them now. I picked works by two of my favorite authors, Graham Greene and Robert Musil.

In ‘Under the Garden’, Graham Greene attempts a childhood fantasy, something much different from the adult spy and foreign adventure fiction that he is justly famous for. I must say that I had a lot of difficulty appreciating this work, as fantasy is probably my least favorite genre of fiction. A boy of seven goes underground beneath the garden at his home and discovers some strange creatures and persons living there. There is the one-legged old man Javitts and his woman Maria who “kwahk”s instead of talks. Their daughter has left them and is now in the upper world and has been crowned Miss Ramsgate. Even though Greene’s other work nearly always appeals to me, this one did not really sustain my interest.

‘Flypaper’ by Robert Musil starts with eight short good-natured essays. Some of them were dated, having been written a hundred years ago. The standout for me was the first one, ‘Flypaper’, which is about that sticky paper people used to control the number of flies before there were a lot of insecticides. It was paper with this golden yellow sticky poison on it. The flies would land on it, get stuck, and slowly die. Robert Musil exactly describes what happens to the fly. I suppose as a child watching the flies land on flypaper was my first intimation of mortality. I thought Musil’s essay was a brilliant example of close sharp observation as he captures the plight of the flies.

In another of these essays, Musil closely observes the behavior of monkeys on a monkey island at the zoo. One can learn a lot about human nature by observing the behavior of monkeys on monkey island.

Essays don’t have the same impact for me that fiction does. ‘Flypaper’ does wind up with a twenty-six page fictional story which is also good-natured and has some of the qualities of Musil’s other fiction.

I suppose that if there were any real money to be made in the reprints of these works, they would have been given a proper reprint instead of a Penguin 60 reprint. I definitely would not recommend buying a box set of all the Penguin 60s today.

 

‘Under the Garden’ by Graham Greene       Grade:    C+

‘Flypaper’ by Robert Musil                               Grade:   B