Ror Wolf (1932–2020)

Wunderschön. Was in dem Buch passiert? Ich habe keine blasse Ahnung, aber das macht nicht, ein kleines, pelziges Sprachwesen windet sich da über Seiten, hebt ab und zu den Kopf und zischelt den Leser zwischen den zahlreichen, verstörend schönen Collagen verführerisch an.
Und dann wäre da noch Seite 216. Eine Seite, ein langer Satz. Ohne den geringsten Makel, in einem geschmeidigen Fluss, eine phonetisch Einheit, wunderschön, perfekt. Wirklich perfekt! Perfekter geht es nicht mehr. Ich bin in Trauer um die Unmöglichkeit, Perfektion zu erreichen, und Ror Wolf reichte mir lachend den schwarzen Schleier.… (plus d'informations)

This collection originally appeared in a shorter version in 2003; the 2007 edition I read contains two extra digressions and is about 50% longer than the earlier one (the English translation is also based on the 2007 edition).

The original 47 digressions are all very short, many of them only single paragraphs. Like some of Thomas Bernhard's early pieces, these are mostly framed in the format of a newspaper fait divers, in which we learn the protagonist's occupation, where they are from (and sometimes their age), and are told what they did — or what happened to them — and the place where it happened, but learn little or nothing about the context. Wolf goes further than Bernhard, though, in playing with our narrative expectations by either claiming not to know essential details or telling us that he chooses to withhold them, and he likes to use negative descriptions — someone was "not of memorable appearance" or "not acting in a significant way". The whole idea is to tease the conventions of narrative storytelling and bring them into the foreground by denying us an actual story that has some sort of point.

There are also wider things going on that bridge the stories: place names seem to be taken at random from all over the German-speaking area (and sometimes North America), but they come in assonant groups — a man from Ulm meets a man from Olm in Elm. Any attempt to make geographical sense out of the stories is frustrated immediately. There's also a lot of play with certain obvious symbols — hats, cigars, snakes — that don't have any obvious symbolic reference, and Wolf loves to throw in references to unexplained authorities — "Schleitz tells us...".

The slightly longer pieces in the contiguous forty-seven expand this structure into surreal dream sequences, in which a series of this kind of inconclusive incidents and encounters takes place without any clear logical connection.

The "Penultimate Digression" is a bridging paragraph, and the "49th Digression" is a longer first-person narrative in twelve chapters, that claims to be the narrator's life-story but actually consists of a series of dreamlike episodes, the longest being a sea-voyage in which the narrator's ship repeatedly sinks leaving him to be picked up as sole survivor by the next passing ship and a coast-to-coast walk across Africa in which the narrator claims to be the first person to have done this journey without knowing whether he was going East to West or West to East.

Despite the unreal framework, everything is pinned down to specific dates with the author's lifetime, but the narrator also likes to refer to events in his past or future by the chapter in which they occurred, even when they are not actually mentioned in that chapter. And then, of course, the whole thing ends with a pastiche of the opening chapter of The Maltese Falcon — the narrator is a detective, and a mysterious naked woman dressed in black comes to his office to tell him a strange tale. Except that the point seems to be the telling of the tale, there's no suggestion that she wants him to investigate it. And he doesn't choose to share the tale with us.

Robert Walser's footprints are all over this book, of course, and Wolf acknowledges that by bringing in an only slightly veiled reference to Walser's death in the snow (with actual footprints) in the last chapter.

You need to be in the right frame of mind for this sort of book: I can imagine that a lot of readers would be saying "Yes, I get the point" by about page three, but it's worth carrying on, there are a lot of little jokes and absurd leaps to keep you amused and puzzled.… (plus d'informations)