The Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin keeps coming home to me. Last time I mentioned an audience transformed by Astrid Gorvin reading Robert Walser at the 2005 ILB. Among the assembled was one Millay Hiatt, whose friend laughed “like twenty people in their added-up lives haven’t laughed”; emboldened by this to approach Ms. Hiatt, her friend, and their friend, then a delinquent philosophy student now an ascendant novelist, I found that Ms. Hiatt was actually Mrs. (she and her husband run the alone worth-the-trip Cafe Ohio near the Schlesisches Tor stop on the U1) and that she was made to translate Walser. Witness her translation of “Kennen Sie Meier?”, and cf. her account here of its origins in none other than Kenyon’s Tyler Meier mit ei, as the original begins. (Ed. note: serious young man #3 has since fixed his “broken German” and serious young man #1 was, in fact, the above actress, who was in fact only as serious as “Meier.”)
Herr Meier and Zach Savich (look out for him in the Spring KR, which may be the most hallowed in its heralded history) read here this past Sunday, and let it be said of each, that they let their incontestable language fall:
so to speak, piece by piece, so that it might occur to someone listening to go up to the man and gather up the things at his feet. The sound of this voice, I have studied it only too carefully, gives approximately the same impression in terms of tone as the movement of a snail makes on the eye, it sounds so marvelously slow, so lazy, so brown, so very crawly, so slimy, so mushy, and so very IfIdon’tcometodayI’llcometomorrow. A pleasure, quite simply. I can recommend it with the best conscience.
Almost (but not in the end) parenthetically, let me with the same resolution recommend two more readings.
I work in an old firehouse called Schoen Books, where the KR Blog’s own Joe Campana will be reading this Sunday (with another honorary Ohioan, his Graywolf Press colleague Martha Collins). When Tyler opened up our first reading almost a year ago, he was joined by Lewis Freedman and Michael Kasper.
The latter, short prose master M. Kasper by night, knows how to read and, Reference Librarian by day, he also knows how to read. At that reading, he guided me to John Taylor’s Paths to Contemporary French Literature. Now you know where this is going. In that book, you will find the most clear-headed assessment of the new Laureate’s now even harder-to-read harder-to-read oeuvre.
Why now? As those of us who flocked online to find the early, reputably more difficult and rewarding works published by Pantheon in the 1960s now know, there has been, shall we say, a reversal in sales. As I diligently tried bookseller after Book Cellar (formerly bargain basement: the exact same copy, now on Ebay for $1660 was on ABE for $65 when I tried to order it Thursday morning, before being informed that it had “sold”), I heard story after story of desperate runs being made on books that had been “sitting on the shelf,” in the words of one kind peddler, “for eight years.” As I watched the prices climb literally “minute by minute” as Sergei predicted, I mused on how all of this of a sudden falling all over ourselves scarcely counterpoints Engdahl’s invocation of American insularity. While the out-of-luck watched a dozen or so copies of the already out-of-print The Interrogation disappear from ABE within a few hours, the three copies of Le proc??s-verbal available (in America) early Thursday morning stuck around until this afternoon, when, full disclosure, I ordered two of them. (I’ll be slowly documenting the full details of my search here.)
Next time: I second Tyler’s endorsement of the the little ILB, i.e. the Kenyon Review Literary Festival, and ask: Do you know Wagner?