From a Dead Beat to an Old Greaser

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

But isn't that sadness more about you own declining energy as a reader?

There ARE brilliant new books & authors ...

Like, to name an American example, Joshua Cohen ("Four New Messages", "Book of Numbers", "Moving Kings"), who writes, in my humble opinion, better than Philip Roth, an author he often has been compared to.

Cohen, just by the way, helped Edward Snowden by teaching him how to write, as Snowden reveals in the acknowledgements of "Permanent Record". When I read this I had to think of Pynchon who would perhaps, and not only because of his writing skills, also have been a good candidate for that job.

Since you mention your "personal pedestal": If I should name just one novel from the 21st century which was written in the German tongue & reminded me, in terms of artistic audacity, of "Gravity's Rainbow", it would be "Die Stunde zwischen Frau und Gitarre" (The Hour Between Woman and Guitar; this may sound like the title of a Borges story, but the novel has 1020 pages), which was published by the Austrian author Clemens J. Setz in 2015 (by now a paperback edition is available).  Setz - there's an explicit reference to the dodo episode from "Gravity's Rainbow" in his former novel "Indigo" (which got translated into English) - is a Pynchon reader and he studied, along with German literature, mathematics which becomes manifest in his metaphors. The style of Setz is sometimes called "synaesthetic" and, indeed, reading this novel is a highly psychoactive experience.

Setz was born in 1982, Cohen in 1980: Both brilliant writers, still young (in terms of literary art). And then my "literary hero" Christian Kracht (* 1966) will be "gracing us" with a new novel in 2020!


+ In a residential home for people with physical and mental disabilities, a young woman – Natalie Reinegger – is employed as a caregiver to Alexander Dorm. The man is confined to a wheelchair, has an unpredictable temper and is regarded as »difficult«. Nevertheless, he has a visitor every week. That visitor, of all people, is Christoph Hollberg – the man whose life Dorm allegedly ruined years ago when he stalked him so relentlessly that he drove Hollberg’s wife to suicide.

The »arrangement« was based on mutual benefit, Natalie is being assured, and they liked one another very much. But soon the blatant aversion that Hollberg shows towards his supposed friend unsettles Natalie. She tries to uncover the enigmatic visitor’s secret and to understand the motives for his actions. She quickly realises that her new environment is shaped by nearly inscrutable relationships: the way the other carers behave among themselves is unfathomable, opaque are their relationships with the patients. Natalie is slowly drawn into a subtle, double-edged power play, the rules of which she only begins to understand gradually.

The novel spans over 1.000 pages – a book like »a lively micropolis«, as the author describes it – and is filled with peculiar niches and asides, full of outrageous and shocking moments, but also full of tenderness and moving scenes.

The Hour Between Woman and Guitar is a rollercoaster ride into the world of Clemens J. Setz. He reveals its inner order, its secrets and principles: power and the lack thereof, the search for meaning and loss of orientation, submission and love in all forms and shapes: nurturing, respectful, obsessed love, love as delusion and as a tool of manipulation. And of revenge. So subtle and painful that the question of who is the victim and who the perpetrator leads into a nameless abyss. +


https://www.suhrkamp.de/buecher/the_hour_between_woman_and_guitar-clemens_j_setz_42495.html?d_view=english


Am 11.12.19 um 15:32 schrieb rich:

Soon the curtain of one's literary heroes gracing us with new work will
close. The current obsessions of new and upcoming fiction writers I have
found are not mine, worthy as they are. I wont be one of those grumps
bemoaning the ascendance of a new generation of writers. But it does sadden
me a bit that soon there won't be anyone left for me to put on my personal
pedestal. Part of me realizes this is just natural. But I will miss the
excitement  I once had.
musing on a snowy winter's day

rich
--
Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
.