From a Dead Beat to an Old Greaser

[Mark Kohut]

Looks like I have to get Indigo while I await this one in English.
Which sounds wonderfully Pynchonian and beyond. (in some themes
and styles, not in achievement )

Not your usual review blurbs:
»To say that the text literally seizes hold of the reader's body, infecting
and attacking it - is presumably the highest compliment one could pay
Setz.« Eva Behrendt, *taz*

»... *Indigo* is mad, ambitious and self-ironic.« Helmut Böttinger,
*Süddeutsche
Zeitung*




On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 6:52 AM Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
wrote:

>
> 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
> .
>
>
>
> --
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>