From @terivarhol's Elemonials series, which are among my favourite Black & White photographs. Simply adore how much they border on abstract without quite veering into cameraless photography territory. I can get reads on the latter two as some kind of ice formations in water, but on the first I have no idea what's even going on -- it ends up kinda forcing you to think mostly in shapes, rather than in what is being depicted, which is immensely cool. Genuinely amazing stuff
(p.s. I believe she is currently most active on her instagram page? Go check that out as well!)
i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. like in the airbnb i was at i guess it used to be a kids room cause you could see the imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. like that's a poem already what's the point
some thoughts on Schattenfroh (it's not worth the time)
(Hopefully this isn't messy to a point of unreadability I'm just gathering all the various notes I made on discord)
Anyways I've been doing yearly "brick reads" where I read a book that's about brick-sized this is year 3 I went through William Gass's The Tunnel first for the first year which I loved and Mircea Cărtărescu's Solenoid (tr. Sean Cotter) after that which I thought was merely alright and decided to check out Michael Lentz's Schattenfroh (tr. Max Lawton) this year (which I read alongside with the politely compiled Reader's Guide to keep track of everything) and which I frankly hated and was thoroughly disappointed by. I ended up coming across all three of these in more or less the same spheres and given that Schattenfroh was eagerly recommended by The Untranslated blog and was published by Deep Vellum which have some cool stuff I expected generally better and frankly now I just doubt some people's actual literary critical reading skills
Schattenfroh is generally kinda sold as some big contemporary modernist masterpiece -- The Untranslated likens it, in an admittedly pretty strong opening paragraph to his review, back to back, to Moby-Dick, Á la recherche du temps perdu, Ulysses, The Recognitions, and The Tin Drum, some of which I've read and some of which I've on my shelf awaiting reading; other reviews (such as the LARB one), add to that list Don Quixote, Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Beckett's Trilogy, the last of which the LARB review suggests Schattenfroh to be a kind of spiritual successor to. And it is true that it has a lot of references to various things, in a way reminiscent of modernist works. But on the whole, those references don't manage to cohere together into something particularly interesting or revolutionary. It's like watching somebody run a distance which would have been a world record in the 20s or 30s or 40s or 50s or so, but is no longer, and now you only feel like this is trodden ground; or, rather, I guess, like watching somebody do a game speedrun without having kept up with the actual community. It's a striking achievement, it's purely technically impressive, it's cool to watch sometimes; but it's rather terribly lagged behind what has been taking place outside its tiny bubble, and ends up quite far from setting any records. The skips are performed cleanly, but seem clumsy compared to what has been discovered since. Why are you doing this part, we can skip the whole area now! Are you having fun, personally? Are you doing this purely for personal enjoyment? But to that last question, it doesn't seem like it -- Schattenfroh is rather insistent in taking itself seriously, and for its 1000 page run (it, in fact, is shorter - the page count starts on p. 19, but this would imply that the book cover is page 7. The translation is actually 983 pages long, but has been artificially inflated) it only made me laugh twice: once around page 440, where the protagonist starts monching on books and they try to attack him in turn, and then on page 900, where he defeats the antichrist via beer. Otherwise it's a continuous onslaught of references and scenes rendered rather drily. I don't think, as has been claimed, that full PhDs will be dedicated to it, beside perhaps comparing it to something else, more interesting, more successful.
Going somewhat linearly through the book, its premise is that what we're reading is the direct, almost unmediated (almost, for all language is to some degree mediation) recording of the protagonist, Nobody (Niemand),'s thoughts straight into his cerebrospinal fluid (at first given the wondrous name "Gehirnwasser" in the German original). He is then placed in an empty room with nothing but some odd mechanical pair of goggles which do the recording, and seemingly, though it's never elaborated upon, a tongue-biter louse (the ones that replace fishes' tongues, they've had a few waves of popularity online you know 'em) that has replaced his tongue and feeds on his words. From which setup you can see the possible connection with Beckett's Trilogy, though Schattenfroh never gets even remotely close to the radical emptiness of The Unnameable, nor manages to interrogate the problems of putting together a story with the same intrigue and investment -- at best it sits somewhere between Malone Dies (which is mentioned in a fat bibliography in the middle of the book, but the rest of the trilogy is absent) and The Unnameable, though in terms of quality quality sits firmly below either.
However, this setup is rather quickly abandoned in favour of having the characters exist in a book, alongside the book itself, which also exists to the characters, such that they'll occasionally open it and read about themselves. This move happens at least as early as page 149, which is the first to reference what page the book is currently on, and persists later, even becoming the basis of various moments which the reviews consistently reference. It is also a far less radical move, familiar to anyone with some experience with modernist and postmodernist works (and even with children's books like The Neverending Story (a banger!)) and one it doesn't pull off nearly as well as other examples. So, the central conceit with which the book opens and which all the reviews reference is abandoned about a tenth through the way to remain background noise. This presence as background noise, this rooting of everything into the character's consciousness, in fact, ends up undermining what could have been a far more interesting and surreal work. Seeing, simply, the character casually entering a painting and then promptly struggle to get out, would have been a lot more memorable a scene without the knowledge at the back of your mind telling you "it's all in the imagination of the protagonist, these are mere associations and ruminations!" Or an uncertainty abound the boundary between subject and world could have been upheld -- as Cărtărescu does quite well in various of his works, inheriting the decadent tradition, but most remarkably of what I've read, in Solenoid (I'll get through Blinding one day, too, I swear). This would have given some freedom of interpreting the work separately from interpreting the character alone, and even without it later scenes leave enough room to make this connection ("The [man's] saliva collects on this paper and quickly comes to form a small lake. My father takes me out onto this lake in a boat," p. 483).
From those opening pages on, where fun is had with the isolation chamber, the woodlouse, and the endless piles of paper at the father's office, Schattenfroh's imagery ends up being rather dull/ed. There are extensive sections of ekphrasis (which most reviews make mention of), rendered in rather unremarkable prose (though whether I should blame Lentz here or Lawton I cannot quite tell; my German is good enough to manage with sections, but too slow to tackle anything quite as large as this), such that anything particularly surreal or strange or interesting ends up being so only because somebody else had an interesting idea -- Bosch or Grünewald or Tübke, or often someone else -- upon which Lentz's writing is leeching, drawing from without building upon. Rarely does he have any particularly interesting observations to make about the paintings he describes (only one stood out to me from the entire volume, a note on p. 308 that Jesus's mouth seems to have been redrawn several times in Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece), and even more rarely does he manage to capture the feeling of looking at the painting, the sheer so-much-ness of looking at a Bosch, for example. In fact, often his writing ends up working against it, as he will single out a particular detail and then narrativise the scene around that detail. What is worse, he will often subsume the multiplicity which is his raw material into talking about his father (The Father! more about him in a bit) or Satan, his two key topics in the whole thing. So, from the great demon parade that is Bosch's Hell or Garden of Earthly Delights, before which a viewer may marvel for long, the composition of which lets one's eyes drift freely across the canvas, Lentz will pick out one or two or three figures, say "this! this is Satan!" and "that! that is my father!" and, since there can be nothing more important than Satan or the Father (which bleed together into the character of Schattenfroh, or, occasionally, are supplemented by Mateo), all else is left behind; the 2m by 3.8m Garden of Earthly Delights becomes a 10cm by 15cm cutout of a corner.
The book actually has these two themes, of the Father and Catholic Christianity as its master signifiers, so to call them, which immediately put a stop to any play of the imagination. Everything very quickly becomes either Satan (or, if Lentz is feeling generous, The Bible!) or the Father, and if it isn't it's scarce worth lingering on. And there is a clear reason for this particular mode of engagement with the cultural material upon which Schattenfroh draws, illustrated in a later scene and quote:
[Here] you'll find the Luther Bible in all of its important editions, his German first had to he translated and it was frequently mistranslated, if one struggles against Luther, one must take on the original Luther. Here is so-called contemporary literature. I do not read it. It is not substantial enough for me
(p. 445)
It's made very clear that Schattenfroh wishes oh so badly to be, in some way, canonical, to be serious literature and unlike contemporary literature, which has lost all substance and thus merit. It turns pastwise and tries to get this canonicity by borrowing from established, canonical authority -- either that of biblical discourse or the authority of the Father.
The figure of the Father in particular is presented wholly undigested, so to say: he is less a character as much as a shortcut to the notion of Authority. He is the stern Father everybody knows as a child and fears but also somewhat secretly respects, that boys wish to be, the Father of the 19th and 20th century, the Father of Patriarchy, head of the family, the Father in the Sky, the father Freud's children wish dead, the Father in his most basic and boring iteration. And for all its preoccupation with him, Schattenfroh has pretty much nothing interesting to say about him. It barely even tries to subvert that authority, except with the well-trained movement of exclaiming "oh how frail and old he's gotten!, woe, where is that Father I once knew!," only few of which manage to be gutpunching (though, I admit, when they do land they do land). But no, the Father is barely a character. You can even pinpoint precisely where he starts to become one: on page 722 he, for the first time, asks Nobody a question not in trying to interrogate or examine him, as he would have from his position as Father, but as an equal, from the position of Person. What follows is a slightly more broken-up and fun dynamic between the two as they go on their little journey toward the final painting explored in the book, and one of the more enjoyable sections to read in terms of character dynamics. This, however, Lentz fails to uphold, and around 150 pages later, his father is back to being The Father. The situation with the biblical discussions is similar -- it is clear that Nobody (and likely Lentz through him) is coping with a heavily Catholic past, but almost nothing of interest is made of what has been inherited, discarded and condemned.
(inserting this here 'cause I gotta complain somewhere, this strive for canonicity can be seen all throughout the work and culminates in the assertion that cannot but come off arrogant unless deliberately read ironically, that "seven hermeneutics" shall come before Schattenfroh (p. 806). it thinks it's the Bible!! Like, come on, girliepop, have some perspective)
The other thing that might stand out is this broad attack against contemporary literature (made without naming any names or books, for better or for worse), the outright refusal to meaningfully engage with which firmly blocks Schattenfroh from inheriting the modernist tradition in any meaningful way. Even Eliot, in his scorn for it, makes mention of "That Shakespearean Rag" in The Waste Land, whilst Ulysses's list of mundania lovingly rendered is seemingly endless; but Schattenfroh refuses to engage with them on principle, and so cannot have anything interesting or meaningful to say of them. Its view of literature, rendered somewhat comedically, but insufficiently self-reflexively, as something that can be measured in calories, implies that there is some inherent worth built into the books separately from reader and interpretation, such that some books simply have a greater (caloric) value than others, and should be eaten instead of them. Books are there to be passively consumed, rather than actively engaged with, played with, taken apart and put back together. Lentz's strive for canonicity, his dense walls of references and quotations, seem, thus, a strive to make something highly caloric. But his approach seems to consist more of throwing more baking powder into the mix, hoping volume might make up for flavour. It doesn't. It cannot. It fails.
In fact, these are the sections reviewers have left largely uncommented -- these conservative, reactionary complaints about contemporary literature not being as "calorific" as The Old Masters were, the sections about how we need to put more storage space on smartphones because people are so eager to film and upload their crimes on facebook that we might as well let them condemn themselves (around p. 640), two needlessly mean and somewhat grotesque descriptions and ruminations on fat men, one where Nobody is rather voyeuristically observing his mother on a train (around p. 480), one a bit later (that I'm too lazy to find back) -- are perhaps the most showing of the kind of thinking that Lentz does outside the walls of his kabbalistic obscuritanism built on bricks of references. It is a shallow kind of thinking, often unoriginal, the kind that makes you feel the same way as when your conservative uncle is on the table and brings up politics. The focus of reviews typically falls on the denser parts, which less clearly aim to say anything, because everyone feels too awkward to bring Lentz's facebookisms up, after dinner. And while it is certain that Schattenfroh has read a lot, it has eaten many books, but it isn't particularly clear if it has thought nearly as much about what it's read, if it has digested any of them, and with sections like these you're left wondering whether that might actually have been a good thing.
(another minor insertion -- Lentz never makes explicit the connection between his seeming disturbance by overweight people, the grotesque descriptions of their appearance and apparent eating habits, and his own insistence upon consuming only highly caloric books. It's a connection that seems a product of the work's method of composition, of continuously throwing things in, but you can still probably wring out a fun, self-ironising reading here, if at Lentz/Nobody's expense.)
I wanna use this bit to pivot to some of the points made in those initial review I read which sold the book to me, keeping in mind this bit about it not having actually thought much about or digested (dragging along the eating books metaphor) the material it spends extended sections spouting back at you.
[T]he ideal reader of Schattenfroh is expected: [...] to have an advanced understanding of the mechanics of the printing process in the 16th century [~p. 810-817 and on]; [...] to be acquainted with the botanical and geological features of the north of Thuringia [~p. 858]; [...] to understand the technicalities of the design and construction of the cylindrical building of the said museum [~p. 694-721]; [...] to understand 17th-century Spanish [p. 819]
(I have picked out, among The Untranslated's giant list, only the ones that stood out to me particularly, lodged in my memory enough to make a clicking noise mid-read. I have taken the courtesy to indicate roughly where all of these take place)
Admittedly, this one, I think, is just straight-up false. As with much of Schattenfroh, the knowledge indicated here has not been digested, and is simply regurgitated whole on the pages, as if lifted directly off of some manual or encyclopaedia to be placed within the book, with barely any rewriting (and, while I recognise that found poetry is a thing, this is not that). These descriptions can be extensive, some nearing 30 pages (as with the technical parts about the construction of the museum), but nothing subsequently comes of them; understanding how the reinforced concrete sections of the circular parts of the museum hold up their own weight does not then lead to a part where the characters have to rebalance a crumbling building utilising this knowledge or something -- it is placed there, dragged out, and then abandoned. To the section about the mediaeval printing press is appended a bit about Schattenfroh (the book within the book)'s magical self-writing, and Nobody is at one point likened to a part of the printing press, but the better part of the rest of the description is not engaged with at any meaningful length. The page of 17th century Spanish is the first page of the 24th chapter of the 2nd volume of Don Quixote. Its contents are not discussed at all, and it is present only as an aberrant inclusion, a surprise to the characters. The descriptions of the flowers are perhaps the least "lifted out of a technical book" of these, and the mountain scene is a pleasant break from the mediaeval cities, but, again, no knowledge is a prerequisite, for Lentz tells you directly, that "[a]reas of heather and bird’s-foot sedge suggest higher amounts of rainfall" or that "[t]he ground beetle Amara pseudostrenua is considered to be most rare."
(Also, compared to similar sections of listing botanical sights in William Gass's work, from the ending stretch of "Henry Pimber" in Omensetter's Luck, through the 110 weeds crammed together in "Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's," and ending with "Garden" from his Middle C, Lentz's are not particularly poetic or impressive or fun to read in the moment; he doesn't seem nearly as engaged or tuned in with what he's describing).
So, you, as a reader, hardly need to actually read, let alone understand these sections. It is unclear whether Lentz himself really has a grasp on what he's including in his work, or whether he has simply found them somewhere and thought to paste them into his Big Book. This in stark contrast to the aforenamed, for example, Moby-Dick, where the sections about whaling all come from lived experience and all add up to something singular; or with Ulysses, with its religious sections (though not only). The impressive thing about these modernists beasts is precisely that this knowledge -- on one hand purely technical, on the other also philosophical -- comes neatly and naturally to its author, such that it can then be transformed into something of aesthetic and poetic value, which Lentz fails to. One can even assume the opposite attitude (as, perhaps, Schattenfroh should have, given its central conceit), about experience had only vicariously -- as Gass's narrator in The Tunnel opens, a "Life in a chair," -- and reacting critically to this supposed erudition rendered separate from lived experience. But Schattenfroh is too concerned with its seeming erudite to allow this kind of attitude.
(In a rare moment of lucidity, on p. 717 Nobody/Lentz briefly wonders whether such material should be included in the book at all, and says it can be skipped if you don't feel like reading it; then jocularly adds that there might be a reader out there who is really really into this topic and this might be his favourite section of the book!, though I'm personally afraid that somebody quite this into technical literature about the architectural construction of buildings -- and this I say as someone who does have a passive interest in architecture -- would simply be reading something else)
Finally, I wanna comment briefly upon some things from reviews that came back to mind while reading:
Psychogeography of the self ("Eine Psychogeografie des Selbst")
One of those catchy phrases, presented initially in this German review, but then more famously picked up in The Untranslated's review, and finally included on the inside of the front cover of the book itself. However, it is unclear how this phrase reworks the notion of psychogeography, which aims to situate somebody in an environment, a self placed among the non-self and among others, at least not without it simply reverting back into becoming psychology. The initial review doesn't really seem to explicate that, and subsequent uses of the term, like echoes, do less and less. It implies, to some degree, a spacialisation of the psyche, but this doesn't seem like something new, to me? Is Á la recherche not temporally-spacial in a similar way, is it not a psychogeography of the self, recalling the past (especially with its work with Bergson's notion of time, which is somewhat spacialised)?If not this, is it something to do with the writing? It doesn't seem spacialised in any particularly interesting way, the way Gertrude Stein's is (here recalling A Geographical History of America in particular, though her closeness with Picasso and the cubists has lead to plenty of readings of her poetic works -- such as Tender Buttons -- as spacialised writing. I don't think that's exactly true, but it holds enough ground to be a starting point). So, does "psychogeography of the self" actually designate anything new being done? It really doesn't seem like it, to me
Michael Lentz gives the lie to the notion that self-reflexive texts are a preposterous relic of the 1960s and 1970s and plays his textual games with a disarming bravura. Occasionally, the characters refer to the exact number of the page on which they are located. Sometimes, the text of the main narrative gets repeated in the books situated at a lower diegetic level.
And this is true, characters do reference pages of the book. Repeatedly. This happens on pages 149, 193 (re: p. 23), 229, 242 (re: end of book), 252 (re: p. 485), 445, 446, 550 (re: p. 442), 574 (re: p. 193), 603, 613 (re: p. 883), 754 (re: p. 730), 790, 808, 837 (re: end of book), 866 (re: p. 61), 902. I have not gone to note down the reduplications the book does, though they're fewer and, inevitably, more elaborate than "we're now on page 196, wow!". It's funny the first few times, but, as with his technical knowledge, Lentz does not explore it in any meaningful depth, so it ends up feeling like one of those Marvel Movie "gulp he's right behind me isn't he" gags which only interrupt the flow of the narrative. As with many of its tricks, it performs it, something done already and by others, and then goes nowhere with it. It doesn't expand the field of literature. It doesn't know how
to have a firm grasp of Northern Renaissance art, especially Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings; [...] to have visited and admired the Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen exhibiting Werner Tübke’s colossal 14 by 123 metre painting Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany
The Untranslated's Reader's Guide I mentioned at the start (based, I believe, in part on Lentz's own Innehaben, where he discusses the workings and structure of parts of Schattenfroh) ensures that a lot of what might have been dumbfounding and striking upon those first reads after the book's release is quickly demystified, even to a point that it trivialises sections of the book by simply showing you the picture that the work would send you on a quest after otherwise. The descriptions, as I mentioned, are not pleasurable or interesting to read in the moment, and opening the guide and checking that out instead to just marvel at the painting might be more worth your time
page-long labyrinthine sentences that would have given nightmares even to Thomas Mann
The prose of Lentz, as rendered, at least, by Lawton, is not particularly syntactically exciting, I don't think. This review more or less encapsulates my thoughts on the prose, though it doesn't go quite hard enough on the work, I think.
Nobody as Odysseus
This is inevitably mentioned in just about every review. It's even mentioned in the book (p. 879), which ends up somewhat subtracting, for me, the tiny bit of originality this observation might have otherwise had. But Nobody is no Odysseus, and Schattenfroh is no Odyssey, and Lentz is no Joyce
I do concede, Schattenfroh is occasionally typographically and visually inventive. Not to the degree of other works -- most obviously House of Leaves, but also Tristram Shandy, which is referenced -- but still. However, these bits feel more like candy to keep you from getting overbored, whilst the rest of the book trudges on. Whenever it borrows these playful bits -- referencing, near the start, back to back, a script I cannot recognise, the Voynich manuscript (also used in Solenoid, and to better ends, tying it to other things), Tristram Shandy, and Abraham Abulafia’s Haye ha-‘olam ha-ba (Life in the World to Come) (pp. 172-175 & 197; I thank the Untranslated's Guide for that last one, and add to it that the description provided below the two circles of hebrew is very similar to certain German-language experiments of the baroque era) -- it rarely does much with them, beyond giving the reader the chance to do that Leo DiCaprio pointing meme. The black page, referencing, clearly, Tristram Shandy, is, once, simply inverted from the minute of mournful silence it is in the original, and said to be a page "so crammed with words that it looks like printer’s ink has been poured over it" (p. 196); but this move is one done already, in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (and then, 5-6 year after that, in 2011, in Visual Editions's rendition of Tristram Shandy as well), and Schattenfroh doesn't build on it in any way. It also quickly subsumes -- again -- the black page into that Christianity & Father discourse duo, first by having the father disappear into the page, and then by designating the page to be the Corpus Christi (p. 294), leaving you wondering why it borrowed this element from Tristram Shandy if it had no intention of engaging with it. There's another section where the text goes in two columns (pp. 718-721; there's also a second one pp. 784-788, but there the right column is very sparsely populated so I don't count it), which is reminiscent of Derrida's Glas, but, again, Lentz fails to make good use of this parallel text and renders the right column of text wholly subservient to the left: in the right drone on those technical details about the construction of the museum, which the characters have by now stopped listening to whilst in the left the plot takes place; and only the left references what happens in the right column of text, and only the left column is actually worth reading. On the whole, the typographical experiments are not really new, aren't used in any particularly interesting way (relative to whatever work made use of these ideas first) and don't do much to save the book
As a final verdict, I don't think there's really much reason to read Schattenfroh beyond curiosity and having too much time on your hands, or, alternatively, wanting to seem fancy by engaging with foreign "difficult" literature. It is not an enjoyable or particularly memorable work; it does not reward you in the moment with exciting plot or pleasurable prose, nor in the long run with engaging philosophical ideas or atmosphere and imagery, or plain doing anything particularly new. There's some 150-200 pages that definitely stuck (and might stick still) in my mind, especially ones related to the death of either parent, which are emotionally charged and hold something interesting, but on the whole the book fails to really justify its own length and reward you for the sheer amount of effort it takes to read it
Additionally, out of both sheer pettiness and a vague desire to note that I was, in fact, reading carefully, here's a collection of errata in Schattenfroh, based on the First English Edition by Deep Vellum and Cross-Referenced with the original German edition:
Spelling mistakes:
p. 287, line 10 - "know" should read "known"
p. 346, line 16 - "eventeenth" should read "seventeenth"
p. 576, line 9 - Alice in Alice through the Looking Glass should be rendered in italics
p. 614, line 8 - "weighter" should read "weightier"
p. 644, line 1 - "behemoth" should read "Behemoth"
p. 726, line 4 - "Being-in the-world" should read "Being-in-the-world."
p. 726, line 11 - "being-in-the-world" should read "Being-in-the-world"
p. 830, line 29 - the image of the hand-written Schattenfroh has been cropped in transfer
p. 850, line 10 - "stalagmite" should read "stalagnate"
p. 877, line 32 - "his recollection" should read "his recollection" (no double space)
p. 878 - "separate internment" should read "separate interment" (no double space)
p. 911, line 22 - "killer" should read "kill"
additional notes:
p. 335, 403 - the Tau section is perfectly identical in the original, but has randomly been differentiated in the translation.
p. 350 - "Kargste Kuhl" is translated as Mosthollow Pit; the German -ste suffix does not strike as odd on its own, such that Hollowmost would be closer to the original German in terms of how it reads to the native speaker
p. 522:
But the basement is another basement than in the other houses, it's always been one and the same basement
coherence of the sentence has been lost, here.
In the original:
Der Keller ist aber ein anderer Keller als in den anderen Häusern, der immer ein und derselbe Keller war
which would be closer to something like:
This basement, however, is a different basement than the one in other houses, which was always the same basement
i.e. the basement in all other houses is the same, and this is the only one that's different. I had to check the original here, to make sense of what the sentence was supposed to mean
p. 575 - there is an error on Lentz's part, retained in the translation - Hagner's book is listed as Die Sache des Buches, but is, in fact, titled Zur Sache des Buches.
p. 759 - it is unclear why the typical spelling mistakes which mark the original have not been retained in the English translation, when in other places they have been (such as rendering "blisters" as "blesters" on p. 835, borrowing from the 14th c. French "blestres," as parallel to the Old Hochdeutsch "swili," which later becomes "Schwiele" in the original)
p. 830 - "only with whore's children (widows)"; misplacement of the apostrophe from "whores'"? The original Hurenkidern does not imply anything sitting quite as odd as the omitted "a" here
Additionally, here are two omissions from The Untranslated's guide, though there are likely others as well:
p. 594 - a reference to Beckett's Endgame
p. 760 - a quotations from Numbers 16:5
some thoughts on Schattenfroh (it's not worth the time)
(Hopefully this isn't messy to a point of unreadability I'm just gathering all the various notes I made on discord)
Anyways I've been doing yearly "brick reads" where I read a book that's about brick-sized this is year 3 I went through William Gass's The Tunnel first for the first year which I loved and Mircea Cărtărescu's Solenoid (tr. Sean Cotter) after that which I thought was merely alright and decided to check out Michael Lentz's Schattenfroh (tr. Max Lawton) this year (which I read alongside with the politely compiled Reader's Guide to keep track of everything) and which I frankly hated and was thoroughly disappointed by. I ended up coming across all three of these in more or less the same spheres and given that Schattenfroh was eagerly recommended by The Untranslated blog and was published by Deep Vellum which have some cool stuff I expected generally better and frankly now I just doubt some people's actual literary critical reading skills
Schattenfroh is generally kinda sold as some big contemporary modernist masterpiece -- The Untranslated likens it, in an admittedly pretty strong opening paragraph to his review, back to back, to Moby-Dick, Á la recherche du temps perdu, Ulysses, The Recognitions, and The Tin Drum, some of which I've read and some of which I've on my shelf awaiting reading; other reviews (such as the LARB one), add to that list Don Quixote, Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Beckett's Trilogy, the last of which the LARB review suggests Schattenfroh to be a kind of spiritual successor to. And it is true that it has a lot of references to various things, in a way reminiscent of modernist works. But on the whole, those references don't manage to cohere together into something particularly interesting or revolutionary. It's like watching somebody run a distance which would have been a world record in the 20s or 30s or 40s or 50s or so, but is no longer, and now you only feel like this is trodden ground; or, rather, I guess, like watching somebody do a game speedrun without having kept up with the actual community. It's a striking achievement, it's purely technically impressive, it's cool to watch sometimes; but it's rather terribly lagged behind what has been taking place outside its tiny bubble, and ends up quite far from setting any records. The skips are performed cleanly, but seem clumsy compared to what has been discovered since. Why are you doing this part, we can skip the whole area now! Are you having fun, personally? Are you doing this purely for personal enjoyment? But to that last question, it doesn't seem like it -- Schattenfroh is rather insistent in taking itself seriously, and for its 1000 page run (it, in fact, is shorter - the page count starts on p. 19, but this would imply that the book cover is page 7. The translation is actually 983 pages long, but has been artificially inflated) it only made me laugh twice: once around page 440, where the protagonist starts monching on books and they try to attack him in turn, and then on page 900, where he defeats the antichrist via beer. Otherwise it's a continuous onslaught of references and scenes rendered rather drily. I don't think, as has been claimed, that full PhDs will be dedicated to it, beside perhaps comparing it to something else, more interesting, more successful.
Going somewhat linearly through the book, its premise is that what we're reading is the direct, almost unmediated (almost, for all language is to some degree mediation) recording of the protagonist, Nobody (Niemand),'s thoughts straight into his cerebrospinal fluid (at first given the wondrous name "Gehirnwasser" in the German original). He is then placed in an empty room with nothing but some odd mechanical pair of goggles which do the recording, and seemingly, though it's never elaborated upon, a tongue-biter louse (the ones that replace fishes' tongues, they've had a few waves of popularity online you know 'em) that has replaced his tongue and feeds on his words. From which setup you can see the possible connection with Beckett's Trilogy, though Schattenfroh never gets even remotely close to the radical emptiness of The Unnameable, nor manages to interrogate the problems of putting together a story with the same intrigue and investment -- at best it sits somewhere between Malone Dies (which is mentioned in a fat bibliography in the middle of the book, but the rest of the trilogy is absent) and The Unnameable, though in terms of quality quality sits firmly below either.
However, this setup is rather quickly abandoned in favour of having the characters exist in a book, alongside the book itself, which also exists to the characters, such that they'll occasionally open it and read about themselves. This move happens at least as early as page 149, which is the first to reference what page the book is currently on, and persists later, even becoming the basis of various moments which the reviews consistently reference. It is also a far less radical move, familiar to anyone with some experience with modernist and postmodernist works (and even with children's books like The Neverending Story (a banger!)) and one it doesn't pull off nearly as well as other examples. So, the central conceit with which the book opens and which all the reviews reference is abandoned about a tenth through the way to remain background noise. This presence as background noise, this rooting of everything into the character's consciousness, in fact, ends up undermining what could have been a far more interesting and surreal work. Seeing, simply, the character casually entering a painting and then promptly struggle to get out, would have been a lot more memorable a scene without the knowledge at the back of your mind telling you "it's all in the imagination of the protagonist, these are mere associations and ruminations!" Or an uncertainty abound the boundary between subject and world could have been upheld -- as Cărtărescu does quite well in various of his works, inheriting the decadent tradition, but most remarkably of what I've read, in Solenoid (I'll get through Blinding one day, too, I swear). This would have given some freedom of interpreting the work separately from interpreting the character alone, and even without it later scenes leave enough room to make this connection ("The [man's] saliva collects on this paper and quickly comes to form a small lake. My father takes me out onto this lake in a boat," p. 483).
From those opening pages on, where fun is had with the isolation chamber, the woodlouse, and the endless piles of paper at the father's office, Schattenfroh's imagery ends up being rather dull/ed. There are extensive sections of ekphrasis (which most reviews make mention of), rendered in rather unremarkable prose (though whether I should blame Lentz here or Lawton I cannot quite tell; my German is good enough to manage with sections, but too slow to tackle anything quite as large as this), such that anything particularly surreal or strange or interesting ends up being so only because somebody else had an interesting idea -- Bosch or Grünewald or Tübke, or often someone else -- upon which Lentz's writing is leeching, drawing from without building upon. Rarely does he have any particularly interesting observations to make about the paintings he describes (only one stood out to me from the entire volume, a note on p. 308 that Jesus's mouth seems to have been redrawn several times in Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece), and even more rarely does he manage to capture the feeling of looking at the painting, the sheer so-much-ness of looking at a Bosch, for example. In fact, often his writing ends up working against it, as he will single out a particular detail and then narrativise the scene around that detail. What is worse, he will often subsume the multiplicity which is his raw material into talking about his father (The Father! more about him in a bit) or Satan, his two key topics in the whole thing. So, from the great demon parade that is Bosch's Hell or Garden of Earthly Delights, before which a viewer may marvel for long, the composition of which lets one's eyes drift freely across the canvas, Lentz will pick out one or two or three figures, say "this! this is Satan!" and "that! that is my father!" and, since there can be nothing more important than Satan or the Father (which bleed together into the character of Schattenfroh, or, occasionally, are supplemented by Mateo), all else is left behind; the 2m by 3.8m Garden of Earthly Delights becomes a 10cm by 15cm cutout of a corner.
The book actually has these two themes, of the Father and Catholic Christianity as its master signifiers, so to call them, which immediately put a stop to any play of the imagination. Everything very quickly becomes either Satan (or, if Lentz is feeling generous, The Bible!) or the Father, and if it isn't it's scarce worth lingering on. And there is a clear reason for this particular mode of engagement with the cultural material upon which Schattenfroh draws, illustrated in a later scene and quote:
[Here] you'll find the Luther Bible in all of its important editions, his German first had to he translated and it was frequently mistranslated, if one struggles against Luther, one must take on the original Luther. Here is so-called contemporary literature. I do not read it. It is not substantial enough for me
(p. 445)
It's made very clear that Schattenfroh wishes oh so badly to be, in some way, canonical, to be serious literature and unlike contemporary literature, which has lost all substance and thus merit. It turns pastwise and tries to get this canonicity by borrowing from established, canonical authority -- either that of biblical discourse or the authority of the Father.
The figure of the Father in particular is presented wholly undigested, so to say: he is less a character as much as a shortcut to the notion of Authority. He is the stern Father everybody knows as a child and fears but also somewhat secretly respects, that boys wish to be, the Father of the 19th and 20th century, the Father of Patriarchy, head of the family, the Father in the Sky, the father Freud's children wish dead, the Father in his most basic and boring iteration. And for all its preoccupation with him, Schattenfroh has pretty much nothing interesting to say about him. It barely even tries to subvert that authority, except with the well-trained movement of exclaiming "oh how frail and old he's gotten!, woe, where is that Father I once knew!," only few of which manage to be gutpunching (though, I admit, when they do land they do land). But no, the Father is barely a character. You can even pinpoint precisely where he starts to become one: on page 722 he, for the first time, asks Nobody a question not in trying to interrogate or examine him, as he would have from his position as Father, but as an equal, from the position of Person. What follows is a slightly more broken-up and fun dynamic between the two as they go on their little journey toward the final painting explored in the book, and one of the more enjoyable sections to read in terms of character dynamics. This, however, Lentz fails to uphold, and around 150 pages later, his father is back to being The Father. The situation with the biblical discussions is similar -- it is clear that Nobody (and likely Lentz through him) is coping with a heavily Catholic past, but almost nothing of interest is made of what has been inherited, discarded and condemned.
(inserting this here 'cause I gotta complain somewhere, this strive for canonicity can be seen all throughout the work and culminates in the assertion that cannot but come off arrogant unless deliberately read ironically, that "seven hermeneutics" shall come before Schattenfroh (p. 806). it thinks it's the Bible!! Like, come on, girliepop, have some perspective)
The other thing that might stand out is this broad attack against contemporary literature (made without naming any names or books, for better or for worse), the outright refusal to meaningfully engage with which firmly blocks Schattenfroh from inheriting the modernist tradition in any meaningful way. Even Eliot, in his scorn for it, makes mention of "That Shakespearean Rag" in The Waste Land, whilst Ulysses's list of mundania lovingly rendered is seemingly endless; but Schattenfroh refuses to engage with them on principle, and so cannot have anything interesting or meaningful to say of them. Its view of literature, rendered somewhat comedically, but insufficiently self-reflexively, as something that can be measured in calories, implies that there is some inherent worth built into the books separately from reader and interpretation, such that some books simply have a greater (caloric) value than others, and should be eaten instead of them. Books are there to be passively consumed, rather than actively engaged with, played with, taken apart and put back together. Lentz's strive for canonicity, his dense walls of references and quotations, seem, thus, a strive to make something highly caloric. But his approach seems to consist more of throwing more baking powder into the mix, hoping volume might make up for flavour. It doesn't. It cannot. It fails.
In fact, these are the sections reviewers have left largely uncommented -- these conservative, reactionary complaints about contemporary literature not being as "calorific" as The Old Masters were, the sections about how we need to put more storage space on smartphones because people are so eager to film and upload their crimes on facebook that we might as well let them condemn themselves (around p. 640), two needlessly mean and somewhat grotesque descriptions and ruminations on fat men, one where Nobody is rather voyeuristically observing his mother on a train (around p. 480), one a bit later (that I'm too lazy to find back) -- are perhaps the most showing of the kind of thinking that Lentz does outside the walls of his kabbalistic obscuritanism built on bricks of references. It is a shallow kind of thinking, often unoriginal, the kind that makes you feel the same way as when your conservative uncle is on the table and brings up politics. The focus of reviews typically falls on the denser parts, which less clearly aim to say anything, because everyone feels too awkward to bring Lentz's facebookisms up, after dinner. And while it is certain that Schattenfroh has read a lot, it has eaten many books, but it isn't particularly clear if it has thought nearly as much about what it's read, if it has digested any of them, and with sections like these you're left wondering whether that might actually have been a good thing.
(another minor insertion -- Lentz never makes explicit the connection between his seeming disturbance by overweight people, the grotesque descriptions of their appearance and apparent eating habits, and his own insistence upon consuming only highly caloric books. It's a connection that seems a product of the work's method of composition, of continuously throwing things in, but you can still probably wring out a fun, self-ironising reading here, if at Lentz/Nobody's expense.)
I wanna use this bit to pivot to some of the points made in those initial review I read which sold the book to me, keeping in mind this bit about it not having actually thought much about or digested (dragging along the eating books metaphor) the material it spends extended sections spouting back at you.
[T]he ideal reader of Schattenfroh is expected: [...] to have an advanced understanding of the mechanics of the printing process in the 16th century [~p. 810-817 and on]; [...] to be acquainted with the botanical and geological features of the north of Thuringia [~p. 858]; [...] to understand the technicalities of the design and construction of the cylindrical building of the said museum [~p. 694-721]; [...] to understand 17th-century Spanish [p. 819]
(I have picked out, among The Untranslated's giant list, only the ones that stood out to me particularly, lodged in my memory enough to make a clicking noise mid-read. I have taken the courtesy to indicate roughly where all of these take place)
Admittedly, this one, I think, is just straight-up false. As with much of Schattenfroh, the knowledge indicated here has not been digested, and is simply regurgitated whole on the pages, as if lifted directly off of some manual or encyclopaedia to be placed within the book, with barely any rewriting (and, while I recognise that found poetry is a thing, this is not that). These descriptions can be extensive, some nearing 30 pages (as with the technical parts about the construction of the museum), but nothing subsequently comes of them; understanding how the reinforced concrete sections of the circular parts of the museum hold up their own weight does not then lead to a part where the characters have to rebalance a crumbling building utilising this knowledge or something -- it is placed there, dragged out, and then abandoned. To the section about the mediaeval printing press is appended a bit about Schattenfroh (the book within the book)'s magical self-writing, and Nobody is at one point likened to a part of the printing press, but the better part of the rest of the description is not engaged with at any meaningful length. The page of 17th century Spanish is the first page of the 24th chapter of the 2nd volume of Don Quixote. Its contents are not discussed at all, and it is present only as an aberrant inclusion, a surprise to the characters. The descriptions of the flowers are perhaps the least "lifted out of a technical book" of these, and the mountain scene is a pleasant break from the mediaeval cities, but, again, no knowledge is a prerequisite, for Lentz tells you directly, that "[a]reas of heather and bird’s-foot sedge suggest higher amounts of rainfall" or that "[t]he ground beetle Amara pseudostrenua is considered to be most rare."
(Also, compared to similar sections of listing botanical sights in William Gass's work, from the ending stretch of "Henry Pimber" in Omensetter's Luck, through the 110 weeds crammed together in "Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's," and ending with "Garden" from his Middle C, Lentz's are not particularly poetic or impressive or fun to read in the moment; he doesn't seem nearly as engaged or tuned in with what he's describing).
So, you, as a reader, hardly need to actually read, let alone understand these sections. It is unclear whether Lentz himself really has a grasp on what he's including in his work, or whether he has simply found them somewhere and thought to paste them into his Big Book. This in stark contrast to the aforenamed, for example, Moby-Dick, where the sections about whaling all come from lived experience and all add up to something singular; or with Ulysses, with its religious sections (though not only). The impressive thing about these modernists beasts is precisely that this knowledge -- on one hand purely technical, on the other also philosophical -- comes neatly and naturally to its author, such that it can then be transformed into something of aesthetic and poetic value, which Lentz fails to. One can even assume the opposite attitude (as, perhaps, Schattenfroh should have, given its central conceit), about experience had only vicariously -- as Gass's narrator in The Tunnel opens, a "Life in a chair," -- and reacting critically to this supposed erudition rendered separate from lived experience. But Schattenfroh is too concerned with its seeming erudite to allow this kind of attitude.
(In a rare moment of lucidity, on p. 717 Nobody/Lentz briefly wonders whether such material should be included in the book at all, and says it can be skipped if you don't feel like reading it; then jocularly adds that there might be a reader out there who is really really into this topic and this might be his favourite section of the book!, though I'm personally afraid that somebody quite this into technical literature about the architectural construction of buildings -- and this I say as someone who does have a passive interest in architecture -- would simply be reading something else)
Finally, I wanna comment briefly upon some things from reviews that came back to mind while reading:
Psychogeography of the self ("Eine Psychogeografie des Selbst")
One of those catchy phrases, presented initially in this German review, but then more famously picked up in The Untranslated's review, and finally included on the inside of the front cover of the book itself. However, it is unclear how this phrase reworks the notion of psychogeography, which aims to situate somebody in an environment, a self placed among the non-self and among others, at least not without it simply reverting back into becoming psychology. The initial review doesn't really seem to explicate that, and subsequent uses of the term, like echoes, do less and less. It implies, to some degree, a spacialisation of the psyche, but this doesn't seem like something new, to me? Is Á la recherche not temporally-spacial in a similar way, is it not a psychogeography of the self, recalling the past (especially with its work with Bergson's notion of time, which is somewhat spacialised)?If not this, is it something to do with the writing? It doesn't seem spacialised in any particularly interesting way, the way Gertrude Stein's is (here recalling A Geographical History of America in particular, though her closeness with Picasso and the cubists has lead to plenty of readings of her poetic works -- such as Tender Buttons -- as spacialised writing. I don't think that's exactly true, but it holds enough ground to be a starting point). So, does "psychogeography of the self" actually designate anything new being done? It really doesn't seem like it, to me
Michael Lentz gives the lie to the notion that self-reflexive texts are a preposterous relic of the 1960s and 1970s and plays his textual games with a disarming bravura. Occasionally, the characters refer to the exact number of the page on which they are located. Sometimes, the text of the main narrative gets repeated in the books situated at a lower diegetic level.
And this is true, characters do reference pages of the book. Repeatedly. This happens on pages 149, 193 (re: p. 23), 229, 242 (re: end of book), 252 (re: p. 485), 445, 446, 550 (re: p. 442), 574 (re: p. 193), 603, 613 (re: p. 883), 754 (re: p. 730), 790, 808, 837 (re: end of book), 866 (re: p. 61), 902. I have not gone to note down the reduplications the book does, though they're fewer and, inevitably, more elaborate than "we're now on page 196, wow!". It's funny the first few times, but, as with his technical knowledge, Lentz does not explore it in any meaningful depth, so it ends up feeling like one of those Marvel Movie "gulp he's right behind me isn't he" gags which only interrupt the flow of the narrative. As with many of its tricks, it performs it, something done already and by others, and then goes nowhere with it. It doesn't expand the field of literature. It doesn't know how
to have a firm grasp of Northern Renaissance art, especially Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings; [...] to have visited and admired the Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen exhibiting Werner Tübke’s colossal 14 by 123 metre painting Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany
The Untranslated's Reader's Guide I mentioned at the start (based, I believe, in part on Lentz's own Innehaben, where he discusses the workings and structure of parts of Schattenfroh) ensures that a lot of what might have been dumbfounding and striking upon those first reads after the book's release is quickly demystified, even to a point that it trivialises sections of the book by simply showing you the picture that the work would send you on a quest after otherwise. The descriptions, as I mentioned, are not pleasurable or interesting to read in the moment, and opening the guide and checking that out instead to just marvel at the painting might be more worth your time
page-long labyrinthine sentences that would have given nightmares even to Thomas Mann
The prose of Lentz, as rendered, at least, by Lawton, is not particularly syntactically exciting, I don't think. This review more or less encapsulates my thoughts on the prose, though it doesn't go quite hard enough on the work, I think.
Nobody as Odysseus
This is inevitably mentioned in just about every review. It's even mentioned in the book (p. 879), which ends up somewhat subtracting, for me, the tiny bit of originality this observation might have otherwise had. But Nobody is no Odysseus, and Schattenfroh is no Odyssey, and Lentz is no Joyce
I do concede, Schattenfroh is occasionally typographically and visually inventive. Not to the degree of other works -- most obviously House of Leaves, but also Tristram Shandy, which is referenced -- but still. However, these bits feel more like candy to keep you from getting overbored, whilst the rest of the book trudges on. Whenever it borrows these playful bits -- referencing, near the start, back to back, a script I cannot recognise, the Voynich manuscript (also used in Solenoid, and to better ends, tying it to other things), Tristram Shandy, and Abraham Abulafia’s Haye ha-‘olam ha-ba (Life in the World to Come) (pp. 172-175 & 197; I thank the Untranslated's Guide for that last one, and add to it that the description provided below the two circles of hebrew is very similar to certain German-language experiments of the baroque era) -- it rarely does much with them, beyond giving the reader the chance to do that Leo DiCaprio pointing meme. The black page, referencing, clearly, Tristram Shandy, is, once, simply inverted from the minute of mournful silence it is in the original, and said to be a page "so crammed with words that it looks like printer’s ink has been poured over it" (p. 196); but this move is one done already, in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (and then, 5-6 year after that, in 2011, in Visual Editions's rendition of Tristram Shandy as well), and Schattenfroh doesn't build on it in any way. It also quickly subsumes -- again -- the black page into that Christianity & Father discourse duo, first by having the father disappear into the page, and then by designating the page to be the Corpus Christi (p. 294), leaving you wondering why it borrowed this element from Tristram Shandy if it had no intention of engaging with it. There's another section where the text goes in two columns (pp. 718-721; there's also a second one pp. 784-788, but there the right column is very sparsely populated so I don't count it), which is reminiscent of Derrida's Glas, but, again, Lentz fails to make good use of this parallel text and renders the right column of text wholly subservient to the left: in the right drone on those technical details about the construction of the museum, which the characters have by now stopped listening to whilst in the left the plot takes place; and only the left references what happens in the right column of text, and only the left column is actually worth reading. On the whole, the typographical experiments are not really new, aren't used in any particularly interesting way (relative to whatever work made use of these ideas first) and don't do much to save the book
As a final verdict, I don't think there's really much reason to read Schattenfroh beyond curiosity and having too much time on your hands, or, alternatively, wanting to seem fancy by engaging with foreign "difficult" literature. It is not an enjoyable or particularly memorable work; it does not reward you in the moment with exciting plot or pleasurable prose, nor in the long run with engaging philosophical ideas or atmosphere and imagery, or plain doing anything particularly new. There's some 150-200 pages that definitely stuck (and might stick still) in my mind, especially ones related to the death of either parent, which are emotionally charged and hold something interesting, but on the whole the book fails to really justify its own length and reward you for the sheer amount of effort it takes to read it
It seems the notion of "Ergodic" literature has undergone a kind of bleaching-from-its-academic-discourse-so-that-people-can-use-it-for-whatever, somewhat similarly as has been done with Barthes' "Death of the Author;" And, like, yeah, fancy term, coined from Greek, this has always been big in the anglophone theory world (see, for example, Colerdige's esemplastic, as derived and greekified from Schelling's Ineinsbildung), you get to borrow both from the authority of Greek and of academic discourse and that's always a thrill; But "ergodic" was meant to be a specialised variation of "interactive" (which had become just a hype word in the 90s) and Aarseth wanted an alternative which shifts to focus away from merely "you interact/do stuff with the work" and toward how you interact with the work -- do you simply recombine elements? do you add new text? are your additions permanent and available to everybody? &c.; -- And, on that front, I guess it is a success, 'cause people don't really use "ergodic" to denote "interactive": instead, most of the time, they seem to picture something along the lines of "literary works that foreground the connection between themselves as material artifacts and the imaginative realm of their story," works that look cool and fucky because of how they use text and visual formatting (Raw Shark Texts being an especially egregious example, and Ella Minnow Pea an even more egregious one [come on, basic constraints? Not even anything visually interesting? Why Ella Minnow Pea and not all of OuLiPo!], though Hughes's XX also doesn't escape here either, and Tree of Codes might make it in only with a well-argued case), and, thing is, this is already A Thing in this niche of theory and that last set of quotation marks is a quotation and is from N. Katherine Hayles's Writing Machines and the name for this branch of texts is technotexts and you should be calling them technotexts instead; Except I guess "technotext" doesn't sound particularly exciting next to that paronym of erotic and so nobody uses and nobody knows it. Alas!
I guess my point is that usually when you see "ergodic" you should think "technotext." You should also read the actual sources for when you use terms. Maybe. Please
