Robert Walser: The Assistant

Robert Walser’s The Assistant tells of Joseph Marti, a young rambler who commences employment in the titular position for well-to-do inventor Carl Tobler in the (presumed Swiss) town of Barenswil. Tobler has a number of inventions he is trying to peddle, with limited success, the most noteworthy being the ‘Advertising Clock’, containing pop-out promotional banners, space upon which is intended for sale to ‘enterprising capitalists’. There is also the ammunition-distributing ‘Marksman’s Vending Machine’ to be located at shooting ranges and hunting grounds.

Tobler’s misguided enthusiasm for the profitability of his gadgets finds him frequently on the road, purportedly in the pursuit of finance for his projects but increasingly down the local pub drowning his sorrows. This leaves Marti responsible for helping out Tobler’s wife and four children around the house, playing Jass, drinking coffee and smoking endless cheroots. His chief business responsibility concerns writing letters to fend off creditors. Business difficulties prevent Marti from receiving any salary owed him, but his fondness for the members of the household, from the abused Silvi to the doted upon Dora, and their provisions prevent him from leaving.

Written in 1907 when Walser was under 30, The Assistant has much in common with other European modernist fiction of the time, particularly Kafka and Canetti. It was apparently written in 6 weeks so as to enter a competition, and the easy, drifting narrative flow, often unpredictable and occasionally chaotic, like Canetti’s Auto Da Fe, supports this. Marti’s erratic frame of mind meanwhile, mistrustful of his own thoughts, leading to verbal outbursts with Frau Tobler, only to humbly apologise and about face, recalls the quandaries of Kafka’s characters. However, with such an engaging premise relayed in Walser’s dry and witty style, as conveyed bu Susan Bernofsky’s translation, he is much funnier than either of them.

Had the Advertising Clock suddenly proved a washout? Not a bit of it. On the contrary, the elegant wings of the advertising fields shone brighter and more resplendently than ever, and the Marksman’s Vending Machine? Hadn’t the fabrication of the very first specimen been underway for weeks now? Didn’t the most efficient and assiduous of mechanics turn up almost daily at the villa in order to play cards with Tobler? Other people played cards as well and enjoyed a glass of wine, and yet continued to prosper – why shouldn’t Tobler prosper as well?

The depiction of the Toblers’descent to financial ruin, and Marti's to joblessness, provides Walser with a vehicle with which to critique and satirise contemporary commerce, and it’s here that The Assistant is particularly modern.

The grotto in the garden had now been completed as well, except for a few minor details. The contractors submitted their bill, which ran to approximately five hundred marks, a sum that had not been seen in the Villa Tobler for quite some time. Where would they get it? Could they dig it up from beneath the earth? Should they set Leo on some retiree out for a nocturnal stroll, knock him down and rob him? Alas, it was the twentieth century, the age of moonlit robberies was over.

And later:

Leo was no dragon. He might even have responded somewhat currishly to such outrageous Medieval assumptions. All in all, it was a twentieth century tableau.

The befuddlement felt by the Toblers and their inability to engage with the new realities of twentieth century society point to nostalgia for earlier, simpler times, and seem to reflect the insecurities of the author. Walser’s brother Karl, also a writer, was a successful member of Berlin high society, a world Robert, Bernofsky tells us, found difficult to engage with. Not long after the publication of The Assistant Walser attempted suicide, his depression misdiagnosed as schizophrenia, and he was committed to an asylum. There he spent the remaining 35 years of his life, never to write again. ‘I’m not here to write, I’m here to be mad’. After the joys found herein I’ll be reading everything the young Walser wrote.

Deszo Kosztalanyi: Skylark

Dezso Kosztalanyi was a 'faithful lover' of Budapest and a passionate modernist, champion of Joyce, Kafka, Musil; editor, journalist, poet, novelist. Skylark is an apparently representative Kosztalanyi work, telling of an elderly couple devoted to their overweight, unattractive and aging daughter Skylark, and the surprising joys they experience when she goes away on a week's holiday. Hilarious and tragic, I've rarely encountered so funny a drama and so bleak a comedy. And what powers of description:

Her flesh was powdery and voluptuously weary,as if tenderised by all the different beds and arms in which she had lain. Her face was as soft as the pulpy flesh of an overripe banana, her breasts like two tiny bunches of grapes. She exuded a certain seedy charm, a poetry of premature corruption and decay. She breathed the air as if it burned her palate, baking her small, hot, whorish mouth. It was as if she were sucking a sweet or slurping champagne.

The couple hold an interesting position within the town, once welcomed and respected, they now lock themselves away with Skylark, enjoying calm domestic pursuits, eating blandly, abstaining. With her gone it's not long before they, almost reluctantly, start to fall off this wagon and enjoy themselves, re-establishing old friendships, gorging themselves at the restaurant, Mother shopping, Father smoking, drinking and gambling. But like all benders the end remains always in sight. This from an old friend and poet who follows them home and stays on to observe:

He could hear rummaging from inside the house, the old couple preparing for rest. And he could see quite clearly the wretched rooms, where suffering collected like unswept dust in the corners, the dust of lives in painful heaps, piled up over many long years. .. They had no tragedy, for how could tragedy begin to grow in such a wasteland? Yet how profound, how human they all were.

Of course, Skylark returns, and with it despair, resignation and hopelessness, for all parties. This is depicted metaphorically in the form of a pet bird Skylark has brought back from the country:

"Look, isn't he sweet? Tubi, Tubica. My dear little Tubica. Isn't he a darling?"
Seeing the electric light, the pigeon began scratching with its twisted, sooty feet, turning its stupid, harmless head and blinking at its new mistress with black peppercorn eyes.... It wasn't a pretty pigeon. It was a tatty, dishevelled little bird.

The catalogue of miseries, and tasty delights, is vivid and tactile, recalling Orwell, no doubt due in part to the excellent translation by Peter Esterhazy. Esterhazy also provides an insightful introduction to the book and a summary of Kosztalyani's life, written in a welcoming and idiosyncratically offbeat tone that suits the subject. After Skylark I'm very keen to read more Kosztalanyi, but Esterhazy's introduction makes him even more appealing, Especially with quotes from Kosztalanyi like this:

I have always been interested in just one thing: death. Nothing else. I became a human being when, at the age of ten, I saw my grandfather dead, whom at that time I probably loved more than anyone else. It is only since then that I have been a poet, an artist, a thinker. The vast difference which divides the living from the dead, the silence of death, made me realise I had to do something... For me, the only thing I have to say, however small an object I am able to grasp, is that I am dying.

Keizo Hino: Isle of Dreams

"For all of you not wasting away in concreteland, the Isle of Dreams is here!"

I was instantly enticed to read Keizo Hino's Isle of Dreams by the blurb on the back cover:

Though it has a lovely name, the real "Isle of Dreams" is a hunk of reclaimed land in Tokyo bay where the city dumps its garbage... and yet, Shozo Sakai, a middle-aged widower, does indeed find the place beautiful: gravitating more and more, since the death of his wife, toward the isle's massive piles of trash'.

How wonderful! I'd spent a lot of time in Odaiba, that reclaimed land site now filled with shopping malls (whose ceiling is decorated with clouds and features lighting which changes from day to night in an hour), TV studios, beaches and scale-models of the Statue of Liberty, reached by automated elevated monorail, and thought the place strange, but went nowhere near actual rubbish, only this simulated cultural kind. Also, it's published by Dalkey Archive Press, my new favourite publisher.

There's comparisons to be made between this little-known novel by little-known author with the work of Osamu Dazai (featured below) and similarly pessimistic Japanese writers, particularly as articulated through a close understanding of physical artifacts and modern urban detritus. This is especially present in Hino, in an almost metaphysical sense: that the inanimate matter of contemporary society has eclipsed human life, and that human society is doomed to be overrun by its own waste.

With its blurring of the boundaries between dreams and waking life, inanimate objects and living beings, past and future, Isle of Dreams is also a lot like the later films of David Lynch, but given that Hino wrote it in 1985 its incredible how contemporary it reads. The manner in which the lead character, the widower Shozo Sakai, wanders haphazardly into strange, otherworldly scenarios also recalls the dream(y) sequences of Kazuo Ishiguro, specifically the battle scene of When We Were Orphans and the whole of The Unconsoled. Hino however is the less straightforward writer, creating more enigmatic scenes, and allowing his story to conclude without clear resolution. These are all commendable traits, and are brilliantly executed, and Isle of Dreams is among the most haunting and genuinely thrilling (in the sense of being energised by Hino's fictitious creations) novels I have read.

The narrative follows the gradual unravelling of Sakai, an office worker for a construction firm, from his harmless, lonely wanderings looking at modern buildings, through his growing obsession with the reclaimed land of Tokyo, to his nightmarish nocturnal excursions with a female motorcyclist and her son through bombed out relics of Tokyo bay islands. Mannequins appear to come to life, and window displays posses more reality than the 'real' scenes around them.

Hino's pessimistic philosophy is expressed through the thoughts of Sakai when charged by these new encounters, 'charged' in much the same way as the protagonist in Tom McCarthy's Remainder when experiencing reenactments, and presented in the book in italics. The most pointed of these occur when Sakai first visits the waste disposal site at Reclaimed Land Site #13:

Tokyo was expanding (vertically, having already reached its horizontal limits), brimming over with commodities (devoid of either the light or shadow of history), the ever-increasing refuse (with many items unnecessarily discarded) brought to life again between the water and the light (with glittering plastic bags and the wheezing cacophony of garbage)...

Tokyo Lives, thought Shozo. No, he pondered further, as he recalled the view he had just seen of the distant, smog-enshrouded city from atop the mound of refuse, "Tokyo" is only what we call a quivering, breathing, expanding presence, a shape maintained by the endless belching forth of waste, exhaust, sewer water, heat, radio waves, noise, and idle chatter; a circulatory mechanism, invisible but powerful, created and controlled by no one... And when I too have been twisted to the breaking point and cast upon the rubbish heap, will I too acquire light and shadow and begin to tell my story?

And later, upon entering a mannequin manufacturing warehouse:

The thickness of the hard concrete, the intersecting iron reinforcement bars, a steel frame holding up the broad, high roof... Shozo had walked around construction sites more times than he could count, but this was the first time he had felt so directly over the entire surface of his body the presence of cement and metal - their roughness and weight, their crushing oppression, the cracking sounds, the piercing smells, the colours of ash and rust, the bone-chilling cold... It is we who have bestowed on our country this hermetically sealed darkness, desolate and dead, where even the strange smelling air is stagnant.

Isle of Dreams is full of these quotable observations, all of which seem to perfectly embody contemporary hanutological musings and psychogeographic thoughts on non-spaces. Hino's supposed to be similar to Ballard, in which case I'd better read more Ballard. It's intoxicating, this uniquely Japanese cynicism and melancholia, and Hino adds to this by attempting to explore beneath this bleak surface, capturing the rotten, soul-destroying essence of contemporary society, and its in-built future destruction. I've been prattling on about this book to anyone who will listen, it's marvellous, and I hope Dalkey Archive, or anyone, translate his other works.