39 Books: 2023

This is the 39th and final post of this series. As the introduction explains, I began seeking a return to the short-form of the early days of blogging. And it started off well, with each entry written in no time, sometimes stirring up the sediment of initial enchantment. As I got to the later stages, however, questions arose, answers were inadequate, and freedom became confinement. In effect, 39 Books compresses twenty years of this blog into five weeks. There was also a secret hope that on completion I could put an end to this kind of writing, to escape the fortress that became a prison cell. Into what?

"Perhaps there are other forms of writing," writes Kafka to Max Brod, "but I know only this kind."

Except Kafka was talking about night writing:

This descent to the dark powers, this unshackling of spirits bound by nature, these dubious embraces and whatever else may take place in the nether parts which the higher parts no longer know, when one writes one’s stories in the sunshine.

The letter was written after a night in which Kafka had lain sleepless in the spa town of Planá during which he says it became clear to him "on what frail ground or rather altogether nonexistent ground I live". 

In 2023 I read Kari Hukkila's One Thousand and One translated from the Finnish by David Hackston, a novel written over such frail or nonexistent ground. The narrator is also in a spa. The cabin in the countryside in which he planned to escape finally to write what he needs to write had been damaged by fallen trees, so he sleeps in the sauna. What he writes from an uncertain elsewhere is patterned by such interruption. There are several in the first quarter of the book only: he visits Mara, a philosopher friend who has interrupted his life in Helsinki to live in Rome and who shares his ideas about Wittgenstein's life and work, itself full of self-imposed interruptions, a discourse interrupted by an irrational quest to find an Ethiopian illegal immigrant who had introduced lice into his bed after a one-night stand, both of which lead to a discussion of the poet Gunnar Björling who lost his life's work in a wartime bombing raid.

Readers may recognise that meandering between diverse and often melancholic stories of outsiders is a key technique of WG Sebald's novels, especially in The Rings of Saturn, as is the telescopic framing of the telling, notably in Austerlitz, itself a key technique of Thomas Bernhard's novels, as Sebald admitted with some concern, as is the displaced writer, such as Franz-Josef Murau also in Rome, so for those who revere Sebald's novels and reflect on what might have been had his life not been interrupted, One Thousand and One may provide the consolation of continuity. 

But for all of the pleasure of reading this novel and admiring Hukkila's weaving of the narrative strands, I couldn't help wonder what might interrupt the elegant spirals of the novel, or indeed if anything could.

Mara's talk of Wittgenstein reminds the narrator of how for the latter "the ideal and the self-destructive are irreparably intertwined". During his composition of the Tractatus, he deliberately put himself in extreme danger on the eastern front during the first world war:

And it was over the course of those days and nights, Mara believed, that the Tractatus started to change, though its exact wording only burst onto the page a month or two later. As though it had a life of its own, Wittgenstein's work had expanded from the foundations of logic to the very essence of the world...As if the foundation of logic itself had been the target of nocturnal enemy fire and was transfigured by something that helped it survive. There were things in the world that simply made themselves manifest, they could not be put into words. Life is the world, and the meaning of life is the meaning of the world.

A novel is neither life nor world, so what does it make manifest? Perhaps an ideal that, despite the descent to the dark powers, despite the many violent stories and stories of violence, can neither interrupt nor destroy itself. What helps it to survive?