39 Books: 1993

I've written about Gert Hofmann's novels a few times, most recently Veilchenfeld (Our Philosopher in the US edition), but not his short stories. In the year Hofmann died aged only 62, I bought and read Balzac's Horse and other stories in the wonderful Minerva paperback imprint. They confused and disappointed me. Later, I lost the book along with many others.

On a whim last year I searched for a replacement copy and found the Secker & Warburg hardback was cheaper than the paperback. As soon as I read the first few lines the confusion and disappointment was turned on myself; how could I have been so wrong, so ignorant? The reason I felt so differently in 1993 is the same reason for my confusion and disappointment seven years earlier reading other Faber-published novels that didn't have the weight and philosophical perspective of the one that instigated this deep dive into reading: Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being. I was looking for heaviness and Hofmann is lightness; "limpid, neutral, hyperrealist" in Ian Bamford's words. The second story in the collection – 'Casanova and the Extra' – is a Burlesque companion to The Judgement.

An advert for Minerva paperbacks from 1990. Hofmann's Parable of the Blind at bottom left, Peter Handke's great novel Repetition on the row above. Those were the days.

Even after a stroke at aged 57, brought on, his son Michael says, by writing a novel each year for ten years, Hofmann didn't stop writing. He was unable to read and edited his final novel verbally, responding to drafts read aloud by his wife. 

Not writing is the condition of the two writers in 'Arno', the fifth story in Balzac's Horse. The title character has given up writing "from inside" and turned to writing an obituary of his new neighbour, an elderly poet, Herr Quasener, and imagines him sitting in the dark at the back of his room with his life's work, which, according to the local librarian, is no longer in demand: "Nobody here...still buys literary works or thinks about them, everyone despises them or ignores them." 

The story ends with Arno and his mother peering into the darkness of the neighbour's room wondering if Herr Quasener has died, in effect delaying the end of 'literary works' with the obituary waiting in Arno's bottom drawer and the story suggesting otherwise by its mere existence. Wallace Stevens observed a similar thing: "Yet the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined." As did Maurice Blanchot: "Not to write—what a long way there is to go before arriving at that point, and it is never sure." And, already cited, Franz Kafka: "I am a writer, which is actually true even when I am not writing."

I will come back to "not writing".