But Schwartz' prose seems much more aware of a listener, the fact that there is an objective reality to present, and some subjects to whom that is being presented- it doesn't make the transmission an easy one, by any means, and certainly the language is aestheticized. The language of the stories at the start reminded me of G Stein to some degree, maybe because the use of the academic jargon and odd word choice made me think of the plasticity of Stein's language, and the shared interest in domestic spaces and environments. I get a similar sense here, that I've entered an environment, and the goal of these stories is to help me to engage with that environment. It's true, the docent would concede, that there were stories, dramas that played out here, but that is not our primary interest- the story of Vesuvius is not that people lived ordinary lives there, but that those ordinary lives were disrupted by the volcano. All of it is delivered in a more or less conversational tone, though obviously a conversational tone under pressure, making a deliberate presentation of what you are seeing, in a fairly academic tone and vocabulary. There are lots of things the speaker seems to know about the German landscape of these first stories, but not everything. As I was reading, I felt like I was being guided by a museum docent through a restored historical scene, sort of like you'd want when you walked around Vesuvius, maybe. The first section is maybe the richest and most strikingly original in this regard, because it seems bounded by a single consciousness as well as the setting. The book is split into three sections, which I think might be more useful a organizing heuristic than the short and fragmentary pieces that make up each section the sections, then, group the stories more or less by setting and period, and the fragments are something like monologues that describe sometimes the action but often the environment themselves. As much a revelation to me as Ben Marcus was. And so did this stout reading party.Ī really wonderfully inventive book that to me at least presents a totally different way to approach narrative. I cannot report that the porcelain chipped, that the glass cracked. A feast for the ghosts, as the saying goes. "Surely the fire hunt was an afterthought. You begin to think these words have been chosen deliberately for their percussiveness, but also because in their combinations they are empty of meaning. I hesitate to say descriptive lists, though they are in most cases, they're also peculiarly terse as if chiding you for taking an interest in the details. And as for our speculation upon the hat?" So much of these stories read like lists: of clothes, of food, of furniture. But then this is followed by the near gibberish of the next 2 sentences - "The necktie is red - blood red, if you like. Dissonant sentences, that don't fit together, or might almost fit together through near-assonance such as "the purse is brown, its buckle undone".
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