The Kirschbaum Lectures

by Seth Rogoff

Sy Kirschbaum, renowned for his translations of major European writers like Jan Horak and Anton Grassfeld, has arrived at the college to teach a course called Introduction to Literature. He's come from the Czech countryside, where he'd been undergoing treatment by Dr. L. Hruska for a psychological breakdown connected to the seventeen-year-long process of finishing Horak's epic novel of Cold War dissent. Standing before a group of disoriented but enthralled students, facing down an increasingly tyrannical dean, Kirschbaum embarks on a twelve-week journey into his past and toward the heart of his literary life, 1990s Berlin, where art and dreams surged with the raw energy of utopian aspirations. Sy's lectures cross treacherous narrative terrain and spiral toward the shocking revelation of an unhealed wound, from which literature itself, in its infinity of interwoven forms, seems to pulsate.

300 pages, Paperback

Published May 1, 2023

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a rather unique way of telling a story or a collection of short stories, all in the form of a series of lectures by a man who was recently being treated for a mental breakdown and who becomes more harried and paranoid as each lecture comes around. There are a lot of books out there with a narrator who is simply addressing the reader and telling the story, when your narrator is giving lectures to the reader you need more depth to their voice, they need to interact more and grab your attention in a different way. In Sy Kirschbaum, Rogoff has got it spot on, right from the off you could picture the man behind the voice, looking scruffy, gesticulating with his hands as he talked and never keeping still by pacing back and forth in front of the lectern...I got big time Richard Feynman vibes listening to Kirschbaum, so captivating. You can almost sense that with each lecture there are more and more students in the hall as word spreads, I don't for one second believe the Dean's report about the students using the lecture to sleep.

What is happening in the lectures is fascinating, characters and plots all merge as we see just how unreliable a narrator Kirschbaum is, he isn't lying to us, it's just due to his breakdown he isn't aware of what is true anymore and is using these lectures to unravel the truth. At one point there is great description on what is happening, the characters are described as the points on the Star of David and where the lines cross is where their stories cross, Kirschbaum is using these lectures as a form of therapy and each week he turns up with the next piece of the puzzle. The pieces of the puzzle are a group of stories and new stories written as notes on top of other stories, one of these stories stands out way above the others, a short about a live mannequin in a shop window and the man on the other side of the window who spends hours watching her everyday, absolutely loved this little love story.

This is one hell of a literary puzzle, Rogoff through Kirschbaum weaves together a book that pushes the boundaries of what the reader comprehends as real and fiction. Give this one a read and see if you can make it out the other side with your sanity intact.

Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2023...

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You can fade away into it. That’s the best way of listening to a story like this. Allow everything else to fall into the depths and find the crack through which you can pull and push your being."