The Attraction of Things

by Roger Lewinter, Rachel Careau (Translator)

Stunning fragments that offer an epiphany of grace and beauty  The Attraction of Things concerns the entirety of beauty and the possibility of grace, relayed via obsessions with rare early gramophone records, the theater, translation, dying all these elements are relayed in a dizzying strange traffic of cultural artifacts, friendships, losses, discoveries, and love. Roger Lewinter believes that in the realm of art, “the distinction between life and death loses its relevance, the one taking place in the other.” Whereas Story of Love in Solitude is a group of small stories, The Attraction of Things is a continuous narrative (more or less) of a man seeking (or stumbling upon) enlightenment. “ The Attraction of Things ,” states Lewinter, “is the story of a being who lets himself go toward what attracts him, toward what he attracts―beings, works, things―and who, through successive encounters, finds the way out of the labyrinth, to the heart, where the bolt of illumination strikes. This is the story of a letting go toward the illumination.” 

Genres: Fiction, France

128 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2016

About the author

Roger Lewinter was born in Montauban, France, in 1941, to Austrian Jewish parents. The family moved to Switzerland during the war, and he has lived much of his life in Geneva. For more than forty years he has worked as a writer (of both literary and scholarly works), an editor, and a translator (of Georg Groddeck, Karl Kraus, Elias Canetti, Robert Walser, and Rilke, among others). Among his dozen books are three works of fiction.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most of all The Attraction of Things reminded me of Diary of a Madman that was written not by Nikolai Gogol but by Thomas Bernhard… The narration is the stream of consciousness deriding pseudo-intellectuality.

…while incidentally he spoke to me about a book he had discovered, by Wilhelm Fränger, devoted to the Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch, more accurately titled The Millennial Kingdom, about which he demonstrated that it traced, not, as was commonly believed, the follies of the Fall, but, referring to a Judeo-Christian heresy, a means of salvation centered on an amorous practice the knowledge of which could not have been the product of the painter’s free imagination; a hypothesis evidently imposed by certain details of the painting, which were otherwise inexplicable, and which were restructuring the entire body of work of Hieronymus Bosch, which, ceasing to be a series of commissions, articulated an inspired discourse: a gospel that, to the initiated, passed on the teaching of the life of a master…

When one attempts to explain some incomprehensible things using even more incomprehensible and obscure notions, one just makes oneself a butt of ridicule…
Roger Lewinter depicts the main character’s pursuits and fixations with a truly dark sarcasm and in the end all main hero’s intellectual posing adds up into nothing more than a passion to buy cheap trash at flea markets…

In the morning, at the flea market, curious about what I might find to hallmark what had occurred in the night, I went past Lometto’s stand just as Fontanet, going through some porcelain, was unpacking a bust whose luminosity made me stop, so that she laid it in my hands: it was a Sèvres bisque, Alexandre Brongniart, by Houdon, a child’s eyes and smile focused elsewhere, inwardly, which, for one hundred francs, I kept – several people, seeing it, equally dazzled, wanted to buy it…

In art, everybody wishes to be authentic but how many inadvertent frauds there really are.

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 3 out of 5]

More 3.5 stars.

This book, like Story of Love in Solitude, is a series of sentences that twist and turn from one time period and event to another, taking in the contemplation of 78 records featuring opera singers to a fervent desire for kashmir shawls, these pursuits merging with memories of friends, pedlars at markets, and the unnamed narrator's father. Lewinter skilfully depicts the narrator's at times loving, at times strained, relationship with his sole remaining parent who is ailing, and finds solace (or celebrates moments of sudden closeness) in the collection of things. These things become living objects under his gaze.

The way that the material is presented strikes me as true to how we think within ourselves, that internal voice that runs riot with language and associations that we perhaps inevitable filter when we want to communicate clearly to others. If at times the material appears less interesting than the presentation, this is a matter of taste.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

He had spoken to me about withdrawal, about an empty bottle of whiskey on the ground there, and about a brawl in which he had torn the sleeve of his anorak; and when we arrived at my apartment -- outside, we had had to wait a quarter hour for a taxi, during which, in fits, in order not to fall, he had hung on to me --, he had flopped down on the bed, asking me, before sinking under, not to forget to wake him at five o'clock: when the telephone rang, I wasn't sleeping, but he was unconscious; rubbing his face with a towel moistened with cold water, I finally managed to pull him from sleep: he looked at me; then, slowly putting together what had happened, he came around, suddenly ecstatic, in a trance enveloping me in a worshipful embrace within which I remained, stunned: it was seven thirty when he recalled that he was supposed, at six o'clock, to have opened the bistro where he had been working only three days, and telephoned his boss to ask him to find someone to fill in, saying that he would be there as soon as he had found a taxi -- outside, it was snowing --; but, now, he couldn't manage to unknot the laces of his putrefied Clarks, which I had pulled off him to put him to bed: I took them in my hands then, and at the moment when, detecting their odor, which at its most extreme -- unbearable -- was an invading force that suddenly made me hyperventilate, I knelt down at his feet, he released in one breath, "I will marry you, you have only to say the word, wherever you want, whenever you want"; and when, at quarter past eight, having finally gotten a taxi, a rendezvous having been set for that evening at nine at the Colibri, a bistro downstairs from his place, unable in the entryway to pull himself away, he kissed me, beside himself -- "I love you and I worship you, and I am very jealous, and if you betray me, I will kill you" --, I discovered to my elation that, while this was what I had wanted to experience, convinced that there had to be a difference, there was none, between man and woman, none whatsoever, since it is negated for the body that in its fulfillment is escaped.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

I needed to write about this book to process it. My thoughts on this and the companion piece Story of Love in Solitude can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2016/12/29/th...

[Peyton]

Very quick and electric, heady and dense, not nearly smart enough for this yet, the parts where he goes in detail about his work as a translator were certainly over my head. But the attachment to physical things, clothing, records, getting in the ole lotus position to find solace and comfort rang true!

[Tucker · Rating 3 out of 5]

English/French edition. I did not understand what this novella was about, and I read the English version.

[Richard Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fine writing, but some of this eludes me. Lydia Davis thinks highly of it, though.