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Geometrischer Heimatroman
The first time in paperback for the English-language debut of this leading Austrian writer. Geometric Regional Novel is an innovative satire on the process by which bureaucracy and official regimentation insidiously pervade society. In a deadpan, pseudo-scientific tone, the nameless narrator takes us on a tour of a bizarre village whose inhabitants lead such habitual, regulated lives that they resemble elements in a mathematical equation. The traditional leaders of village life--the mayor, the priest, the teacher--uphold the status quo with comically exaggerated attention to ceremony and trivia, and other villagers perform roles identical to those of the generations who preceded them. That nearly every aspect of village life has been codified in some way is suggested by the intrusive presence of warnings, instructions, aphorisms, diagrams, historical records, ordinances, and forms--including a hilarious 6-page one for anyone wishing to take a stroll in the forest that makes the IRS's long form look user-friendly by comparison. Contrasting with the mathematical descriptions of village life are flashes of colorful, surrealistic writing, exemplifying the life of the imagination so often smothered beneath the monotonous routine of traditional rural existence. The stifling conservatism of such life has rarely been exposed as mercilessly as Jonke does here.
167 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1969
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March 5, 2025When Affect Swamps Allegory
-
Gert Jonke, still virtually unknown in English, is a member of the generation of Viennese experimental writers who emerged in the 1960s. (Peter Handke, Friederike Mayröcker, Elfriede Jelinek, and Thomas Bernhard are others.) Dalkey Archive has done something very unusual with this book: it has also released a "casebook" of essays as a free download.
Note to the Dalkey Archive editors, if they ever see this
Have you done something similar for your other authors? I wish you'd said something on the website, or on the "casebook," about how you came to the decision to provide this file, and whether you might do it for any other author. I've read several Dalkey Archive titles recently and had very interesting exchanges with their translators and with other authors (most recently, Emilian Galaicu-Păun's Living Tissue 10x10). Dozens of Dalkey Archive titles are as unfamiliar to English-language readers as Jonke, and could use something like this. I bet you'd find translators and scholars interested in contributing!
The principal reception of the book
Jonke's book was his first (written in 1967/8, and published the following year; it was revised in 1980, and translated in 2000), and it has amassed a large secondary literature. The preponderant interpretation is that it's a satire and indictment of a certain kind of complacent, faceless bureaucracy. Each of the short chapters in the book presents a different activity, fact, or area in the "region" and adds comments about the laws, regulations, and signage that keep it running in an orderly manner. Potential threats are everywhere, and alternate chapters tell the increasingly futile story of unnamed narrators trying to do something very simple and harmless: they only want to walk across the town square. Bureaucracy is signaled in the translation in various ways: d o u b l e s p a c e d words for emphasis (in the German-language tradition), SMALL CAPS for signs, and even forms with banks to be filled in ____________________. Rules and by-laws are reheared in a monotone, sometimes at length. The descriptions of these conditions are in a kind of mock precision--hence the qualifier "gometric," which stands in the place of, say, "romantic."
Problems with the reception
This reading is the main burden of the opening essay in the "casebook," written by Vincent Kling (the essay occupies more than half of the entire text). One of thr contributors, Maria Luise Caputo-Mayr, concludes that "the novel can be seen as linguistic parody of an illusory homeland and the presumed freedom of life in the countryside, in that it shows the continual narrowing of personal freedom and cultural horizons." Another anthology, Wesen und Wandel der Heimatliteratur: am Beispiel der österrecihischen Literatur seit 1945 (1989) also has readings of Jonke's politics. Instead I want to emphasize another property of the novel that has less often been noticed: its affect, which is by turns bored, cold, and -- most interestingly, I think -- suddenly violent.
A good place to start this reading is Robbe-Grillet. Jonke's novel is full of echoes of Robbe-Grillet's novels of the 1960s. Many chapters begin with detailed inventories of apparently unimportant objects, places, or buildings. These are "geometric" very much in the way Robbe-Grillet's often are, emphasizing whatever can be described in terms of proportions, lengths, lines, triangles, cones, and other simple geometric and numerical terms. The opening is a good example:
"The village square is rectangular, bordering on the houses gathered around it; streets and lanes flow into it; other than the well in the center, in which the paving stone patterns seek their source and from which they spread out like rays, there is nothing in the village square."
This is not a pastiche, because it has no legible distance from its model. It is nearly a quotation of the description of the town square in The Voyeur. I'd like to call these passages facsimiles, to register that they aren't mainly emulative or parodic. I don't think a full reading of Jonke's book can imagine this kind of reference as an expediency, as if Jonke took one of Robbe-Grillet's inventions and re-used it as a simple "geometric" description in order to launch his critique of bureaucracy (or rather, of the hopelessness of intervening in resolutely static socities). The inwardness of Robbe-Grillet's mimetic passages continues to resonate here: they are petrified, lost, paralyzed, and above all racked with pain, anxiety, jealously, and other emotions (The Voyeur, Les Gommes, In the Labyrinth, Jealousy).
In Geometric Regional Novelthe allegories of good and bad regional government are disrupted, and sometimes derailed, by unexpected and often unwarranted violence. The second chapter provides the opening example. It rehearses what happens when a "hiker" going to the village is forced to kill a bull that has escaped from its paddock. Bureaucratic protocols then come into play. There is a feast, and everyone gets a piece of the bull. Then there's a double-line break and the text continues in italics (in the translation), describing what happens if the bull kills the man. It's unnecessarily violent if the chapter's implied author is a regional administrator (or observer, or historian), because many other things might also happen on the road. The chapter is about the sudden emergence of violence, not the administration of tourism.
The fourth chapter (that is: the second chapter that isn't about the village square) does the same. It's about a traveling performer who walks a tightrope across the village square. He falls, and "his back landed on the crossbar of the well winch... whereupon a few people are said to have screamed like mad." The images and even the typography are violent in excess of the narrative demands and of course in excess of the much more modest requirements of a narrative intended only to exposit the region's rules and customs.
Later in the book there's a chapter called "The New Law" which is often mentioned in reviews, since it consists largely of a form that travelers need to fill in if they want to walk through the woods, where there are "b l a c k m e n who hide in the shadows." The form has lines like:
"HAVE YOU AVOIDED TAXES IN RECENT TIMES ____
"WHY_______________
"WHEN______________
"FOR HOW MUCH DID YOU DEFRAUD THE STATE___"
This chapter opens with an especially lengthy facsimile of Robbe-Grillet:
"The new law is being posted on all barn walls. Striking hammers drive the nails through the paper made from reeds into the wood. When the points of the nails pierce the paper at the edges, the white fibers rustle. There's a hissing before the nail, hit by the hammer blow, penetrates the barn wood. You can see the billposters' hands holding hammers; they position the nails before hitting them, standing on one leg in front of the wooden brown walls, the other leg raised, pulled up, so that the kneecap presses the lower edge of the poster against the wall, as they drive the first nail through one of the two upper corners of the notice into the wood..."
The next section of the chapter introduces the politics that many readers find to be the book's main purpose. (The "b l a c k m e n" remain an undefined threat.) And the form introduces some of the book's sharpest satire. But the chapter's opening is another world: it's the barely suppressed violence that Jonke extracts from Robbe-Grillet, which is own interests in administration cannot always use and or even contain.
-
Gert Jonke, still virtually unknown in English, is a member of the generation of Viennese experimental writers who emerged in the 1960s. (Peter Handke, Friederike Mayröcker, Elfriede Jelinek, and Thomas Bernhard are others.) Dalkey Archive has done something very unusual with this book: it has also released a "casebook" of essays as a free download.
Note to the Dalkey Archive editors, if they ever see this
Have you done something similar for your other authors? I wish you'd said something on the website, or on the "casebook," about how you came to the decision to provide this file, and whether you might do it for any other author. I've read several Dalkey Archive titles recently and had very interesting exchanges with their translators and with other authors (most recently, Emilian Galaicu-Păun's Living Tissue 10x10). Dozens of Dalkey Archive titles are as unfamiliar to English-language readers as Jonke, and could use something like this. I bet you'd find translators and scholars interested in contributing!
The principal reception of the book
Jonke's book was his first (written in 1967/8, and published the following year; it was revised in 1980, and translated in 2000), and it has amassed a large secondary literature. The preponderant interpretation is that it's a satire and indictment of a certain kind of complacent, faceless bureaucracy. Each of the short chapters in the book presents a different activity, fact, or area in the "region" and adds comments about the laws, regulations, and signage that keep it running in an orderly manner. Potential threats are everywhere, and alternate chapters tell the increasingly futile story of unnamed narrators trying to do something very simple and harmless: they only want to walk across the town square. Bureaucracy is signaled in the translation in various ways: d o u b l e s p a c e d words for emphasis (in the German-language tradition), SMALL CAPS for signs, and even forms with banks to be filled in ____________________. Rules and by-laws are reheared in a monotone, sometimes at length. The descriptions of these conditions are in a kind of mock precision--hence the qualifier "gometric," which stands in the place of, say, "romantic."
Problems with the reception
This reading is the main burden of the opening essay in the "casebook," written by Vincent Kling (the essay occupies more than half of the entire text). One of thr contributors, Maria Luise Caputo-Mayr, concludes that "the novel can be seen as linguistic parody of an illusory homeland and the presumed freedom of life in the countryside, in that it shows the continual narrowing of personal freedom and cultural horizons." Another anthology, Wesen und Wandel der Heimatliteratur: am Beispiel der österrecihischen Literatur seit 1945 (1989) also has readings of Jonke's politics. Instead I want to emphasize another property of the novel that has less often been noticed: its affect, which is by turns bored, cold, and -- most interestingly, I think -- suddenly violent.
A good place to start this reading is Robbe-Grillet. Jonke's novel is full of echoes of Robbe-Grillet's novels of the 1960s. Many chapters begin with detailed inventories of apparently unimportant objects, places, or buildings. These are "geometric" very much in the way Robbe-Grillet's often are, emphasizing whatever can be described in terms of proportions, lengths, lines, triangles, cones, and other simple geometric and numerical terms. The opening is a good example:
"The village square is rectangular, bordering on the houses gathered around it; streets and lanes flow into it; other than the well in the center, in which the paving stone patterns seek their source and from which they spread out like rays, there is nothing in the village square."
This is not a pastiche, because it has no legible distance from its model. It is nearly a quotation of the description of the town square in The Voyeur. I'd like to call these passages facsimiles, to register that they aren't mainly emulative or parodic. I don't think a full reading of Jonke's book can imagine this kind of reference as an expediency, as if Jonke took one of Robbe-Grillet's inventions and re-used it as a simple "geometric" description in order to launch his critique of bureaucracy (or rather, of the hopelessness of intervening in resolutely static socities). The inwardness of Robbe-Grillet's mimetic passages continues to resonate here: they are petrified, lost, paralyzed, and above all racked with pain, anxiety, jealously, and other emotions (The Voyeur, Les Gommes, In the Labyrinth, Jealousy).
In Geometric Regional Novelthe allegories of good and bad regional government are disrupted, and sometimes derailed, by unexpected and often unwarranted violence. The second chapter provides the opening example. It rehearses what happens when a "hiker" going to the village is forced to kill a bull that has escaped from its paddock. Bureaucratic protocols then come into play. There is a feast, and everyone gets a piece of the bull. Then there's a double-line break and the text continues in italics (in the translation), describing what happens if the bull kills the man. It's unnecessarily violent if the chapter's implied author is a regional administrator (or observer, or historian), because many other things might also happen on the road. The chapter is about the sudden emergence of violence, not the administration of tourism.
The fourth chapter (that is: the second chapter that isn't about the village square) does the same. It's about a traveling performer who walks a tightrope across the village square. He falls, and "his back landed on the crossbar of the well winch... whereupon a few people are said to have screamed like mad." The images and even the typography are violent in excess of the narrative demands and of course in excess of the much more modest requirements of a narrative intended only to exposit the region's rules and customs.
Later in the book there's a chapter called "The New Law" which is often mentioned in reviews, since it consists largely of a form that travelers need to fill in if they want to walk through the woods, where there are "b l a c k m e n who hide in the shadows." The form has lines like:
"HAVE YOU AVOIDED TAXES IN RECENT TIMES ____
"WHY_______________
"WHEN______________
"FOR HOW MUCH DID YOU DEFRAUD THE STATE___"
This chapter opens with an especially lengthy facsimile of Robbe-Grillet:
"The new law is being posted on all barn walls. Striking hammers drive the nails through the paper made from reeds into the wood. When the points of the nails pierce the paper at the edges, the white fibers rustle. There's a hissing before the nail, hit by the hammer blow, penetrates the barn wood. You can see the billposters' hands holding hammers; they position the nails before hitting them, standing on one leg in front of the wooden brown walls, the other leg raised, pulled up, so that the kneecap presses the lower edge of the poster against the wall, as they drive the first nail through one of the two upper corners of the notice into the wood..."
The next section of the chapter introduces the politics that many readers find to be the book's main purpose. (The "b l a c k m e n" remain an undefined threat.) And the form introduces some of the book's sharpest satire. But the chapter's opening is another world: it's the barely suppressed violence that Jonke extracts from Robbe-Grillet, which is own interests in administration cannot always use and or even contain.
May 5, 2024
Well, I thoroughly enjoyed that. An experimental novel with a sense of humour, great combo in my opinion.
Jonke describes an anonymous pre-industrial rural village in geometric terms, there are odd goings on and there is a total lack of characters. Splendido!
Jonke describes an anonymous pre-industrial rural village in geometric terms, there are odd goings on and there is a total lack of characters. Splendido!
Read
January 5, 2026Even Robbe-Grillet couldn’t Robbe-Grillet as hard as Jonke does.
Here are some descriptions of a perfectly orderly algorithmic community. From the German-speaking world, one has to conclude that this is satirical, but to what extent is this genuinely a satire of village life, and to what extent is it a satire of the position that we outsiders have of village life? It’s hard to say. All you have is a series of exact measurements and proportions. And the most concrete and plain things are the most open to interpretation.
I fucking loved this.
Here are some descriptions of a perfectly orderly algorithmic community. From the German-speaking world, one has to conclude that this is satirical, but to what extent is this genuinely a satire of village life, and to what extent is it a satire of the position that we outsiders have of village life? It’s hard to say. All you have is a series of exact measurements and proportions. And the most concrete and plain things are the most open to interpretation.
I fucking loved this.
March 31, 2014
Slyly subversive on the bureaucracy and small mindedness of village life. But not every section is successful, the beginning and ends more engrossing than the middle. The forms to fill in in order to be granted access to walk the forests are hilarious.
Read
February 19, 2015Finished last night before the lock!
It's geometric. It's regional. It's a novel. It's the Geometric Regional Novel.
It's geometric. It's regional. It's a novel. It's the Geometric Regional Novel.
November 12, 2024
Un OLNI jubilatoire, absurde à souhait (ou à outrance), audacieux, novateur, à l'écriture parfaitement géométrique (ou géométriquement parfaite). Du grand n'importe quoi, qui peut autant réjouir, que laisser sceptique, parfois les deux en même temps, s'il ne vous laisse pas tout à fait sur le bord. Si vous voulez découvrir ce village, il vous faudra déjà traverser la place du village, ce qui n'est pas une mince affaire. 😅
Je ne sais pas ce que j'ai lu, mais j'en ai adoré le concept et l'expérience était assez courte pour que je ne m'en lasse pas tout à fait. Les tout derniers chapitres m'ont complètement essorée. Je défie quiconque d'en avoir lu chaque ligne et mot attentivement.😆
De belles trouvailles, mais un plaisir de lecture tout de même inégal d'une farfeluterie à l'autre.
Je ne sais pas ce que j'ai lu, mais j'en ai adoré le concept et l'expérience était assez courte pour que je ne m'en lasse pas tout à fait. Les tout derniers chapitres m'ont complètement essorée. Je défie quiconque d'en avoir lu chaque ligne et mot attentivement.😆
De belles trouvailles, mais un plaisir de lecture tout de même inégal d'une farfeluterie à l'autre.
July 21, 2023
Ultimately I'd say this is a bit too idiosyncratic in its experimentation (I never really got my head around the s p a c e d o u t l e t t e r s, and that's just one of the many weird things at play here) to really meaningfully get deep into the sense of real sadness, fear and beauty that clearly lurks within it, but it's still a novel where a mountain range is described by its Fourier transform so I ain't mad lol
November 7, 2024
A curious and singular book. For a review I refer you to the one who recommended it, Marc Nash, a presence here. It would be very tedious to describe, but he was right that it recalled both Beckett and Kafka, two personal heroes.
May 5, 2025
A deeply admirable book, taking the encyclopedic fiction of a provincial town and concentrating it into just the appendix, basically. I might read this again in a few years (it's deeply related to my own interests in the psychogeography of small town life) and it might end up being a favorite.
Read
December 25, 2022Read this for class, so no rating. But I did really like it generally.
February 24, 2024
vraiment très rigolo ! j’aime bcp le coté décalé crazy fou du livre mais à la fin j’ai trouvé ça un peu lourd (peut-être comme les habitants du village finalement….:0)
August 18, 2024
Expérimentation littéraire intéressante, mais longue passée les soixante premières pages.
November 17, 2014
Seems to be a novel reverse-engineered to fit a set of found conditions in a city, providing chronology the same way we might search for telltale overlaps and marks in an abstract painting to unearth its reactive sequence, perhaps here described as a hopeful archaeology. Especially of note are the repeated considerations of the village square and its different, often conflicting, attributes, perhaps the tale of the blacksmith's round limestone house and its constructional nuances as well.
Somehow I couldn't avoid thinking of post-facto rationalizations of World War II traumas, especially in the tale of the annual mortar-devouring bird plagues. In the bullet hole scars explained to be from citizens firing upon the flock, I recalled the same on the facade of the Palais de Justice in Paris, and certainly more such manifestations rationally inexplicable to thoughtful humans. In attributing these oddities to the life of the city there is some peace to their passage.
Somehow I couldn't avoid thinking of post-facto rationalizations of World War II traumas, especially in the tale of the annual mortar-devouring bird plagues. In the bullet hole scars explained to be from citizens firing upon the flock, I recalled the same on the facade of the Palais de Justice in Paris, and certainly more such manifestations rationally inexplicable to thoughtful humans. In attributing these oddities to the life of the city there is some peace to their passage.
tasted
August 22, 2015This book started off very promisingly. I admired the geometric detail, the stuff about the bull, the acrobat, but especially the emphasis on the uncertainty of the certainties we become accustomed to.
But I didn’t feel that Jonke was able to keep it up. It became dull for me and, therefore, the repetition didn’t work anymore. And there was less of the geometricity (or was there too much of it?). I stopped reading, but I’m glad I gave this experiment (no more novel than regional) a good taste.
But I didn’t feel that Jonke was able to keep it up. It became dull for me and, therefore, the repetition didn’t work anymore. And there was less of the geometricity (or was there too much of it?). I stopped reading, but I’m glad I gave this experiment (no more novel than regional) a good taste.
January 21, 2016
hyperbolic and heady, head-scratching. reading this quickly would be like trying to take a small bite out of a water balloon and expecting its content and context to remain intact throughout the experience. I would expect I'm not "literary" to understand the context in which the composition was written, and I say this because the formal experimentation and structure (meta) dominates the book.
January 31, 2011
my favorite jonke novel. about a town that takes bureaucracy to its very ultimate logical end, complete regimentation. the author does this though with humor and a wink at the human underneath it all.
Want to read
May 5, 2011
April 25, 2017
A rather strange first book from well-regarded Austrian novelist Gert Jonke, this has sat on my shelf unread since I ordered it during one of Dalkey Archive Press's sales some years ago.
Let's start with the title: "regional novel" translates the German Heimatroman, a specific subgenre of fiction, popular from the late 19th century on, which focused on idealized scenes of life in rural villages poised between the twin threats of natural catastrophe and progressive cultural forces from the city. As a first point of reference for the English reader, I'd throw out the name of Thomas Hardy... with the caveat that his work displays far more literary merit than the undistinguished dreck typical of the genre. (As you might expect, the Heimatroman peaked in popularity after the first World War; its provincial aesthetic proved highly compatible with the blood-and-soil nationalism of the Third Reich.)
Jonke, writing in the 1960s, is not out to recapture the popular success enjoyed by earlier writers of 'regional novels.' Instead, he picks up the (arche)typical setting of the village, and a few stock characters and familiar tropes, then puts them through the wringer to produce an avant-garde novel that is entirely sui generis. The writing style is characterized by repetition and accumulation, with sentences doubling back on themselves in an almost musical way ("We couldn't walk across the village square because we weren't supposed to be seen, and we observed how those sitting on the benches c o u l d n ' t see us, because we didn't walk across the village square; we saw how they d i d n ' t see us." - p. 92). The effect is reminiscent of Samuel Beckett, or of Jonke's Austrian contemporary Thomas Bernhard; but where Bernhard's novels overwhelm the reader with ceaseless torrents of language from their frenetic narrators, Jonke's pace is more thoughtful, his repetitions dilatory rather than obsessive. Where dialogue is present, it most commonly takes the form of disconnected phrases ("All kinds of opinions could be heard, knows his business, knows what he wants, that sort of thing is rare today, one should have nerves like that, a fine fellow, a holder of distinguished service crosses first and second class" - p. 20) which are sometimes attributed to a crowd of speakers, sometimes to the mutterings of a solitary individual. (In Beckett's famous phrase: "What matter who's speaking?")
True to its title, the novel also makes use of figures and diagrams to illustrate the text; but these are just a fraction of the heterogeneous material which breaks up the passages of descriptive prose. At other times, we are shown paragraphs of legalese from the village's regulations, facsimiles of official forms and paperwork, even a page of musical notation. Jonke's approach here should not be mistaken for the 'low mimetic realism' of, e.g., James Joyce's Ulysses, which approached the inner life of its characters by way of the newspaper headlines and advertising posters they encountered in the world around them. The characters in Geometric Regional Novel have no inner life to explore, and many of the most striking incidents recounted in the novel have only the most tenuous connection to any sort of external reality. One early chapter describes the possible outcome of a hypothetical traveler's encounter with an escaped bull on the road into the village -- but there is no such traveler, and no escaped bull; and even if there were, the narrator stresses, the description given would apply to just one possible sequence of events. Then, there is this remarkable passage near the middle of the book:
The terse vision of nature at work here follows a painstaking ten-page description of the construction process for a single house in the village: from the grass sprouting around the sandbox where the mortar is mixed, to the gradual weathering of the tin roof atop the completed structure (50-59). In this context, the understated observation "the people would have had to build new roofs" carries a tremendous emotional charge just below its surface appearance of subdued and fatalistic resignation.
At times, Jonke's method of distanced description can also bear a resemblance to the nouveau roman of Alain Robbe-Grillet (as noted in the translator's afterword), given the alienating attention to surface detail in passages like the following:
But Robbe-Grillet's novels (with which I am, admittedly, not as familiar as I should be) are something like puzzles or mysteries to be solved, the details of plot and character slowly emerging out of the juxtaposition of so many flat descriptions: Two chairs on the neighbor's patio have been moved to face one another; A pattern in the wallpaper suddenly calls to mind the dark shapes seen on a dusty desktop from which several objects were recently removed; etc. Anyone expecting Jonke's novel to progress in this way -- perhaps shedding some indirect light on the identity of the mysterious narrator who appears from time to time, always accompanied by a companion, hiding in the shadows and observing the village square -- will be disappointed.
Neither character-driven nor plot-driven, the book sometimes seems to have nothing at all holding it together. (Certainly, the jarring shift to outright magical realism in the later chapters may cause some readers to lose patience.) Yet I would argue that it tries for, and achieves, a certain minimal degree of coherence on the level of its images, its ideas and its formal strategies. Even the novel's most surreal and unexpected development, the strange flocks of birds which attack the houses of the villagers, can be regarded as a natural progression from motifs introduced earlier. Driving their beaks between the houses' bricks and pecking out the mortar, the birds follow a path traced earlier by the narrator's eye as it probed the life of the village's interstitial spaces: the white buds of moss between paving stones in the square, or the algae growing between tiles in a washbasin.
Geometric Regional Novel has been interpreted as a satire on the spread of bureaucracy and rationalization in the postwar era, and that may be what Jonke had in mind; but I find such a reductive interpretation wholly inadequate to account for the beauty of its many non-satirical passages. I also detected a strain of skeptical individualism in the author which owes more than a little to Nietzsche. The early scene of a tightrope walker performing above the village square unmistakably alludes to Thus Spake Zarathustra; and Nietzsche's teaching of the Eternal Return is never far from my mind during passages like the following:
More than anything else, these are the moments from my reading that stick with me: stray details and images drawn from a preindustrial way of life, which must have been vanishing already during the author's lifetime. For all the quirks of its innovative form, it may be that Gert Jonke's greatest triumph in this book was to look backwards, undaunted in his mission to find a new voice for regional literature; and so to make audible again what had been silent, buried under the enormous weight of history.
Let's start with the title: "regional novel" translates the German Heimatroman, a specific subgenre of fiction, popular from the late 19th century on, which focused on idealized scenes of life in rural villages poised between the twin threats of natural catastrophe and progressive cultural forces from the city. As a first point of reference for the English reader, I'd throw out the name of Thomas Hardy... with the caveat that his work displays far more literary merit than the undistinguished dreck typical of the genre. (As you might expect, the Heimatroman peaked in popularity after the first World War; its provincial aesthetic proved highly compatible with the blood-and-soil nationalism of the Third Reich.)
Jonke, writing in the 1960s, is not out to recapture the popular success enjoyed by earlier writers of 'regional novels.' Instead, he picks up the (arche)typical setting of the village, and a few stock characters and familiar tropes, then puts them through the wringer to produce an avant-garde novel that is entirely sui generis. The writing style is characterized by repetition and accumulation, with sentences doubling back on themselves in an almost musical way ("We couldn't walk across the village square because we weren't supposed to be seen, and we observed how those sitting on the benches c o u l d n ' t see us, because we didn't walk across the village square; we saw how they d i d n ' t see us." - p. 92). The effect is reminiscent of Samuel Beckett, or of Jonke's Austrian contemporary Thomas Bernhard; but where Bernhard's novels overwhelm the reader with ceaseless torrents of language from their frenetic narrators, Jonke's pace is more thoughtful, his repetitions dilatory rather than obsessive. Where dialogue is present, it most commonly takes the form of disconnected phrases ("All kinds of opinions could be heard, knows his business, knows what he wants, that sort of thing is rare today, one should have nerves like that, a fine fellow, a holder of distinguished service crosses first and second class" - p. 20) which are sometimes attributed to a crowd of speakers, sometimes to the mutterings of a solitary individual. (In Beckett's famous phrase: "What matter who's speaking?")
True to its title, the novel also makes use of figures and diagrams to illustrate the text; but these are just a fraction of the heterogeneous material which breaks up the passages of descriptive prose. At other times, we are shown paragraphs of legalese from the village's regulations, facsimiles of official forms and paperwork, even a page of musical notation. Jonke's approach here should not be mistaken for the 'low mimetic realism' of, e.g., James Joyce's Ulysses, which approached the inner life of its characters by way of the newspaper headlines and advertising posters they encountered in the world around them. The characters in Geometric Regional Novel have no inner life to explore, and many of the most striking incidents recounted in the novel have only the most tenuous connection to any sort of external reality. One early chapter describes the possible outcome of a hypothetical traveler's encounter with an escaped bull on the road into the village -- but there is no such traveler, and no escaped bull; and even if there were, the narrator stresses, the description given would apply to just one possible sequence of events. Then, there is this remarkable passage near the middle of the book:
It couldn't have gone on this way. The roofs would have shattered. Would have been pushed off the houses by the spreading treetops.
The tree next to the church smashed a spire window. The branch grew into the belfry. The twigs and leaves touched the bell. The tree was stirred by the wind, the branch struck and rang the bell in the church spire.
The trees would have pushed down the dusty mattresses, bedframes, brooms, shovels, commodes, ovens, kitchen stoves, credenzas, buckets, washstands, and spinning wheels stored in the attics; the junk, along with the attics, roofs, rafters, beams, tiles, and shingles, would have fallen behind the houses. The roofs and the junk would have lain behind the roofless houses; the people would have had to build new roofs, buy new beams and tiles, they would have had to pick up the junk behind the houses and carry it up to the attics again. (61)
The terse vision of nature at work here follows a painstaking ten-page description of the construction process for a single house in the village: from the grass sprouting around the sandbox where the mortar is mixed, to the gradual weathering of the tin roof atop the completed structure (50-59). In this context, the understated observation "the people would have had to build new roofs" carries a tremendous emotional charge just below its surface appearance of subdued and fatalistic resignation.
At times, Jonke's method of distanced description can also bear a resemblance to the nouveau roman of Alain Robbe-Grillet (as noted in the translator's afterword), given the alienating attention to surface detail in passages like the following:
In the glass sections of the door you can see the reflection of the well.
When the door is slowly opened, you can see the reflection of the well,
divided by a ten-centimeter-wide wooden board leading vertically from the upper rail of the door to the lower door section, which is one and a half meters high and one meter wide,
slip slowly away from the glass;
it appears as if the reflection of the well were moving into the wall of the house or directly into the room behind the door, but that's an error on your part because only the door's glass is escaping the reflection, and the reflection i s p r e s e r v e d i n t h e a i r between the door-frame posts, [. . .]
the reflection of the well built of brick, invisible to your retina, has always been trapped in the air on the same spot between the door-frame posts[.] (72-73)
But Robbe-Grillet's novels (with which I am, admittedly, not as familiar as I should be) are something like puzzles or mysteries to be solved, the details of plot and character slowly emerging out of the juxtaposition of so many flat descriptions: Two chairs on the neighbor's patio have been moved to face one another; A pattern in the wallpaper suddenly calls to mind the dark shapes seen on a dusty desktop from which several objects were recently removed; etc. Anyone expecting Jonke's novel to progress in this way -- perhaps shedding some indirect light on the identity of the mysterious narrator who appears from time to time, always accompanied by a companion, hiding in the shadows and observing the village square -- will be disappointed.
Neither character-driven nor plot-driven, the book sometimes seems to have nothing at all holding it together. (Certainly, the jarring shift to outright magical realism in the later chapters may cause some readers to lose patience.) Yet I would argue that it tries for, and achieves, a certain minimal degree of coherence on the level of its images, its ideas and its formal strategies. Even the novel's most surreal and unexpected development, the strange flocks of birds which attack the houses of the villagers, can be regarded as a natural progression from motifs introduced earlier. Driving their beaks between the houses' bricks and pecking out the mortar, the birds follow a path traced earlier by the narrator's eye as it probed the life of the village's interstitial spaces: the white buds of moss between paving stones in the square, or the algae growing between tiles in a washbasin.
Geometric Regional Novel has been interpreted as a satire on the spread of bureaucracy and rationalization in the postwar era, and that may be what Jonke had in mind; but I find such a reductive interpretation wholly inadequate to account for the beauty of its many non-satirical passages. I also detected a strain of skeptical individualism in the author which owes more than a little to Nietzsche. The early scene of a tightrope walker performing above the village square unmistakably alludes to Thus Spake Zarathustra; and Nietzsche's teaching of the Eternal Return is never far from my mind during passages like the following:
[T]he air is an infinite geometric progression, the clatter of glass panes falling into pieces is reproduced by the air in specific time intervals according to the laws of an infinite geometric progression, you will again be able to hear, in I-don't-know-how-many years, the striking and hissing of the stones in the smokestack, a bit later the clatter of panes breaking into pieces[.] (77)
More than anything else, these are the moments from my reading that stick with me: stray details and images drawn from a preindustrial way of life, which must have been vanishing already during the author's lifetime. For all the quirks of its innovative form, it may be that Gert Jonke's greatest triumph in this book was to look backwards, undaunted in his mission to find a new voice for regional literature; and so to make audible again what had been silent, buried under the enormous weight of history.
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