The Mill: A Cosmos

by Bess Brenck Kalischer, W.C. Bamberger (Translator)

Bess Brenck Kalischer’s only work of prose was first published in German in 1922 and is translated here into English for the first time. Narrated by a woman being held in a sanitarium after having suffered a mental breakdown, The Mill is less a novel than a rhythmic, hallucinatory, and fractured sequence of prose poems. On its publication, the German author Mynona described it as “more a mill, a cosmos flower, a lyricism and romantic spell than it is a ‘novel.’” Shifting from pedestrian concerns to cosmic visions, from the setting of a basement mushroom farm to scenes on Sirius, from lying restrained on a bed to lying in a coffin made of moonbeams, Kalischer’s narrator weaves together literary satire, anguished dream states, and shifting forms of subjectivity. Woodlice and snails become protagonists, apes and a camel engage in philosophy, lucid analysis slips into suffering or joyous exaltation, and the narrator transforms alternately into a mouse-muse or a pillar in a mausoleum. As much Maldoror as Munchausen, Christian as Canaanite, The Mill describes an unstable journey to psychic restoration that is as radically experimental today as when it was first published a century ago.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1922

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a special book. Although Brenck-Kalischer was an expressionist (she co-founded the Expressionist Working Group Dresden), to me this book belongs to a tradition of hermetic literary works written by women writer-artists of a surrealist bent, including Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini, and Unica Zürn, among hopefully others I have yet to discover. It adopts the personal journey/transformation arc described by those other writers in their most notable works. Richly allusive, oneiric, and saturated with the vitality of imagination, each of these works transmits a singular voice calling out with raw purity from its pages. The Mill: A Cosmos is at times impenetrable, but what psyche isn't?

The center of the earth slowly raised a crystal mill. The blades rang out: We have come to bring new bread to the earth. For thousands of years the depths have harbored us. Generations have pressed down upon us. Every one of our veins, even the smallest, is compressed. We are the clear cold, which no longer reduces the sun, moon, and stars. You will see one another. The graveyards of your dead eyes will open. You will see one another. You will meet one another again.

[Forrest · Rating 3 out of 5]

I believe this is the lowest rating I've given to a Wakefield Press title yet. It makes me sad, because I love what Wakefield does: bring fantastic obscure works in translation to light in the English-reading world. They've done some fantastic work in the past (including the amazing work of Marcel Schwob, Marcel Bealu, Otto Julius Bierbaum, and, most remarkably, Jean Ray). So, you'll excuse me if my expectations are sky high . . . but they are.

My unrealistic expectations were met with the introduction to this volume. As with every other Wakefield Press book I've read, the translator's introduction, this time by W.C. Bamberg, is worth the ticket price alone. It's an extremely evocative piece about this essentially unknown author: well-researched (with a hint of the historiography involved, even), captivating, sympathetic, and enlightening. This is the fine scholarship I've come to (unfairly?) expect from Wakefield. At times, the writing in the introduction out-paced the writing in the actual story.

It didn't take long after reading the introduction to become somewhat disenchanted. What seemed to start out as a staccato poesis descended into pure Dada. I understand that makes the work "of its time," but that doesn't excuse near-incoherence. Yes, the story is about a woman holed up in a sanitorium, but the experimental form . . . well, the experiment just didn't work for me.

The section "The Island of Destiny, or Encounter with the Caliph" was the first truly coherent narrative of this work. It started on page 25 and sustained through page 32, but I have to admit that making it to this section was a feat in and of itself. I've read plenty of stories with insane (or at least highly neurotic) and unreliable narrators, plowed my way through some notoriously difficult prose (Proust, Joyce, and Beckett, I'm looking at you), and read more than my share of stories about madness. But the first 25 pages of Kalischer's work here had me nearly leming the book, but I decided to press ahead. It is a short work, after all, and I'd bested tougher (though better-written) material.

After that the narrative gets wobbly, teetering on the edge of coherence, threatening to fall into Dada at any moment. It's sometimes difficult to discern between playful intellectual brilliance and an utter collapse of reason. It's almost as if Kalischer weaves in and out of each, with no warning about what direction she is turning; blind curves ahead. Sure, the narrator is struggling with mental illness, but a reader needs some kind of compass, even a weak one. Still, I pressed on.

Lest you think this ship has utterly sunk, that all was lost, that's not true. Later, near the end, I uncovered "On Sirius". It is by far the best section of the book. It's a gentle, smoothly flowing prose poem, not entirely lacking disjuncture, but not as chaotic as some earlier sections of the book. It is a piece that is of a piece, well-put-together, but not stodgy. I can (and have) wrap(ped) myself up in it. It is comfortable, but not so cosy as to be uninteresting. If the entire book was written this way, it would be at least a four-star book for me. Alas, that can't be. The neurotic narrator, like most humans, had a long string of near-coherence which, of course, wouldn't last.

However, I didn't mind the ending being disjointed. In fact, I think it worked quite well, given that we had a comfortable baseline in "On Sirius" from which we could jump off. The tragedy of this last section felt real and poignant. A good ending, given what came immediately before it. But the first part of the story started off in such a stark, jarring manner that I just couldn't make the connection with the narrator until halfway through the book. In fact, I wonder what the book would have read like had it begun with "On Sirius" and the erstwhile early material was tagged on to the back of the story (after the sanitorium episodes)? Possibly a stronger narrative? Unfortunately, Kalischer isn't around to ask for a rewrite.

Still, kudos yet again to Wakefield for presenting a work obscured by history and doing so with all the reverence and academic rigor it deserves. Yes, it fell short for me, but that's not stopping me from continuing to dip in the stream of Wakefield works. In fact, there's another waiting on my shelf right now that I am eager to read. I'm still on the Wakefield train and won't be getting off any time soon!

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

"And now I ask you all: Has any one of you ever found a cadaver before the church doors on a winter morning? And read from its entrails?

"I—I am searching for a cadaver before the church doors."

Originally published in Berlin in 1922 and appearing now in its first English translation, The Mill obliquely takes places in a sanitarium, ending with the narrator’s ostensible healing. (Kalischer herself died in 1933 of “the effects of ‘a nervous disease.’”) The book’s 26 unrelated sections have a surrealist feel, but I suspect surrealism wasn’t Kalischer’s intent behind her descriptions of events and creatures cosmic and quotidian.

Back in 1996, the psychologist Lauren Slater published Welcome to My Country, a collection of her observations and opinions of mentally impaired patients. Verbal communications by schizophrenics is the topic of the book’s title essay, where she posits interpreting schizophrenic speech as consisting largely of metaphorical descriptions of thoughts and feelings. Reading with this is mind doesn’t crack open the obscurity of many of the passages, but it does offer a way to understand the sections as mythical tales, remembered words of friends and sanitarium doctors and nurses, as aesthetic doctrines, and a mind still activated by the arts. Dream logic and dream-like images pervade and enrich the prose throughout, which becomes more coherent as the narrator approaches release from the sanitarium.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought that this book was something else, which is entirely not the book's fault, but perhaps that of its PR. Unconnected prose poetry is not something I'm a fan of either, so this was always going to be a tough sell. I can see what the author was trying to do and that it fits alongside Leonora Carrington, but I found this tiny book rather hard going... potentially due to the translation, I'm not sure. There were some great, very quotable, lines in here, but that wasn't quite enough to increase my enjoyment of the reading experience. As a result, I'm beyond grateful to a great friend of mine who allowed me to borrow this book in order to test drive it because, unlike us, this book and I are not friends.

[Pete · Rating 3 out of 5]

i accidentally bought this at lost city because i thought i was holding a little book of gogol's short stories from their small press shelf and instead it was this. fragmented expressionist freakouts. some lines with teeth but on the whole i lost my taste for extra weird language acts at least 10 turnpike exits ago. but a cool thing by cool people! possibly to your tastes! also remember to be a micro patron of the arts and try things you dont normally mess with even if you do it by accident

[Alyssa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had me confused. I think maybe I need to read it again, and then again in German to understand it, and probably have a better grasp on philosophy to even try to understand what the author is saying. But I did learn my new favorite word from it: bruma - meaning mist in Spanish, and also “the day of winter solstice” (my favorite day of the year) in Latin. So I guess it was worth? Oh, I also liked the line, “scratch, said the match, and consumed itself.”

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing series of explosions in (mostly) prose. Left me wanting much more.

[cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

i did not understand it at all. but i experienced it (beautifully, i think)

[Tiffany K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like others, I found this collection in a place it shouldn’t have been — in my case, tucked behind Kafka’s short stories at a local bookstore. I’d never heard of Kalischer but was instantly endeared to her. Dreamy but critical, funny but pained. Sharp without pretension. The Activist Epidemic is, especially, a slam dunk.