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Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst
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Marianne Fritz
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That knee-jerk Schmidtian comparison is unavoidable if you look at that Naturgemass [sic!] link. But here's a thing from Der Spiegel (1985) about "Kilogramm Weltliteratur", re : Dessen Sprache ::http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d...
Wherein it is written :: "Wahrscheinlicher noch, daß sich ein Dechiffrier-Syndikat dieser Prosa annimmt wie des Werks von Arno Schmidt. In der Tat gibt es - jenseits literarischer Wertungen - einige Ähnlichkeiten zwischen Fritz und dem Schmidt. Schon der biographische Vergleich zeigt auffällige Parallelen.
"Beide Autoren betonen ihre proletarische Herkunft, haben nicht oder kaum (Schmidt einige Semester Astronomie und Mathematik) studiert und sind literarische Autodidakten. Beide kapseln sich eremitenhaft von der Außenwelt ab und verweigern sich dem Kulturbetrieb. Ihre Welt-Erfahrung besteht aus Jugend-Erlebnissen, Lese-Abenteuern und historischen Recherchen. Ihr Leben ist (zwanghaftes?) Schreiben. Marianne Fritz, heißt es, besitzt als einzigen Luxus zwei Kugelkopf-Schreibmaschinen für den Fall, daß eine mal defekt ist."
So it wasn't just me. So, yes, the Q remains, as translator=West suggests, Why is Schmidt the great Unread and not Fritz? Maybe Fritz is just as worthy of being knot=read as is Schmidt and his many zettels. Same we ask about Ms Young, no? Not to worry -- you GoodReaders are now actively knot=reading Miss MacIntosh like never before in the history of knot reading.... ; )
Love this line from that article by the translator (and relates well to this GR group in general):In many cases, the esteem that accrues to difficult authors has little to do with their being read; a genius is born not of resolute bookworms slogging through arcane texts but of that critical mass of reviews, essays, and dissertations required to generate the clichés the reading public needs in order to sound intelligent—to make the comparison, no less inept for its ubiquity, of Knausgaard to Proust, or to apply the adjective Kafkaesque to any story about bureaucracy.
Also from the comments of same article, someone wrote:Friedhelm Rathjen, who knows more about all this than I do, says the following: “Looks like Schmidt” was my first impression when I came across the announcements for “Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst” way back in 1985. It all seemed like a superficial Schmidt copy. But when I read and reviewed the work I realized that this impression or preconception was completely wrong. “Dessen Sprache …” is much more comparable to Musil and Proust, but transformed into an aesthetics and poetics that is genuinely Fritz’s own. In “Naturgemäß” you can detect traces of Schmidtian techniques, but again this has scarcely anything to do with the core of the work.
Mmmm Musil and Proust! So wish this was translated.
Hm, she's sorta like them, but, again, very much herself. As for Schmidtian stuff, I prefer her "take" on doing stuff similarly to him, his seeming at times somewhat arbitrary, bored.P.S. Don't get me wrong, Schmidt is really good at what he does.
Hm ... from what I read in the Spiegel article this could either be really good or really annoying. I might need a shorter book to see if I like her.
If you're able to read German, there are plenty of representative scans of her work online. The Weight of Things is somewhat representative, however relatively minimalist, actually, also, at least it seems so to me.
The BURIED Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst (other topics)The Weight of Things (other topics)
Naturgemäß II: Es ist ein Ros entsprungen. Wedernoch heißt sie. (other topics)
German=female=Joyce... maybe ; but maybe woman=Schmidt (because, look at the photos of her in her office/library) ;; or a German Ms Young ;; or, trans=LATE please so we can decide (although the Germans/Austrians seem to be determined not to decide themselves ; mostly out of print there too).
So, so HUGE novels, like Dessen Sprache Du Nicht Verstehst: Roman.
A newly translated thing :: The Weight of Things.
Naturgemass III ("Rührmichnichtan!") available on-line in a series of (661) pdfs ::
http://mariannefritz.at/
A thing by her translator ::
"The Nonessential: On Marianne Fritz"
October 1, 2015 | by Adrian Nathan West
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/20...
"Yet Fritz’s experimentation is neither idle nor random, and the rewards it harbors for patient readers are perhaps unique in world literature." [i appreciate the meaning of 'experimental' being spelled out like this]
Wikipedia (German) ::
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariann...