Bottom's Dream discussion

I'm having fun with this short novel. Here is a snip from a review of this novel in the NY Times, written by Ernst Pawel:

His arcane interests show up throughout his work, often with mixed results. Even ''Scenes From the Life of a Faun,'' for all its cogency, suffers from necrotic patches of pedantry. But Schmidt's wayward scholarship was itself merely the obverse of a fierce contempt for the mass mind. The stiff-necked individualism and manifest lack of faith in God as well as in humanity that made him a brilliant satirist also kept him from identifying with any party, faction or fad, Eastern or Western, that promised new kinds of final solutions. That was reason enough for him to have been widely denounced in Germany as a nihilist.

Yet he was nothing of the sort. His collector's passion for such literary curiosities as James Fenimore Cooper, Karl May and the Baron de la Motte Fouque - he translated Cooper, celebrated May's narrative art in a book-length study and compiled a mammoth biography of the author of ''Undine'' - goes far beyond mere eccentricty and confirms what a close reading of his fiction makes abundantly obvious: This self-styled cynic was an unregenerate romantic at heart. The bruising prose that marked his debut in 1946 in the novella ''Leviathan'' seemed revolutionary to a public still recovering from a steady diet of blood-and-soil epics. Actually, the ideas behind his avant-garde fiction - simultaneity of action and fragmentation of consciousness as reflected in nonlinear narrative - were rather old hat even then. Schmidt may have reinvented the wheel; more likely, given his background, he was familiar not only with Joyce, Beckett and Celine but also with German precursors such as Kafka, Brecht and Alfred Doblin. Either way, he was among the first to restore the link between German literature and the 20th century.


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Any comments? Has anybody read?

Glenn, you may have read this before.

CWP: What’s your favorite line?

NG: Embarrassed to say I don't have one. Not off the top of my head. But for Schmidt, the phrase that stays in my head is :: “My life ? ! : is not a continuum !” from Scenes from the Life of a Faun.

https://dalkeyarchive.substack.com/p/....

Thanks! I'll have read more of Scenes to come up with a favorite line. However, in Dark Mirrors, here's a bit I especially enjoyed:

Hero worship ?" I snorted contemptuously : "Dear girl !" Whoever has lived as long as I have with me, no longer believes in heroes (a few perhaps, but they are definitely long since dead).

Ha! Brilliant! Actually, I think I'll start a favorite line hashtag for my reads on X and Bluesky!!

Great idea, Reem!

I just did post my review of the novel, including many direct quotes! This Arno was such a fun read.

Will go read it now!