Jörg > Recent Status Updates

Not sure if I will reach my goal to have a better command of Greek mythology. Too many difficult names, too many similarities, too confusing relations. I find myself turning back to previous stories often when someone reappears. What was it again that Bellerophon did? Who fathered whom? Weren't they relatives?

Sometimes Köhlmeier mentions variants himself. More often, he chooses one most to his liking and retells it in his own moody interpretation. Not always the most conventional one as comparisons with the myths on Wikipedia show. He firmly sticks with Iason being a swaggerer only excelling in charm. He changes the Roman Amor back to Eros in Amor and Psyche. Other Roman sources are used for Aeneas and with Ovid.

Lots of recurring patterns in those myths. Mixing with gods will not end good. Choosing one will anger the others. Prophecies will come true, especially those involving to not try to father a son. He will be born and devastate his father. Multiple most beautiful women in the world, a certain recipe for dead kings and suitors. Greece must have been full of monsters, to be slain by some hero to fulfill a task.

Köhlmeier is acting like a cozy old fairytale teller. It is obvious by reappearing repetitions that each tale was written to stand on its own but with a view to the whole project when he references to tales to be told another time.
I enjoy his personal assessments of gods and when he puts myths into context with the bible, the Nibelungen or later revisions and variants.

Those gods were a mischievous bunch of buggers. Sensous and mostly promiscuous. And what about those titans. One of them, Prometheus, brought fire to mankind and in a variant was the demiurge creating us from ashes.

I don't like Köhlmeier's style in this but I'm here to refresh and structure my fragmentary knowledge of Greek mythology. It is even more bloody than the old testament.

There are writers who write intense. And there are quiet writers. Stamm definitely belongs to the second category. But while quietness mostly is associated with a certain melancholy, tenderness or soft feelings, Stamm's quietness is lost, distanced, cold.

All the more surprising that this time he gives us an end with a ray of hope. Didn't expect that.

The narrator is an unlikely hero. Suffering from OCD, autistic traits. He shuns decisions, the world around him slowly fades away. His encounters with Fabienne happen in his mind as he's mostly living in his fantasies.

An interesting problem: how do you archive love. Is it medical/pathologic, sociology/encounters, biology/hormones? The thesaurus doesn't help.

At times hard to bear how he stands in his own way.

Since 'To the Back of Beyond', the novels of Stamm disappoint me. But I'm still hoping to rediscover the magic of his early books. This seems to be in line with his recent works. A narrator estranged from the world, living in his thoughts. He wants to archive everything. He even bought the archive of his former company to avoid its destruction. Is he now archiving the feelings of his first unfulfilled love?

A neat twist to the depravity on display: "The notion of the community as a voluntary association of enlightened citizens has died for ever. We realize how suffocatingly humane we've become, dedicated to moderation and the middle way. The suburbanization of the soul has overrun our planet like the plague." It's all part of a plan to heal the soul.

Gets better the more of Eden-Olympia's underbelly is revealed. The Fight Club vibes were correct. Also other depravities, mostly of sexual nature. The USP seems to be in providing a safe environment for the modern business aristocracy to live out any vice without fearing punishment. The masters of the universe seem to have concluded an unholy alliance with executive power.

Shouldn't look closely at the characters. They won't withstand scrutiny. But it's ok for a dystopic thriller like Super-Cannes. Unluckily, the worldbuilding hasn't aged well either. The Silicon Valley campuses have shown how Eden-Olympia should look like. And Japanese companies as dystopic representation of a neon cold future are a thing of the past. Still, a fun read with Fight Club vibes so far.

Roland Barthes wrote The Death of the Author. In this discourse, writing and creator are far from unrelated. And I cannot exclude the person of the author from the interpretation.
Barthes had changing homosexual relationships with young male students. The fragments indicate that these relationships never went far beyond the initial amourousness.

Many figures are pathologic. If written today, they would represent ghosting, gaslighting, narcissism, toxic behaviour. Glad that he couldn't use these terms of relationship war. The fragments are a mixed bag. In some he achieves his goal of reader identification. Often, he's lost in semiotics or pet peeves. If relationships featured all of them, I'd stay single for life.

The fragments are a discourse by someone deeply in love. Those lukewarm on love won't find much here. It is far from a self-help book anyway. No recommendations, just observation, thoughts, recollections. Ordered into those fragments. And always again Werther. Barthes must have gone through every word Goethe wrote and weighted it for this discourse. Nothing found too light in Werther.

The trouble begins with the definition of discourse (used for the French and English title) vs. language (the German title). For a semiotician, this might be clear. I lack the reference scheme. The sum of the fragments is the discourse of love. Each fragment is a figure, described exclusively by the loving one as the subject. Barthes' slip box about love, ordered alphabetically.

Must have been hard to see the world through the eyes of Barthes. He cannot simply see a photograph. He sees dimensions. He wonders about his reception of it. Why he likes one and not the other. What a photograph signifies, an imperious sign of death, "that has been".

Explicitly. Barthes is not a photographer. All the more worthy to read his thoughts on PHOTOGRAPHIE. About the operator (most interesting to me as an amateur photographer), the referent (least interesting) and the spectator (worthwhile to gauge the reception).
My reactions fluctuate between WTF as I don't have his vocabulary as semiotician and aha moments on illuminating insights and classifications.

The resolution is the most clichéd one possible. Love. But I can forgive this to YA literature.
The book lives from the boundless imagination of Ende. The heritage of his father, a surrealist painter, is visible in many scenes.

The second half with Bastian taking over the lead is a moral journey. The amulet Auryn is akin to the ring in LOTR. It lets Bastian forget his life outside Phantasién, corrupting him morally. Not Gollum-like corruption level but a YA version of it.
I'm now sure that I only saw the movie and never read the book before even though I'm sure that I loaned it from a library in my youth.

The thought about the connection between Phantasién and the "real world" is surprisingly complex for a YA novel when you think it through. And surprisingly topical even though Ende couldn't have foreseen fake news.
Just began the second half when the story shifts from Atreju to Bastian who just began his power dream as creator.

Wonderful red and green print for reality and Phantásien. 26 chapters from A-Z, each introduced with a one-page drawing of the letter and starting with a word using it. In it, Bastian reads the very same book, a never-ending nesting structure. AURYN, the amulet of the childlike empress, features two snakes eating each other. A thoughtful construction, loving details, fantasy shall never end.

At times, the plot crawls at a snail's pace, then it runs like a racing horse. Edward on being separated from his company on the retreat, quickly travels from northern England to London, back to Scotland, gets pardoned, gains the hand of Rose and is the last visitor to his friend and chieftain Fergus Mac Ivor before his beheading.

Scott did a fine job describing the interests and political machinations behind the Jacobite Rising. An endeavour doomed to fail under any circumstances. That it went as far as it did is only explicable by lack of communication, slow movement, wrong decisions and fatal allegiances. The images of the low- and highlander Scots aren't very favourable anymore now that the lustre peels off.

Taken hostage by interchanging parties, Edward ends up without any proper accomplishment at the court of Bonny Prince Charlie, joins the Jacobite rising in prominent position and shows his charming side at a ball in Holyrood Castle before the march south starts the following day.
Refreshing to have such a hapless passive character as hero today when everyone seeks self-fulfillment and is the center of his universe.

Waverley is merely a pawn of those around him. His agency is limited, his decisions amount to nothing. It's difficult to believe the appreciation he gets by the highland chieftains, the affection received by the ladies.
His resignation from the English army is forced upon him. His effort to seek justice in Edinburgh is about to be thwarted by petty villagers and a scheming publican.

Of concern for those interested in the emergence of the literary novel. Supposedly the first English historical fiction. Super popular at its time. A different time, different readers. For a modern reader, it is slow plodding, verbose, cumbersome. The redeeming features so far are glances of Scott's british humour and eruditeness.
This damned tiny print of my edition and the antiquated English are a huge challenge.

Edward Waverley is a dilettante, quick-witted but bored easily and acting on a whim without own convictions, driven by others. An interesting choice and essential for the novel, judging by the introduction.
Scott is at times really funny, oozes witty irony, constantly breaks the fourth wall with explanations to the reader and gets lost in long-winded tedious descriptions of environment. Will be a tough read.

After two auto-fictional books nominated for the Deutscher Buchpreis in recent years, now for something completely different. Historical fiction from the 19th century. I blame it on a visit to Edinburgh four years ago and the huge Scott monument there, making me a bad conscience that I know nothing about this guy.

How much is fiction, how much is true life. It feels very close to the truth. The roles are clear. Mother is exploited by father for her resources. She does all the care work. Her studies are doomed to fail. She never gets his support when needed. When she makes a heritage, he uses it to build his dream home while keeping all his salary for his personal purposes. No love in this marriage. Mom good, dad bad.

Since Edgar Reitz' Heimat, the Hunsrück is synonymous with backwardness in West Germany. Dröscher grew up there in the 80s. All the expected prejudices are there. The ones determining the role of a woman are in focus in this auto-fiction.
As common for this genre, surprisingly detailed memories combined with retrospection.