Wagner, Jan Costin

Peter Stamm: In Strange Gardens and Other Stories

There is a knockout photograph on the jacket of Peter Stamm’s “In Strange Gardens and Other Stories”. As an image - an empty, weathered chair in an overgrown garden - it’s captivatingly understated. As an object the chair appears to reflect upon the young men embarking on life who are the focus of a number of pieces in this collection. The first person is Stamm’s preferred voice. The settings might be downtown Manhattan, or Queens over there on Long Island, Italy, a lake in Switzerland, even paddling down a Swedish river. Of course, where there are young men there will be young women, well perhaps. The women are portrayed as mysterious creatures – friendly enough but, for this reason or that, distant, emotionally complicated, seemingly unobtainable. The stories are assembled as two sets, BLACK ICE and IN STRANGE GARDENS. In the first set, in his story In the Outer Suburbs Stamm investigates that all too familiar experience, which can come to haunt consciousness at later unexpected moments, when there is a brief encounter between a pair of total strangers. Something about such an encounter can stand out - unique, affecting - yet doomed to remain a fragment of personal history, which may never be repeated. Black Ice the eponymous last story of the first set, examines the way a journalist attempts to avoid engagement with the emotional reality of his subject. It describes the failing, indeed useless, efforts of the writer to establish and maintain a distance between himself and a young mother in hospital, dying of incurable TB. In this the story connects with Jan Costin Wagner’s ICE MOON. Here the first person ‘I’ is a kind of ‘everyman’, subject to the dilemma of human consciousness, failing to establish ‘distance’ while equally seeming unable to ‘connect’. How could he question this subject and not become involved with the tragedy he is confronting? Interviewer and interviewee, each one is trapped in an insular ‘own world’.

In Strange Gardens, the third story of the second set, presents readers with the mysteriousness of neighbours: with that distant relationship within which nobody actually knows anything about the other, and yet one may ask for the garden to be watered during an absence, or for the garbage bins to be brought in on Thursday. Still, ‘it wasn’t until Ruth had asked her to water the flowers that the neighbour learned that it wasn’t her first visit to the clinic. There was a beautiful garden there, Ruth said, with big old trees, almost a park.’ What We Can Do leads the reader through an awkward - actually distressing - impossible date between a girl and a man. Towards the end he (in reality it’s the ubiquitous ‘I’) says, ‘“You mustn’t expect too much, happiness consists of wanting what you get.” “I want a glass of wine,” she said, and sniffed and slowly sat up. There was a packet of Kleenex beside the bed, and she took one out and blew her nose.’

Peter Stamm’s is a world where survivors deserve a prize for being able to manage a lifetime of disconnection. His is a writing style that, word by word, directs attention to this alienation, which is plainly something that his characters experience for themselves. But is it always alienation? ‘As I lay in bed now, unable to sleep, hearing Maria’s breathing next to me I again had the feeling of absolute meaninglessness, which was at once sad and liberating. I thought I would never feel anything other than this sympathy, this feeling of connection with everything.’ The pared-back style couples with an avoidance of spelling out what’s going on. Meanwhile, emotions hang tangential to imagined emotional possibilities, and all the time there is a powerful and connecting sense of authorial concern for our condition.

Or can we escape? In one story Henry was a cowherd but has now become a stuntman who travels widely looking for the woman of his dreams. In another a Danish woman, Inger, turns her back on everything and departs hoping that things will be better in Italy. And Regina, well she’s so alone, despite living in a grand house, children gone, husband dead, that she moves to Australia!

Katharina Hacker: Morpheus

Altogether different yet in many ways remarkably the same is the very strange yet convincing “Morpheus”. Within this collection of stories by Katharina Hacker the world of classical mythology springs to life anew and claims fresh relevance to contemporary consciousness. The author has put together something extraordinary in these seven interconnected tales concerning figures from ancient Greek culture picked up and dumped into our shared modern mess. Elpenor, a companion to Odysseus (wasn’t he buried by Odysseus?), he’s the first we meet. Dead and buried? Well, that seems not to have been the case. Now he hangs about public places trying to grab the attention of anybody who comes within reach. Elpenor is more just a shape than an actual being. Hardly really even a shape! But if a shape then one whose weakness for alcohol will usually lead to calamity. Transposed, substantially “morphed” from Homer’s original, Katharina Hacker’s creation becomes the reader’s guide. It introduces itself and then its audience to a spiritually exhausted, while theatrically “existential” worldview. This at the same time as surprising others: ‘Here we are. Have I confused you with all this?’ That’s the sort of question Elpenor asks. And then, ‘You’re off? But you were going to buy me a… Now you can’t seriously be accusing me of sponging, that’s not nice, not nice at all. I was going to tell you some stories.’ And stories we are told, concerning Sisyphus, Ariadne, Minotaur, Charon, Morpheus and Mnemon. Sisyphus is still rolling the stone the gods imposed upon him as a condition of life. But there doesn’t seem to be a slope to roll it up. Instead he’s pushing it around a hotel room. The hotelkeeper doesn’t like this at all, it gets to him, he simply must know what’s what with this Sisyphus character – ‘a tall, powerfully built man… wearing a dark suit and nodding a polite greeting. The hotel owner leaps to his feet, both relieved and embarrassed, having expected someone of less elegant appearance. I do hope you’re comfortable here.’ Needless to say Sisyphus is anything but comfortable, controlled as he is by… ‘It isn’t a rock, it’s only a medium sized stone, and because it’s so light and because there’s no mountain here that I can roll it up, I do collide with the walls and furniture…’ Going on to further explain himself he blames it all on Orpheus. The reader is so easily invited into this world of displaced figures from ancient myth that the magic really works. These are touching, potent tales bringing us face to face with the reality of the adage ‘the more things change the more everything remains the same.’ Here are the constants of human life, the past informing the present, dreams melding with memory. These tales constitute a brilliant revisitation of Ovid and his characters, mixing them all up into a uniquely European vision of contemporary emptiness within which even figures from mythology are rendered emotionally powerless. Themes of loss, adoration, the frustration of desire – indeed pretty much the territory covered by Peter Stamm – these and more are handled by Hacker with ease, elegance and, in the handling, they are engulfed by a mist of sadness drifting in off some long forgotten sea of loss. Still, there is an earthy humour assisting the maintenance of perspective, grounding each story in our vacant humanity. Since MORPHEUS was published in the original German the author has gone on to win the 2006 German Book Prize for her novel DIE HABENICHTSE (THE HAVE-NOTS) published by Suhrkamp.

Jan Costin Wagner: Ice Moon

Even way up north in Finland, where Jan Costin Wagner sets his “Ice Moon”, there is this same strange certain something to the principal consciousness depicted between the book’s covers. And the cover features a photograph of a vacant picnic table in snow, giving off a message related to that of the image on the Peter Stamm jacket. This novel introduces Kimmo Joentaa, a cop with the CID in Finland. Kimmo should have been on leave recovering from the loss to Hodgkin’s Disease of his young wife, Sanna. The death of a loved one had hit him exceptionally hard - he could hardly handle life’s complex sequence - and so, keenly and obsessively he begins to turn his attention to finding a serial killer who has been making himself known through a sequence of strangely communicative murders. A woman has been smothered with a pillow while asleep; and a young father has been rendered insensible with chloroform then smothered while sleeping at a tourist hostel in a room shared with a number of other guests. There appear to be no useful clues to assist in solving these crimes. Well, that’s as far as Kimmo and other police officers can make out. A difficult case. Yet something he needs. Attempting to solve these crimes is a kind of therapy for him. ‘It dawned on him that her murder, the death of another human being, had breathed life into himself.’ As the death count rises it hits the reader, before anybody else involved with the story, that this killer is picking out his totally unsuspecting victims and in one way or another quietly stealing their lives. There are no witnesses turning up in connection with any of the deaths. But this is certainly not a whodunit. And thank heavens for that. It is rather an examination of the strange cloths we weave from unexplored levels of our consciousness. From outside the narrative it is abundantly clear that the killer is a young local who works as a piano tuner, and at the Handcrafts Museum – someone who suffers from a split personality. And someone who appears able to come and go without anybody else noticing. He leaves no clues behind at the crime scenes, can this because he’s a master criminal? Or is it simply the result of his being a person people have become so used to seeing about that he passes unseen. What’s more, equally undetected he appears able to return to the scene those objects he has taken away after committing the murder. It is as though he is approaching the state of Elpenor in Katharina Hacker’s MORPHEUS - a consciousness that has become a sort of ‘shape’ only to be noticed when drawing attention to itself.

On the discovery of a third victim’s body – this time a beautiful young actress – our investigator suddenly realises that a part of him desires that these outrages continue unsolved because they are helping him cope with his own depression. By degrees, driven by intuition, it is Kimmo who, among the well-drawn police in this story, has decided that the killings are indeed the work of just one man. And then, under the influence of his own extreme grief he starts to connect with the mindset of this other, criminal, parallel being.

Kimmo’s character is what drives this plot. He has recognised various parallels between the sequence of deaths and that of his wife. His mind returns repeatedly to the scenes surrounding her passing, and this is moving, involving. Yet, at the same time, well towards the end at least, a reader might want not just Kimmo but also the author to let go a little. There are other powerful elements, not the least of which is the Finnish landscape, the cold, white moon illuminating a killer at his work. And in sharp contrast to nature’s disinterest and Kimmo’s grief there are his boss’s uncontrollable rages at the police force’s seeming impotence in the face of this new wave of crime.

Leonie Swann: Three Bags Full

Faced with a real crime situation, potency is the key word when it comes to sheep detectives. Well, at least that is how things are in Leonie Swann’s enchanting, captivatingly anthropomorphic, ”Three Bags Full”. (How else but through anthropomorphic projection can we begin to get out of ourselves and back into the rhythms of this multifarious world?) Readers will be amazed at the ease with which Swann beguiles them into a fantasy of lamb adoration. Why, just by flicking a thumb through the book’s 351 pages, from back to front, there at the bottom right hand corner the eye meets the sweetest line drawing of a woolly ewe frolicking on grass. Wonderful! Translated from the German, set in Ireland (the sheep are grazing ‘the greenist, richest pasture in all Ireland’), this story offers a welcome break from the crime genre’s usual fare of global terrorism, serial killing, the Mafia, paedophilia, whatever. The only serial here is cereal in the form of grass seed heads ingested by a bunch of mild mannered, and highly educated sheep. And yet it’s a real page-turner.

It would normally be assumed that the lot of a shepherd is a considerably happier one than that of any individual within his flock; assumed as well that it’s the shepherd who has all the brains. But no! Not so! When the mob of sheep in question find their shepherd, George Glenn, dead, an agricultural implement sticking out of him, it’s a very smart ewe - ‘the cleverest ewe in all Glennkill’ - who sets about seeking a solution to the puzzle presented by this crime. Clues are uncovered and so on and on we go, held in thrall by each passing, whimsical and witty page. A hardened crime fiction reader might ask, so what? But that’s the magic of it. It’s Miss Maple, the natural born lead investigator, plus others in the flock with names like Othello and Cordelia, who get down to the detective business. Not of course to forget the absent minded head ram, Sir Ritchfield, who is rather long in the tooth, nor Mopple, or dear Heather, and also not to overlook Zora who handles heights particularly well. Why these names? Because their beloved shepherd, George, liked to read aloud to his four-legged friends. And not just read lowbrow anythings. Certainly not! George was intent on introducing them to the finest works of human literature, and in doing so had given to each a name extracted from the classics.
So, who should these cultivated sheep suspect of committing such a terrible crime? High on the list there’d have to be Ham the local butcher, wouldn’t there? The flock don’t like him at all, nor should they. Then there’s another shepherd named Gabriel, a rather charismatic character, he’d have to be a possibility. Next among the suspects there is the preacher who as far as our flock can work out might or might not in fact be God himself.

Along the way – and the journey is worth every step and frolicsome leap - readers are treated to small gems of sheepish wisdom along the lines of, ‘You won’t be able to herd anyone until you can herd yourself’.

The Books

Stamm, Peter: In Strande Gardens and Other Stories / transl. by Michael Hofmann – New York : Other Press, 2006. - 143 pages. ISBN 1-59051-169-7. Original title: In fremden Gärten (German)

Hacker, Katharina: Morpheus / transl. by Helen Atkins. - New Milford : Toby Press, 2003. - 103 pages. ISBN 1-902881-66-4. Original title: Morpheus oder der Schnabelschuh

Wagner, Costin: Ice Moon / transl. by John Brownjohn. - London: Harvill Secker, 2006. - 276 pages .ISBN 1-84343-214-5. Original title: Eismond (German)

Swann, Leoni: Three Bags Full / transl. by Anthea Bell. –London: Black Swan/Random House, 2007. – 35 pages. ISBN 9780552773386. Original title: Glenkill (German)