Der Weltensammler

Ilija Trojanow:
Der Weltensammler
München: Hanser, 2006
473 S.
ISBN 978-3-446-20652-6
Paperback edition:
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2007
English translation:
The Collector of Worlds (Faber & Faber, 2008)
French translation:
Le collectionneur de mondes (Buchet Chastel, 2008) 
Portuguese translation: O colecionador de mundos (Companhia das Letras, 2010)

The novel follows the journeys of the historical figure, Richard Francis Burton, who "collected worlds" in the 19^thcentury, like some people collect stamps. Each of his three travel destinations is described in a separate part of the novel. Burton's journey begins in India where he carries out espionage activities for the British crown. He was given this task because of his adaptability and his knowledge of Indian languages, which he learnt before his arrival. Burton becomes immersed in Indian culture. He finds a Brahmin teacher and his mistress Kundalini initiates him in tantric sexual practices.

The middle part of the novel deals with the secret, arduous pilgrimage Burton undertook to the cities of Mecca and Medina, forbidden to non Muslims. Arabia is the height of his adaptation to foreign cultures: Burton is deeply affected by the communal experience of religious immersion – and yet he distances himself from this feeling as soon as he becomes aware of it. The last destination is East Africa. Along with his fanatical hunting colleague, Speke, Burton undertakes an exploratory journey to find the source of the Nile. Burton assumes a scientific critical distance from the surrounding cultures. From an ethnological perspective, he notes his many observations in notebooks. Burton's journeys are steeped in a continual search for the divine. He nevertheless refuses any exclusive religious claims to God. He cannot, however, escape from receiving the Last Sacrament while lying unconscious on his deathbed in Trieste.

In his bestseller, Trojanow gathers a whole literary world around his protagonist, Richard Francis Burton, an enigmatic and ambivalent figure of British colonialism. In the novel we find echoes of various genres, rich in tradition, such as the biographical, the historical the adventure or the picaresque novel.

Trojanow structures "Weltensammler" as a multilayered work with a wealth of varied detail. A mise en abyme technique encapsulates the eventful narrative: the novel starts and ends with Burton’s death. At the beginning of the novel we have a heavily symbolic fire, in which Burton's diaries are burning. The devastating flames bring the principal character back to life, in a literary form. "The camel leather burns, a grimace cracks, page numbers flame, baboon sounds glow, Marathi, Gujarat, Sindhi vaporize, scribbly letters fluttering skywards as sparks before drifting down as ash. But he, Massimo Gotti, a gardener from the Krast region near Trieste, recognizes the dead Signore Burton in the fire, in his youth, in an old-fashioned uniform." The destructive fire also holds life-giving sparks: the destruction of the diaries on the orders of Burton's spouse is the prelude to the three voyages in the life of Officer Burton portrayed in the novel: British India, Arabia and East Africa.

The reader does not follow only in Burton's footsteps, but also trails the research done by the author (also impressively described in his book "Nomade auf vier Kontinenten"), since he does not accompany his character with only one narrative voice but with several: the section on India partly consists of a naïve account by Burton's servant, Naukaram. He tells a writer about being in Richard Burton's service. The writer also uses this account as a source for his poetic representation of the curious British Officer. The love story involving Burton's mistress Kundalini is reminiscent of Scheherazade. Whereas Burton's initiation into tantric love and the master-disciple relationship between Burton and the Brahmin, Upanitsche, are placed in the centre of the Indian narrative, in Arabia it is a pilgrimage that forms the focal point. Burton experiences the journey as a communal initiation: during the Hadj, the individualist Burton is dependent on his fellow pilgrims and observes religious edification as a communal experience. In this section, extracts of a travel journal alternate with dramatic witness accounts. The Arabian and Ottoman elite unsuccessfully try to understand the objectives of Burton's hadj through these witness accounts. In the last part we find the former slave, Sidi Mumbarak Bombay as counterpart of the Indian writer of the first part. However, Sidi is no writer but a story teller who relates his version of Burton's exploratory voyage to the presumed source of the Nile in flowery colours.

On the whole, this polyphonic representation does not lead to a comprehensive image of Burton, so skilled at adaptation. Burton does not only adopt the languages of his destinations, he truly becomes part of the various cultures. This goes beyond his espionage activities and does no longer constitute a masquerade. Indeed, the masquerade leads to a transformation of the wearer.

At the end of the day, the character of Burton, the nomad, remains a mystery, which is not resolved by the author. Instead, the fantasy is left to the reader, who has to solve the riddle himself. What counts are the grey areas between the self and the other, and thus Burton dies at the beginning of the novel and at the end "early in the morning, before one could have distinguished a black thread from a white one."

One may criticize the incompleteness of the glossary at the end of the novel – the author himself had not foreseen such a glossary. And yet the foreign words are woven into the musicality of the narrative voice, since the reader concentrates on the sound of these foreign expressions. The reader has to gather the meaning of these words from the context, just like Burton learning new languages. In addition to Trojanow's imaginative and colourful style, the artistic structure of the novel contributes to the aesthetic appeal of this highly acclaimed work.

The author manages to create a multifaceted and fantastic image of Burton that also shows up many ironic traits. One of Trojanow's great achievements is that he does not make up the reader’s mind for him. Through the fact that Trojanow allows several indigenous voices to speak and to describe Burton's life, the last judgment is left to the reader.