Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Attraction of Things [and] Story of Love in Solitude
WORK NOTES: both trans by Rachel Careau
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1941
WEBSITE:
CITY: Geneva
STATE:
COUNTRY: Switzerland
NATIONALITY: French
http://www.ndbooks.com/author/roger-lewinter/ * http://www.full-stop.net/2016/11/09/reviews/john-trefry/the-attraction-of-things-story-of-love-in-solitude-roger-lewinter/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1941, in Montauban, France; immigrated to Switzerland with family during World War II.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, and translator.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Roger Lewinter was born in France to Austrian Jewish parents. His family moved to Switzerland during World War II, and Lewinter lived much of his life in Geneva. He is a writer of both literary and scholarly works and the author of fiction. He is also an editor and translator of works, primarily from German to French, including works by Georg Groddeck, Karl Kraus, Elias Canetti, Robert Walser, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
In 2016, two of Dewinter’s works of fiction were published in English: the novel The Attraction of Things: Fragments of an Oblique Life and the short story collection Story of Love in Solitude: Eros Oorpheus Eurydice. “Majestically rendered by Rachel Careau [the books’ translator], their publication represents an opportunity to give Lewinter the prominence he deserves, since, even in his native France, he is known primarily for his translation work rather than his singular prose,” noted Bomb Web site contributor Karl Wolff, adding later: “In many ways, … [the books] demonstrate Lewinter’s obsession with cataloguing his reading and translation.” Commenting on both volumes, Full Stop Web site contributor John Trefry remarked: “Both diminutive books incant, with a singular voice of prose, the being of a limitless morass of people, objects, works of literature, and intellectual concepts all living in time, awaiting respite from their isolated vectors.”
The Attraction of Things
Lewinter’s novel titled The Attraction of Things: Fragments of an Oblique Life presents a story that focuses on a man’s obsession with things and their psychological impact. Lewinter writes in the novel’s introduction that the story is about “a being who lets himself go toward what attracts him, toward what he attracts, — beings, works, things –, and who, through successive encounters, finds the way out of the labyrinth, to the heart, where passion strikes. This is a story of a letting go toward that passion.”
The Attraction of Things is narrated by a translator who collects antique records and things. The objects he collects were once owned by other people who had either died or let go of the objects due to various circumstances, from financial problems to ridding themselves of an emotional attachment. The narrator spends a lot of time at flea markets searching out such items. Extensive passages are dedicated to describing the things the narrator has found and the reasons he has decided they are important to add to his collection. He notes in passing that his mother has died. However, he is more interested in his father and his various losses, from the death of his wife to his failing health and eventual move into a nursing home.
“This story of loss, however, comes to light through the story of scratched records and broken porcelain cups and flea markets,” noted Asymptote website contributor Poupeh Missaghi, adding: “He weaves these two aspects of his life so tightly together that they seem inseparable, and of the same weight.” A Kirkus Reviews Online contributor called The Attraction of Things “a provocative, sometimes-baffling set of riffs on inanimate objects and death, in that order.”
Story of Love in Solitude
Story of Love in Solitude: Eros Oorpheus Eurydice contains “three stories of recurrence, death, and self-discovery,” as noted by a Publishers Weekly contributor. In the title story “Story of Love in Solitude,” Lewinter presents a lonely narrator who spots a spider on his way to bed one night. Then each night he sees a spider on his way to bed. Before long, he is looking forward to the company of a spider every evening. “The scenario is episodic, a simple commentary in which the brevity of the encounters is such that they hardly have room to develop before being suddenly cut off,” wrote Asymptote website contributor Thea Hawlin.
In second story titled “Passion” the narrator becomes attached to a camellia. It turns out that he purchased the camellia in 1986, a full two decades after giving a another similar flour to his parents on their anniversary. Over time he has come to identify the camellia with his mother’s death. The narrator has taken care of several camellia plants over the years and the plants represent not only death and decay but also rebirth as the narrator translates Rilke and reminisces about the past. The narrator is working on a translation of Rilke as the camellia grows into a luxurious plant. Before long, however, the narrator is trying desperately to keep the plant alive as insects attack it.
The third story in the collection, “Nameless,” finds the narrator struggling with loneliness. He eventually becomes obsessed with a man working at the local market after some interactions with him. The narrator ends up spying on the man from a distance. At one point the narrator is given a book and quickly recognizes himself in a character whose life is almost identical to his own.
Lewinter “creates entire worlds, labyrinthine but also sensual.,” wrote New York Journal of Books website contributor Karl Wolff, adding: “Lewinter’s prose is the perfect balance between the intellectual plumbing the depths of philosophy and a practical explorer of tastes and sensations.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked: Lewinter’s “imaginative energies are easy to appreciate in these small doses.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Lewinter, Roger, The Attraction of Things: Fragments of an Oblique Life, New Directions Books (New York, NY), 2016.
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2016, reviews of The Attraction of Things and Story of Love in Solitude: Eros Oorpheus Eurydice,
Publishers Weekly, September 19, 2016,”Lewinter Wonderland,” review of The Attraction of Things and Story of Love in Solitude, p. 44.
ONLINE
Asymptote, http://www.asymptotejournal.com/ (November 17, 2016), Poupeh Missaghi and Thea Hawlin, “In Review: Two New Books Mark a French Author’s English Debut.”
Bomb, http://bombmagazine.org/ (June 1, 2017), K. Thomas Kahn, review of Story of Love in Solitude and The Attraction of Things.
Full Stop, http://www.full-stop.net/ (November 9, 2016), review of The Attraction of Things.
Literary Hub, http://lithub.com/ (November 15, 2016 ), review of The Attraction of Things.
New York Journal of Books, http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (June 1, 2017), Karl Wolff, review of Story of Love in Solitude and The Attraction of Things.
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (September 19, 2016), review of Story of Love in Solitude.
Roughghosts, https://roughghosts.com/ (December 29, 2016), “The Enigmatic Fiction of Roger Lewinter: Story of Love in Solitude and The Attraction of Things.“*
Roger Lewinter was born in Montauban, France, in 1941, to Austrian Jewish parents. The family moved to Switzerland during the war, and he has lived much of his life in Geneva. For more than forty years he has worked as a writer (of both literary and scholarly works), an editor, and a translator (of Georg Groddeck, Karl Kraus, Elias Canetti, Robert Walser, and Rilke, among others). Among his dozen books are three works of fiction.
QUOTE FROM BOOK
Lewinter Wonderland
263.38 (Sept. 19, 2016): p44.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
This fall, new directions brings the first two books by the notable French author into English
The Attraction of Things
Roger Lewinter, trans. from the French by Rachel Careau. New
Directions, $13.95 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-0-8112-2520-5
Lewinter's serpentine "fragments of an oblique life" nominally recount three years in a man's life, but they more closely resemble a work that his narrator wants to translate: "a text that, improvised on each occasion in a state of concentration, was a simple verbal process" for its writer, but for the reader becomes a "labyrinth from which to find the way out." The narrator is an accomplished translator and avid collector of antique records, Kashmir shawls, and other objets d'art, and is increasingly solitary. His elderly father, his only living parent, is growing fragile: "Making up for twenty years in three weeks he suddenly became an old man." An ex-girlfriend whose new book is finally finished mentions that she's "getting married in two hours." The narrator's relationships with men afford him the understanding that gender is ultimately unimportant, "since it is negated for the body that in its fulfillment is escaped," but these relationships have also proven transitory. In this ephemeral world, the flea market offers consolations and coincidences within which the narrator locates a deeper meaning. Finding an intricately woven shawl, or the old sound recording of a dancer in which only the music and "a sharp tap of the castanets sufficed to evoke in its brilliance the entirety of beauty," he moves closer and closer to revelation. Lewinter's sentences can span several pages, moving backward and forward through narrative time; through their possible frustration, readers too may approach enlightenment. (Nov.)
* Story of Love in Solitude
Roger Lewinter, trans. from the French by Rachel Careau. New
Directions, $10.95 trade paper (64p) ISBN 978-0-8112-2519-9
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Comprising three stories of recurrence, death, and self-discovery, Lewinter's collection is refreshing in its fundamental strangeness; his narrator's road to realization dramatically eschews the linear and doubles back, many times, on itself. In "Story of Love in Solitude," the narrator, living alone, welcomes the evening company of an unusually punctual spider, "the only animal, in practice, with whom it is possible to coexist within strictly defined, and respected, territories." In "Passion," the narrator grows attached to a camellia that he purchases for himself in 1986, 20 years after giving a similar flower to his parents for their anniversary. As he works on a translation of Rilke, the camellia grows "luxuriant ... encircled with an armor of foliage that, under the low-angled rays of the afternoon sun, lit up ... into which, often, in the evenings, with exultation, I would plunge my face." Soon, however, the flower is attacked by insects, and the narrator must fight frantically for its survival. In "Nameless," the narrator's struggles with loneliness and desire--concurrent with the story of the camellia--are made explicit as he becomes enamored with a seller at the local market, with whom he fails to reach an understanding even as "the devourment of not knowing his name was exacerbated nearly to madness." Lewinter's prose--lengthy sentences, punctuated largely by commas, semicolons, and dashes--has hypnotic appeal when combined with his tendency toward meandering asides and lovely melancholy. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Lewinter Wonderland." Publishers Weekly, 19 Sept. 2016, p. 44. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464352695&it=r&asid=68499fb8844352ef32288a2e59d9ad25. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464352695
November 9, 2016
The Attraction of Things / Story of Love in Solitude – Roger Lewinter
by John Trefry
The Attraction of Things coverStory of Love in Solitude cover[New Directions; 2016]
Tr. by Rachel Careau
Everything we experience, in each of our seconds of perception, is an intersection of time and space. Physicists call these “events.” They need not be significant. They are four-dimensional coordinates. Though, we are, if honest with ourselves, always waiting for coincidences to dog-ear the ceaseless events, or looking backward to find points that we later learned had coincidental significance. What elevates some of these to coincidence and smooths others into the rhythm of normalcy — until they may be called upon by future linked intersection? Roger Lewinter settles into this question in two serene novels, his first two books in English translation, The Attraction of Things and Story of Love in Solitude. Both diminutive books incant, with a singular voice of prose, the being of a limitless morass of people, objects, works of literature, and intellectual concepts all living in time, awaiting respite from their isolated vectors.
Hieronymus Bosch is a pivotal figure in The Attraction of Things, both as a person and an intellectual concept. The narrator translates a German text asserting that Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights does not depict the fall of man, but details a heretical notion that true salvation is found in a particular, unspecified, form of sexual relations. I finished reading Lewinter’s books on the 500th anniversary of Bosch’s death. Is it coincidence that for 500 years the churning dirge of physics led this book to fall in my hands, for my time to be managed in such a way that I finished it on this precise day? Or is the coincidence more that I happened to slow my scroll through Twitter at the precise moment that someone mentioned it was the 500th anniversary of Bosch’s death? We don’t know of all the things that don’t befall us.
The narrator of Lewinter’s two books exists in time, but does not wholly pass through it. He is more concerned with time as a location, an event, than time as a measure, or as duration. This conception is largely developed in the style of the prose, which I will discuss in detail shortly, but also through the inflection of the style by its vaguely narrative content, which, like the specification of a material, must be apparent before its methods of assembly are determined.
Coincidence is the knowledge of a relationship within the intersection that is occurring, or has occurred, the knowledge at last coinciding, perhaps after many unobserved repeats of the pattern, with the operands of the situation. It is the signification of the intersection by external forces of meaning. Relationships are aspects of time, not physicality. Lewinter’s narrative tendencies cultivate the novelty of coincidence in two ways. The first is through the narrator’s obsession with collecting. The narrator, a translator and writer, collects intellectual connections. His work as a translator seems heavily burdened with the subjective lineage and tenuous interconnection the works he elects to translate. Follow this: in Paris to work on a translation of Diderot’s Complete Works, he stays in the vacated room of a friend, who, deciding to learn Chinese, will no longer be translating the aforementioned work on Bosch, by Wilhelm Fränger, and offers him the chance to translate it in his stead, and this friend, when they first became acquainted, had insisted he read The Man Without Qualities, the English version of which had been translated by the same man who translated the Fränger into English. Of course this is meaningless, the asterism to bind the accident of stars, but it is as close to being meaning as can be found in the volume of his life. The facets of his biography, primarily these translations and taking care of his ailing parents, are also punctuated by collecting trips to various flea markets in search of early gramophone records and Kashmir shawls. In almost the opposite of Proust’s mnemonic triggers, which materialize without notice into the consciousness, Lewinter’s flea market discoveries are opportunities to mark events in time, to elect the physical form that will embody a memory. He does not always find the object of his desire. Yet, the emptiness of those moments, the absence of an object, or the sense of loss for an object unknown, is also an intersection. Collecting makes a specific kind of intersection. It is an active pursuit of the intersection with a known, or a category of knowns that lie waiting, distributed in space. A month after his father’s death, the narrator has the urge to give the event significance, as though it had none already:
On Saturday, April 23, I went to the flea market, telling myself that what I would find would be my father’s sign, and as I was arriving in front of the stand of the Ange du Bizarre, to whom, seven years earlier, I had precisely specified the shades of the Kashmir shawl that I would ideally want, Sabine was unfolding on the ground, to lay out her objects on, ragged but shining, the very one, which I bought for 160 francs: an embroidered square from which emerged, fringed in black, commanding the space in its fullness, a Saint Andrew’s cross whose arms erected at the center a cross elongated into domes — white, black, green, and turquoise blue — , gathering, at their junction, around the black heart formed from a square crossed by a diamond, eight concentric swirls, of precious stones and flesh at once: vermilion, yellow, purple; turning crimson to the eye, shot through with fire.
The second manner Lewinter’s narratives reflect on the intersections of coincidence is through considering its antonym, the insignificant passage of time, as it is observed in the decay of the most languishing operand, human life. It should be noted that, in light of the loving care of the shawl description, Lewinter’s overwhelming urge to cement its precise physiognomy in prose, we do not have a sense of what the narrator’s father looked like. In reading Lewinter I thought often of other writers’ fascination with the coincidences of human relationships, including the burden of those stretched through history. Sebald came racing to the forefront. As unpredictable as people and human relationships are, which tend to make their intersections more treasured, they are different to the collector, to Lewinter, for whom it is things that seem more happenstance and rarified, and it is they that are celebrated where someone like Sebald would place humans. In The Attraction of Things, the human things and the collected things seem quite separate, one in lieu of the other. In Story of Love in Solitude, the relationships focus on the collector’s urge for control over the inexorable change of living things, whether it be a spider in his apartment, a camellia that had belonged to his parents, or a produce vendor at the market. He follows the unpredictable march, awaiting, fighting for, a place where the balance will hold, where an intersection can bloom into an equilibrious relationship between two things, that always lies in the death of one of the operands. The ethos of both books is relentlessness, that these things are always “coming”, that they abide through our meager durations, and that we are the accidents.
I previously labored to establish the relationship between time and matter in coincidence because it helps contextualize the monolithic block of Lewinter’s prose, and how the prose, together with the narrative ethos, indulges in a specific form of Mechanism, the generally abandoned branch of scientific philosophy that describes all systems in terms of simple collisions of matter and indulges in deterministic fantasies of time and space. My supremely misguided intuition is that contemporary physics and cosmology have returned to somewhat of a similar perspective regarding time and matter. Here is physicist Sean Carroll from his book From Eternity to Here:
In philosophical literature this is sometimes called the “block time” or “block universe” perspective, thinking of all space and time as a single existing block of spacetime . . . Rather than carrying a picture in the back of our minds in which time is a substance that flows around us or through which we move, we can think of an ordered sequence of correlated events, together constituting the entire universe. Time is then something we reconstruct from the correlation of these events. We’re not committing ourselves to some dramatic conceptual stance to the effect that it’s wrong to think of ourselves as embedded within time; it just turns out to be more useful, when we get around to asking why time and the universe are the way they are, to be able to step outside and view the whole ball of wax from the perspective of nowhen.
When Lewinter writes, “ . . . connection by means of cross-invasion, where the question of knowing who is who ceases to be relevant — because one becomes the other, whom he fulfills . . . ” he is reflecting on the literary form of Mechanism in his prose style, albeit a contemporary form of such reductionism contextualized by the elegance of potential oneness found in string theory, or the nature of time being determined by the disposition of a particle.
Considered in the embodiment of prose, this oneness is a oneness of form and it is a oneness of time. The most immediate thing one notices in Lewinter’s writing is the preponderance of em dashes. The em dash glut could seem a gimmick at first, and it is, undoubtedly. Omnipresent in the two books, this is something that Lewinter has adopted as his “thing”. But an application this skilled, and this relentless, should be considered for what it does, less than what we think it might long to do (which is why we disgust so much in gimmicks, they long to do things that we know they can’t).
Lewinter is a prolific translator, primarily from German to French. Twain helps us understand the implications of this in his The Awful German Language (it should be noted that by parenthesis Twain means em dash):
An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all ten parts of speech — not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary — six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam — that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each enclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parantheses, which re-enclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens with pens; finally, all the parentheses and re-parentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it — after which comes the VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the very — merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out, — the writer shovels in “haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein,” or words to that effect, and the monument is finished.
The beclausened sentence is not rare in French letters. The memory projects of both Proust and Roubaud are saddled with more commas than periods. Claude Simon regularly spun his sentences into Rumpelstiltskinian thickets for pages. But Lewinter is doing something new with the morass. Rather than the sense of articulate informality in Proust and Roubaud, rather than the diffuse and topographic prose in Simon, Lewinter’s prose resembles the temporal and causal diffusion of a cut-up. It is disconcerting and frequently disruptive to the point of incomprehension, of jettisoning any sense of burden on one moment producing the next in time. The implications of actions are scrambled and the disposition of objects in time are loosened. The em dash and the content it separates are not as jarringly discontinuous as a cut-up; it is still highly contingent and masonry. But like Perec’s Life: A Users Manual, the masonry of events are not cataloged in sequence, more in the scatter of recollection, in an additive fashion, and sometimes temporally subtractive, with little concern or editorial valuation of its consequence on the primacy of the seed statement. In prose viewed with this eternalism, a perspective that Carroll describes as holding, “that past, present, and future are all equally real,” the mechanism of what we understand to be our relationships with people, things, and space becomes expressed in the diminishment of contingency. Through indulgence in coincidence Lewinter asserts that the block time of events lacks conscious motives for hierarchy. This accounts for both the nihilism of the truth — that all is oblivion —, and the inescapable inflection of our perceptions — that desire (collecting and love) is the only thing that can mark an intersection.
The best thing I can do is just share characteristic Lewinter with you at some length. This is approximately half of a 500-word sentence that opens the story “Passion” from Story of Love in Solitude:
A camellia which I identified — placed, in my parents’ living room, opposite my office —, in November 1978, one week after the death of my mother, had withered on the stalk, suddenly losing its leaves — I had given it to my parents, a dozen years earlier, for their anniversary, one December 27 — , while a second camellia, which was bought for the same occasion the following year and which my mother, six months later, when it wilted — I said she ought to throw it out soon —, not having a green thumb but remaining obstinate, had been able to bring back to life, flourished; from then on, having misunderstood what is beyond understanding, gripped, to the same degree that the second responded, by the impulse to buy a camellia that would restore the first — in December 1980, and whereas until then its buds had fallen, a sudden passion elating me, it had produced two long-blooming flowers, to flower again regularly when I had taken it home with me, in November 1982, shortly before the death of my father —, restraining myself: the one, however, that I saw, on the first of February 1986 at eight o’clock in the morning on my way to the flea market, in front of Fleuriot, riveting me on the spot — it was a shrub more than three feet high . . .
At first, Lewinter’s use of the em dash, and the way that it binds time and space, brings out about sympathies to the lauded long take in cinema (go read this interview with Janice Lee if you are interested in a more voracious catalog and perspective http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/observations-on-the-long-take/). But the reason it comes to mind here is more specifically thematic than formal. I think of the film Russian Ark. Certainly it is the most bravura of the long takes, the entire 99-minute film being one steady-cam shot meandering through the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. Lewinter’s sentences are not remarkably long, not bravura, simply noticeably long. There is truly nothing interesting about the long take or the long sentence in and of themselves. These feats become noteworthy when they serve to illuminate an aspect of the conceptual project that would not percolate forth otherwise. In the case of Russian Ark and Lewinter’s works that is, inextricable from the duration and continuity of these tactics, time. Perhaps because of the difference in medium, but certainly because of the difference in tonal use of the duration, the two works manifest time very differently. Russian Ark, in its voyeuristic invaginations, sees time, although on a grand scale, in a quite a human way, as unfolding. Three hundred years of Russian history play out. However, the continuity of human life, the continuous gaze through history, makes it feel that, although our lives are very long, that that history is recent, and knowable, and within the realm of comprehension. Where durations like the time since the big bang (14 billion years) are silly and inhuman, the notion that only forty generations have passed since the Magna Carta was signed, seems easily within our grasp. Very similar in ethos, but different in its physics, Lewinter asserts that time, as a sentence, visible in its extent on the page, durational in its reading but not in its image, is a mass, present all at once, although aggregated like granite. The signing of the Magna Carta is not so long ago, it is present now. But the physics of Lewinter are far more inclusive than Russian Ark; the Big Bang is also present now, which of course we know it is, from our vantage, reaching us in the lugubrious protraction of electromagnetic waves from the cartographic precipice of time.
Lewinter is a prose stylist of lithic luminance. These tiny books are blocks. In a way, in a type of reading that is open to the spirit of the book as being in the world, Lewinter’s prose argues that literature, in its abstraction, is best to embody the coincident sameness of all manifestations and phenomena, whether they be objects, living things, or more matrix like as time or relationships, where other forms of static art exist more solely as material reflections, as things themselves, and do not as much smear, do not empty themselves so as to contain other things.
John Trefry is an architect and the author of the novel PLATS, the caprice THY DECAY THOU SEEST BY THY DESIRE, and the forthcoming APPARITIONS OF THE LIVING, his work has appeared on The Fanzine and forthcoming on Black Sun Lit. He contributes to Entropy Magazine and Minor Literatures. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.
Roger Lewinter's Story of Love in Solitude and The Attraction of Things
by K. Thomas Kahn
Translated by Rachel Careau
New Directions, 2016
The Attraction of Things and Story of Love in Solitude, two short books by Roger Lewinter, are the first by the French author, editor, and translator to appear in English. Majestically rendered by Rachel Careau, their publication represents an opportunity to give Lewinter the prominence he deserves, since, even in his native France, he is known primarily for his translation work rather than his singular prose.
These two slim volumes, which are somehow stories, memoirs, meditations, diaries, and novels all in one, operate as much at the level of the sentence as that of the story. Indeed, reading Lewinter is akin to being inside his head as he unfolds long, layered sentences and myriad digressions—often rendered in dash-offset clauses—that encourage comparisons to Marcel Proust. Other authors come to mind as well, in particular writers he has translated such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Elias Canetti, and the German physician and writer Georg Groddeck. Lewinter has clearly steeped himself in their work, and their presence and influence is evident in the way he pitches his sentences on the razor's edge between syntax and meaning.
In many ways, The Attraction of Things and Story of Love in Solitude demonstrate Lewinter's obsession with cataloguing his reading and translation; mentions of Denis Diderot, Karl Kraus, Canetti, and especially Groddeck abound. In compulsive and meticulously detailed accounts of his translation work, dates become obsessive features that recur and morph, as if Lewinter were experiencing every day's iteration all at once, heedless of any temporal logic whatsoever.
The result is a singular mix of aesthetics, ars poetica, and the mundane, which, filtered through Lewinter's unique sensibility, is never boring. The internal realities of reading and writing blur and intersect with the external details of the lives of friends, lovers, and family. Ruminating on the Sonnets to Orpheus at a flea market, he encounters a beautiful boy who sends him into spasms of lust as well as agony: "His body, the more I approached the end—the thunder-stroke of joy—, out of a single nostalgia that I couldn't explain to myself, tormented me unspeakably." His translation of the latter's Duino Elegies is caught up with his description of nursing two camellia plants, one of which comes to symbolize his dying mother—it's "a paradox," Lewinter notes, his thoughts running outside of time while she runs out of time, because "for [the tree] … time didn't exist."
It seems Lewinter's main aesthetic interest and passion lies with Groddeck. His syntax and grammar mirror the latter's style, which flouts the temporal and causal logic of the traditional sentence. Ultimately, Lewinter's sentences are the reason why English-language speakers should read him. Not only does he point to ways that one might expand the grammatical and syntactical confinement of the English sentence, there is no ultimate distinction between art and life, he implies, because—whether hunting for vintage Gramophone and Typewriter records in flea markets, mourning the loss of a parent, or navigating the lust and desire of everyday interactions—there is no way to process these prosaic events without recourse to art.
K. Thomas Kahn's criticism, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Millions, 3:AM Magazine, Numéro Cinq, and other venues. He lives in New York City.
In Review: Two New Books Mark a French Author’s English Debut
November 17, 2016 | in Reviews | by Poupeh Missaghi and Thea Hawlin
A network of veins, ponds, ferns, a system of gray stills saturated with a reddish glow in which, like a rainbow...suddenly appeared the Angel.
Asymptote reviews two new publications—a collection of short stories and a novel—by Roger Lewinter, born in 1941 in Montauban, France. The author currently lives in Switzerland and has worked as a writer, editor, and translator. These are two of his three works of fiction to date, and their publication with New Directions is Lewinter’s first appearance in English, in translations by Rachel Careau.
lewinter-headshot
Story of Love in Solitude by Roger Lewinter, tr. Rachel Careau, New Directions
Review: Thea Hawlin, Social Media Manager
New Directions certainly lives up to their name with this exciting new foray into the work of a long neglected French author. Story of Love in Solitude marks the first translation of Roger Lewinter into English. Lorenzo Valentin has compared Lewinter’s writing to “a Kashmir shawl in its infinite interlacing, woven in one piece and from a single thread” and the description is apt. The continual lacing of Lewinter’s prose is a beguiling process; it may confuse and frustrate, but in its complexity it also points to beauty.
This short but sweet collection combines three of Lewinter’s tales, ‘Story of Love in Solitude’, of the title, ‘Passion’, and ‘Nameless’. Intriguingly, rather than a facing-page translation, the publishers have decided to starkly separate the translation and its original counterpart in the book. This makes cross-referencing a lot more of a challenge, but equally forces the reader to take time with the translations and appreciate them as independent from their origin.
The first, and most lyrically titled of the three, begins with an all-too familiar scenario—spotting a spider before heading to bed. Except this occurrence becomes a sinister loop. The next night, another appears and the pattern continues. The scenario is episodic, a simple commentary in which the brevity of the encounters is such that they hardly have room to develop before being suddenly cut off.
This cyclic repetition reappears in the second and longest tale, which grapples with a more extensive narrative of recovery in the aftermath of the death of the narrator’s mother. The narrator seeks solace in the delivery of a camellia, and the promise of life that plants bring during a time of mourning: ‘one must devote one’s thoughts to a plant for it to thrive, I had concentrated, so that they grew to the point of becoming’. However, like the spiders of the first tale, in this episode we are again faced with creatures that come to invade and infringe upon the life of the narrator. Soon he begins to spot the first signs of death working its way into the plants: ‘depression hollowed out in the deep green thickness’, the leaves ‘reduced to a network of veins’. The story itself is rich with the keen perceptions and terminology of a botanist: ‘corolla’, ‘calyx’, ‘stamens’. Scientific terms pepper the text with insightful and illuminating usage and create poetic images that powerfully linger: ‘the lower petals atrophied like a ruff’. The life cycles of man, plant, maggot, moth, all converge in this tale. Time passes and life and death rear their heads again and again in a variety of forms.
With the stories just a few pages each, it’s easy to see why critics have often struggled to classify Lewinter’s work. Though generally termed short stories, these could just as easily drift gently into long prose poems or flash fiction. The brevity and intensity of the tales are their defining features, and the narrative arches and spirals the cement that keeps the book together.
In the last and most poignant of the tales, ‘Nameless’, the use of dashes becomes reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Lewinter’s lines stretch and contort, shifting the focus to individual words and phrases with a poetic hand: ‘–the thunder-stroke of joy–’, ‘–purity, a matter of a movement of exact madness, depending on that instant–’. His use of punctuation throughout the collection is notable, as is Rachel Careau’s in her wonderful translation, both creating a force that draws a reader to and fro with unfailing power.
In ‘Nameless’, we are finally introduced to a narrative that involves more than one character. The interplay between the narrator and a nameless man on whom he spies from a distance at a market becomes the crux of the episode. The narrator, like an author, is able to observe from a position of safe remove and control—apart from the person he views and yet openly a part (however distant) of this person’s life.
The narrator, like Lewinter himself, is a writer and translator, and his precarious mental state is reflected in his interactions with the man at the market stand. When he is given a book he begins to see his own life mirroring art—the tale of a character he reads strikingly similar to his own. Fate becomes a physical and influencing hand: ‘a force beyond my control gripping the nape of my neck had made me move away without a word’, maintaining the natural tendency of the observer to be fascinated without daring to approach, but to puncture ‘the solitude in which he seemed to move’. Again circularity becomes key, the strange infatuation of pure and platonic love becomes a cyclical act. To simply observe a man at a market stand and enjoy his life as it is without openly interacting or engaging with it presents ‘the open possibility of love a loop without end’, where the speaker is able to savor the brief encounters of transactional utility that bind them together at the market.
Lewinter perfectly captures the strangeness of infatuation and the way in which it becomes all too easy to project one’s own narrative onto the bodies of those around us. This collection ends with frustration, a hanging colon, a piece of punctuation that calls out for more, that radiates with suspense and the suggestion of what is to come next. Lewinter gives nothing away; leaving his reader at this cliff-edge, he retreats. He causes a reflection and suspension that may not be to every reader’s taste but intrigues nonetheless. More importantly the action calls into question the boundaries of such stories. Where does fiction end? Can there ever be a true ending? Lewinter’s answer is clear—the question itself is enough.
The Attraction of Things by Roger Lewinter, tr. Rachel Careau, New Directions
Review: Poupeh Missaghi,
Roger Lewinter’s The Attraction of Things is about things and a person’s attraction to them. But after finishing the book I keep misremembering the title as The Attraction of Things Past. In my mind that “past” aspect is inseparable from the other elements of the narrative and plays a key role in the book because the narrator is as much obsessed with the past as with the matter. He chases objects that once upon a time belonged to people who had to let them go, due to death or financial or emotional necessity. The things survive and find their way to flea markets.
The narrator spends a lot of time in flea markets, searching. Records, cashmere shawls, and porcelain cups are some of the objects we get to know in detail. Lewinter dedicates long passages to their descriptions, to why the narrator wants them, how he finds them, and what he sees in them:
“… when for the second time I unfolded it, its serene luminosity deceived me; and it wasn’t until after dinner, at home, the third time I unfolded it, that there appeared to me, in its all-encompassing motion, the thread whose molecules, in equal parts solid, liquid, ethereal, according to the interplay of the colors, constructed, through a network of veins, ponds, ferns, a system of gray stills saturated with a reddish glow in which, like a rainbow, …, suddenly appeared the Angel.” (29)
Through his strolls, the narrator also tells us about translating, reading Rilke’s poetry, doing yoga, acting in a play, even if, in comparison to the time he spends on objects, these are passing interests. Even more briefly, he glides over past relationships, loss, and death. We learn of his engagement coming to an end in less than half a page: “toward the end of the meal, officially that of an engagement, she announced to me that she had a new boyfriend; giving me formal notice, by this fail accompli, if I wanted to proceed to make my own choice” (45). He mentions the loss of his mother here and there, and actually speaks more directly and in detail about his father’s loss—his declining health, the hospitalization, the move to a nursing home, and finally, his death. This story of loss, however, comes to light through the story of scratched records and broken porcelain cups and flea markets. He weaves these two aspects of his life so tightly together that they seem inseparable, and of the same weight. Yet there is a moment when he begins to reveal that perhaps his passion for objects is his way of connecting to people and the past:
“…while that evening, going to bed after the lotus, just before midnight I sank into an unconsciousness from which the telephone pulled me: On Wednesday, March 23, at 1:05, had come death.
“On Saturday, April 23, I went to the flea market, telling myself that what I would find would be my father’s sign…” (75-56).
In telling this character’s story, Lewinter’s writing takes us on a stroll through a flea market of its own. His sentences are long and winding, full of phrases and clauses, moving in and out, back and forth, between stalls and spreads, from past to present. (The complexity of these chains of words makes one wonder how translator Rachel Careau found her way around, aiming for the same style in the target language.) It takes some patience to walk with Lewinter through these passages, but if you do stay with him, you might arrive at that gem you have been looking for, or one that you weren’t even aware you needed.
Thea Hawlin (Ha-V-lin) is a writer, artist, and social media manager at Asymptote. After graduating from the University of Cambridge in English Literature and running away to Italy she has gone on to write for a variety of publications, including AnOther, VICE, Harper’s Bazaar, and the Times Literary Supplement. Her most recent fiction can be found in the forthcoming Next Review.
Poupeh Missaghi is a writer, English-Persian translator, and Asymptote‘s Editor-at-Large for Iran. A recent Ph.D. graduate from the University of Denver’s Creative Writing Program, she has published both fiction and non-fiction work in Entropy, The Brooklyn Rail, the Feminist Wire, World Literature Today, Guernica, Quarterly Conversation, and elsewhere.
THE ATTRACTION OF THINGS
by Roger Lewinter, translated by Rachel Careau
BUY NOW FROM
GET WEEKLY BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS:
Email Address
Email this review
KIRKUS REVIEW
A reissue of the author’s 1985 novella, an elliptical meditation on possessions and their loss.
This work by French-born novelist Lewinter (Story of Love in Solitude, 1989, etc.) has a definite arc, following the declining health of the narrator’s parents. But it’d be off-base to say it has a plot: Lewinter is a prose poet, delivering long, sinuous, and complex sentences that switch back and forth in time and weave around the story. (This edition includes the original French text to compare to Careau’s translation.) So though he’s contemplating mom’s and dad’s mortality, Lewinter’s hero is doing so through the filter of objects: a coveted LP; a bespoke shawl; Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry; a set of vintage porcelain. Rather than suggesting that the narrator’s fixation on stuff is misguided, Lewinter delivers an appreciation of the spiritual power of things: the shawl, for instance, possesses a “serene luminosity” whose threads are “equal parts solid, liquid, ethereal”; a singer on a record “becomes an elaboration of the divine.” Compared to the blunter depictions of his father’s trips in and out of the hospital and ultimately to hospice, the narrator can seem shallow; a brief fling with a street drunk only bolsters the notion. But Lewinter’s narrator is more interested in aesthetics than in morals. He seeks “that which transfigures the void,” and because he feels that’s more likely to be found in a song that can’t die, his remove from his father has a certain poignancy. The wooliness of the narration doesn’t wholly sell the point, but Lewinter unquestionably brings a lot of gravitas to a brief, abstracted tale.
A provocative, sometimes-baffling set of riffs on inanimate objects and death, in that order.
Pub Date: Nov. 1st, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2520-5
Page count: 128pp
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22nd, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1st, 2016
Reviewed by:
Karl Wolff
“[Lewinter’s] unique literary voice . . . is that of an obsessive, a philosopher, and a miniaturist.”
Spiders, camellia, dying parents, Rilke, a younger man at a Geneva street market—these things become obsessions to Roger Lewinter in Story of Love in Solitude. Written in dense yet fragmentary paragraph-length sentences, Lewinter’s unique style represents a daunting challenge to translators. Expertly rendered into English by Rachel Careau, Mr. Lewinter’s grammatically concentrated passages become entrancing.
In three stories spanning a meager 37 pages, he creates entire worlds, labyrinthine but also sensual. Lewinter’s prose is the perfect balance between the intellectual plumbing the depths of philosophy and a practical explorer of tastes and sensations. Marcel Proust’s super-long sentences and lush prose delineating the hierarchies and aristocratic rites of Second Empire France are the most obvious literary antecedent to Roger Lewinter.
But Lewinter’s agenda is not Proustian. It remains grounded in the present, nostalgia and regret intertwining with the immediate. Story of a Love in Solitude begins with the titular short story. The plot involves him dealing with a single spider in his apartment. As he captures and expels the first, another appears. This cycle repeats itself until he doesn’t find any more. The story itself feels akin to a clown from Samuel Beckett stuck in a cruel feedback loop. The disarmingly simple story reveals a complex and nuanced psychological portrait of a man in crisis. It is an hors d'oeuvre for the feast to follow.
The second story, “Passion,” is a meditation on death, decay, and rebirth. As with the first story, the plot is simplicity itself. Over several years, Lewinter takes care of several camellia plants. But the plot is shot through with reminiscence, botanical care, and horror. The narrator is assumed to be Lewinter, since he discusses his ongoing translation projects.
He meditates on issues surrounding the translation of Sonnets to Orpheus and The Duino Elegies, both challenging poetry cycles written by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. His obsessive care for the camellias and his meticulous descriptions of the plants bring to mind the luxurious prose of Joris-Karl Huysmans. “[S]o that I was asking myself whether, once it became acclimated, it would still produce, despite everything, a flower—their color, deep crimson bordering on purple, seemed to me as exceptional as their form, opened out flat—without the crumpled petals at their heart like those of a peony—, like roses of medieval illustrations—,” And so on.
This excerpt gives a hint at the flavor of Lewinter’s prose style. Unlike Proust or Huysmans, Lewinter’s prose begins in a deceptively pedestrian way and then runs on and on in a massive sentence, except that the sentence is an accumulation of fragments. Proust has prose that creates the atmosphere of a waking dream, lulling and seducing with a hothouse flower voluptuousness.
Lewinter urges on, each fragment and each image bringing about a compulsion and a need to reach the conclusion. Despite its pedigree of nuanced sensuality and refined intellection, the prose moves with the speed usually associated with the thriller genre.
The third story is a gorgeous exploration of infatuation. “Nameless” follows Lewinter as he witnesses a younger man working at a Geneva street market. While not a love story, a romance, or even erotica, it records Lewinter’s feelings across a spectrum of emotions. “[A]s I waited my turn, by placing myself at a slight angle let my eyes wander over him—, I knew that I shouldn’t have looked at him[.]” The story’s intensely voyeuristic atmosphere shades into a comedy of manners when he finally confronts the nameless man to buy something.
But Lewinter peppers the story with insights into human relationships. “[P]utting off approaching him until Thursday—Saturday morning, I saw that he also worked the Coutance Market, across from La Placette, assisted by a girl his age, whom I supposed, from the similarity of their appearance as well from their ease together, to be his sister, since he didn’t have the opacity of those who live with another as one—, prolonging the suspense of the vision without an exchange carried me; so that it wasn’t until two weeks later that I decided, one Monday morning, to buy from him eight ounces of peas[.]” In this brief passage Lewinter weaves together his anticipation and longing, an acerbic observation about mutual cohabitation, and his mundane task (buying peas). The story, like the volume in general, burst forth with such remarkable passages.
New Directions has released Story of Love in Solitude in a bilingual edition. At the end of the book the three stories are presented in their original French. Now Roger Lewinter can be enjoyed in both languages. His unique literary voice, seamlessly translated by Rachel Careau, is that of an obsessive, a philosopher, and a miniaturist.
Karl Wolff is currently the Staff Writer/Associate Editor for the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. In 2013 CCLaP released his book, On Being Human, an exploration of the question, “What does it mean to be human?” investigating the question by looking at various pop cultural artifacts from science fiction dystopias to Beckett novels to roleplaying games.
Image of The Attraction of Things
Author(s):
Roger Lewinter
Release Date:
October 31, 2016
Publisher/Imprint:
New Directions
Pages:
128
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Karl Wolff
“Roger Lewinter casts an exacting eye upon himself, creating in prose a self-portrait worthy of Rembrandt.”
Written with a spectral intensity, The Attraction of Things by Roger Lewinter has the subtitle Fragments of an Oblique Life. In a series of diary entries Mr. Lewinter examines his passions as they interweave with the events of his life. Dating from August 1980 to May 1983, he constructs a memoir that is also a series of analytical essays. This species of autobiographical writing defies the usual conventional literary taxonomies. Is it an essay? Is it a memoir? Lewinter defies the confines of either/or.
Rachel Careau performs a heroic feat with her translation, capturing the subtle gradations inflaming Lewinter’s various passions. He recounts his time as an amateur player in a production of Antigone. His other passions include collecting rare gramophone records and translations. During this interval he writes about his dying parents. Yet each diary entry is infused with all these things—theater, records, translation, dying parents—to such a degree that separation would be like tearing apart a tapestry. Each element becomes so tightly woven they achieve a spectral intensity. One passion blending into the other as to be seamless.
In a short paragraph prior to the diary entries, Lewinter explains his methodology. “The oracle of Apollo, at Delphi, notably consulted by Oedipus, was known as the oblique oracle. The oblique is the shortest path of destiny, the direction of a life that places itself outside straight lines, which the oblique crosses in the manner of a short circuit, quick as a flash.” He continues, saying this is a story “of a being who lets himself go towards what attracts him, toward what he attracts—beings, works, things—, and who, through successive encounters, finds the way out of the labyrinth, to the heart, where passion strikes.” He seeks personal enlightenment not through repressing the passions, but setting them free.
Inhabiting the rarefied world of opera, classical theater, and literary translation, Lewinter floats among the highbrow. His diary entries reflect an active participant who is simultaneously an acute observer. Each observation polished to a crystalline brilliance, Nabokovian in execution. “La Argentina [an old Japanese dancer], whose vision by its sheer strength had revived Spanish dance, which at the time had nearly fallen into obsolescence, must, in her pure brilliance, have embodied grace; and it wasn’t particularly suprising that, now once again, she could so enrapture an aging Japanese dancer: in the realm of art, the distinction between life and death loses its relevance, the one taking place in the other, both equally done away with for the spirit that, through beauty, signals the profound transition.” In the previous paragraph, he wrote about his dying father.
Beautiful prose isn’t what makes Lewinter worth reading. He welds this prose to intense emotions and his individual experience. With a jeweler’s eye toward the smallest detail, he exhibits his intimate passions. These passions rule over him, yet he acts neither as a libertine nor an ascetic. Roger Lewinter casts an exacting eye upon himself, creating in prose a self-portrait worthy of Rembrandt.
Karl Wolff is currently the Staff Writer/Associate Editor for the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. In 2013 CCLaP released his book, On Being Human, an exploration of the question, “What does it mean to be human?” investigating the question by looking at various pop cultural artifacts from science fiction dystopias to Beckett novels to roleplaying games.
The enigmatic fiction of Roger Lewinter: Story of Love in Solitude and The Attraction of Things
December 29, 2016 roughghosts10 Comments
It is unusual to come to the end of a book and be completely at a loss as to how to write about the reading experience one has just had, and yet feel compelled to make some sort of attempt, however indirect or uncertain that might be. And that is exactly how I find myself now, having just finished Roger Lewinter’s novella The Attraction of Things. Together with Story of Love in Solitude, a very brief collection of three short stories, these two recent releases from New Directions (translated by Rachel Careau) serve as an English language introduction to the French writer and translator’s beguiling, meditative, and sometimes simply perplexing, fiction.
lovesolitudeThe latter volume, originally published in 1989, is one of the most unusual and strangely captivating books I read all year. The stories are focused and contained, reading almost like prose poetry, but they offer a taste of Lewinter’s idiosyncratic unspooling sentences that can wind around seemingly unrelated clauses before finding their way, from beginning to end, by such a circuitous route that one often feels inclined to retrace the pattern back to its source. It is an experience akin to untangling a long garden hose, or, more appropriately, following the designs of a richly decorated tapestry such as the Kashmir shawls that Lewinter’s narrator—whose writing and translating projects mirror the author’s so directly that the line between fiction and memoir appear to blur—obsesses over in the story “Passion” and throughout the course of the longer novella. Even attempting to write about Lewinter’s prose invites a tendency to add divertive notes, set off with dashes, not entirely unlike the style he employs.
See? Already it feels as if I am spinning my wheels. The reward though, especially in the shorter pieces, lies in the attention to detail and emotion, often of a detached or self-reflective nature, that is granted the events, objects or individuals with whom the narrator is engaged. The simplest story, the opening titular piece of Story of Love in Solitude, lasts for less than three pages and concerns the persistent presence of a spider. It captures so acutely the type of everyday irritation that quickly turns to a sense of loss when the routine is broken and an odd affection is realized after the fact.
athingsThe other two stories are more complex in the attractions and obsessions they entail and introduce characteristics that are present—and I want to say, more inclined to cause a measure of frustration—throughout the novella: Lewinter’s tendency to use explicit dates and translation projects to track time while he dismantles and reconstructs the chronological (in)consistencies in his stories—one which involves an epic battle against insect infestation and fate to save two camellias, and the other, which traces the protagonist’s drawn out and ultimately fruitless obsession with a young man he observes in the market. What makes these set-pieces work is the way that, for all his musing and meandering, Lewinter writes with an almost symphonic intensity, building tension into his narratives, and bringing each one to a charged conclusion. These small discursive journeys relate ordinary events that are oddly familiar, sensitive, and moving.
The same forces are at play in The Attraction of Things, which is the earlier of the two works, originally published in 1985, and, again, the overlap of characteristics between the narrator of the novella and, at the very least, the literary career of the author, create the sense that this is one voice, an alter-ego or fictionalized version of Lewinter himself. As he states, Attraction is:
…the story of a being who lets himself go toward what attracts him—beings, works, things—and who, through successive encounters, finds the way out of the labyrinth, to the heart, where passion strikes. This is the story of a letting go toward that passion.
The path that this being follows is one that appears to be characterized by an attempt to avoid deep emotional engagement with people by allowing objects—78 RPM records, Kashmir shawls, porcelain collectibles—to distract him. Against this pursuit of things, his mother and father become ill and eventually die, he allows a relationship with a woman to drift away, and lets a man take advantage of him. His passivity approaches denial of mortality, commitment, and sexuality. The flea market and the lure of things is a refuge. So too, is his work, which primarily involves immersing himself in the words of others.
Lewinter, the author and his narrator alike, has translated Karl Kraus, Elias Canetti, Robert Walser, and Rilke among others. But of special significance perhaps, is his deep association with the work of Georg Groddeck (1866-1934), the German physician widely regarded as a pioneer of psychosomatic medicine. If nothing else, this presents a possible context for understanding the manner in which the protagonist and his parents each face, and deal with, illness and physical ailments. There is a strong self-determination and stubbornness shared by the three family members that is, at the same time, a source of frustration to the son in his own distracted state. It is also interesting that Lewinter—separating him from his narrator is becoming redundant in this context—mentions writing about the connection between Bosch and Groddeck in an essay on paradise in psychoanalysis (Groddeck et Le Royaume millénaire de Jérôme Bosch—1974). Immediately this adds a new dimension to the obsession with Kashmir shawls—the colours and designs integrating cardinal points, black hearts, and angels—that runs throughout the novella and resurfaces in the later story “Passion.” To what extent are the textiles collected, cherished and hung on the walls an attempt to reflect a dream of paradise? But, most critically, when winding one’s way through the elliptical sentences that stretch on and on, often for a page or more, the narrator’s absorption with the work of a man who envied Freud’s discovery of psychoanalysis offers a way to “read” Lewinter’s distinct style of writing.
Any quotation from either book that captures a fragment of one of the gloriously nested sentences, would fail to do justice to the effect, or serve as a necessary sample for discussion, so permit me one longer, complete quote (by happy coincidence, this passage, which I selected as I was reading, happens to end a longer excerpt that was reproduced on Lit Hub):
The health of my father, since the previous September, had been deteriorating, the drugs having less and less control over the tremor that was now paralyzing him in spurts, disjointing his day with gaps to which, not wanting to hear of another hospitalization, he reconciled himself, and which I likewise trivialized; while, returning after the three months’ interruption occasioned by Antigone to Le chercheur, I finished the word-for-word translation in June, to find myself confronted with the difficulty unresolved, since I still didn’t know how to convey in French what showed through in the German, in my version rendering, as I was aware, only a state of amazement, not, in its magnetization, the torrent of a life; and, the more I advanced, the more I was losing my way, when, on August 13, I had to have my father admitted, despite his refusal—“because you die there”—, to Thônex so that they could try, by gradually changing his medication, to stabilize his condition; but it was the balance found upon the death of my mother, three years earlier, that was undoubtedly slipping away.
Lewinter’s narrative clearly fits into the broad category of stream of consciousness writing. It is not as loosely unformed as some variations; the insertion of exact dates and concurrent writing and translation projects provides a structural formality and logic to the account. Not being well acquainted (yet) with the pioneers of the nouveau roman, I am not as well equipped as another reviewer (see John Trefry here) might be to draw refernces from that direction—my reading is necessarily instinctual and informed by the spaces where I related with particular poignancy to the larger story. The way the narrator’s mind wanders is reminiscent of the way we talk to ourselves and allows him to capture something somewhere between unarticulated thoughts and formal discourse. This is the private debate, the ongoing perseveration, the way we justify our obsessions with objects or people, our impatience with others—especially with those closest who invariably raise the most complex emotions—and any other shortcomings we care to catalogue and excuse as we structure our own internal narratives. As we articulate ourselves into being.
As the narrator’s equilibrium is slowly undone, that is, as his father’s deteriorating health challenges him to break down his own defenses, he is forced to finally open himself up and truly embrace the man he must admit he has never really understood. Father and son, mirrors in more ways than either wishes to recognize, are drawn, both resisting the pull, into a full acknowledgement of their affection for one another. And what is the first thing our narrator does to mark this breakthrough? He looks for an object to commemorate the occasion. There is constant interplay between emotional exhilaration and exhaustion that drives The Attraction of Things, at the level of the sentence and across the text as a whole, that to no small degree, contributes to the state in which a reader emerges at the end. In the span of 79 small pages one has experienced something at once fantastic and draining.
Not unlike a session on the analyst’s couch. And very much like the experience of trying to untangle and make sense of our own lives.
Lewinter is not going to be for everyone. If I was uncertain in the early chapters of Things after loving the smaller pieces in Story of Love, I became increasingly engaged as the father’s health deteriorated, in part because there were echoes of my own father’s decline and death over the first six months of this year. At times I almost had to laugh out loud at the older man’s stubborn resolve and refusal to give in to a weakening, crumbling body—my father was exactly the same. Now, having taken the time to write about this novella, I have come to respect and marvel at what it demonstrates about how an essentially ordinary, even mundane story can be told—no, orchestrated—and granted an operatic arc that creates an experience a reader will have a hard time shaking. There is a lot in this slender volume.
In the end, I am not certain I have articulated or elucidated anything especially profound about these two small books. To date, there is one more piece of fiction in Lewinter’s oeuvre and, as I understand it, Rachel Careau is still dedicated to translating his works. I know I will be watching for more.
Story of Love in Solitude and The Attraction of Things are published by New Directions. Each book is bilingual, with the complete French text following the English.
The Attraction of Things
Roger Lewinter, trans. by Rachel Careau
November 15, 2016
Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)34Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)More
The following is from Roger Lewinter’s novel, The Attraction of Things. Roger Lewinter was born in Montauban, France, in 1941, to Austrian Jewish parents. The family moved to Switzerland during the war, and he has lived much of his life in Geneva. For more than forty years he has worked as a writer (of both literary and scholarly works), an editor, and a translator (of Georg Groddeck, Karl Kraus, Elias Canetti, Robert Walser, and Rilke, among others). Among his dozen books are three works of fiction.
It had been a year now since, in breaking things off, I had declined the choice made for me by my mother before her death; as she had been doing every two months, however, Michèle had called, and we were supposed to see each other that Wednesday, December 17: to begin with, I wanted to show her the second Kashmir shawl that, just at the end of Le pasteur, I had found at the flea market—a Marseille jacquard square that had nevertheless fascinated me at once, since it constituted the necessary counterpart to the Rose Garden, setting against its sixteen dispersive swirls on the outside a concentrated sphere on the inside, of red tracery, floating in a diamond of metallic-gray ether itself set in a green-and-black square that incorporated into its corners sections of the central globe—; turning away from it, Michèle observed, “I don’t get the radiance of your Kashmir shawl”; and we went to the station buffet where, toward the end of the meal, officially in our engagement period, she announced to me that she had a new boyfriend; giving me, by this fait accompli, formal notice, if I wanted to proceed, to make my own choice; and so when we parted at midnight, I returned home full of a feverishness that the sleeping pills increased, so that, around one thirty, I got up and went out, to go to the public toilets, on place Saint-Gervais, in the basement, where for years I persisted in looking for what, already stunning me in the stench of the public urinals in Paris, at age twelve, evading my grasp, captivated me—before Pentecost, returning home from the classes in Zurich, around one in the morning, I had encountered someone there who didn’t appeal to me but whose waiting affected me, not realizing that he was drunk and that, in this state, I was intruding upon him with my aimless concentration, whose misbehavior, the next evening, when I saw him again, in the guise of sudden passion at first moved me deeply, when, without segue, he called out to me in German, “Why are you so stupid?” then made me freeze when he continued in French, “You belong to me, I want your body, I want your soul”; and I had driven him away, only to attempt, several days later, to find him again, in vain, a hallucination to which I refused access in reality—; while now, a reeling lout suddenly looming up, seeing me, fell to his knees at my feet.
He had spoken to me about withdrawal, about an empty bottle of whiskey on the ground there, and about a brawl in which he had torn the sleeve of his anorak; and when we arrived at my apartment—outside, we had had to wait a quarter hour for a taxi, during which, in fits, in order not to fall, he had hung on to me—, he had flopped down on the bed, asking me, before sinking under, not to forget to wake him at five o’clock: when the telephone rang, I wasn’t sleeping, but he was unconscious; rubbing his face with a towel moistened with cold water, I finally managed to pull him from sleep: he looked at me; then, slowly putting together what had happened, he came around, suddenly ecstatic, in a trance enveloping me in a worshipful embrace within which I remained, stunned: it was seven thirty when he recalled that he was supposed, at six o’clock, to have opened the bistro where he had been working for only three days, and telephoned his boss to ask him to find someone to fill in, saying that he would be there as soon as he had found a taxi—outside, it was snowing—; but, now, he couldn’t manage to unknot the laces of his putrefied Clarks, which I had pulled off him to put him to bed: I took them in my hands then, and at the moment when, detecting their odor, which at its most extreme—unbearable—was an invading force that suddenly made me hyperventilate, I knelt down at his feet, he released in one breath, “I will marry you, you have only to say the word, wherever you want, whenever you want”; and when, at quarter past eight, having finally gotten a taxi, a rendezvous having been set for that evening at nine at the Colibri, a bistro downstairs from his place, unable in the entryway to pull himself away, he kissed me, beside himself—“I love you and I worship you, and I am very jealous, and if you betray me, I will kill you”—, I discovered to my elation that, while this was what I had wanted to experience, convinced that there had to be a difference, there was none, between man and woman, none whatsoever, since it is negated for the body that in its fulfillment is escaped.
During the month that followed, I saw him only when he was drunk: he would telephone then without warning, in the middle of the night—every time, whatever the hour, that he called, he pulled me from the unconsciousness of the most profound sleep, even though I otherwise remained, as usual, awake—, and, from the bistro he hung around at, taking a taxi, he would suddenly appear ten minutes later at the door, a genie released from his bottle, gaze piercing, body luminous; without my seeking—even though he insisted, at first, that I intrude— ever to have a hold on him, making me realize, and this filled me with an acute exultation—which, three weeks earlier, as I was throwing myself into Le chercheur, had finally made me buy the Psalms of David, by Schütz, the joyous intensity of which, at first hearing, years earlier, had enthralled me, without my having, until now, dared to listen to them—, that, for him, I didn’t exist in reality outside of drunkenness; the asceticism consisting in being only this, which made of two bodies brought together the mere stopping-off point in an impersonal connection that, through the necessary surrender to his arbitrariness ravishing my body, was draining me completely through this dissipation, about which, by telephone, at the end of January, in response to a remark I made to him about his increasing discontinuity, he stated abruptly, “Hollywood, it’s over.”
At the end of January, when the draft of Le chercheur was advancing rapidly, I went to the Théâtre du Caveau to see Moriaud, with whom I had remained in contact, although the relationship had soured when, after the Musset, Moriaud having asked me what exactly I wanted, disconcerted, I hadn’t known what to answer, while he pressed me to finally choose, whoever it be, a body, at which I expressed my reluctance, claiming, dishonestly, to have already done so besides; and, backstage, after the performance of Point d’eau—in which he played the guru of a group of survivors of some cataclysm—, I was recounting to him my news when Sandra, a Romanian refugee, who had staged the play, her curiosity obviously aroused, invited me to have a drink with the troupe, so as to offer me out of the blue—we hadn’t exchanged three words—the part, in February, in her next production, initially conceived as a montage on the theme of Antigone, of the announcer, then, should the need arise, in the play by Sophocles, which was being staged in May, that of the leader of the chorus.
Article continues after advertisement
At the thought of working again with Moriaud, who was playing Tiresias, but, still more, struck that, when I had known her, eight years earlier, Svetlana, giving up ballet, had rightly tried her hand at theater in a montage of the trilogy by Sophocles in which she played, in addition to the Sphinx and Jocasta, Antigone, I accepted, fascinated by the logic of the proposition: for if I had, initially, given up the theater, it was with the awareness that it would be impossible for me to act without consenting to homosexuality, which would have overwhelmed me, whereas I was aiming for control over it; for which the Fränger had supplied me with a technique whose significance I had long failed to see, similar to the disruption of sleep that, systematically, I had brought on by taking sleeping pills, with an obviousness I didn’t wonder about, as soon as I undertook the Diderot—culminating, when I met Moriaud, in three months of total insomnia, which was losing its agonizing nature only now, with the sudden appearance of the lotus—: the Adamite heresy, as re-created in The Millennial Kingdom, elaborated, in actual practice, tantrically, by the man who, indefinitely postponing his ejaculation in orgasm, with his mind sent it back like a fire into his own body, thus sublimated.
Starting with three academic conferences on Antigone, which she was responsible for chairing, and the project, soon abandoned, of staging the single play by Sophocles, in the version by André Bonnard; also dangling the prospect of a series of performances at the ancient theater at Delphi in August, after the fifteen performances now set for the Caveau, Sandra had succeeded, for this production, in putting together a professional troupe in which I was the only amateur, moreover the one in charge of the dramaturgy: though every time we had discussed Antigone she would take the words out of my mouth, I didn’t suspect, despite the way she had of leaving her cigarette butts lying around everywhere, that, lacking any substance, she was concerned only with charming whoever was drawn into her obsession with staging one show after another.
After two weeks of rehearsals, when, the croaks piercing the hoarseness, her voice had become unbearable to me, and although it seemed that, precisely because of the contracts she voluntarily signed, we had to act for the mere beauty of the gesture — which no one, while he was able to withdraw, had apparently noticed—, at the beginning of April, I acknowledged that Sandra was only the opportunity, rare according to Moriaud, for whoever knew how to use it, to be forced, having been driven back onto oneself, to break through one’s own limits; and, as the fraud was on the point of being discovered, my double function making the actors uncertain whether I hadn’t engaged in manipulation by proxy, I had to take on the dramaturgy where the leader of the chorus, the link between the human and the suprahuman, like the third eye opening up to the blind vision of Tiresias, was solely an impassive seat of concentration; adopting, in order to make it perceptible, little by little a bearing taken from yoga: during the performance, which lasted an hour and a half, standing, immobile, on the proscenium, a presence, in the midst of the actors, with a phrasing at first floating but, on the advice of Moriaud, whose attention was focused on me, projected with an increasingly embodied force, to the point where Creon, on the evening of the premiere, and even though, during the rehearsals, he had conspicuously avoided all discussion, before coming onstage being unable to resist any longer, blurted out, “You don’t want to be the Exterminating Angel, either.”
The health of my father, since the previous September, had been deteriorating, the drugs having less and less control over the tremor that was now paralyzing him in spurts, disjointing his day with gaps to which, not wanting to hear of another hospitalization, he reconciled himself, and which I likewise trivialized; while, returning after the three months’ interruption occasioned by Antigone to Le chercheur, I finished the word-for-word translation in June, to find myself confronted with the difficulty unresolved, since I still didn’t know how to convey in French what showed through in the German, in my version rendering, as I was aware, only a state of amazement, not, in its magnetization, the torrent of a life; and, the more I advanced, the more I was losing my way, when, on August 13, I had to have my father admitted, despite his refusal—“because you die there”—, to Thônex so that they could try, by gradually changing his medication, to stabilize his condition; but it was the balance found upon the death of my mother, three years earlier, that was undoubtedly slipping away.
From THE ATTRACTION OF THINGS. Used with permission of New Directions. Copyright 1985 by Roger Lewinter. Copyright 2016 by Rachel Careau.
Story of Love in Solitude
Roger Lewinter, trans. from the French by Rachel Careau. New Directions, $10.95 trade paper (64p) ISBN 978-0-8112-2519-9
Comprising three stories of recurrence, death, and self-discovery, Lewinter’s collection is refreshing in its fundamental strangeness; his narrator’s road to realization dramatically eschews the linear and doubles back, many times, on itself. In “Story of Love in Solitude,” the narrator, living alone, welcomes the evening company of an unusually punctual spider, “the only animal, in practice, with whom it is possible to coexist within strictly defined, and respected, territories.” In “Passion,” the narrator grows attached to a camellia that he purchases for himself in 1986, 20 years after giving a similar flower to his parents for their anniversary. As he works on a translation of Rilke, the camellia grows “luxuriant... encircled with an armor of foliage that, under the low-angled rays of the afternoon sun, lit up... into which, often, in the evenings, with exultation, I would plunge my face.” Soon, however, the flower is attacked by insects, and the narrator must fight frantically for its survival. In “Nameless,” the narrator’s struggles with loneliness and desire—concurrent with the story of the camellia—are made explicit as he becomes enamored with a seller at the local market, with whom he fails to reach an understanding even as “the devourment of not knowing his name was exacerbated nearly to madness.” Lewinter’s prose—lengthy sentences, punctuated largely by commas, semicolons, and dashes—has hypnotic appeal when combined with his tendency toward meandering asides and lovely melancholy. (Nov.)
Reviewed on: 09/19/2016
Release date: 10/01/2016
Hardcover - 978-0-8112-2611-0
STORY OF LOVE IN SOLITUDE
Eros, Orpheus, Eurydice
by Roger Lewinter, translated by Rachel Careau
BUY NOW FROM
GET WEEKLY BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS:
Email Address
Email this review
KIRKUS REVIEW
A trio of sketches, first published in 1989, about the nature of affection by the veteran Swiss experimentalist (The Attraction of Things, 1985, etc.).
Each story in this brief collection is a study of a particular incident. In “Story of Love in Solitude,” the narrator repeatedly spots a spider in his apartment and attempts to remove it. In “Passion,” he contemplates the frailty of a pair of camellia plants in his apartment, paired with his discovery of a mass of moths and maggots in his kitchen. In “Nameless,” the longest piece, he recalls his affection for a man he meets at a street market, rhapsodizing on the “density of his body in its unbearable splendor.” Lewinter means to link the three stories—the book is subtitled “Eros, Orpheus, Eurydice”—and share a narrator who’s a writer like Lewinter himself. But what connects a romantic fixation with a couple of bug infestations? In part, language. Lewinter approaches each subject with the same billowing, recursive sentences, thick with em-dashed digressions; he’s prone to riffs on writers he translates, such as Karl Kraus and Rainer Maria Rilke. But the stories are more broadly unified by his interest in the line between living and dying. The spider’s return speaks to our natures as creatures of habit; he watches the fate of the intertwined flowers, draining energy from each other, as if it were a relationship; his attraction to a man he can’t approach at the market speaks to our disconnection. The overall tone recalls stiffer existentialist and experimental fare by Camus and Robbe-Grillet—Lewinter hardly bats an eye when he discovers those maggots—and the recursive prose can be wearying. But his imaginative energies are easy to appreciate in these small doses. (This edition includes the original French text.)
A daunting but well-crafted and original look at relationships.
Pub Date: Oct. 25th, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2519-9
Page count: 64pp
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22nd, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1st, 2016