Incentives - New Literature from Austria

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Project realization: the Office of Documentation of Contemporary Austrian Literature (reviews, author’s portraits) – The Association of Translators (translations) – readme.cc (infrastructure).

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[ book tip by Incentives ]
Thomas Stangl’s volume of essays Reisen und Gespenster (Journeys and Ghosts), which follows three novels – most recently Was Kommt (What Is Coming) – documents the attempt to examine the threads between literature and life, writing and experiencing – in a measured manner, even though more or less everything depends on them, carefully, even though they cannot be torn apart.

In this document Stangl guides the reader to the depths of his writing, certainly very deep depths, as there, at the point where the sentences begin to revolve around themselves, what threatens is the loss of the world, as in his work the author does after all exert ‘gentle force’ on the literary images. At the same time writing and reading perhaps provide the only access to the world: ‘perhaps it is precisely about literature that I am learning, have been learning, outside of literature, but never completely so, learning to live and to die.’

In his literary explorations Stangl sends on ahead of him above all such authors as exhausted their own short lives in a fairly short time at the boundary between art and life. Kafka is one who is mentioned, as well as Raymond Roussell, a forerunner of the surrealists, who took his own life in 1933, and the drug addict Antonin Artaud. Stangl follows him through Mexico, in a physical as well as a literary sense: ‘Mexico, for Artaud that was the name of a great expectation, the phantasmagoria of a country as the Other become real’ – a unified paradise of world and perception which Stangl too, sixty years later, seeks in vain in the same country as ‘one who sits in the train and looks out of the window’.

These are wonderful stories of travelling, through cities, music, pictures – and naturally there is also poetics: Stangl shows the reverse side of writing and the reverse side of experience. The texts read like a unified whole – and yet are in no way merely a ‘theme with variation’, while this theme, that is perceiving, remembering, is precisely one that is ubiquitous. By the end Stangl has aroused a craving for both, for literature and world, in a lasting way. This is a form of existence not without danger – but probably the only one.

Short review by Bernhard Oberreither, May 2012. English translation by Leigh H. Bailey.
Full German text: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=9574

The novels: Was kommt. (What Is Coming) Droschl, 2009. http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=3412
Ihre Musik. (Her Music) Droschl, 2006. http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=2723
Der einzige Ort. (The Only Place) Droschl, 2004. http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=2826

[ book info ] Stangl, Thomas: Reisen und Gespenster. (original language: German) Droschl, Graz, Wien, 2012 . ISBN: 978-3-85420-731-7.
Translated from German