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 ] Two stories can be found in Josef Winkler’s new book, “Da flog das Wort auf” (Then the Word Exploded) and the story from which the title of the book is taken “Mutter und der Bleistift” (Mother and the Pencil). Once again, these two stories, like almost all of Winkler’s writing, are variations on the recurring theme of “his” childhood. The main difference between the two seems to be the elements that set the texts in motion and structure them.

This time, the narrator named Josef Winkler draws his associations from his travels not through Italy, Varanasi or Japan, but through Ellora, Toulouse and Lagrasse, Pune and Kiev; this time the texts he is reading are by Ilse Aichinger and Peter Handke. Yet it is more than the framework that is new, and more too than the slight shifts in focus. In “Da flog das Wort auf” it is the strong emphasis on that element of his childhood that plays a key role in Winkler’s work, inasmuch as he believes it is the reason his parents’ home fell silent – namely the news of the death of his mother’s third brother; in “Mutter und der Bleistift” it is the concentration on the figure of the mother, including some new information such as her treatment with anti-depressives.

But what is truly new is the tone of the texts. The way words are used is no less powerful – no less pleasure (it seems) is taken in describing the ritual of death, the moment of dying in Baroque language, the connection between religion and violence, the missed chance to come to terms with the past, the dark aspects of rural life – yet both texts are infused with a tenderness that was sometimes also present in Winkler’s other texts, but was easy to overlook. Now the dead are also spoken about lovingly, even the overpowering father shows his vulnerability and also, surprisingly, that he can be proud of his son; there’s even something like eroticism in the parents’ relationship: “The anecdote about the wooden ladder that my father climbed up in the garden […] to get to the young, beautiful woman flitted for decades among the relatives, much to the amusement of my father and the embarrassment of my mother, whose face turned red and who immediately began stirring the pot more quickly.”

The two texts do not tell us anything new, but they tell in a new way what has been told again and again (and what else is literature if not telling what has been already been told, but – and this is the point – in a way that is new and different). These new texts are a non-identical repetition of the texts before them, as if the author wants to tell us that this is all literature, not autobiography, that he is allowed and is able to make things up; they question the older texts (and the older texts question these new texts) and undermine the idea that Winkler’s texts might be “autobiographies.” This is because his texts circle around what has to be told, narrow it down more and more, vary words and sentences, without ever reaching a finishing point. The language, the process of writing is what counts, not the content, not the story. And it is the language, as well as the process of writing (which is constantly reflected on), that makes this slim volume so worth reading.

Abriged version of the review by Peter Clar, May 2013. English translation by Laura Radosh Full German text: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=9959

[ book info ] Winkler, Josef : Mutter und der Bleistift. Ein Requiem für die Mutter. (original language: Deutsch) Suhrkamp, Berlin, 2013 . ISBN: 978-3-518-42358-5.