[ book tip by Incentives ] A fragile condition

A lonely old man (Dr. Walter Steiner) walks aimlessly through the streets of Vienna. He’s retired, his wife has left him and he senses “a wonderful emptiness in each and every cell.” But, he asks himself, “how can he stand this emptiness”? Then out of the blue he finds two rolls of film and has them developed. The photos suddenly take him back almost fifteen years, into the world of the Stanek sisters, Mona (whose gravestone, inscribed “Monica Stanek 1979-2000,” appears in one the photos) and Andrea (whose name we only learn on the next-to-last page). He looks through the photos “over and over again, maybe to get the story (a story) going.” Or maybe to get through the transition. To fill his inner void with something external.

The setting is Vienna in 2000, when “a race of beaming tanned champions [took] over power under the leadership of two evil gnomes.” The character? A young woman (Andrea Stanek), who can “no longer flee from her own life into politics, nor from politics into her life” and who feels nothing but empty, powerless and angry after the deaths of her father and sister. As if she could hold death back, fill the void it created, she “walks in Mona’s stead, lives in Mona’s stead.” Mona, who had divorced herself from society, who had drifted and wandered from bars to strangers’ beds until she made “herself disappear.”

These are snapshots from the lives of three people who are searching for something. Thomas Stangl choreographs their stories slowly, “elegantly and hazily” into a dance. The book is replete with brooding, searching and doubting; absent-minded inner monologues, “duplicates and delays,” encounters as “entry points to another life.” Stangl elaborates in parentheses. He makes statements while asking questions. He adjusts images, shifts meanings or turns them around completely, leaving many open strands.

“It’s all a question of rhythm,” and Stangl is a master of rhythm. Three people, three bodies, three solos that transform in the end into one explosive dance. As if Stangl were constantly quoting Saint Augustine: “Dance is a transformation of space, of time” – or maybe “the ability to go through walls.”

Abbreviated review by Edit Rainsborough, December 2013. English translation by Laura Radosh.
Full German text: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=10219

[ book info ] Stangl, Thomas: Regeln des Tanzes. (original language: German) Droschl Verlag, Graz, 2013 . ISBN: 978-3854208464.