I once wrote an essay comparing Joyce’s Ulysses and Mann’s Lotte in Weimar, in the latter’s favor: while the former’s stream of consciousness was beautifully written, I found its subject — the internal life of middle class Dubliners — throughly uninteresting and ultimately — unbearable; by contrast, Lotte contained a chapter of Goethe’s stream of consciousness, which was both beautifully written and interesting. Somehow, the thoroughly dull Thomas Mann (“morning walk with dog, Adorno to dinner”) managed to channel a fascinating mind. A proof of Mann’s genius, and an illustration of the unfathomable ways in which genius works. If it is impossible to write a novel about a person more intelligent than oneself, how can it be possible to write a novel about a person more interesting than ourselves?
Enard’s novel sheds new light on the project. The consciousness of the hero — and Austrian musicologist with an interest in the Middle East — is filled with fascinating facts of history and scholarship; of books, authors, personalities, events; curious, obscure, delightful facts. Like the fact that Albania’s national poet, Naim Bey Frashëri — an author in four languages, incidentally — was probably Europe’s last author of Classical Persian poetry; that in 1974, at the (get this) Gargantuan Pianistic Extravaganza in London, Gina Bachauer, Jorge Bolet, Jeanne-Marie Darré, Alicia De Larrocha, John Lill, Radu Lupu, Garrick Ohlsson and Bálint Vázsonyi riffed on Beethoven’s Turkish march for 16 hands; that Hugo von Hofmannstahl wrote a dialogue in which Balzac and the Austrian Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall discuss “Character in Novel and Drama”; that the Portuguese term “saudade” derives from Arabic sawdah, meaning “black mood” (or what in Greek would have been Melan Cholia), and that the same sawdah gives origin to sevdah. thus explaining why the music of Bosnia sounds so much like fado, only different.
All these wonderful facts, and more, and more, and more, are held together by a ho-hum love story of two perfectly ordinary people, who happen to be scholars, and who illustrate the problem with most scholars: that the amassing of vast reading and the command of a great body of encyclopedic information does not lead automatically to… interesting insights. That it is possible to know all these fascinating facts, and be perfectly boring and uninspired all the same.
You end up skipping the relationship bits and yawning through overarching theories of representation and alterity. Thankfully, the delightful obscure facts keep coming, so you don’t have to skip too much.
Mathias Enard, Compass
Oltre Mare 