mars in aires (alexander lernet-holenia, tr. robert dassanowsky & john s. barrett)

Lernet-Holenia’s novel, the second of this year, takes place in the days at the start of the Second World War. A veteran Viennese soldier, Count Wallmoden, has no real inkling that war is about to break out. He becomes besotted by Cuba, a mysterious woman, a femme fatale. Just before he has an assignation with her, his company begins to march into Poland. The world is on the brink of war but Wallmoden is distraught he cannot meet up with Cuba. He is certain that the military manoeuvres will end shortly and this will all blow over. The account of the march into Poland is detailed and specific. It doesn’t have the feel of the start of a world war, and Wallmoden compares what is happening with the horrors of the First World War, which he fought in, and feels that it’s quite lightweight. Until he is almost killed as the battles intensify. It’s a fascinating account of a moment when the horrors that will be shortly unleashed are only just emerging from their chrysalis. The tale is also a ghost story. Cuba, Wallmoden is later told, has died. He later meets a woman in a deserted Polish mansion who has the same name. A ghost story in times of war feels even more  understandable or plausible. (One thinks of the seances in Gravity’s Rainbow and the fascination in the First World War.) Mars in Aires is a novel which on one level feels straightforward, but contains a concealed level of complexity, even danger. 

“However, there is no doubt that we – and how often! – for moments, for days, yes, sometimes even longer than that, are in completely different realms, even though we think we’re here, and we live a life there and do things about which we know nothing. But we do live it, that life, and perhaps it’s the real one.”

count luna (alexander lernet-holenia, tr. jane b. greene)

Reading Lernet-Holenia’s curious text which is something of a shaggy dog story, I was myself haunted by the shadow of a Viennese count.

Count Luna tells the story of Jessiersky, a wealthy Austrian citizen descended from a mittel-european family with roots in Poland, Ruthenia and other parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire. When the Second World War breaks out, Jessiersky is tasked with buying some land from Count Luna, which he doesn’t want to sell. The end result of this mismanaged transaction is that Luna ends up in a concentration camp, and Jessiersky feels a cloying guilt which then transforms into a vengeful psychosis, as he tries to locate the mysterious Luna, who he believes is taking revenge on him. It’s a novel about psychosis and delirium, which fittingly starts and ends in the catacombs of Rome, the deep substrata of catholic Europe. The ideas don’t go as far as they might, but it’s an entertaining and quietly disturbing read.

My haunting came from realising the Viennese world which Luna, Jessiersky and the author belonged to was also a world my lost grandfather would have shared. He died in the Second World War, my father never knew him, and that whole strand of the family only slightly reconnected in the 21st century. Yet, the shadow of the Viennese count has always lurked in the background. Perhaps acting as a distancing mechanism from the actual world, as Luna does for Jessiersky. 

time of the wolf (w&d haneke)

We had just arrived in London. A muggy summer afternoon in Whitechapel. Walking past the Genesis, I see that Time of the Wolf is on, re-released for some macabre reason. I contact Rob’s son, who says he’s not sure. A minute later he sends me a message saying he’s watched the trailer and it looks boring. Then he gives in and decides to come, munching popcorn through Haneke.

Is it boring? As ever with Haneke, it is a bit, but that’s kind of the point. The end of the world will be boring, interspersed with moments of sheer terror and classical music. When the daughter listens to the tape of a sympathetic survivor, I realised how much I must hace stolen from this film in the writing of Truck. My blog informs me that this is the third time I have seen the film (and the second time I have claimed to have stolen from it). It still feels fresh, unpredictable, treading a line between tedium and high tension. Rob says it’s not his greatest work, but his son seemed, in spite of the boredom factor, to have been sucked in by it. As was I and will probably watch another decade down the line, when it will feel just as novel, just as dull, just as radical. If we still have cinemas, ten years down the line. 

pd - a few weeks later Rob's son chose to go and see White Ribbon which apparently he loved.

the man with the golden arm (d. otto preminger, w. walter newman, lewis meltzer, nelson algren)

In the olden days you went to Cinemateca half expecting that the projector might break down and the film would struggle to get to the end. Those days have gone, just like the old salas have gone, but this screening was a throwback. Half way through, the film gave up the ghost, and even though valiant efforts were made to resuscitate it, I ended up watching the final hour in a much better print on YouTube.

Given all this, it’s worth noting that the screening was part of a season of alternative films that managed to sneak under the radar. Preminger’s Chicago, full of sleaze balls, femmes fatales, and flop houses, not to mention the junk, is beautifully realised. It feels like something out of Gorky, the lower depths, a place where the crushing  inevitability of poverty is bound to get you in the end. In the midst of this, Sinatra gives a bravura performance, part junkie, part matinee idol. The operatic notes of the direction clearly play to his hand, but we perceive another man in his performance to the smooth entertainer he became. The desperation of his character, Frankie Machine, is completely credible, which perhaps hints at another life Sinatra might have lived had the gods not smiled on him. 

the piano teacher (w&d haneke, w. elfriede jelinek)

The Piano Teacher was scheduled by Mariana Enriquez as a part of a ciclo she curated, very little of which I am able to watch, due to rehearsals for Birdland. Nevertheless, I caught Huppert and her funny games. The film was more savage than I remembered. It might be one of the most extreme films ever made. Sexual violence, self-mutilation, and the closest Haneke perhaps gets to really letting the handbrake off. For all his cold art, The Piano Teacher feels furiously visceral. In all the wrong ways. By which one means - in all the ways that truly disturb. Unlike, say, Titane, which for all its extremism is nevertheless kind of alluring. Haneke is the high priest of deconstructing western materialism. His uncompromising vision, allied with where Huppert is willing to go as an actress, backed up by Jelinek’s source text, makes for something that seems designed to get its audience to walk out. Or stagger out, bloodied and beaten like the film’s titular protagonist. 

club zero (w&d jessica hausner; w. géraldine bajard)

Hausner’s film about food ends up being a bit of a suet pudding. There’s a lot of ideas in there, but they never seem to settle into a coherent narrative. It could be subtitled Five go Mad for Fasting. Charismatic teacher, Ms Novak, played with a fierce lack of emotion by Mia Wasikowska comes to a private school to teach a class about conscious eating. What is conscious eating? It’s a process of moderating your food intake to an absolute minimum, for the good of your body and the planet. A select group of five are later initiated by Ms Novak, into Club Zero - which is when you stop eating altogether. The kids embrace this as an attack against the system and their parents - it’s essentially a teenage rebellion. The kids become wanner, their skin touched by a sulphuric yellow, as they gradually wither away, and head towards an entirely enigmatic fate, in between offering their parents diatribes on how the consumption of food only serves to fortify the capitalist system. It’s all very po-faced, reminiscent of mid-period Godard or Lanthimos, but the ideas seem to hover at the edge of the screen, chomping at the bit to be allowed in. There are the occasional gross-out moments which are stitched into the narrative, obvious calling-cards, but these moments have the feel of clunky necessity in a script which has been boiled to within an inch of its life.  

71 fragments of a chronology of chance (w&d haneke)

The third of Haneke’s early films seen on consecutive nights, this was in structural terms the most ambitious, perhaps, but in narrative terms the most straightforward. A note at the front of the film informs us of a multiple murder in a bank followed by the suicide of the assassin, so we know what’s coming. The point isn’t dramatic tension, it’s to construct a societal collage, as we follow the lives of various characters whose fates will cross in the bank, just before christmas. It’s a jigsaw puzzle, and like any jigsaw puzzle, the nearer you get to completion, the more apparent the design becomes. There lurks beneath the austere takes and the cold logic a strong narrative drive in Haneke’s films, and this is no exception. The frequent inclusion of news reports (Michael Jackson and the Yugoslav wars) root the film in its interrogation of what history might mean, and how much our perspectives are shaped by this consumption of a constructed idea of the present, an idea the film’s end appears to mock, with its repetition of the Jackson news story. Yet 71 Fragments is always more detached than the earlier films from his glaciation trilogy. There is a fascination with the physical process of putting a film together (also known as editing) which hints at the way we edit our own lives, perhaps, seeking to control the narrative but never knowing when the nutter is going to walk in and blow our brains out. 

benny’s video (w&d haneke)

Pub quiz question. In which Haneke film does the British queen make a cameo appearance? The answer… is Benny’s Video. A clip from Spitting Image lampoons the royal family, but this is just one of the panorama of seemingly random images which populate Benny’s screens and to which he will contribute his own devastating additions. Benny’s Video is from 1992, a time just before the internet was about to transform our lives into a restless sea of images, and in this Benny feels like a preternaturally modern character, one step ahead of his peers, right down to his savage amorality. However, this amorality perhaps has a more complex root than sheer information overload. Talking to the young girl he will soon murder, Benny tells her that the violence in the films they watch is all fakery, composed of paint and plastic. He, and perhaps even she, wants to rediscover a reality beyond the movies, to discover what real blood looks like. (Something which Haneke can paradoxically only show with fake blood, no matter how shocking it might seem.)

Benny’s quest for the real, which doesn’t seem to change him at all, also ties in with his parents post-Nazi amorality, driven by petty bourgeois greed and fear (to be revisited in White Ribbon). Like so many post-war austro-german auteurs, Haneke is also a captive of his nation’s past, and aware of the fact. What this means is that there are multiple factors which contribute to the listless amorality in which Haneke’s film is apparently immersed. The absence of value is only of them, even if within a world of images, this is the one that comes to the foreground. The extended and seemingly irrelevant Egypt section, which goes on for perhaps ten minutes, feels like another manifestation of this: if all images are of equal import, from the killing of a pig to a Spitting Image clip to a  camera view of the street outside, why shouldn’t a film just be composed of arbitrary images, which have no relevance to plot or character? Except that there has been a key development in this sequence, which is that the mother has picked up the camera herself, she has become one for whom the production of images is a way of fending off their meaninglessness, as has been the case with Benny. Two of the videos he has made, one of the killing of the girl, the other of his parents’ acknowledgement of their complicity in his crime, will determine everything that occurs, and in so doing, Benny becomes actor/ director in his own drama, rather than mere passive recipient. It’s not a comfortable space, it’s fucked up, but it affirms the fact that, for better or for worse, he is alive.

The echo into the 21st century of this philosophy is chilling: a world where people only come to life through the manipulation of their image, a manipulation that goes beyond good or evil, transforming the subject into a kind of aestheticised zombie, seemingly in control of their image/fate, but actually atomised, all at sea, lost in a maze of empty referents. 

the seventh continent (w&d haneke; w johanna teicht)

Haneke’s first film, supposedly, which deals with the true story of a family who decided to drop out in the most merciless fashion possible. A few thoughts:

1 - Nostalgia. Weirdly, given that this is a film set in Austria about nihilism, one of the first sensations watching it was one of nostalgia. For an era of middle class, pre-digital living, where phones lived on walls and people read newspapers.

2 - Schopenhauer. I might be wrong but I believe that Schopenhauer had a standpoint wherein he suggested that the rational thing to do in life was basically starve yourself to death. I had also been thinking about Michael Landy’s Break Down. As the family in The Seventh Continent enter into the third phase of the movie, that of unexplained auto-annihalation, it strangely felt as though they were both participating in a hermetic tradition but also were at the vanguard of what would become a 21st century credo, the idea of anti-materialism, even if that credo goes hand in hand with its countermeasure, the worship of materialism.

3 - True Stories can never be realised on screen. Haneke seems to aspire towards an objective neutrality, shorn of any directorial adornment, but this doesn’t preclude the film from seeming, with the benefit of our retrospective perspective, completely and utterly Hanekesque. The attention to seemingly irrelevant details (the breakfast, a door opening, a tap running), whose later destruction will be key to the film, also helps to define a certain atonal style which would become a hallmark, over the years. These details serve to make the contemporary viewer feel that there is nothing neutral or objective about the film; rather it is the start of the director's visceral critique of a system he will continue to confront from his clearly marked standpoint over the course of the next thirty years. 

sparta (w&d ulrich seidl, w. veronika franz)

Having now seen three of his films, it seems to fair to make the call that Ulrich Seidl is one of the most transgressive directors at work, making movies that others wouldn’t dare to. Sparta is no exception. There are scenes in the film which are as transgressive in modern western society as almost anything you can get away with. To have as your protagonist a pedophile is obviously a bold step, but to then have him wander round naked in the showers as his prey (or are they) frolic in their trunks is to take it one stage further. Having said which, perhaps the most transgressive thing Sparta does is seek to humanise Ewald, the wealthy man-child at the film’s heart. The film shows us Ewald embracing his inner child on the swings, joining a snowball fight, identifying more with the children than the adults, a kind of Wordsworthian monster, before he gets to open his Sparta academy where he grooms one young boy in particular. At the same time, the Sparta he creates is a kind of haven for the boys, a place where they can act out their childish games, play at being gladiators, scream and holler as much as they like. The dark turn we keep expecting the film to take is only ever insinuated at; if it happens it is never disclosed. Perhaps Ewald, caught up in the shadow of his senile Nazi father, is just a harmless fantasist? Or perhaps not. At the same time, it seems relevant that Ewald preys on Romanian children, which could be a metaphor for the way that the rich prey on the weak, or could be a more direct commentary on the expansionist economics of Germany and Austria, a hangover of other expansionist policies who the senile father embodies. Seidl’s film might have been accused of being exploitative, were it not for its disciplined edit and rigorous cinematography. The framing by Wolfgang Thaler is always thought provoking: an interplay of architecture, image and sensation. The edit breaks the dramatic tension as much as ramping it up. The film succeeds in being both deadening and dramatically tense at the same time, a curious and admirable achievement, which might be said to reflect the modern condition. 

caché (w&d haneke)

Watching Caché on the big screen reminded me of how important his film was in the development of our film, Censor. No-one really believes us when we reference Haneke, or they think we’re being pretentious, because UK films aren’t supposed to do that kind of thing, but the director’s use of video has echoes in ours, the rewinding of tape, the whirr of the video machine, the hidden messages that may or may not lurk. This is not to compare the films, just to note its influence. After watching Caché, C & I met up with Santiago and Flamia in the Imperial, and Flamia noted that in the first interview I gave him, a decade ago, I referenced the Austrian. I am not sure if that strand has sustained itself in my personal creative process, which seems disappointingly slight when measured against the achievements of Haneke and his ilk. How, one wonders, watching Caché for the umpteenth time, did he get to make this film? Although the answer is that once you have succeeded in convincing the right people of your genius, you can start to control your destiny, (only don’t tell Orson), and make the films you want to make. Caché is remarkable in so many ways. On the one hand, it is a taught psychological thriller. The film sets up a mystery with its opening shot, one that the viewer and the characters will seek to resolve as the film goes on. It’s reminiscent, in this sense, of Bolaño’s love of cheap detective thrillers. Secondly, it is a coruscating slap across the cheeks of the bourgeois literati. Auteuil’s character, Georges, hosts a literature program where guests slag of Rimbaud’s girlfriend. In a lovely little scene, Binoche’s Anne speaks on the phone at a literary soiree whilst a figure who never reappears just barks names in the background: “Baudrillard, Wittgenstein…” The couple’s lives collapse under the stress of an unknown truth. Thirdly, Haneke’s use of the camera is forensic. Just like the camera of whoever is making the videos which upset Auteuil and Binoche’s apple cart, it is an inert, threatening presence, allowing the viewer to analyse the image for clues. The very opening shot, for example, of their home, shows a pretty little house, screened by an unlikely hedge, set against a backdrop of highrises which rear up behind. The house wants to cut itself off from the outside world, turn its back on the poor dwellings that are a stone’s throw away, but the camera doesn’t permit the viewer to forget. Perhaps I am over-reading the image, but the director’s use of the camera invites this kind of engagement from its viewer, compels one to be active, rather than passive. You could easily write a thesis on the detail which is disclosed in each and every shot, so much so that I found myself wondering about the art direction and how much Haneke himself would have participated in this. Lastly, for now, as I could evidently spend hours writing about Caché, but have work to do, the script itself, in spite of what might otherwise have been a languid pacing, is brilliantly constructed, fuelled by the dramatic tension of the mystery. The film contains key narrative beats: the appearance of the tapes themselves, the tape in the door, the disappearance of the son, and of course, its one moment of shocking violence. (The effectiveness of this was apparent in the cinema, as one or two who had clearly never seen the film before cried out in dismay when it occurred.) In this sense, it feels as though Haneke is engaging with a classical script diagnostic, as determined by the gurus and the quacks. His mastery of the rhythm of filmmaking ensures that the viewer remains constantly hooked (to use a word), whilst never permitting him or her to become passive. 

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I note that this is the first film that has been written about twice on this blog. Normally if I see a film for a second time, a rare event, I don’t get round to writing anything, but in this instance, the urge would have appeared to have overtaken me.

the emperor’s tomb (joseph roth)

Roth’s other Trotta novel is understandably less celebrated than The Radetsky March. It’s a patchy, rangy book, which sweeps from pre-war Vienna and Slovenia through the protagonist’s participation in the war, imprisonment as a POW in Siberia, and then return to Vienna where he finds himself impoverished following the collapse of the Hapsburg empire. It feels like a 500 page novel squeezed into a hundred and something pages and doesn’t entirely hang together, no matter how fascinating the individual episodes might be. Nevertheless, the sections themselves, in particular the Siberian and post-war episodes offer an unusual vision of how these moments of history happened on a human scale. As a POW  in Siberia, (an experience my great grandfather also supposedly shared), we see the ragged edges of a war which no-one is all that concerned about. Post-war Vienna, in Roth’s vision, has a curiously modern feel, where sexuality is fluid and artistic flavours of the month come and go. People try and fail to spin businesses out of nothing, which mostly fail. All of which feels very like the twenty first century.

the radetsky march (joseph roth, tr michael hofmann)

We go searching for clues in life. Perhaps the fact that I finished Roth’s classic text on the day that the British queen was buried is one of them. The potential parallels are striking. Roth’s novel depicts the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which had been held together for so long by the figure of its ruler, the Emperor Franz Joseph. The novel opens with Lieutenant Trotta saving the emperor’s life at that battle of Solferino, which occurs in 1859. For this act he is rewarded by being made Baron Trotta von Sipolje. His son becomes the District Administrator of a small town in the Empire and his grandson, forever in awe of his grandfather’s heroic reputation,  joins the cavalry. The novel follows the family over the course of 55 years, reigned over by an increasingly doddery monarch, as the internal tensions within the Austro Hungarian empire begin to fray, tensions which will lead to the assassination of Franz Joseph’s heir, Franz Ferdinand and the onset of the First World War.

The Radetsky March is about fathers and sons and grandfathers, but it is also about the way that historical certainties are constructed on myths and destined to become uncertain, sooner or later. After the initial meeting of Emperor and the first of the Trottas, there will be subsequent future meetings between Emperor and family, all of which hark back to the original incident, which becomes more and more obscure in the mists of time. The Emperor will come to physically resemble almost exactly the District Administrator, whose peaceful life will be overtaken by tragedy as his son’s fate becomes more and more conjoined to the eventual fate of the Empire, which will be extirpated by the Great War. Periods of peace contain entropy which will provoke the onset of tragedy and destruction. The more something appears to be set in stone, the more this is true.

Roth expresses a marvellous humanism in his portrayal of this family and its empire. The characters are beautifully flawed and their flaws are shown to be related to the nature of the society they have been born into. A society whose apparent inertia, taken up by small scandals and plaintive festivities, is invisibly disintegrating. This is the world of Freud and Schiele, as well as the world Hitler was born into. Not to mention my grandfather, whose parents might have had similar expectations to the District Administrator’s, before the twentieth century burst onto the scene and interrupted the peace with all its sound and fury. 

malina (ingeborg bachmann, tr phillip boehm)

This novel reads like the genius clandestine work of a marginal figure. It comes as some surprise to discover after finishing it that Bachmann was a central pillar of Austrian culture, a reference for the likes of Bernhard and Jelinek, who adapted the novel for the screen. Malina is a dense, complex read, structured around the thoughts of a woman who lives with one man, Malina, and has an affair with another, Ivan, although her relationship with Malina is probably platonic. The book is composed of three sections, one where the primary emphasis is on her relationship with Ivan, another, the last, with Malina, and a section in the middle where the focus is her father. This section is the most nightmarish, as it becomes increasingly evident that the relationship between father and daughter was incestuous.

There is so much going on in Malina that the threads sometimes seem to run away from the reader, perhaps even the writer, but that is part of the novel’s complex glory. The game of the novel involves following these threads, sometimes getting caught up in their unlikely logic, sometimes trying to make sense of them. The phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ is perhaps used too much when discussing female writers, but it’s clear that Bachmann delights in leading the reader up the garden path and back again, at times with sequences that don’t even pretend to make grammatical sense, at others with a ragged challenging brilliance. At the same time, this is also a novel which explicitly details the joys and sufferings of being an independent Viennese woman.

“I’ll sleep on my questions in a deep intoxication. I’ll worship animals in the night, I’ll lay violent hands on the holiest icons, I’ll clutch at all lies, I’ll grow bestial in my dreams and will allow myself to be slaughtered like a beast.”

judgement day (ödön von horváth, tr christoher hampton)

Horváth play comes from a recognisable Mitteleuropean tradition. Dürrenmatt, Kafka, and many more. It’s a tale of a small town whose society becomes corrupted. Hampton’s useful introduction notes how Horváth, having fled Nazi Germany in 1933, then returned with the aim, according to Hampton, of documenting through theatre the effects of fascism on society. Judgement Day takes place in a rural town where a succession of minor disturbances in the fabric of the community leads to a fatal industrial accident, when a train crashes, killing seventeen people. In this sense the play feels highly prophetic. So often in an industrial society the small tears in the fabric can lead to tragedy. (In the UK alone, Grenfell, King’s Cross, Hillsborough etcetera). These accident don’t come from nowhere, they have their roots in how society is structured, and the opening scene, where the accident happens, makes it clear that the stationmaster, Hudetz, who will become the anti-hero of the story, has been over-burdened due to cuts or “rationalising, they’re going to keep going until there aren’t any trains left at all.”

The playwright then uses this tragedy as a way of examining the mores of the small town, the fickle way in which the residents change their allegiances, depending on how the news is reported, another feature of the play that feels all too contemporary (twas ever thus). However, the play takes a sudden turn when it gets to the last of its seven scenes. Here, Horváth veers off towards more metaphysical territory. At this point the narrative embraces what might now be called horror. The use of stage elements, sound, lighting, is employed to the full and this final scene is devastating both in its judgement of the society and its theatrical originality. 

amour (w&d haneke)

This was not perhaps the wisest of weeks to finally catch Haneke’s paean to old age and death. At a time when I have recently witnessed how fast decay can take hold of the body, Haneke’s splenetic description of Emmanuelle Riva’s demise was a gruelling watch. As ever, he goes about the task of charting this demise with rigorous efficiency. Although it might be that the trope of the sudden moment of extreme shock, witnessed in so many of his films, was beginning to lose its edge here. When Piccoli articulates his love in an act of brutal kindness, it comes as no real surprise. There is also a curious dream sequence, with its bona fide jump scare, which seems somehow coarse for this most frostbitten of directors. Haneke’s lingering camera always invites reflection. Watching Amour, a film that engages with the realities of dying in a way that cinema almost never does, one can see why death in cinema veers towards the cartoonish or the symbolic. The awareness of death is not something we cannot bear too much of. One can applaud the director for having the courage to confront the issue, but one is also relieved that one doesn’t have to face it all that often. 

the piano teacher (elfriede jelinek, tr. joachim neugroschel)

I finished the Piano Teacher, yesterday, Christmas day. As anyone who has read the book can testify, it’s a gruelling read. One that gathers pace as the book unfolds, measured out in long scenes of increasing psychological and physical horror, told in a distanced, ironic tone which one suspects never quite translates, no matter how effective Joachim Neugroschel’s English version. The memory of Haneke’s film and Huppert lingers in the back of the mind throughout. In a book where the issue of physicality is so potent, the image of Huppert’s austere, skinny attractiveness perhaps works against the depiction of Erika in the novel. Huppert is on the cover, she’s become the Piano Teacher. But the piano teacher existed before Huppert claimed her. 

The brutality of the novel generates a classic horror reaction. The more we are shocked, the more we want to read on. The first half of the novel is more mundane. Erika Kohut observes, she lives on the edge of the world. We share her observations, her consciousness. It’s only as she starts to engage with the sub-Nazi youth, Walter Klemmer, that things move from the conceptual to the actual. Contemplated inflicted pain is not the same as actual inflicted pain. Contemplated rejection is not the same as actual rejection. The novel explores the gap between the workings of the mind and the workings of the world; something that is all the more pertinent in a time where the conceptual warriors are given a platform in the  virtual world to wage their conceptual battles or indulge their conceptual perversions. 

Yet, beyond the terror the book inspires, why is this novel so compelling? It contains the perversity of Maldoror. The cruelty of Bataille. Many might question its morbid fascination with the dark side. Whilst the novel depicts the abuse of a woman in harrowing detail, it’s hard to view it as a feminist tract, when Erika’s mother is also her psychological oppressor. What perhaps marks the novel out is the courage with which it converts Erika into a tragic heroine not of someone else’s abuse narrative, but her own transgression. Erika, who is more than capable of committing a cruel action herself, is hoisted on her own petard. She inhabits a world whose atomisation, to use a phrase, means that her mind, brilliant as it is, turns and twists inwards, in the process catching her in a trap of its own making. The relentless way in which the author traces this process seems to articulate a literary courage on her part. Jelinek is prepared to reveal those things we would rather not acknowledge exist. The terrible contradictions of the human heart. Society is constructed on a basis of these elemental yearnings, which acquire shape in fantasies which have veered so far off beam that when they come to be realised, they destroy the subject entirely. The reason for the Piano Teacher’s power as a novel is that it mercilessly tears back the veil and shows the Western world in all its hideous deformity. Where we think we perceive beauty, there actually hides savagery. Behind the pretty child in the advertising poster, there lurks a grinning skull. 

lillian (w&d andreas horvath)

Andreas Horvath’s unorthodox road movie, wherein the protagonist is only seen in a car on one occasion, feels like an instant classic. A classic because it taps into that most elemental American narrative, the travelling hobo. We are on the road with Lillian, as she embarks on her Quixotic quest to cross the US from New York to Alaska. Lillian never talks. There’s no back story. We don’t know why this Russian woman takes this decision, what has driven her to these extremes. It’s the journey laid bare. In the process we are introduced to what might be called the real America. A land of thrift stores and local radio stations. Of laundrettes and security cameras. Also, tellingly, a land of little kindness. Only two people in the film makes an effort to help this wandering stray. A sheriff lends her his coat, a woman gives her some drinks. In part it could be said that this is due to Lilian’s refusal to interact, for reasons we never learn, but it also shows up a land with at least 70 million people who seem diametrically opposed to the notion of the good samaritan. Obviously there’s a scripted element to this: the filmmaker chooses what he wishes to show, but the loneliness of the long distance walker is never interrupted as she marches towards death. The film is replete with cinematic references. There’s the bus from Into The Wild, Grizzly Man’s black bear, Antonioni’s death valley and, perhaps, Lilian’s end echoes that of the wanderer in Kalatozov’s Unsent Letter, alone on an ice floe. Lilian has much in common with Kalatozov’s film. The growing tension that is generated through the mere act of survival. We root for Lillian, played with a blank-face brilliance by Patrycja Planik, and the worse things get the more we root for her. Her journey feels absurd, doomed, but that doesn’t matter. As long as she keeps going, there’s hope. The starkness of her journey is one that the film’s producer Ulrich Seidl, would be proud of, and his influence can be felt. However, this film belongs to Planik and Horvath (who not only directed but also photorgaphed, edited and composed the music). Once again, the cinematic act of defying the odds, striking out to create something that seems absurd, makes for an astonishing film, putting similar Hollywood fare (Into the Wild, The Revenant, etc) in the shade. 

correction (thomas bernhard, tr sophie wilkins)

 I’m not sure where this novel sits in the oeuvre of the Austrian arch-miserabilist, Bernhard. A figure both shunned and venerated. Years ago, when I was friends with Mr C, we used to discuss his work and I guess I used to read his novels, but it’s all a blur now, all part of that hinterland life which is also known as ‘the past’. 

It might be that I came to Correction expecting something more nuanced than I encountered. In so many ways this feels like a piledriver of a novel, reminiscent of the sound of the road being dug up outside your window when you’re trying to work. It’s a meditative, relentless, exasperating noise, yet not without its fierce beauty. This novel of two parts, the first half dedicated to the narrator’s account of his friendship with the misanthropic Roithamer, the second a reworking (or correction) of Roithamer’s text stroke diary, which he was keeping in the weeks leading up to his suicide. Reading the text is like stumbling forward in a blizzard. Sometimes the words overwhelm, threaten to asphyxiate; at others the snow clears and the clarity seems all the more so for the text having been so dense and illegible moments before.

“…all the decrepit garbage of this totally decrepit European civilization, or rather, to hold nothing back, this totally decrepit modern world of ours, this era that keeps grinding out nothing but intellectual muck and all this stinking constipating clogging intellectual vomit is constantly being hawked in the most repulsive way as our intellectual products though it is in fact nothing but intellectual waste products…”

the inheritance (peter stephan jungk, tr. michael hoffmann)

The Inheritance is a novel about a man who is seeking to realise his inheritance. There’s not much in the way of subtext. Daniel has an uncle who lives in Venezuela. Daniel is his only kin. He has left a will, but the will is less definitive than it should be and Daniel accuses the Venezuelan executors of the will of stealing two million dollars which is rightfully his. The struggle to reclaim the monies takes years. Daniel gyrates from London to Caracas to Panama to Miami. It also leads to the breakdown of his marriage. However, there is another factor in the breakdown of the marriage: Daniel has an affair with a neighbour which his wife finds out about. The fact that he has no income; he is a listless poet; that his family live from hand to mouth and that he’s having an affair are never really acknowledged by the narrator as the real reason for his problems: rather he blames it all on his failure to realise an inheritance, which he doesn’t really seem to deserve on any kind of higher moral grounds. If this was a novel about misplaced obsession and fatal flaws, it might have been powerful; however the author seems, for reasons that aren’t always easy to discern, devoted to his protagonist, for whom it’s impossible to feel any kind of sympathy as his case goes from bad to worse.