The Last Man from Vienna
Thomas Glavinic's Night Work.
Reviewed by Simona Sivkoff
The city of Vienna has figured largely in Austrian literature, dressed in various garbs: Vienna the Magnificent, Vienna the Debauched, Vienna the Epicenter of Culture. Thomas Glavinic's novel Night Work, his second to appear in English, is to my knowledge unique in bestowing upon Vienna the peculiar honor of being home to the last living man on earth: Jonas, interior designer, mid-thirties. This is a familiar device - post-apocalyptic fiction constitutes an entire sub-genre, beginning with Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man. But whereas most specimens of this genre follow down the path of horror, Glavinic opts to use it as a stage for a meditation on the psychology of isolation.
On July fourth, Jonas wakes up and finds that his newspaper has not been delivered. Alarmed, he turns on the television, which shows nothing but static. No one is picking up their phone either. Everyone - animals included - seems to have vanished. Glavinic never explains how water and electricity continue to run without human intervention, nor do we ever fully comprehend what is happening to Jonas, who is frequently visited by hallucinations and memory gaps.
Jonas maintains his composure throughout. He travels further and further away from Vienna, looking for other survivors, signing postcards and guest books at roadside hotels. He first travels to small towns outside Vienna, then to Germany and finally all the way to Scotland before returning to Vienna. He is utterly alone. We never find out what happened. Glavinic is more interested in exploring the psychological implications of total isolation than in filling in the gaps in the narrative. The novel explores Jonas's relations to his parents and girlfriend Marie, pausing occasionally to offer some slightly puzzling metaphysical meditations on human existence, such as the following: "God was a body that sent off human beings, possibly animals and plants as well, or even stones, raindrops and light, to acquaint themselves with everything that went to make up life." Later on, rummaging through keepsakes in his father's apartment, he reflects on the impossibility of holding on to a moment. These meditations run parallel to Jonas's psychological unraveling, which manifests in increasing paranoia and dissociation.
Occasionally it seems as though Glavinic is not sure what kind of novel he is writing. The novel skips awkwardly from the suspenseful to the mundane, neither mode ever being developed to full satisfaction. But those who enjoy walking the streets of the Other Vienna - the Austrian capital's literary double - may relish Glavinic's peculiar slant.
Thomas Glavinic's Night Work.
Edinburgh; New York; Melbourne: Canongate, 2006.
The New Kind of Love Story
Wolf Haas' The Weather Fifteen Years Ago
Reviewed by Simona Sivkoff
Austria's favorite crime novelist Wolf Haas tries his hand in the romantic genre, giving us a boldly riveting love story in the form of an interview. The Weather Fifteen Years Ago takes us into the creative world of novel writing and the mystery of love at once. Wolf Haas delivers a flirtatious interview between a writer (Wolf Haas) and a German journalist (whose quirky North German accent is regrettably but inevitably lost in translation) in which the plot of his story materializes only indirectly. It is a highly original way to narrate a novel, and Haas does it with confidence and ironic self-awareness. This double fictionality adds a suspenseful excitement for the reader as the border between fiction and reality is in constant flux. Haas spontaneously comments on conventional truisms without diverting our attention from the love story. His prose is fresh, contemporary, interspersed with English expressions, and subtly ironic. The book rejects the sentimental and kitschy romantic mood associated with love novels and focuses on the slightly geeky and emotionally awkward young engineer Vittorio Kowalski. And although the female literary critic, known only as "Literary Supplement," taunts Haas that the novel's most romantic moment seems to be the painstaking description of Anni's kiss on Kowalski's cheek fifteen years after their last meeting, the intensity of the emotions is preserved in their subtlety and quaintness. Haas creates a playfully ironic world in which the German engineer has a passionate Italian mother and in which the Austrians appear so much more exciting than the Germans from the Ruhrpott region. The author comments critically on cultural, national, and literary stereotypes, making the novel a complex intersection of styles, discourses, and genres.
For Haas, Kowalski is not merely a savant whose knowledge of the weather of each day of the year fifteen years ago makes him the winner on a popular German TV quiz show, but rather a Quixotic, love-stricken figure. Kowalski and Anni fall in love when they are just teenagers, but their blooming affection is tragically interrupted by an accident. Anni, whose parents own a small hotel in a beautiful Alpine village in Austria, disappears from Kowalski's life for the next fifteen years. The trauma of losing Anni is displayed in Kowalski's strange obsession with meteorological data: millimeters of precipitation, the seconds between thunder and lightning, the number of survivors in Alpine accidents. Haas gives us the quintessential longing for a romantic ideal but fortunately for us the author's ironic detachment and cultural sensitivity prevents it from ever degenerating into kitsch. It is a story aware of its sentimentality, capable of pining for a bygone childhood and a first love without sounding trite. The Weather Fifteen Years Ago received the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize of the City of Braunschweig in 2006. An English translation by Ariadne Press is slated to appear in 2009.
Wolf Haas, Das Wetter vor 15 Jahren
Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2007
(Forthcoming in English translation by Sephanie Gilardi and Thomas S. Hansen as The Weather Fifteen Years Ago, Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 2009.)
