BOOKBROODER

“ He was still dreaming, his face was all dreams, and his eyes had no longer that nasty slimy look; there was something childlike about them, and that might have been because he had a real dream, had been genuinely happy. Happiness washes away many things, just as suffering washes away many things.”

Though in his dream he was happy, in real he was fearful, fearful of his impending death, and throughout this train journey he was fearful, even at the later moment when he tried to console his soul in the company of that Polish prostitute Olina, he was fearful, so fearful that he could not effectuate!

This was the second book of my German endeavor this month, After reading ‘Thomas Mann two days back, Heinrich Boll, gave me much needed augment, “Buck up kid!”, as if the author said to me after I finished this one. If reading a new author fills me with contentment, this is always a thing to remember with a sense of pride. Picking up a book randomly and then getting a winner is a nice game of luck and crack. You can call it the smugness of a reader!
I also recalled my last year’s reading Of Alone in Berlin, which had made a convincing impact on me.

The plot was too tight; a young man, some of his co-passengers, a train, a prostitute, and the fear of that man.
What else?
Nothing,
you don’t need much stuff to write a story.
He wrote it beautifully.

In fact, the fear was no less personified throughout the plot, so ‘fear’ was also sitting nearby the window seat of the train along with him all time, as if twirling its dreary mustache. The fear of death is entwined with desolation and despair when there is going on a WAR outside.

“Soon I am going to die, I’ll never see that tree again, that russet tree over there by that green house, I’ll never see that girl wheeling that bike again, the girl in the yellow dress with the black hair, these things that the train is racing past, I’ll never see any of them again…”

Andreas was his name, a young German soldier on a train journey, and the author has portrayed his inner conflict and fear in such an evocative manner that I could not put it down. Like a smooth thread being reeled off, the events will flash and die inside the memory of the protagonist, and the author escorted it from his mind to the mind of the reader in such figurative language. It was metaphorically rich text. The second part, where Andreas is with a prostitute, was written nicely, in that part I found the emotions between them were evoked gently, yet they could not propel that self-indulgent tenderness that I was expecting.

This was an evocative read with high emblematic value for me, a story that dealt with human emotions and fear of death in a war-like situation, A haunting novella!

“At an age when others are spendthrift daydreamers, blithely postponing the execution of great plans- he began his day early with a jet of cold water at his chest and back, and then a pair of tall wax candles in silver sticks shining over his manuscript..”

This man was ready to sacrifice on the altar of art, the strength he had garnered from his sleep. This is his story.

There was such burnished prose that I was slithering upon from the first page. I learned after finishing the book that in German this book was written in a very complex manner, using many rare words, creating paradoxical juxtapositions of terms and a literal translation of the prose into English could look like gibberish, but I am telling you the one that I read was extraordinarily translated, I felt surreal at some places!

I thought of reading this book suddenly in the morning yesterday when my country was celebrating its independence day, we unfurled the tricolor at our place and then distributed sweets, a chiffon cake along with whipped cream! Though most of it melted by the time I brought it back to my room from the place we were celebrating, still it was delicious!

So the book was picked up, out of nowhere, I was reading a chapter featuring that racecourse scene in’ Anna Karenina last night, and here this morning I met this man Gustav Aschenbach, who left his apartment in Munich, overstrained by his difficult morning hour, to walk alone, in a hope that fresh air will restore him for his evening work. There he meets a strange red-haired man, he is a foreigner and after seeing this strange man he is now so eager to travel!

Gustav Aschenbach got early fame, he is a writer, a poet of overburdened and already worn out. He lived in Munich as an honored bourgeois. To quench the thirst of his travel, He goes to Adriatic Island and then to Venice.
In Venice, ‘in a gondola perhaps’, in a hotel, he meets a boy, 14 years old, Tadzio, along with his family, and the charm of this young boy enchants him, You should know that Gustav is fifty years old.
Now.
What do you want me to write about?
No, this book was not like that.

When I started reading it I thought it would be a mystery. Death in Venice and then a search for the culprit! But no! It turned out to be an extremely different thing. This turned out to be a tale of obsession. An old man is obsessed with a young boy. But you must notice that neither this man touched this boy nor ever talked to him throughout the plot, so anything that you are thinking must be thrown away from your head at once!

The story was an extreme case study of a human passion, maybe infatuation, or idée fixe, haven’t you heard this term, something of that sort !

Was this obsession about an intellectual satisfaction of a poet or was it a sensual fantasy of an old mind? Was his observation of a young boy about beauty, about God, spiritual or purely for senses? Was this a disgraced subterfuge? A trickery played by the author Or just the vigorous curves of his emotions!
What failed this old man to do what he wanted to do?
His self-esteem, his maturity, his conscience, or his late-won simplicity?
Or was it his weakness?

This was a tale of obsession, what an obsession, this man had perhaps a bee in his bonnet, a Bee of artistic pleasure or spiritual salvation, or of moral weakness! But boy! Whatever it was, it was an extraordinary reading experience for me, I read Thomas Mann for the first time. Very Impressive! In some places the prose was so lyrical that if you read it aloud you will feel yourself in a dream on a stage and when you wake up, you will find yourself: – enervated, shaken, powerless!

Look! That train was on time

Let’s go to Venice today!