Figures and Flowers: Two Short Reviews
Figures and Flowers: Two Short Reviews
On SALMON by Sebastian Castillo and Last Vanities by Fleur Jaeggy
SALMON by Sebastian Castillo
I’m partial, because of my friendship with Sebastian, but I’d have been happy, I think, to read this novel during any other point in my adult life. I’m not talking about superlatives—though Salmon is well written—instead I’m talking about a particular sensation (cozy for lack of a better descriptor) when a particular book matches your own particular temperament. The analytical frame drops away and you find yourself enjoying a novel as you would a rustic sunset, or a talented juggler, another thing in the world to appreciate. SALMON—the title is in all caps—concerns an unnamed narrator, a young poet and employee at wine cellar, who takes an arduous journey by ship to the island nation of that same name, “to teach in their public schools.” Each chapter heading is a summary of its contents, like in 18th century adventure novels, which makes SALMON easy to consult. I forgot why the narrator travels to SALMON and there it was, spelled out in the first chapter: “Why I decided to go to SALMON”. Very convenient. On his voyage, the narrator encounters, among various odd characters, a man by the name of Sebastian, though neither he nor the narrator strike me as being self-portraiture. The latter half of the novel, set on the island of SALMON itself, is written in dramatic form, as dialog between characters, like the script of a play; and like the script of a play, the writing (throughout the novel) does not dwell much on exterior characteristics, on landscape or physical appearance, but rather on the interaction between its principle figures, each character defined not by any definite physiology or psychology, but rather in terms bound up, combined and recombined, in wild configurations, only to dissolve at last—water being an excellent solvent—into the sea.
Last Vanities by Fleur Jaeggy (translated by Tim Parks)
I haven’t read much by the Swiss writer Fleur Jaeggy, but then again there isn’t much to read, speaking purely of volume. Though she’s had a long and illustrious career, more than fifty years going at this point, her output has remained sparse, a half dozen or so novellas and short story collections, none of these books totaling much over a hundred pages. Stack them on a table or arrange them on a bookshelf, and they don’t create an overawing impression. But their words do. Jaeggy’s. style has remained consistent across the decades, with terse, often fragmentary sentences, abrupt jumps in verb tense; the latter technique she ascribes to her Germanic background. She writes in Italian, but many of her stories, including these, are set in German speaking areas of the Confederation, like her native Zürich. Multiple references are given to local dialects, which are not mutually intelligible with other German varieties, a sort of private alpine language. There’s a cold intimacy in Jaeggy’s work, a sense that we haven’t just crossed linguistic barriers but also barriers of privacy, barriers of dignity, like someone reading your mind without permission—a cold intimacy, filled with malevolence. Take the titular story, which concerns an unpunished manslaughter, a geriatric wife helping her geriatric husband out their apartment window. This and other human tragedies are described like mundane natural phenomena, like alpine flowers suddenly coming into bloom and then slowly withering away, an image Jaeggy returns to often, her given name being surely important in that regard. I read this collection piecemeal, a story here and a story there, while visiting my father in the hospital. There’s a terrace garden on the third floor, halfway up, an interfaith chapel attached to it, with fountains and contemporary sculpture, with yellow lilies blooming through prismatic glass; in all the days I was there, no other person visited the chapel but me. It could have been a setting for one of Jaeggy’s stories, Switzerland transposed with the suburban Pacific Northwest. As much as I enjoy her work, it felt a little inconsiderate reading it in such a place. With so much cruelty and violence and calculated insanity, this book would not make comfortable bedside companion, at least for the patients, who have, after all, been harmed enough by life already.
