Tag: Gerhard Rühm

Gerhard Rühm’s The Folded Clock (Book acquired, drifted through, last week or the week before, end of 2025)

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I dug/was perplexed by Gerhard Rühm’s Cake and Prostheses a few years ago, so when I got my soft pink hands on The Folded Clock, (translated like C & P by Alexander Booth), I was intrigued. Publisher Twisted Spoon describes The Folded Clock as a collection of “number poems, comprising typewriter ideograms, typed concrete poetry, collages of everyday paper ephemera and scraps, and a wide variety of literary forms where the visual pattern created on the page underpins the thematic meaning.”

Rühm seems to identify Kurt Schwitters as his artistic precursor, or an artistic precursor. Like Cake and Prostheses, the pieces in The Folded Clock defy easy categorization — Is it a script or a poem or art? is probably the wrong question.

Passing eyes over the text is probably not the way to go; Rühm’s asking you to engage. As Joseph Schreiber puts it in his review at Rough Ghosts, you might follow Rühm’s directions and “allow yourself to read aloud and, there are you are, from the very beginning, not simply reading but actively engaging with the poem.”

I don’t really like numbers that much, at least not in a mob, a gang, a swarm. I tried and didn’t work out. Not just with this book but in general. I can’t count sheep, I guess.

I had a better time with Rühm’s forays into music and letters and collages; I enjoyed whatever psychotic version of minesweeper or Sudoku this piece is:

Blog about some recent reading

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A few weeks ago, I picked up Anthony Kerrigan’s translation of Miguel de Unamuno’s Abel Sanchez and Other Stories based on its cover and the blurb on its back. I wound up reading the shortest of the three tales, “The Madness of Dr. Montarco,” that night. The story’s plot is somewhat simple: A doctor moves to a new town and resumes his bad habit of writing fiction. He slowly goes insane as his readers (and patients) query him about the meaning of his stories, and he’s eventually committed to an asylum. The tale’s style evokes Edgar Allan Poe’s paranoia and finds an echo in Roberto Bolaño’s horror/comedy fits. The novella that makes up the bulk of the collection is Abel Sanchez, a Cain-Abel story that features one of literature’s greatest haters, a doctor named Joaquin who grows to hate his figurative brother, the painter Abel. Sad and funny, this 1917 novella feels contemporary with Kafka and points towards the existentialist novels of Albert Camus. (I’m saving the last tale, “Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr,” for a later day.)

I’m near the end of Iain Banks’s second novel, Walking on Glass (1985), which so far follows three separate narrative tracks: one focusing on an art student pining after an enigmatic beauty; one following an apparent paranoid-schizophrenic who believes himself to be a secret agent of some sort from another galaxy, imprisoned on earth; and one revolving around a fantastical castle where two opposing warriors, trapped in ancient bodies, play bizarre table top games while they try to solve an unsolvable riddle. I should finish later tonight, I think, and while there are some wonderful and funny passages, I’m not sure if Banks will stick the landing here. My gut tells me his debut novel The Wasp Factory is a stronger effort.

I’ve been soaking in Sorokin lately, thanks to his American translator Max Lawton, with whom I’ve been conducting an email-based interview over the past few months. Max had kindly shared some of his manuscripts with me, including an earlier draft of the story collection published as Red Pyramid. I’ve found myself going through the collection again now that it’s in print from NYRB—skipping around a bit (but as usual with most story collections, likely leaving at least one tale for the future.)

I very much enjoyed Gerhard Rühm’s Cake & Prostheses (in translation by Alexander Booth)—sexy, surreal, silly, and profound. Lovely little thought experiments and longer meditations into the weird.

I really enjoyed Debbie Urbanski’s debut novel After World. The novel’s “plot,” such as it is, addresses the end of the world: Or not the end of the world, but the end of the world of humans: Or the beginning of a new world, where consciousness might maybe could who the fuck actually can say be uploaded to a virtual after world. After World is a pastiche of forms, but dominated by the narrator [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc whose task is to reimagine the life of Sen Anon, one of the final humans to live and die on earth—and the last human to be archived/translated/transported into the Digital Human Archive Project. This ark will carry humanity…somewhere. [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc creates Sen’s archive through a number of sources, including drones, cameras, Sen’s own diary, and a host of ancillary materials. [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc also crafts the story, drawing explicitly on the tropes and forms of dystopian and post-apocalyptic literature. After World is thus explicitly and formally metatextual; [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc archives the life of Sen Anon, last witness to the old world and Urbanski archives the dystopian and post-apocalyptic pop narratives that populate bestseller lists and serve as the basis for Hollywood hits. [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc namechecks a number of these authors and novels, including Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, and Ann Leckie, while Sen Anon holds tight to two keystone texts: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. But the end-of-the-world novel it most reminded me of was David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Even as it works to a truly human finale, Urbanski’s novel is spare: post-postmodern, post-apocalyptic, and post-YA. Good stuff.

Speaking of: Carole Masso’s 1991 novel Ava also strongly reminded me of Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Its controlling intelligence is the titular Ava, dying too young of cancer. The novel is an elliptical assemblage of quips, quotes, observations, dream thoughts, and other lovely sad beautiful bits. Masso creates a feeling, not a story; or rather a story felt, intuited through fragmented language, experienced.

I continue to pick my way through Frederick Karl’s American Fictions. He is going to make me buy Joseph McElroy’s 1974 novel Lookout Cartridge. 

Gerhard Rühm’s Cake & Prostheses/Max Blecher’s Transparent Body (Books acquired 11 Jan. 2024)

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I was quite excited earlier this week to get a pair of books in new English translations from the Czech publisher Twisted Spoon Press.

I started in on Gerhard Rühm’s Cake & Prostheses (translated from the German by Alexander Booth) late last night and kept reading and reading, greedily consuming the surreal, poetic “mini dramas” as thought experiments played out in my head. Here’s an early example of one:

practiced biblical saying

catechist : love thy neighbor as thyself.

exegete: i hate myself! (gives the former a hard hook to the chin tho crumples him to the floor).

I’ll admit I didn’t know of Gerhard Rühm, but I’m enjoying Cake & Prostheses and hope to muster a review in the next week or so. Here’s Twisted Spoon’s blurb:

An inveterate experimenter with image and text and music, Gerhard Rühm is truly one of the major figures of the postwar European avant-garde. Yet reprehensibly little of his work has appeared in English. This edition brings together a selection of his work spanning the past seven decades, displaying a wide thematic range (as he has remarked, “there is nothing that cannot become part of one’s poetic universe”) and ingenious combinations of music, pornography, banality, humor, and mythology. The first section comprises “mini dramas,” the text often combined with images and musical notation to create sensorial episodes, the expression of a singular aesthetic perception. The second section is a wry deconstruction of Grillparzer’s play Hero and Leander that juxtaposes original passages with images from a swimming manual and with a more contemporary erotic retelling of the mythological tale. The final section presents 24 short prose pieces: 12 from the early 1950s and 12 from the past few years.

I had heard of the surrealist Romanian poet Max Blecher, but am still largely unfamiliar with his work. Twisted Spoon is publishing his 1934 collection Transparent Body along with some, uh, other texts, in a translation by Gabi Reigh. Blurb:

Blecher’s very first book, the poetry collection Transparent Body, appeared in 1934, in a limited edition for bibliophiles. Yet general recognition as one of the most inventive European writers of his day came only with the publication of two of his three “novels” a few years later. And then he died, at the age of twenty-eight. But since 1930 Blecher had been publishing his poetry, short prose, essays, critiques, and other texts in the leading Romanian periodicals, some even appearing in important French publications, such as Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution. In addition, the past half century has seen the posthumous first publication of many texts in a variety of Romanian editions.

Transparent Body & Other Texts brings together Blecher’s entire output of poetry and short prose, from the earliest texts published during his lifetime to those appearing for the first time only recently. They range from stories in the vein of his fantastical, hallucinatory longer work to aphorisms, reportage, and notebook fragments. The volume also includes a selection of his correspondence with such major figures of Romanian interwar modernism as Geo Bogza, Ilarie Voronca, and Saşa Pană to give a fuller picture of Blecher’s engagement with the avant-garde and literary life even as his health was progressively deteriorating over the course of the 1930s.