COMING ATTRACTIONS
This is a sort of teaser for the very long essay that THE HOLLINS CRITIC asked me to write on...
TRUTH AND FACTS
An essay on ANNIVERSARIES by Uwe Johnson
ANNIVERSARIES is published by New York Review Books and will be available in October... look to Amazon...
ANNIVERSARIES is published by New York Review Books and will be available in October... look to Amazon...
PREFACE
1
Uwe J.[Johnson] last and
solitary 10 years in England always fascinate me. Shortly after his death I met
a bookseller in Richmond that knew him. And when Sebald invited me to a
symposium in Norwich I met there the late Michael Hamburger that was his
friend. Speculations [About Jakob]... a very innovative work.
I keep a very good Spanish translation, Conjeturas..., from 1973, annotated,
with a critical introduction and bibliography. No publisher will do this kind
of work in Spain anymore. And his Spanish translations are out of print. But I
believe Zamyatin was right: the future of Russian literature, and of
literature, for short, is in its past. The rich past will erase the pastime.
And the eyes of a new and real reader will follow the lines and the lives of St. Patrick's Day...
(from
a letter from Julian Rios (author of LARVA)
to the writer of this essay)
2
The tendency of every
age is to bury as many classics as it revives.
If unable to discover our own urgent meanings in a creation of the past,
we hope to find ample redress in its competitive neighbors. A masterpiece cannot be produced once and for
all; it must be constantly reproduced.
Its first author is a man. Its later one--- time, social time, history
----Philip Rahv
ONE
ANNIVERSARIES
by Uwe Johnson is a great American novel though written in German but now
available in a complete, precise and very readable translation by Damion
Searls.
ONE
I began writing this essay about Uwe
Johnson’s ANNIVERSARIES on September 1, 2018, the 79th
anniversary of the beginning of World War Two and I am writing the essay in a
small town in New Jersey, home to a former Michelin tire factory that closed in
1930 though the main street is still crossed by Pershing, Haig, Foch and Joffre
streets with a little side avenue named for Petain and an American Legion hall
named for Joyce Kilmer as is the elementary school. Everything remains and is forgotten.
ONE
I had thought more provocatively to
have started my essay with: ANNIVERSARIES by Uwe Johnson is one of the greatest New
York City novels and of course it begins
at a New Jersey beach town and will end at a Danish beach town.
ONE
-->
Or, Uwe Johnson’s ANNIVERARIES From a Year in the Life of
Gesine Cresspahl (giving its complete title) is the freshly translated, definitive and complete 1668 page
novel constantly centered on the year of 1967-68 in the life of a German woman
living at West 96th Street in Manhattan remembering or being placed
in times that include both the Nazi past and the then present divided Germanys,
while constantly mirroring those lives in a daily reading and quoting from The
New York Times.
I am unsure of including this note as there is already a PS to my essay... but it seems necessary... Johnson always acknowldged that William Faulkner was THE great American writer as indeed does much of the world. Faulkner is the only modern American writer who can be thought of a member of the World Republic of Letters as Pascale Casanova mentions in her book with that title
-- From the essay by Evelyn Scott on William Faulkner’s THE SOUND AND THE FURY: “William Faulkner has that general perspective in viewing particular events which lifts the specific incident to the dignity of catholic significance, while all the vividness of an unduplicated personal drama is retained. He senses the characteristic copmulsions to action that make a fate.” [this is from a photo copy of the actual original booklet that the publisher issued for the publication of the novel]
Of course Johnson’s name could be substituted for Faulkner.
