A Flaming Beam in a Wretched Year

If any writer could be said to have exerted an influence on reading this year, it would be Gabriel Josipovici. One influence does not preclude another: the claim might equally apply to Gerald Murnane or Friederike Mayröcker. The latter died, aged ninety-six, in the summer, but to share a time with such writers is a flaming beam during an otherwise wretched year. These are writers of subtlety, not stylists or crafters of perfect sentences, though many of their sentences, to borrow from Nietzsche, turn into a hook, pulling something incomparable from out of the depths. What can be more exhilarating than to follow the thoughts of such singular minds?

Of all years, in this one more contemporary fiction was read and abandoned than usual—an attempt to read against the grain. That so few newly published novels are worth reading is no surprise; it could describe any age. What remains, too often, is superfluous style, excess of adjectives, too little space in which to open a door to one’s own reflections. What lasts, if anything, is the mood or atmosphere. As Jenny Erpenbeck puts it: the most important things sink deeper in our memories, we internalise them, take them into our bodies, and they stay there, blind and mute.

Sharing the interior lives of others through literary creation arguably reveals more of the world than any other medium. Three novels this year offered the sharp light of an autumn afternoon, a glimpse into the inner architecture of their creators: Jacques Roubaud’s The Great Fire of London, Peter Weiss’s Leavetaking, and Gabriel Josipovici’s Moo Pak. Formally they could not be more different, but each offers a serious portrayal of the human condition in its many forms.

That description applies equally to Friederike Mayröcker’s And I Shook Myself a Beloved, translated by Alexander Booth. A fiction only in the sense that all journeys into inner worlds are fictions, it recounts, in dark tones, her relationship with Ernst Jandl. A raw meditation, lifted by its strange, unquestionable beauty.

Art restimulates inspirations and awakens sensibilities / that’s the function of art, wrote Agnes Martin in Writings. This collection of letters, lectures, and journals is exceptional, and, like David Sylvester’s Interviews with Francis Bacon, offers insight beyond the specifics of a single artist’s vision.

Though not especially a year for poetry, Derek Walcott’s White Egrets stood out. Quiet and conservative poems, vivid in their sense of personality. There is something of Larkin’s precision and Heaney’s feel for landscape. The poems addressing canonical painters: Uccello, El Greco, del Sarto, Blake, Van Gogh, and Constable, are particularly resonant.

The next phase of reading may draw inward: depth over breadth, thinking even through the minor works of those talismanic writers who remain essential. Likely more poetry, less contemporary fiction, and perhaps a return to Ancient Greek and Roman literature. But the shape of a reading life tends always to serendipity, resisting plan or chart.