Absurdistan
George Saunders on Daniil Kharms, the Soviet absurdist writer who died during the siege of Leningrad:
Kharms’s stories are truly odd, as in: at first you think they’re defective. They seem to cower at the suggestion of rising action, to blush at the heightened causality that makes a story a story. They sometimes end, you feel, before they’ve even begun. Here, in Yankelevich’s translation, is the entire text of “The Meeting”:
“Now, one day a man went to work and on the way he met another man, who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was heading back home where he came from.
“And that’s it, more or less.”
Bring that into workshop! You’ll get slaughtered. Crickets will sound in the seminar room. Someone will say, “I guess I’d like to know more about the Polish bread.” No starving former lover crosses the path of our man as he brings home the bread to his own hungry family; no child needs to be pulled from the Neva; the man does not pass the open door of a shoemaker’s shop, inside of which the shoemaker is berating his wife, which makes our man contemplate his own troubled marriage, as he has a meaningful flashback to his honeymoon, crushing the bread in sudden angst.
A well-written review makes me aware of a writer’s work but also engages me in a discussion about the rules for writing. That is what George’s remarks on narrative did to me this morning. And that’s also the pleasure I found in reading, in the same issue of the NYTBR, a review by Michael Gorra of Anne Landsman’s The Rowing Lesson:
Most readers will spend the book’s first chapter trying to locate themselves in relation to its “you” — the “you” that implies a largely absent “I.” Although later chapters will bring Betsy’s own circumstances more fully to the foreground, Landsman’s shifting pronouns are what gives this book its febrile and uncanny life, in which the barriers between self and other appear at moments to dissolve. Betsy’s persistent invocation of “you” allows her to comment and question and judge, to conduct a conversation in which her father’s physical silence matters not at all, so vocal does he seem in her mind. In that conversation, Landsman makes us see Harold Klein with a clarity she could not have achieved in a more conventional first- or third-person account.
