tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4012491099567362012.post4610102463180891508..comments2020-10-21T08:45:38.625-07:00Comments on MORAVIAN-NIGHTS-DISCUSSION: Review: A Slow, Inquiring NarrationSUMMA POLITICOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11214697505465094305noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4012491099567362012.post-44114973351230792872017-01-12T16:05:25.986-08:002017-01-12T16:05:25.986-08:00Let's not get into that "bad blood",...Let's not get into that "bad blood",my friend, it has little relevance here. However, I agree that Scott's use of the quote is specious, too. For what is "social" in this monologue? with very beautiful and amazing writing but also quite a bit of self-serving self-justification. It is an autistic, self-enclosed fantasy.SUMMA POLITICOhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11214697505465094305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4012491099567362012.post-150231369676442792017-01-12T14:56:04.623-08:002017-01-12T14:56:04.623-08:00I have now finished reading also the translation o...I have now finished reading also the translation of MORAVIAN NIGHT and have had some time to think about it and Michael Roloff and Scott Abbott’s different responses - the NY Times reviewer Cohen, Joshua I bet is as awful a novelist as a reviewer. <br /><br />I love the Frenon quote that Abbott puts ahead of his piece -”He said: to tell stories is to ratify the social... To take part in its game. Since childhood we have been constituted by stories that we have to believe in.. .” But I don’t see this kind of existential need for story-telling as a social fabric in MORAVIAN, or sense at any moment an extreme need on the writer’s part to convey this elaborate tale of tales. Nor do I see that lying or falsification is a necessary part of story telling, if an existential need existed for the narrator to tell this sequence of stories, and the use of the quote strikes me as yet another form of speciousness. <br /><br />The mention of Samarkand very much puts me in the mood, in an anticipation of a “thousand and one night” and, initially, the first, the invitation section, reinforces that expectation, anticipation, and is one kind of story telling, it creates an “as if” state that is then realized or not... and “not” is my over-all sense despite or perhaps because the numerous so widely differing stories and events that are recounted - one year in the life, or what easily could be one year in that writer’s, in Peter Handke’s life since the book’s stages correspond to Handke’s, but my feeling is that it is the different kinds of subjects and events are what make for the different kinds of telling these stories, or afford different kinds of forms of narration, including all that narrating and what Roloff calls stitching splicing, you sort of get the bottom part of a basket woven if you see what I mean or half weaver bird’s bower to use Roloff’s amusing metaphor for the whole.<br /><br />Samarkand and Numancia - their both having been forts, strongholds, conquered by very different armies is one commonality - if Handke had that commonality in mind? Numancia as a story telling venue comes as news - however, in MORAVIAN it is the location of the Noise Symposium, an imaginary event created for this novel, but growing out of, so I gather, Handke’s frustration, and not just his, with the intrusion of all kinds of hideous noises even into his fairly pastoral suburban retreat; and the writer’s acquaintance with this odd poet Pablo, Handke himself wrote one of his essays in nearby Soria, one of the fording points of the Duero. What shocks me is Handke’s brutality to women - here he assaults an unsuspecting -former lover? - is that part of “story telling”, all that paranoia about women or a woman lurking in the reeds in the Morava, no wonder is all I can say! Or the abandoned girl friend on Corfula, now a vengeful crone. These matters are told, but not resolved, or understood. It might be true, it might not be, it’s just a tale told by an idiot writer! With a lot of time on his hand for sure. I don’t know gospodin Handke, we were in contact just once, when I sent him Roloff’s first essay on the his first books on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and Handke refused to accept Roloff’s mail, but then had no objection to Roloff’s essay, but for one point where Roloff had misread a passage as being anti-Croatian, yet asked me in his reply whether I thought Roloff was a socio-path. Not only did the question take me aback, since after all Handke and did not know each other, but Roloff had informed me why Handke was not replying to his mail, and I knew quite a bit about Handke personally at that point, and why there was bad blood between them, not Roloff’s doing best as I could tell, and so I concluded that I might be correct in my feeling that Handke had a schizophrenic streak, in addition to his autism, later sent him the then bible on the subject, but did not hear back, or that he was just too brilliant to be socially aware; thus in some way Moravian Night is a deeply troubling book, and not in the way that that idiot Joshua Cohen means.Franz Angstnoreply@blogger.com