EVENING EDGED IN GOLD

by Arno Schmidt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 25, 1980

No, that price is not a misprint. This is a dauntingly energetic, heroically translated last work (1975) by the late German avant-gardist Arno Schmidt--and it comes in the form of an 18"" x 12(apple)"" typescript, 200 huge yellow pages covered with. . . utterly unreadable prose. ""A FairytalefArse/55 Scenes from the Countryside for Patrons of Errata"" is the subtitle; these scenes (in dialogue-with-stage-directions form) are set in the village of Klappendorf on an October day in 1974; and the ostensible subject-matter is the enchantment of 15-year-old Marina, child of aging parents, by a band of ""licentiate and literary"" hippies. But this story-line is only the barest framework for a free-associative, non-associative barrage of wordplay. One preoccupation, of course, as suggested by that subtitle, is sex: ""We are concerned with the simultaneous benefits of both visual- and verbal materials. Arise outev sexual images familiar t most people."" But Schmidt also throws in anything else at hand: excerpts from German romantic novels; pictures illustrating how to take a shower; maps; charts of the novel's non-progress; all kinds of the most wideflung etceteras. And perhaps in the original German this potpourri achieves some genuine resonances. In English, however, the prose clearly lacks what seems intended--a Joycean panache: Woods' translation, in fact, usually sounds much more like Ezra Pound (talking his ""Murican"" English) than Joyce: ""Those butterdroasters & beef-tasters!? Sortev your transparent ol' fogey and dadda: afterall, those codgers 'r still living an old-fangl'd life: side-trackt sergeant-major types; old sored pommels and fieldmarmelade faces!-; (he holds his thumb up to the moon, measuring:?"" The academic community may want to make further such comparisons and analyses--but otherwise this white-elephant import is more notable as an awesome, grandiosely quixotic act of publishing than for the debatable merits of the contents.

Pub Date: Aug. 25, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1980

Categories: FICTION