Instant Coffee, Marlen Haushofer, Things of That Nature ...
Two new pieces.
Just Add Water
For this past weekend's New York Times Magazine I wrote this short appreciation of instant coffee — or, really, a celebration of how the seasons of life change our relationship to our routines.
People love coffee and love comparing notes on routines, and I had more fun than usual scrolling through the comments (a low bar, to be sure).
“Today … I Shall Begin My Report.”
Short version: I reviewed Marlen Haushofer’s 1962 novel The Wall for The New York Review of Books, and the piece is online and on newsstands now.
Less short version: Fifteen years ago I walked into a used English-language bookstore in the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome and bought an English translation, published in the UK, of Die Wand (The Wall), a 1962 novel by the Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer. I'd never heard of the novel, nor of Haushofer. Like a lot of people, I find my way to new books a bit more spontaneously when I'm traveling.
I'd come to Rome because my brother was studying there. But most days I had no other plans beyond meeting him for dinners. I walked around, sticking mostly in Trastevere, getting a feel for the neighborhood, drinking coffee, eating pastries and pizza, reading, taking naps. During my trip, there was a Richter 5.9 earthquake in the nearby medieval city of L'Aquila. Several friends emailed to ask if I was okay; I hadn't felt a thing.
The Wall fit perfectly with this vacation. It tells the story of an Austrian woman who finds herself trapped alone in a mountain valley by a mysterious force field. From the earliest pages she is without human company; the novel is about the life she makes in the aftermath.
Of course, in Trastevere, I wasn't facing any challenges to my survival. But I was spending the great bulk of my days alone, deciding entirely by myself what to do next. Haushofer's novel is powerfully immersive, drawing you into a drama of physical survival and also — just as grippingly, or more so — mental reevaluation of life and how it forms and changes, sometimes gradually, sometimes overnight.
I liked the novel so much that I didn't think much about exactly what made it so powerful: I just read, hour after hour. When I was done, I went back to the bookstore and bought something else (a DH Lawrence novel, I think, though I can't remember which one.) After this vacation was over, I mostly forgot about The Wall for a few years, when I read an excellent Nicholas Spice piece about Haushofer in the London Review of Books, which alerted me to the fact that she had two other books available in English (both, again, published in the UK but not the US).
I went back and read The Wall again. By this point I'd spent almost four years organizing my life around attempts to write fiction myself. This had changed my default reading style. I was more inclined, this time, to sit and ask myself how books I loved worked, trying to lift what I could for my own toolbox. I paid closer attention to how Haushofer played with — sometimes borrowing, sometimes deviating from — conventions from other stories about people stranded by catastrophe. I also tracked down and read Haushofer's other two books, noting how there too she played against readerly expectations, building anticipation for something that never really comes. All the important secrets stay buried; no one gets out of the trouble they’re in, not in any final or meaningful sense. I can't say for sure, but I'm thinking my admiration for this approach probably informed the approach I ended up taking in Planes.
I was excited when New Directions gave The Wall a proper US release last year. And I'm happy that the New York Review of Books gave me the chance to write about the novel (and Haushofer's other two English translations), the mechanics behind its beguiling nature, and its relation to other "last man" (or, more rarely, last woman) novels. My review is out in the current "Spring Books" issue, online and on newsstands now.
BREAKING: The combined forces of investment capital and complacency continue to erode the arrangements that once made it possible to get money in exchange for the labor of writing. Still, here we are.
Until next time,
—Peter