Geoffrey C. Howes, translator of the novel, tells us in The Whole of Life, Jürg Laederach experiments with how language both refers to reality and creates its own reality. He goes on to warn "Laederach knows that language is only as reliable and stable as the minds that use it; in other words, it is unreliable and unstable."
For Walter Abish, The Whole of Life is fiction as an act of invention. Ernestine Schlant notes The Whole of Life makes a reader think of an architect walking across a bridge he builds as he goes across and which collapses behind him.
If all of the above sounds unconventional, you're headed in the right direction in tapping into the funky beat of this offbeat Swiss novel. Jürg Laederach traveled to New York City's downtown multiple times to participate in the jazz scene and it shows with a showtime Thelonious Monk downbeat. When reading The Whole of Life, think in terms of jazz and improvisation - fiction playing off conventional narrative. Indeed, rather than following straight linear progression, this jazzy 300-pager is formed into three sections according to theme: 1) Job, 2) Wife, 3) Totems and Taboos.
JOB
Jazz cool, big daddy deadpan, the narrator performing riffs on Robert Hecht aka Bob aka R aka Bobby as he follows bumbling Bob, the Swiss everyman, moving in and out of unemployment to various jobs such as gardener for a nursery where Bobby also plays lounge piano (probable combination? - go figure), government upper-level bureaucrat dealing with complaining apartment tenants (Robert Hecht talks nonstop as a way of combating all the complaints), industrial baron of French Fries (Would you like some fries with your absurdity burger?).
Poor Bob. Poor society. We keep hearing that repeating phrase, an outrageous ostinato, as if performed on jazz piano: this is a work world of complete dysfunction, complete dysfunction - with Bob the dysfunctional boob taking his place in the murky, incoherent, terrifying workaday chaos. "Bob Hecht moved between them, mediating, as a stupendous virtuoso at the piecemeal revelation of his own inabilities." One prime casualty of all this job, job, job - if anyone seeks intimacy or genuine contact with another person, their chances of success hover right around zero.
"Robert did not think that his likes and dislikes, which seemed to him like a colorful play of his soul, could have anything to do with the relationship of the tenant to the government." One of the many instances where we read respectable Robert's authentic feelings are completely alienated from functioning in a job. Can you identify with our Bob and his alienation? If you are shaking your head "yes," join the club - such is the plight of nearly everyone our modern cubical, computerized culture.
WIFE
Bad new, readers. Robert is going through a bout of impotence. Meanwhile, Jürg Laederach keeps on pumping out the cross-rhythms with psychoanalysis and artistic invention serving as intertwining melodies. "Robert's wife, her breast pockets hanging down to her belt, reading out past the pages of the novella as if the lines of the novella went on to the right past the page margin and as if the stone floor and the wall seams also contained novella text printed on them and as if the all-covering wallpaper was nothing but a never-ceasing novella text smudgy with fly-foot specks . . . Robert's wife, reading text lines three meters long - to judge by her swift, squinty eye movement - waiting with a stony mouth for Robert's ultimate befuddlement."
TOTEMS AND TABOOS
Good news, readers! This third and final section lets go of all the Roberts and Bobs and Bobbies, to shift to first person. However, be aware, as Robert Hecht is ineffectual on the job (when he has a job, that is) and impotent in the marriage bed, when it comes to touting of totems and tattling of taboos, Bobby the writer flounders in creative inaction, which is a sideways way of saying the boy has writer's block. "I was a young author; pretty pauperized; there was a connection there." Yet another bout of bad news, Bob - sounds like your lack of money feeds your lack of productive writing; in other words, nothing in the bank, no words on the page.
But this final section grooves on for 120 pages. Among my favorite modulations: a long list of boogies on the jobless writer and the jobless reader relating with prose writing. As in: "What does an author do who writes, and reads his prose? He loses his job, doesn't he?" And: "Jobless people read more because they have more leisure time and need advice. Jobless authors produce more because they are in need and would like to reintegrate themselves. Thus the jobless author's need for overproduction of prose and the jobless person's need for overconsumption of prose accommodate each other."
Perhaps not surprisingly, there's an immediate shift to writer Bob and his wife Ann squaring off against one another cast as a Friday Night as the Fights boxing match. I mean, how would you like to have a guy like Bob as your breadwinner? And there's the bell!
A few pages on there's stimulating syncopation and shenanigans of Zeppo teaming up with Groucho written as if an exercise in language formulated by a linguist. There's ample reason Jürg Laederach dedicated The Whole of Life to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This to say, if you like your innovative, subversive jazzy novel leavened with a healthy dose of heady philosophic cogitations, The Whole of Life deserves a place on your bookshelf.
Swiss author Jürg Laederach, 1945-2018
"My writing that moved in parallel with all experiences was coming along, page by page, and on paper I was the prize-winning whirlwind of old. The pages were thrown by the bundle on the paternoster principle into the circulating dumbwaiter, which never stopped running. It received the bundles that were brought to it on conveyor rollers or on a bundle-delivery system." - Jürg Laederach, The Whole of Life
Comments
Post a Comment