KTH RDGWY

I was living like everybody else, looking at life with the open, blind eyes of man, without surprise and without understanding. I was living as animals live, as we all live, carrying out all the duties of existence, examining and thinking I saw, thinking I knew, thinking I was familiar with, my surroundings, when one day I perceived that everything is false.

I read Guy de Maupassant’s The Horla while on a flight to Dublin the other day. (It’s very short).  I was reading the handsome volume from Melville House , part of their "Art of The Novella" series. It includes two versions of the story, from 1886 and 1887, and an earlier version entitled Letter From A Madman , of which the quote above forms the opening paragraph. I think I prefer this first take. It’s very direct, much shorter even than The Horla itself, and it ends with the line, "What should I do?" which had me looking out at the runway of Dublin Airport in a bit of a panic. Damned if I know what you should do, Guy.

The story is straightforward. A man feels that he is gradually becoming in some way haunted, or perhaps possessed, or in any case considerably fiddled with, by a presence, an invisible something-or-other, which drinks the water on his bedside table while he sleeps, and drinks the milk he leaves as a test (because he hates milk himself) and which causes him to suffer greatly and feel deep fear and unease and dread, unto the point of despair, and in the last version, violence. He thinks he’s going mad. Then he thinks that there is another possibility. That the creature, which he takes to calling Le Horla (he doesn’t know why) is a higher form of life that has arrived to take the place of mankind. He finds evidence for this in reports of a strange illness in a town in Brazil.

The translation is a lovely piece of work, by Charlotte Mandell. In an afterword, she points out that the neologism ‘horla’ combines hors , meaning outside, and là , meaning there. "So le (note the masculine gender) Horla sounds like the Outsider, the outer, the one Out There."

De Maupassant’s descriptions of nocturnal activities in a locked room where he is ostensibly alone immediately put me in mind of Thomas Glavinic’s Night Work , about which I’ve written on this blog . Glavinic takes (I’m sure he must have read The Horla ) what is a slight but startling set of ideas about our perceptions and our sense of ourselves, and expands them into a terrifyingly empty world, which nevertheless seems to have someone else in it. These are stories about the self. But the self isn’t single.

Melville House tell us that The Horla "was published shortly before the author was institutionalised for insanity". It’s a bit of a stretch, that, I think, to be fair. He wrote Letter From a Madman a full seven years at least before he entered the asylum after a suicide attempt. But it’s clear that De Maupassant was thinking and writing about what ‘insanity’ feels like. It’s terrifying, clearly. And the terror comes in large part from what it also feels like - reasonable, and logical, and precise.

Night Work is about a man called Jonas who wakes up one apparently ordinary summer’s day in his home city of Vienna to find that the television isn’t working, the newspaper hasn’t been delivered and the internet connection is down. He accidentally slices open his finger in the kitchen and it occurs to him that nobody else has ever seen the bare bone he can now glimpse. He goes to the bus stop. There is no one on the street. There are no buses, no cars. Fairly quickly, Jonas comes to realise that he is the only living creature in the city. There is no one else. There are no people anywhere. He is utterly alone.

I’ve written here recently about Ferenc Karinthy’s Metropole , and mentioned in passing Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled . In my own small mind, Night Work forms a sort of loose trilogy with these books. I’m not very well read. I’m sure there are other books which place a character in a city which makes no sense to him, and subsequently examine ideas of isolation and fear and panic. Panic books. They prod that scary childish part of me that is scared of being abandoned. All three of these books alarmed me in the reading in one way or another, but there is a rising scale. The Unconsoled is rather beautiful, gentle. It’s disorienting certainly, but it has the quality of a dream, in which the peculiarities tickle and stimulate, and it is, or it is to me, ultimately a positive, warm book. Metropole is much more unforgiving. It is more extreme, and its sense of dread more pervasive and persuasive. It has an open ending, to which you can attach ideas of your own, depending I suppose on your temperament. I felt doomed.

Night Work though, in terms of effect on me, was of a different order altogether. I found it genuinely scary. It unnerved me. I felt odd when reading it. I had to stop sometimes, get up from where I was sitting, walk around, look at things, think about something else, look at something on the television. I didn’t like reading it at night. I had to stop leaving it by my bed.

Jonas begins, very quickly, to get the idea that he is not alone. Things happen. He finds doors he left open shut. He finds a photograph of himself behind the bread bin that he can’t account for. His solitude is so peculiar to him that it takes on an otherness that is impossible to reconcile with reality. He sets up video cameras to film himself sleeping. He begins to think of the person he watches on these tapes as The Sleeper. The Sleeper does strange things. Frightening things. The Sleeper starts to use the night.

There is a literary mechanism here that brings to mind Dostoyevsky’s The Double , and Stevenson’ Jekyll And Hyde , and similar stories. But what is most unusual about Glavinic’s book is the horrible spotlight that the set up places on this idea of a man haunting himself, terrorising himself. There is nothing else in the world but Jonas. With the hell of other people not available, Jonas creates it out of parts of himself. And though it’s fully diagnosed from the beginning, this pathology persists and worsens and begins to unravel in the reader both the sense that it can ever be overcome, and any notion that understanding it might have been of any use in the first place.

Night Work is wonderfully well written. The pace is perfectly judged. The tension, and the often excruciating suspense, is completely at the service of large ideas about isolation, witness, and existence itself. It’s one of the ironies of the book, and one of the clever tricks it plays on the reader, that you become increasingly conscious as you go on, of how the activity of reading is such a solitary experience. You wander through this book alone, wanting to take someone with you, wishing there was someone else at your shoulder reading the same lines as you. And then you stop and think about that for a minute. And it becomes a terrifying idea.

Glavinic’s only other book currently available in English is Carl Haffner’s Love Of The Draw . It’s a fictionalised portrait of the Austrian chess player Karl Schlechter, whose style of play emphasised caution above all else. It’s a very different book to Night Work , and it hasn’t stayed in my mind to nearly the same degree. But it’s quiet and sad and lovely, and it shows a skill in the portrayal of relationships that you don’t, obviously, get any clue of from Night Work .

Glavinic seems, on the basis of these two books, a writer of immense range and talent. A (lukewarm) review of Night Work in the LRB last year by Philip Oltermann gave me some idea of the Austrian context in which Glavinic writes, and, tantalisingly, an idea of what’s going on in some of his other books. Night Work is published by Canongate, in a slightly silly cover that suggests a high tech surveillance thriller. Well, perhaps that’s not so silly. I don’t know. I hope they’ve done well enough with it to persuade them to publish the other books. I want to read more by this man. Lots more.

Regardless though of what else might come, Night Work is an amazing, arresting, alarming piece of work.

I used to hang around in Amsterdam with some of the rent boys who lived there at the time, in the early 1990s. I used to try out story ideas on them - ideas for stories or novels that I thought I could write. The boys were usually bored or bewildered by everything I came up with, and they’d listen, but they’d shrug and not really care one way or the other.
- Yes Keith that’s a good idea, you should write that.

There was one idea though that would annoy them, and which they wouldn’t let pass. It was the idea of a guy who starves to death in a large city because he can’t speak the language.
- Why would he starve Keith?
- Because he doesn’t know how to ask for anything.
- But you speak no Dutch. You don’t starve.
- Not Amsterdam. Some other place, where no one speaks his language.
- What is his language?
- I don’t know. Something that no one else speaks. And he doesn’t know any other languages either.
- So how did he get there? To the city?
- What?
- How did he book his ticket?
- I don’t know. What’s that got to do with it? The point is that he finds himself in a city where he can’t understand anyone and they can’t understand him. So he starves to death.
- He could point.
- What?
- He could just point at things in a café or at a food counter, or just pick things on a menu even if he didn’t understand them. He wouldn’t starve Keith.
- But he’d be too shy.
- Shy?
- Yes. People can be that shy. Shy and timid and afraid.
- Too shy to point? More shy than hungry?
And I would give up, and go sullen, and believe that I would never manage to write anything good, anything worthwhile. Because I knew no way of getting to the point.

His achievements thus far were sickenin gly insignificant. He hadn’t enough information to deduce a system: he could not even put a sentence together. And when he tried using the words he knew, or the words he supposed he knew, to enquire, for example, where he might find a café or a metro station he was surprised to find that he was either misunderstood or not understood at all. Could he be mispronouncing the words? That would not be unlikely, having heard the curious, alien-sounding articulations of the locals. Later though, in one of the underground tunnels of the metro, some kind of altercation broke out, and Budai noticed that everyone else was merely shouting and rambling, with no one paying any attention to anyone else. Could it be that they themselves could not understand each other, that the people who lived here employed various provincial dialects , possibly even quite different language? In a particularly feverish moment it even occurred to him that each of them might be speaking his own language, that there were as many languages as there were people.

That’s from Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy. Karinthy was a Hungarian writer, linguist and water polo champion. He died in 1992. Metropole is the first of his books, of which there are well over a dozen, to appear in an English translation. It tells the story of Budai, a linguist, who is on his way to a conference in Helsinki, and who finds himself, through a series of perfectly understandable errors and accidents, in the centre of a densely populated city which he does not know, surrounded by people whom he cannot understand and who are both unable to understand him and apparently not particularly inclined to try. He does not, of course, starve to death. He does a lot of pointing. But he is comprehensively trapped. He can’t get out of the city. He tries to find his way to the airport, to train stations; he calls people at random from the phone in his hotel room; he tries to dial internationally; he tries to make the staff at the hotel understand that he doesn’t know where he is; he gets himself arrested, hoping that he’ll be deported. Nothing works. It’s terrifying.

If you look up the book almost anywhere, you’ll see the word Kafkaesque , which is a superficial word, and which is here superficially applied. It actually feels much more contemporary, and what it brought most to my mind, with its over-tired sense of unreality, and in its careful but bewildering descriptions of a place which is somehow wrong, is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled . Both are about men lost in situations which seem metaphorical, but which nevertheless have to be faced, dealt with, struggled with. The condition is the description of the condition. We are trapped in the description of being trapped. And so on. Metropole was written before The Unconsoled . And as far as I know, Ishiguro doesn’t read Hungarian. And yet here are two novels which seem to say similar peculiar things, perhaps the same thing, in such a memorable, hypnotic and discomforting way, that they are like two versions of the same joke.

A third version of this joke is Thomas Glavanic’s Night Work , which I read last year, and which I’ll write about here soon, because it also terrified and worried me, and yet so altered my perceptions that I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the entire text is tattooed somewhere on my internal organs.

Read Metropole , though, obviously. It will speak to you and shake you up. It does what I lately most admire in a novel - it gets to the point without fuss. It doesn’t do what a lot of my terrible writing does - it doesn’t allude or suggest, it doesn’t arrange banal reality so that it spells out B-A-N-A-L and then ask you to applaud; it doesn’t lay out a series of pretty symbols or signs or metaphors and wink at you like a horny, lunatic sot. It does what Gombrowicz does, and what Ishiguro at his best can do, and what I’ve sometimes known Jelinek or Handke or of course, yes, Kafka to do - it plunges you straight in, up to your neck, in the comedy and terror of being the particular tiny living soul that you are, right this moment, in a universe more vast than it is possible for us to imagine that has roared and stretched for fourteen billion years and which will never know of our existence.

And I was worried about what I’d eat.