Books to Seek Out
All through January, February, March, and April of last year, I threw books against the wall. I rent books in two. I cut them with knives. I burned them in the fireplace and tossed them into the microwave. I used them to mop up the cat’s vomit and to write down my shopping lists. Outside, in our vertiginous right-angle of a yard, I threw them into the air, hoping that they might do what they could not do with words: namely, draw breath and fly. Sometimes single words set me off, so that many a tome’s pages resembled a series of blindfolded hostages, the blindfolds made of black magic marker. Other times, whole pages screamed out for assisted suicide—and I helped them with scissors or with a quick rip of the wrist. For an excruciating quartet of months it appeared I would never read anything good again.
Then, slowly, it began to change. The weather became crisp and warm as buttered toast. My allergies cleared up. My nightmares changed to dreams of rows of unread volumes, a crop as wholesome as golden sheafs of wheat. (One night, the gods’ messenger Garuda even came to me in my sleep and whispered, Perdido Street Station in my ear and I smiled and hugged the pillow, anticipated bliss transforming my features.)
Slowly and then in bunches, new books began to tumble from the sky, from the fireplace, from the mailbox, from behind bushes and hedgerows, appearing between the covers, under the couch, beneath the dust jackets of other, lesser, books entirely. And with a dusty muffled hiccup of words in some cases, with a bray of trumpets in others, with a stuttered curse, with a sweeping vision of a city skyline broken with spires, I read them, the titles tumbling off the tongue like ambrosia: Magic Prague, Life and Fate, House of Leaves, The World’s Most Dangerous Places, Moonshadows, The Smell of Telescopes, The Other Side of the Mountain... Since then, I have yet to experience a similar such fecund period of reading enjoyment, alas…
Magic Prague
By Angelo Maria Ripellino, translated by David Newton Marinelli
(University of California Press, 1994)
Ripellino is mad (and his familiar, the translator Marinelli, madder still). He cannot distinguish reality from fantasy, fact from fiction. I love him for it. Who else could mix, in a great Arcimboldic stew, Kafka and Hašek, alchemists and golems, so that a line from a poem by Nezval is as real as a Prussian general and a monster made of clay can still roam the streets of that beleaguered bohemian city along with bicyclists and automobiles. Connections burst from Ripellino’s head fully-formed, as beautiful as any offspring of Zeus:
To this day, every evening at five, Franz Kafka returns home to Celetna Street wearing a bowler hat and black suit. To this day, every evening, Jaroslav Hašek proclaims to his drinking companions in one or another dive that radicalism is harmful and wholesome progress can be achieved only through obedience to authority. To this day Prague lives under the sign of these two writers who better than all others expressed its irrevocable condemnation and therefore its malaise, its ill-humour, the ins and outs of its wiles, its duplicity, its grim irony.
Genre and great art juxtapose themselves in still-life dances of marvelous insight, such as this passage on Arcimboldo and Lovecraft…
There is something amorphous, flaccid and revolting about the managerie face entitled Earth [by Arcimboldo]; it is a hunter’s nightmare, a sinister muddle of beasts. Water, a monstrous head of bug-eyed fish, octopuses, eels, tiny sea animals, conch shells, and snail shells, is the triumph of slime, my idea of Lovecraft’s horrid giant squid head of the sea god Cthulhu.
Magic Prague, with perfect baroque brashness, provides me with the collective unconscious of an entire city in an utterly unique way that presages Steve Erickson’s ability in nonfiction to fuse those elements that make perfect sense to interpose and transpose, but that only a truly unique mind can manage to translate into readable prose.
