That City (Esa ciudad) by Javier Pastor

In January 2007, a colloquium dedicated to the publication of Javier Pastor’s second novel That City (Esa ciudad) took place in the La Central bookstore in Barcelona. During the discussion, the prose of Joyce and Céline was evoked, and the author’s linguistic skills, as well as formal inventiveness, were praised. Sixteen years have passed since that event; Pastor’s novel has gone out of print, and very few readers are now aware of its existence even in the author’s native Spain. This is wrong. It’s time to remind all admirers of innovative literature what remarkable book has been neglected for so long.

I am not totally sure of the Joyce comparison, but the evocation of Céline is dead on: in the course of the six years it took Pastor to write his novel, he managed to forge a very peculiar style reminiscent of the lexical exuberance of The Journey to the End of Night. The language of That City, likewise, is an amalgam of the artificial and natural in which street slang and vulgar expressions coexist with highly literary turns of phrase, specialised jargon, and neologisms. The parallel is not confined to the language alone for there is a certain affinity between Céline’s antihero Bardamu and the protagonist of That City Nicolás Garraiz, who is similarly an unscrupulous, cynical, self-serving, and derisive picaro set on a journey of wild adventures. Besides Céline, I was also reminded of Flann O’Brien, William Burroughs, the David Lynch of Lost Highway, and the Coen Brothers of Barton Fink.

Not only the vocabulary but also some formal aspects of the novel may pose a challenge to the reader. For instance, it takes some time to get used to the fact that all the dialogue is unattributed. Whenever there is an instance of direct speech, it is represented as an italicised text in a separate paragraph. The utterances of different speakers are distinguished only by line indentations. Another formal peculiarity we keep running into is the unconventional spelling of some familiar words. The more we read, the more we understand the logic behind that: the events recounted by the protagonist in what turns out to be his personal diary take place in a slightly altered reality, a kind of corrupted wonderland in which we nevertheless recognise a satirical depiction of contemporary Spain.

The main setting of the novel is the fictional coastal city of Capitolia, in which Nicolás Garraiz arrives to take the position of the weekly columnist for the newspaper La Claridad (Clarity)—an ironic name, for sure, as there is nothing clear about the convoluted city life he is tasked to report on. The decadent Capitolia with its crumbling buildings and labyrinthine lanes also brings to mind the Burroughsian Interzone. Actually, while reading, I couldn’t help but picture the narrator as Peter Weller in the role of William Lee in David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch. The violent, ultranationalist, and highly religious city languishing in perennial sultriness and humidity is a hotbed of street crime, mendicancy, drug abuse, terrorist activity, and weird cults. The spelling of many words related to religion is altered by replacing the “s” letter with the Hungarian digraph “sz”. Thus, “hostia” (host) becomes “hosztia”, “Dios” (God)—“Diosz”, papista (papist)—“papiszta”, and “Cristo Nuestro Señor” (Our Lord Christ) is written as “Jrizsto Nuesztro Szñort”. For many, the drug of choice is the powdered stone from a cave in which a saint hermit used to live. The substance is snorted like cocaine, and an invitation to “the saint’s stone” (as the powder is commonly known) is the highest expression of amicability in Capitolia. The best-preserved building in the city is the stadium at which the extremely popular sport of julbiton is played. Together with the protagonist we visit one julbiton game, which proves to be a biting satire of a football match. Instead of bullfighting, there is cowfighting (vacamaquia) in this deranged topsy-turvy world, but rest assured, the uddered bovines are as aggressive as bulls, if not more, and the goring of cowfighters to death is a common occurrence. As for art, different types of performance, called here “pefomans”, are very popular among the citizens. During one such event, the spectators watch a naked woman hurt herself with a mallet and a power drill and then observe two artists dressed as chickens decapitate live chickens; as the grand finale, the audience gets splattered with animal blood and viscera from some contraptions above their heads.

Peter Weller as Bill Lee in David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch

The story seemingly follows the archetypal model of the tale about a stranger coming to town. At the outset, the author makes sure that we do not harbour any particular affection for Garraiz by describing his irritation with the mother of five with whom he shares his train compartment. Annoyed by the ruckus caused by the kids, the journalist head-butts the woman, whom he calls in his mind a “hypertrophied doe rabbit”. Soon upon arriving in the city and settling in his apartment that doubles as his office, Garraiz becomes friends with an elderly man “of paleontological dimensions” called Moradillo, who is the editor of the cultural magazine Equinotaur and a respected member of the local intellectual circle, into which he immediately inducts his young protégé. Moradillo’s friends are a colourful and eccentric company whom the protagonist gets to know better during their regular hang-outs at the restaurant The Wild Palm. The most distinguished members of the company are Moradillo’s partner Hadlatter, the tireless inventor Piriç, who got reach during several wars by selling to the belligerents toilet paper with the depiction of their enemy’s flag, the Cuban Usmail, who entertains the idea of crossbreeding human beings on an island, the gynaecologist Dostó, who spills the medical secrets of his patients, the young introvert Benito and his fiancée Suri, an Asian woman whose secrets are revealed by the unscrupulous gynaecologist, and the “bony” philologist Victoria, with whom Garraiz has a brief affair and who proves to be a collaborator of the terrorist organisation CaCa, an all-too-obvious parody of the Basque ETA. As we later find out, Capitolia has effectively become a battleground for the cantonalist CaCa and its integralist adversary CoCa. The former prefers the true and tried method of bomb attacks, whereas for the latter the gamification of any harm inflicted on their political enemies is of utter importance. For the operatives of CoCa, any attack on CaCa has to have a ludic character. For example, one of the most successful operations against the cantonalists involves sending to the CaCa members ball-in-a-maze puzzles which detonate in the hands of the players, tearing off their thumbs, as soon as they manoeuvre the ball towards its goal.

ETA members

Garraiz’s acquaintance with the people of Capitolia goes hand in hand with his delving into the history and the esoteric lore of the place. He witnesses the ringing of the invisible meta-bell (metacampana) which can be heard only once a day in a certain place and is the product of the ingenious harnessing and harmonisation of the sounds of all the church bells in the city. He learns about the ancient cult of Aqutasuma whose practitioners are taught by their masters how to overcome numerous difficulties before embarking on a pilgrimage, guided by their erect penises (a nod to Gravity’s Rainbow?) to find the earth goddess who resides at the bottom of a volcano crater and with whom they have to copulate. He is also told the story of Méndigho, the great beggar, who has a dream about a mystical entity called Guma that appears to him as a giant pen on a sheet of graph paper and reveals a secret phrase of supernatural potency: whenever Méndigho shows someone a placard with this phrase, the person who reads it cannot resist giving him alms. As a result, the beggar amasses a great fortune but refuses to leave the secret to his family, eating the piece of paper with the miraculous phrase shortly before his death, Michael Kohlhaas style. These are just several examples of the many curious facts the protagonist discovers during his stay in the city. As may be assumed already at the beginning of Garraiz’s stint in Capitolia, things are not exactly what they seem, and there may be some ulterior motifs behind his inclusion in Moradillo’s circle. His exploration of the city inevitably and dramatically turns into a journey of self-discovery and makes him eventually face some harsh truth about himself, which he has persistently sought to avoid.

Javier Pastor is one of those authors who believe that the invention of a world, be it utopian or dystopian, also requires the invention of a new language. While he is not so radical in his approach as to transform the language of his novel into a conundrum requiring a glossary to be understood, he certainly succeeds in creating a linguistic hybrid befitting the alternative universe in which the novel is set. The language of That City, while comprehensible enough for the reader to get the gist of any situation described, is also sufficiently obfuscated by lexical and typographical tampering as to feel like an alienating lingo of someone not quite from any real place on a map. The ingenious creation of the alienating effect not only by distorting and blowing out of proportion real-life events and situations but also by narrating them in the idiom specifically crafted for this purpose is an impressive achievement which makes Javier Pastor’s novel stand out among many works that focus only on the story and ideas without much regard to the language.

That City is the kind of multi-layered, unclassifiable and uncomfortable literary work that doesn’t get written every year and that is anxiously sought after by the minority of adventurous readers, whereas there is little chance, I assume, that the reader of mainstream literature would have the patience to read this book to the end, let alone enjoy it. The novel has some aspects of a mystical thriller with a twist which could potentially appeal to a wider readership, but the complexity of the language and the disorienting narration style are likely to scare off many plot-oriented readers. All this is to say that it is understandable why the novel was not properly read and appreciated when it came out despite the enthusiasm of some critics. It is not rare that a significant but undervalued work of literature gets a new lease of life after years of neglect when it is reissued and attracts the interest of new readers, eventually getting the positive reception it was denied at the time of its first publication. I want to believe that a similar fate awaits Javier Pastor’s brilliant and bewildering novel That City.

Interview with Antonio Werli: On passion for literature, the volunteers of the Fric Frac Club, translating Horcynus Orca into French, Alberto Laiseca, the indie publisher Le Nouvel Attila, and creating art in different media

The Untranslated: What languages do you use in your work and how did you come by each of them?

Antonio Werli: I began translating literary texts about fifteen years ago. I am French (with Italian roots on my mother’s side) and I never thought I would become a literary translator; in fact, I was rather a poor language learner at school. I decided to learn Italian properly when I was around twenty even though I had only a basic grasp of the language. However, it was Spanish that I eventually mastered around the same time…because of love. I learnt Spanish in another life when I met and lived with a Latin American woman in the 2000s. Then, my passion for literature and my curiosity about authors and texts untranslated into French pushed me towards translation (my first translations were published in literary magazines). Later, I met an Argentine woman who became my partner, and for the past ten years we have been living between France and Buenos Aires. In the last two years, I have also been very active on social media using English, a language I used to know at the school level but which I now use daily. I couldn’t have imagined that I would be able to understand and speak fluently four languages every day—French and Spanish at home and in the streets, Italian for translation or when I’m in Italy, and English on social media and whenever there is an opportunity.

The Untranslated:  Are there any books that you read in your late teens or early twenties that radically changed you as a reader?

A.W.: I think I became a reader as a teenager with the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft. Science fiction, fantasy, and myths were my gateways into literature: Huxley, Poe, Maupassant, Ovid, Dante, One Thousand and One Nights, chivalric tales, things like that. Then, just before I turned twenty, a friend introduced me to the works of Jorge Luis Borges. I was fascinated by his metaphysical universe and references, and I believe that I became a serious reader of literature from that point on. I started reading extensively, not just fantasy literature or classics but also contemporary authors, philosophy, criticism, essays, and more experimental novels. When I realised I was passionate about books and literature, I began looking for employment in that field and landed a job in a bookstore. I worked as a bookseller from the age of 20 to 32.

A very important book for me during that time was House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. Not only because of the book itself (which is quite brilliant, by the way) but because it allowed me to be part of a vibrant community of readers for a few years. In fact, when the novel was published (in 2000 in the USA and in 2002 in France: I was 22-23 years old at the time), it was accompanied by an online discussion forum, one of the very first internet forums specifically dedicated to a novel. There were many of us, the readers who shared every day their interpretations of the novel, but not only that: we also discussed other books that we were reading as well as films, music, philosophy, what we liked and what we didn’t. I learnt an incredible number of things; it was like receiving an accelerated education in contemporary literature, and even in literary criticism! I consider the years spent on that forum as my true literary education (along with all the reading I did during my years in the bookstore) since I don’t have any formal academic training.

The Untranslated: You were one of the contributors to the Fric Frac Club, a cult French-language online journal dedicated to modern innovative literature. How did the idea to start it emerge? What have been the biggest challenges and the greatest successes of this project?

A. W.: The Fric Frac Club originally started as a community of bloggers. In fact, some of these bloggers, including myself, had met on the House of Leaves forum I mentioned earlier. It was a time when blogs were very popular (at least in France), and we quickly became a close-knit group of about ten literature enthusiasts. We shared a common taste for challenging literature and the desire to dissect, each in our own style, the texts we were passionate about. Soon, after about a year, we decided to make the Fric Frac Club “official” and created a website where we collected some of the content from our blogs. After that, we functioned like a real literary magazine, with a schedule, objectives, and various sections. If I’m not mistaken, we were active from 2007 to 2015. Besides writing our own criticism, we invited external contributors, conducted numerous interviews with writers, translators, and publishers as well as discussed music, art, cinema, comics…

All of us were enthusiasts and volunteers; that is, we read and wrote without any funding, whenever our personal schedules allowed. Of course, over the years, that became more difficult, and at one point, our group dwindled from ten members to just two or three, and we either couldn’t or didn’t want to become “professionals”. But the result of this passion is really enormous: nearly ten years, over 900 articles and interviews, friendships that continue to this day…all this for the sake of art!

One of the challenges of such an adventure was undoubtedly its organic and chaotic nature. We had neither a real “editorial board” nor an actual “editor-in-chief”, and we worked without compensation. Most importantly, we lacked technical support to handle website updates and security. In fact, we were hacked several times between 2012 and 2014, and although we didn’t lose any data, we had to migrate the website. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet been able to put all the content back online, but it will certainly happen someday.

Moreover, we lived through moments of great excitement, such as when Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 or Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day was published. We were all reading these novels simultaneously, and, on a weekly basis, each of us would publish their own serialised critique. I also remember with great joy the trust that authors and translators placed in us when they enthusiastically agreed to participate in our interviews. Perhaps the most significant successes are also personal: the majority of the regular contributors ended up finding work in literary criticism or became writers, essayists, translators.

The Untranslated: Could you describe your experience of reading Stefano D’Arrigo’s novel Horcynus Orca for the first time? What resources did you use to make sense of all the difficult words hardly found in any dictionary?

A.W.: I discovered Horcynus Orca about fifteen years ago when I came across very high praise for the book on the Internet while researching contemporary Italian literature. I had never heard of this novel or the author before, and I was immediately intrigued. I began by collecting articles and other materials on the Internet, and a bit later I tried to acquire the book. At the time, all the editions were out of print, and the book was unavailable in bookstores (either in France or in Italy). I finally found a PDF of the 1975 edition and started reading it in small sections, of about ten pages, which I printed out at home. My Italian was quite rudimentary to tackle D’Arrigo’s language, which was particularly challenging for me to follow. But I had no doubt about the richness of the style, the musicality of the prose, and the evocative power of the imagery. I must have read around 300 pages like that, over a few weeks, and to be honest, I probably understood only half of it! Immediately afterwards, I bought the French translation of Cima delle nobildonne (Foremost of Noblewomen) and devoured it. I was extremely impressed by this little masterpiece, even though D’Arrigo’s second novel had very little stylistic resemblance to Horcynus Orca. Over time, I managed to find the Rizzoli edition and resumed my reading, jumping from one passage to another, constantly amazed and a little bewildered too…

When we decided to launch the translation project with Benoît Virot (the publisher of Le Nouvel Attila) and Monique Baccelli (my co-translator) in 2012, I started from scratch, with a pencil in hand and opened dictionaries lying around. I also spent several months reviewing all the materials I had accumulated (besides the special dictionaries) and continued to search for new tools. Fortunately, thanks to the Internet, it was possible to access a vast number of linguistic tools and studies on D’Arrigo and Horcynus Orca, which allowed us to save an enormous amount of time in deciphering many words, expressions, and contexts that remained relatively cryptic even for Italians. For example, I can mention the works of Gualberto Alvino, Pierino Venuto, and Stefano Lanuzza, which proved essential for me and which can help any reader to understand the Sicilianisms and neologisms in the book. It was also necessary to become familiar with Sicilian and understand how D’Arrigo Italianised it. Sicilian dictionaries were of great help, and in particular a specific Sicilian-Italian-French lexicon that was available online until recently (Méridianismes chez les auteurs siciliens contemporains) by Professor Arnaldo Moroldo of the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis—it was very comprehensive.

Now that the translation has been completed, I would like to take the time to re-read the novel in Italian, to truly read it as if for the first time, without stumbling against incomprehensible words and without having to find translation solutions.

The Untranslated: One of the biggest challenges of translating Horcynus Orca, in my opinion, is posed by the Italianised Sicilian words and neologisms. What was your solution?

A.W.: There were actually a lot of solutions, and it is difficult to list them all. First and foremost, it was a collaboration of two translators, which is important: translating as a team creates a sort of “dialect” in itself. Then, it was necessary to determine the “issues” and decipher the arcalamecca [translator’s note: D’Arrigo’s coinage that means anything amazing] of his style: to find out which words originated from Sicilian, Old Italian, French, English, Latin; to identify pure neologisms, shifts in meaning, personal metaphors, specific language quirks from the Messina region as well as personal and poetic syntactic structures, repetitions, musicality, punctuation! To even begin to grasp the complexity of D’Arrigo’s style, one must thoroughly study the first two parts of the book.

We adhered to some fundamental principles from the outset: no footnotes, to translate everything (not to leave any words in Italian), to attempt to preserve the punctuation, to try to convey the wordplay, alliterations, consonances, and repetitions whenever possible; and, above all, to try to be as “systematic” as the author: we created a glossary (over 40 double-column pages with Sicilianisms and neologisms as well as with common expressions and words), which made possible the creation of a harmonised and harmonic text in French.

Finally, in terms of linguistics, we borrowed words from Provençal, the Marseille and Burgundian patois (among others), from Old French; we used numerous dictionaries from different time periods to find rare and forgotten words; we “Frenchised” certain words when it seemed possible; we coined neologisms. The greatest challenge for me, besides the overall harmonisation (this book is truly a symphony!), was to ensure that the reader wouldn’t feel that the text we had produced sounded artificial – meaning that we always intended that the neologisms, altered expressions, adaptations from Old French or dialects could be read as if they were natural (even though many of our discoveries can’t be found in any dictionaries!). I sincerely hope that the reader will have the impression of a “natural” language because that’s the impression we had when reading the Italian version (even though it quickly became apparent that there were many things that one didn’t understand at first glance and that weren’t to be found in dictionaries).

The Untranslated: How did you cooperate with your co-translator Monique Baccelli all these years? Was there a particular routine you both followed?

A.W.: Monique completed a little over two-thirds of the initial draft, and I did the rest. All the sections we translated along the way were systematically and carefully reviewed during numerous back-and-forths via email. That’s roughly what we did in the first six years of the project. Concurrently, and until the very end, I worked extensively to clarify and find solutions to the passages, expressions, and words that remained obscure. Once the solutions were found and accepted, they had to be applied, which meant going through the 1500 pages again and replacing all the occurrences of the word or phrase. It was meticulous work. What’s more, some things became clear not thanks to the dictionaries but thanks to the book itself! A word or expression could remain obscure for 800 pages, and then, suddenly, D’Arrigo provided a contextual or poetic explanation within the text! That’s why it was relatively impossible to consider our translation finished until we had completed it as a whole.

The Untranslated:  What is your favourite episode or scene in Horcynus Orca and why do you particularly like it?

A.W.: There are so many! And for different reasons. Some passages fascinate me by the powerful writing, others, less baroque, by the emotions they provoke, and still others by their intertextual engagement with texts of the literary canon…

‘Ndrja’s dream sequences are absolutely extraordinary, phantasmagorical, and stylistically mind-boggling. One of my favourite passages is undoubtedly ‘Ndrja’s open-eyed dream, a vision of the mystery of the dolphins’ death, an extremely evocative episode where the reader delves into ‘Ndrja’s subconscious discovering a fantastic landscape and incredible nature, first at sea and then in the heart of a volcano. There his writing reaches the heights of composition and evocation; these pages are truly sublime.

I was also totally enchanted by the long passages about the orca. The descriptions of the animalone [translator’s note: huge animal], its awakening, its murderous nature, this intermingling of the life instinct and death drive, are amongst the most intense and grandiose in the book. The epic, poetic, and fantastical sweep — with which something completely natural is described: an animal in its element — can hold its own against Melville’s Moby-Dick or Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea. In fact, D’Arrigo adds a “gothic’ twist to his novel when the orca appears: he not only describes the most terrible sea monster on our planet but also turns it into a genuine archetype. Cthulhu seems like a joke by comparison.

Finally, the book’s incipit is magnificent: these four pages are a veritable prose poem, extremely difficult to translate, with an incredible rhythm and musicality, not to mention the numerous linguistic challenges right from the beginning. Similarly, the very end of the book— the last page, let’s say. In addition to the conciseness and beauty of the language, there is also emotion that reaches its climax. The last sentence is sublime.

Frankly, it’s difficult to make a list of those episodes; they are all coming to mind now that I’m thinking about them, and I can’t quote the entire book…

The Untranslated: You have translated Alberto Laiseca’s novel Aventuras de un novelista atonal into French. What do you find especially appealing about this author and have you ever thought of translating his magnum opus Los sorias?

A.W.: I worked on Laiseca’s book with the same publisher, Benoît Virot (Le Nouvel Attila). He was the one who proposed it to me. I was immediately captivated by the wild character of that novel and then by Laiseca’s work in general. An incredible coincidence led me to live in Buenos Aires afterwards. I was able to immerse myself in his work and meet the author. Alberto Laiseca had an incredible universe in his mind, difficult to summarise in a few lines. What attracts me the most is that he writes and composes his novels without prejudice; the stories he invents are the most unbelievable I have ever read, blending esotericism, political and social satire, history, eroticism, literature, technology, music, and cinema. He is a master of humour (both dark and regular), and he himself described his work as “delirious realism”. He is one of the few authors I’ve read who can make me burst into laughter. A kind of Frank Zappa of literature… My publisher and I are interested in Los sorias. It’s a mammoth chunk of a book (shorter and less dense than Horcynus Orca, but not devoid of difficulties on account of Laiseca’s idiosyncratic style). But perhaps we need to take a break after Horcynus Orca before we can consider, both intellectually and materially, the possibility of tackling it. In any case, I’d be ready to do it.

The Untranslated: The German translation of Horcynus Orca was published by Fischer, a big press, whereas the French one is coming out from the small indie publisher Le Nouvel Attila. Could you tell me a bit about the history of this publisher and how it has managed to achieve such a feat?

A.W.: Actually, the German translation was supposed to be published by an independent press, but if I’m not mistaken, the publisher ran into difficulties that led to the closure of the publishing company, so the project couldn’t be completed. I am happy for Moshe Kahn, the German translator, who, likewise, after so many years, saw his translation published.

As for Benoît Virot, he started out by editing a print magazine titled Le Nouvel Attila in the 2000s. Gradually, he transitioned into publishing, first within the magazine, and later by establishing with an associate a new entity, which was simply named Attila. After Benoît Virot and his associate parted ways (around 2013, I believe), Attila became Le Nouvel Attila again. I am less familiar with the French literature he has published, but I can say that his catalogue of foreign literature is superb, coherent, marked by a sense of curiosity and rigour. I’m very pleased that we were able to successfully complete this work together, despite the obstacles and sacrifices over the years. At the beginning of the project, we received financial support from an important translation programme funded by the European Union, which is how Monique and I were paid. This aid by no means covered the whole work, but it gave us the necessary impetus to hold on to this dream that has now become a reality. For the past two years, Le Nouvel Attila has been affiliated with Seuil (a major publishing and distribution company in France), which provides the “small” press with greater stability and security.

The Untranslated: Besides being a translator, you are also a writer of fiction and a visual artist. What are, in your opinion, the most significant works you have produced in both fields and where can one find them?

A.W: Regarding fiction, I have written very few texts and have rarely published (a few short stories). It is almost anecdotal compared to my other creative activities. But I have several ongoing projects, which have been in progress for years, and maybe one day I will devote more serious effort to completing them. I do have a couple of ideas for a novel, but I don’t feel very comfortable with the form. On the other hand, I am working on poetic prose with philosophical content, fragmented texts where composition plays an essential role. In any case, I am not currently seeking to publish them. They are more like intellectual and poetic “exercises” from which I draw ideas for my visual art.

In Buenos Aires, in 2016, my partner and I established a small artisanal publishing house Insula, where we make books entirely by hand. We set up a printing office and a binding workshop for this purpose. We even took part in a documentary about typography in Argentina titled Los Últimos – Endless Letterpress.

τέρας n°2 by Antonio Werli. Handmade collage on paper, 2021

Between Horcynus Orca and Insula, I have tried to spend most of my time working on my visual art, which I have been very happy to resume in recent years. I work with various techniques (drawing, collage, engraving, typography), and a few years ago I also integrated digital art (the creation and processing of artworks using different software programs) and, in particular, generative art (programming with JavaScript). However, I do not use artificial intelligence, which is currently very trendy in the field of digital art. Some of my recent work can be found on my personal website, which I actually need to update… and a significant portion of the digital art I have produced in the past two years has been published on platforms dedicated to NFTs. I also have the support of two small galleries in Buenos Aires, where several series of my drawings have been exhibited. I am looking forward to resuming the creation of artworks, after the months of revising Horcynus Orca this year, and following my artistic pursuits: particularly drawing and generative art.

This is an English translation of the interview, which was conducted in French.

About Antonio Werli

Antonio Werli (b. 1980) is a French literary translator and visual artist living between France and Argentina. He has also worked as a publisher for two decades (for Cheyne Editeur and Quidam Editeur, and his own projects Cyclocosmia and Insula). He has translated from Spanish to French Les forces étranges by Leopoldo Lugones, Les persécutés suivi de Histoire d’un amour trouble by Horacio Quiroga, Asklépios by Miguel Espinosa, Aventures d’un romancier atonal by Alberto Laiseca, Manifeste infrarréaliste by Roberto Bolaño, among others. In 2012, he started to work with Monique Baccelli on Horcynus Orca by Sicilian writer Stefano D’Arrigo. Their monumental translation has taken more than ten years to complete.

Antonio Werli in the documentary Los Últimos – Endless Letterpress

Passage of a Rainband (Durchzug eines Regenbandes) by Ulrich Zieger

The three parts of Ulrich Zieger’s novel are designated like the panels of a triptych painting: (left), (Middle), (right). The stories recounted in each section are self-contained save for the re-emergence of some characters from the left panel in the right one. The main uniting factor is Grimms’ Fairy Tales, so if one had to imagine this novel as a real triptych, it would consist of three extremely complex compositions set in post-war Germany but to different extents inspired by three tales from the Grimm Brothers’ collection. Those tales are, respectively: Mother Trudy, Little Briar Rose, and Mr Korbes. Ulrich Zieger (perhaps best known to the international audience as a co-writer of Wim Wenders’ film Faraway, So Close!) does not offer us mere retellings of the fairy tales in a modern setting. The result of his 10-year labour is an erudite, unwieldy, disorienting, and totally bizarre work, which, along with Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh, is one of the strangest novels written in Germany in the past decade. Passage of a Rainband concerns German history, society, culture, and the minutia of everyday life seen through the prism of the absurd and the surreal. It does many things at the same time without caring much about the effect left on the perplexed reader. The homage to the Romantics, especially E. T. A. Hoffmann, and the German expressionist cinema coexists with Pynchonian conspiracies and geeking out on crime TV series. Although all this sounds like a fun rollercoaster ride, it is anything but. Zieger’s novel tries patience. It has too many digressions, too many mundane details, too many reflections and observations. It doesn’t “flow”—quite on the contrary, it keeps tripping you up. A middle-aged German would have a considerable advantage over any other reader due to the sheer volume of allusions and references to TV lore and popular music. I would say that in comparison with Schattenfroh, it is a more hermetic and less reader-friendly work, which is unlikely to be fully appreciated by a non-German audience, so I am not holding my breath to see it translated any time soon.

The first part (or the left panel) has the same name as the whole novel and is set in the 1990s. The narrative is in the third person. The protagonist is a journalist called Norden, who, one evening, receives at his office a very peculiar visitor. The unexpected guest introduces himself as Weh-Theobaldy and claims that he belongs to the oppressed ethnic minority of Lapislazuli residing on the island of Bienitz (the name is derived from Biene, the German for a bee). The representatives of this ethnic group are forced to wear clothes made of paper and are allowed to do only unqualified, menial work.  For several hours, the visitor recounts to his increasingly stupefied host the most convoluted and weird story he has ever heard and then bides farewell leaving behind a plump file with the notes allegedly confirming his extravagant testimony.

Weh-Theobaldy’s meandering and oftentimes implausible tale involves an overview of the political tensions between Bienitz and the neighbouring island Wespitz (Wespe is a wasp in German) to which the overthrown monarchy of Bienitz has been forced to flee. In order to canalise the anger of the royalist masses, the authorities of Wespitz implant in the hinterland of their own island a sham guerrilla force commanded by a certain Max Tillitz whose seeming goal is to reinstate the King and Queen back to Bienitz. Then, there is the story of Weh-Theobaldy himself who came to Germany as a 12-year-old refugee and grew up as a member of the Lapislazuli diaspora, which even in a new homeland continues to be discriminated against and oppressed. Their oppressors are Little Heinrichs (Kleinheinrichs), another ethnic group of which we learn precious little except their unjust and outrageous policy towards the Lapislazuli, who are still not allowed to take any prestigious profession—Weh-Theobaldy, for example, has to earn his living as a seller of rags. Moreover, the insidious Little Heinrichs seem to be implementing a lopsided inter-ethnic marriage policy whose end state is allegedly a complete extinction of the Lapislazuli diaspora. The key figure in the rag seller’s story, however, is a mysterious man called Hajo Schal, a native of Bienitz, who they both happen to know through artist spouses Vektor and Nane Bollo. Both Norden and Weh-Theobaldy have had mind-altering experiences in his presence. The latter, for example, found himself for a brief moment in a parallel world in which everything happened in slow motion. He believes that he saw there Schal’s mother, medieval Cistercian abbess Gundula, who used to lead a savage life in a cave before her conversion. Weh-Theobaldy is quite confident that their common acquaintance is none other than the Antichrist and that the only way to stop him from ushering in the apocalypse is to murder him in three different ways.

Maurice Sendak, illustration for Mother Trudy

Early on in the conversation, Weh-Theobaldy confides to Norden that he finds Mother Trudy by Grimm Brothers utterly terrifying. In this tale, a stubborn and curious girl won’t listen to her parents’ admonition and goes to visit Mother Trudy. When asked by the woman why she is so pale, the girl tells her that she met on the staircase a black man, a green man, and a blood-red man. Mother Trudy brushes off her fears, by explaining that those were a collier, a huntsman, and a butcher. The girl also tells Mother Trudy that she looked into the window and saw a devil with a head of fire instead of her. Then the woman acknowledges that she saw the witch in her proper attire and turns the poor girl into a block of wood, which she immediately throws into the oven. The tale ends with Mother Trudy sitting by the oven and enjoying the warmth coming from the burning piece of wood that used to be the girl. Weh-Theobaldy’s version differs from the canonical one. In his retelling, Mother Trudy explains that the black man is a chimneysweep, the green man—a surgeon, and the blood-red man—a knacker. It is possible that the confused and anxious young man just misremembers those details, but this could also be a tell-tale sign of the unreliability of his narrative. In any case, the theme of punishable curiosity runs through the whole section and becomes central when Norden undertakes his own investigation to check the authenticity of his night guest’s story.

A weather forecast is given on the radio at the end of Norden’s feverish search for the truth. The passage of a rainband is expected in the morning, but the summer heat will return in the course of the day. Should we interpret this brief spell of precipitation as a respite in Norden’s quest to disentangle the web of political intrigues, murders, torture, suicide, and mysticism, after which he will renew his investigation despite the inherent risks? Or maybe the rainband symbolises the temporary obfuscation of the mind, a short-lived obsession, that has sent Norden on a wild goose chase initiated by the ramblings of a madman? The readers will decide for themselves. The left panel of the triptych adroitly exploits the trope of the obsessive quest and, besides being the shortest part of the novel, it is also the most dynamic and readable one. This section also has a strong cinematic component (which becomes even more powerful in the third part) featuring a mysterious suburban cinema where only old movies are played. This gloomy establishment smelling of hashish and beer fumes in which Norden and Hajo Schal watch together François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 is essential to the plot of the first part of the novel. The hectic pace set by the story about the journalist and his night guest is not sustained throughout the whole book, which becomes evident when we start reading the second part, in which things considerably slow down.

Walter Crane, illustration for Little Briar Rose

The middle section is narrated in the first person and is titled Is it true that you’re all coming back? The story is set in an East German provincial town in 1969 and is related to us by 23-year-old Harro Mittwich, whose main occupation is singing schlager songs in an amateur band. He lives with his extended family, which comprises his grandparents, parents, two brothers, his sister, her husband, and their two daughters. Harro’s narration is replete with detailed descriptions aimed, it might seem, at giving an exhaustive inventory of everything that happens around as well as of everything that goes on in his mind. Wherever he is, he is likely to overwhelm us with minor details most of which do not contribute much to the overall story. We have to struggle through all those descriptions not unlike the ill-fated princes who try to penetrate the hedge of thorns in Grimms’ fairytale. The very texture of this section reflects some elements of the story upon which it is based. What is more, there is also real thorn shrubbery growing in the garden of Miss Strauk, an old lady from the same town as the protagonist, as her house is supposed to represent the enchanted castle from Little Briar Rose. The central event of Harro’s narrative is the mysterious disappearance of Miss Strauk, who one day tumbles out of her window, falling smack into the coal cellar through the open hatch, and is nowhere to be found ever since. Later, a secret underground passage leading to the cellar is discovered. The woman must have used this passage for years to bring to her house all kinds of junk. When the young man, alerted by his neighbour, gets inside the house, searching for a way to get into the cellar, he is astounded by the number of objects Miss Strauk has hoarded in the course of her long but lonely life: ramshackle furniture, rusty pram chassis, scuffed suitcases, threadbare plush animals and dolls missing limbs, unmatched shoes and slippers, old snapshots and postcards, spools of thread, and, appropriately enough, a bunch of spindles. Among this conglomeration of clutter, Harro chances upon a fairly recent photograph of an attractive young woman, which seems to be oddly out of place. This is the sleeping beauty whom our prince will doggedly try to find for the remainder of the narrative. Besides the disappearance of Miss Strauk, there are other unsettling events worrying the residents of the town and the neighbouring villages: an inmate has escaped from the nearby psychiatric facility and is hiding in the woods, a baby has been kidnapped, and a donkey has been stolen. At some point, the protagonist begins to wonder if all these incidents are connected in some way. Harro’s search will lead him to an encounter with his country’s dark past, the time of the Second World War when Schwarzschlachtung or illegal slaughtering of livestock was punishable by death. (As it turns out, Miss Strauk’s sister was decapitated for this crime by the Nazis, leaving two orphaned children behind.) He will be told that he is the same age at which the deer is supposed to die, and, perhaps most importantly, that the prince did not need to save the sleeping beauty with a kiss because the 100-year term of the evil spell was about to expire and she would have awakened anyway.

The second part of the novel explores the motif of the impossibility to capture the past, to completely understand it, never denying the necessity of learning about it and coming to grips with some of its tragic episodes. In addition, this section is remarkable for its evocation of provincial life in the GDR at the end of the 1960s. Ulrich Zieger carefully recreates that bygone atmosphere by letting the main character obsessively catalogue and describe all the people, places, and objects that he encounters. Suspended somewhere in the middle, between the end of the war and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the protagonist as if experiences two opposing forces working on him: the pull of the past and the pull of the future. He opts for the latter when he decides to start writing original songs. Time has come to shed the shackles of the old and create something new, something that will possibly contribute to a future with more freedom and less enchantment with evil.

Walter Crane, Endpiece to Mr Korbes

The right panel bears the title Investigation of Two Out-of-Town Locations. This part is the largest of the three, taking almost half of the book, and, despite its designation, should be considered the true centerpiece of Ulrich Zieger’s triptych. Befitting the gruesome content of the fairytale it has been inspired by, this section sucks the reader into the realm of chaos and mayhem. Mr Korbes is one of the lesser-known Grimm tales, which even nowadays may shock some readers with the wanton cruelty it depicts in a matter-of-fact way. A hen and a rooster ride in a carriage drawn by a team of mice to visit Mr Korbes. They pick up animals and objects on their way: a cat, a millstone, an egg, a duck, a pin, and a needle. One might think this merry crew is planning to do something nice for the gentleman in question. Perhaps their intent is to help him with household chores? Not a chance—they are conspiring torture and murder. Mr Korbes isn’t at home, so the travellers take different strategic positions from which they consecutively attack the man when he is back. The millstone delivers the coup de grâce by falling on the injured man from the top of the door and dashing his brains out. Up until the third edition of Grimms’ fairytale collection, there was no explanation for the merciless killing. Then the brothers added the not-so-convincing last sentence: “Der Herr Korbes muß ein recht böser Mann gewesen sein.” (Mr Korbes must have been a very wicked man.) Yeah, “must have been”. But what if he wasn’t? One of the main concerns in the final section of the novel is gratuitous murder and those who commit it.

The story in the third part is set several years after the events recounted in the first. We are back to the 1990s. The narrator and the main character of this section is an unnamed artist who studied under the guidance of Vektor Bolo (he gets mentioned several times in the conversation between Norden and Weh-Theobaldy). The artist is twice divorced and lives alone in his spacious apartment with an atelier. Later on, he starts a relationship with a young lady called Gundula Pupp, whom he prefers calling simply Ms Pupp. We are, of course, familiar with the name “Gundula”, for that was the name of the medieval abbess who allegedly gave birth to the Antichrist. The main subject matter of the artist’s paintings is parts of the human body. He never depicts entire human beings, filling the whole canvas with a leg, a hand, a nose, or some other part of the anatomy. From the outset, we are struck by his peculiar way of storytelling. He speaks in a highly digressive and incoherent manner, abruptly jumping from one subject to another without any apparent logic. With time, his narration gets increasingly delirious, and there is a good chance that he may be losing his mind. As an example, here is his train of thought when he notices at a vernissage party that his fiancée is talking to a young guitar player:

I looked around and saw Ms Pupp engrossed in a conversation with the guitar player. He had turned to me his profile of an ephebe and was sitting cross-legged on his little rug. His name was Kilian Meck. Opposite him, Ms Pupp had taken that crouched position with her knees drawn close to her chest, for which I was ready to die on the spot again and again. Slightly drunk, I was enjoying the fact that she was unaware of my gaze. That’s how I knew when she was serious about something, when she couldn’t easily clarify or answer a question. That’s when she was the most beautiful of all. She was never willing to say where exactly she came from. Yesterday didn’t matter because it was already gone. Under my distant supervision, the youngster was being blessed with a sacred moment he would understand only many years later. Then he would probably have to cry if by that time his talent hadn’t entirely vanished. But now he just pushed his canoe from the shore of the backwoods sisters and brothers from the parish choir under the direction of Ms Sockel. Several days before, he camouflaged the boat with reeds as a precaution, to make it look like a swan nest, and hid it in the canebrake, away from the well-trodden plateau of their mothers and fathers, who had withdrawn into their garbage bins right after the last war, infantilised by traumas and constant changes in advertising and daily offers, so that he could finally cross the wide Missouri in his buckskin jacket with fringes on the sleeves and the back, wearing a tricorne with a beaver tail on his head, with a musket and a powder horn on his shoulder. It was all still a game, but it wouldn’t stay that way. Dangers lay ahead: rapids and quicksand, which didn’t release its prisoners for a long time. I saw Tom Sawyer during Huckleberry Finn’s lively farewell dance. An allemande, which had already lost its Allmende, the common land, in the lifetime of Albrecht Dürer and Klos Wucker, just like the Neanderthal in the context of general European interests and, in particular, Hans Wurst, who had been banished from the stage. A man in a half-dark room full of gracefully dancing children played it on the knee violin. A carriage rattled by on the wood paving of the alley. The coachman clicked his tongue against a tooth gap earned dearly in a brawl at the fair, loudly smacked his lips, and, in the same breath, wove with relish a Harzer Roller in the balmy Leipzig air. Swallows whistled in their swooping flight, as they still do today. The man’s wig sat on a gold-painted skull; he single-handedly fished it out of the crypt of his home village church. Humans had originally been fish, and even then, they had lived in the mouths of fish for thousands of years. I saw Echo and Narcissus, the youthful Virgin Mary with the refined boy whose undisguised intelligence touched the innermost reaches of her soul and terrified her in equal measure. I couldn’t help but think of the painting by Max Ernst in which the boy’s halo rushed through the air like a torn-off hubcap. The motto of the evening remained unchanged; everything was fine so far.

Max Ernst, The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses

As you can see, he cannot think straight and keeps branching out into different directions, suggested to him, for the most part, by his encyclopedic cultural knowledge. The delirious artist weaves a myriad of references and allusions into his narrative. He keeps bringing up films, paintings, songs, TV shows, and lots of other exhibits from the museum of his voracious mind. Cinema and TV are especially dear to him. We get everything, from the UFA silent films like Nosferatu and Dr. Mabuse the Gambler to Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract and the Derrick crime series.

The normal course of things drastically changes for the artist when he becomes obsessed with the perpetrator of the horrible crime that has been dubbed the Elbe massacre. A man in Niedersachsen slaughters his wife, children, grandparents, and in-laws in cold blood and disappears without a trace. The ongoing police investigation bears no tangible results. The alleged murderer’s identikit portrait is all over TV, yet no one can give any tip about the whereabouts of the suspect. It is hard to vouch for the veracity of any information about the perpetrator given to us by the apparently insane narrator, but if we choose to trust his findings, we get a curious glimpse of the murderer’s childhood. As a baby, he was adopted by a couple of fairground performers who travelled around the country presenting their marionette show as well as charging customers for the opportunity to pet their Bengali tiger (sedated for the purpose, of course). When the boy grew old enough to work together with his foster parents, they trained him as a ventriloquist. At first, he used a boot jack as a dummy, but then his adoptive mother crocheted for him a doll called Schnokel. The fairground tent with the sedated tiger, the marionettes, and the child ventriloquist becomes a recurring image in the artist’s ramblings. He even asserts at one point that he has attended that show, which should be taken with a grain of salt because at the time the young ventriloquist was performing, the artist was not even born. The narrator’s morbid fascination with the Elbe massacre perpetrator takes a new turn when he develops a friendship with an aspiring crime author only known by his last name—Mokosch. The fact that it also happens to be the name of the Slavic goddess of fertility is not the weirdest thing about the artist’s new acquaintance. With time, the protagonist becomes certain that the wanted murderer is none other than Mokosch despite the fact that he does not even remotely fit the police description.

None of the sections of Ulrich Zieger’s novel lend themselves to a clear explanation, but the case of the third part is extreme. If the artist is Mr Korbes, then who or what stands for the mouse-drawn carriage with the murderous animals and utensils? His own disintegrating mind, perhaps? The doppelgänger motif, which is crucial for the story, gets a new spin when the concept of the “inner doppelgänger” is introduced. Inner doppelgängers may be born long before or after their doubles whom they do not resemble physically, yet they see the same dreams as them and always know what they think about or what they plan to do. It would be wrong, however, to label this text as a mere doppelgänger story. Somehow, any attempt to pin down this narrative seems futile. Even if we tried to visualise this part as a triptych panel, it would be anomalous: how many triptychs in which the right section is larger than the middle are there? In Mokosch’s crime TV series script, which is more similar to a surrealist play by Artaud or Ionesco than to Derrick or Der Komissar, there is a character who tries to decipher wet marks left by rain on the façade of a building. This is not only a subtle reference to the title of the novel but also an allegorical depiction of its reader, especially when it comes to making sense of the final part. The rainband has passed and we are invited to try and read its cryptic message before it inevitably dries up right before our eyes.