Next Door Lived a Girl

First off, this is an extremely graphic book. There is sexual abuse and violence directed at children, and it is dark and extremely graphic. If you are sensitive to that kind of thing, you should probably take a pass on this book. Even if you are not, you will probably need to sit with your thoughts for a minute, or spend some time watching kitten videos on the internet, or whatever your personal response to distressing literary stimulus is.

Next Door Lived a Girl follows a few months in the life of Moritz, a pre-adolescent boy in a rural German town. The narrative is dominated by the intersection of sex and violence. Moritz is the target of sometimes humiliating sexual advances by older women, including his sister and his mother. His play with his fellow 6th-grade friends is often sexual, as is their rivalry with another gang of slightly older boys. And when the violence kicks up, it too is highly sexualized, either inherently or as an expression of sexual domination. The fact that these are all children at the center of the action, and the discovery of a feral and mentally disabled girl the boy’s age, make all this far more disturbing.

Stefan Kiesbye’s prose is recognizably German -terse and bleak descriptions that remind me of the sentences of Herta Muller, albeit far less figurative. The writing is brutally direct, brutally literal, giving the reader no comfort in the ambiguity of poetic expression. When something horrible is happening, there is no doubt as to the specificity of it. The sentences are short and expository, almost a linguistic revolt against the expansive compounding of the German language, and the close third-person narration provides free indirect characterization of Moritz that reminds you, again and again, that these are children doing these things, having these things done to them.

Recommendation: Read it, but, you, know. Trigger warning. This is very good, but this is some pretty dark shit.

Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” and Cultivating the Virtue of Solitude

Rilke’s 10 letters -written when he was rather young, to an admiring fellow poet, younger still- continue to enjoy a popularity within the artistic set. I came to this slim little thing with a bit of trepidation, on account of my cynicism and my lack of patience for anything that might possible swerve in to the territory of “Chicken Soup for the Artist’s Soul”. Happily, it turned out I had no cause for concern. There is plenty of angst but, come on, we are talking about German poets here. I’d assume some kind of disingenuous posturing if the angst was totally absent.

What Rilke seems to spend most of his time on is in describing his relationship with solitude, with the artistic necessity of removing yourself from the crowd of people whose company you enjoy and spending time in your own head. Out of this grows the need to build your own mind into a place where you are comfortable spending extended periods of time -this idea being the big take-away for me. I’m an extremely social person, but I can become depressed if I don’t take the time to go into my own head, creating and dwelling, building the frames and references there before setting them down on paper later. Rilke is talking about it mostly as a precursor to creation, but the solitude he prescribes stands for more than that. It’s about cultivating the kind of mind that is capable of saying something legitimately remarkable, and not merely clever. It’s a damn hard thing to do.

I really appreciate the value of craft-based books, from Rilke’s epistolatory commentary on the artistic life to John Gardner’s far more specifically instructive “On Becoming a Novelist”. I notice that I tend to read these kind of books very differently, almost always with a highlighter or pen ready, and the finished volume full of notes and underlining. There is no substitute for the instructive power of the act of creation itself, but regularly reading the thoughts of great writers and artists isn’t going to hurt. We all want to have someone like Rilke as a mentor, but reading the collective mentoring of all the powerful writers who have written such things isn’t that poor a substitute.



Recommendation: Read it. Spend some time rolling it around your head, especially if you want to create.

Letters to a Young Poet (Modern Library)
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Hesse’s “Siddharta”

This one wasn’t for me. Hesse’s popularity as a countercultural icon in America seemed to have led to this book becoming the subject of Zeitgeist-fixation, but in spite of very moderate expectations, I was completely underwhelmed. The narrative of the searcher is fine, but nothing of any particular interest, and the titular character’s linear progression toward The Meaning of Life left no room for any interesting subtlety. Hesse’s prose was equally unremarkable.

I can see how this kind of book might be a powerful experience for an intelligent and emotionally sensitive young teen. More power to them. It’d be a hell of a lot better than reading Divergent or John Green books. At them same time, unless some rather compelling reasons make themselves known, I’ll wander past Hesse’s other offerings.



Siddharta
by Hermann Hesse

Reading Log: Herta Müller’s ‘Nadirs’ and the Value of Juxtaposition in Bleakness

This is a very well-written book. In a series of short stories that bookend a much longer novella, the author presents her oppressive life as a young girl in a German-speaking Polish town.  Müller evokes an undeniable sense of place ( and it’s not a nice place). The bleakness throughout -but especially in the title piece, Nadirs- gets overwhelming very quickly. I’m all for some powerful darkness, (witness my readings over the last year or so) but Müller’s work hear dips dangerously into the territory of misery-porn.

This kind of self-aggrandizing wallowing would be utterly damning if the prose itself weren’t redeeming -which it is. It’s not a book to read straight through, in spite of it’s short length. The misery, although powerfully denoted, is weakened to a great extent by its lack of juxtaposition. Everything is dying animals and rolls of sallow skin over fat. Without anything interesting to set them off, major sections of this book are set in a lifeless gray-scale, painfully flat.

Not that Müller never breaks out of the monochromatic- there are passages in here that are absolutely hilarious (I don’t really buy the idea that German humor is underdeveloped -if anything, it’s more understated). There are glimmers of light, but the reader does well to remember the title of the work. Niederungen can be translated most literally as “lowlands”, but the use of plural form of the superlative “nadir” communicates a much more deliberate intensity. Translation is not something that someone of my limited linguistic skills can even really comprehend, but -near as I can figure- that’s a damn good title.

Recommendation: While I won’t recommend it unreservedly, it’s still a very good read. It’s failings might keep it from transcendence, but the arrangement of words on the page is still an excellent arrangement of words on the page. Push through the titular story.



Nadirs
by Herta Muller