On the edges of understanding

Every now and then, you come across a book that leaves next to no impression on you. It doesn’t particularly please or displease. It isn’t uninteresting; it’s just too far removed from any thought you’ve ever had to create responses within you. It’s like watching a play on a stage that’s half a kilometre away from you. Everyone is small and far away and you can’t hear what they’re saying (you can barely make out who they are) and before you know it they’re taking their bows and walking off the set.

This is how it felt to read Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s Blumenberg , a title from Seagull Books’ German list, translated by Wieland Hoban. Lewitscharoff is known for her whimsical magical realist tendencies, and Blumenberg certainly delivers on this score. Set in the ’80s, the novel sets up a bizarre fictional episode in the life of its titular character, the German historical and theological philosopher Hans Blumenberg. Blumenberg is in the final years of his career. He lectures at a university, spends hours alone in his study with his dictaphone, and looks forward to the weekly phone conversations he has with his editor.

Blumenberg; Sibylle Lewitscharoff; Seagull Books; Rs 1,745; Fiction

One night a lion appears in his study. A live lion — “hearty, furry, and yellow”, seated on his Turkmen rug. Blumenberg is understandably perplexed. He wonders what the lion represents, who it is, whether it can tell the difference between the truth and a lie. Over time, he grows accustomed to its presence, and draws strength and comfort from it. It accompanies him to lectures and on errands. It appears in his study almost every night. It is visible to no one but him.

Strange. But Lewitscharoff soon turns her attention to other matters. We are introduced to four of Blumenberg’s students. Each of their lives has in some way been impacted by the old man, although it is difficult to fathom the nature of this impact, as we rarely see him speak with them. But one assumes that statements like “to the extent that humans constantly force one another to follow realism, they are as much in need of consolation as ever, but in real terms they are inconsolable”, uttered in his lectures, must do the trick.

It is unclear what makes these students tick. Why is Isa in love with Blumenberg? Why does Hansi go out of his way to make himself unpopular? Why does Richard abandon Gerhard and run away to South America? Vague references are made to the burden of history: Richard, lying on a hammock and floating down the Amazon, feels “a gradual suspicion towards the moral rigorism of his own generation, their obstinate belligerence towards their parents, an attitude with little interest in knowing what it was really like to live under fascism”.

In Blumenberg , history only makes cameo appearances, just to remind us that the events of the novel do not take place in a vacuum, and to claim a historical identity for the questions it asks.

What are these questions? It’s exasperatingly hard to say. A reader’s experience of the novel is mostly determined by how she chooses to deal with the lion. Lewitscharrof’s lion is not mythical or historical. It doesn’t lend itself to symbolic readings. Its presence is tangible, literal: “he turned his head… and saw the lion reclining on the back seat. It was… too cramped for the animal back there”.

All the same, its presence holds meaning for Blumenberg, so perhaps its function is also representational. Where to go with this quibbling is up to the reader, but this is certainly the effect the author is going for — looseness of meaning, a lack of fixity in signs and narrative movement that force us to think about where the markers of reality and interpretation are really located. The challenge is presented to us obliquely, however, and we might well fail to notice it as we pore over Blumenberg in search of a story.

To an Indian reader, the context feels a little too far out of reach for total comprehension. Knowing nothing of Blumenberg’s works or ideas before I got into the novel felt like a significant handicap — this could be why the narrative failed to absorb me. But on the other hand, the prose itself is uneven. Lewitscharoff’s style is almost Woolf-esque in the Isa and Gerhard sections — light, rhythmic, and vivid — but these impressions give way abruptly to pages of hazy abstraction. The shifts are not easy to follow and I can only wonder if perhaps this jaggedness is absent in the German original.

Blumenberg is not the kind of book you can settle into. It only succeeds in convincing the reader that there is something she is simply not ‘getting.’ It meanders from one set of pleasant sentences to another, from one disconnected chapter to another, from one tragic death to another, and comes to a shuddering halt in an inexplicable cave. Make of it what you will.

Dakshayini Suresh is a Bengaluru-based freelance writer