by Gert Jonke, trans. by Jean M. Snook

Baffling.

Not a word that a marketing guru is likely to choose for the front cover of a new book. But after reading Jean Snook’s new translation of Gert Jonke’s Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique, it’s the most appropriate description I’ve come up with. Yet because we tend to expect novels to make sense—not an inappropriate expectation, mind you—to call this one baffling suggests a disapproval that I don’t really intend: Homage to Czerny is actually great fun for a reader who is willing to slip into the flow of Jonke’s narrative wanderings and, surrendering, float away on them. Incidents and conversations follow on one another in an order that, while feeling wholly organic, seems to obey no clear logic; the story winds like a path through the forest, so that while you can always recall the turning that got you to the unexpected place you’ve now reached, the turning before that and the turning before that are long gone, lost in the darkness. So you plow ahead, and because the company is vivacious, the prose propulsive and clever, and the scenes unflaggingly inventive, you continue, even as you begin to suspect that the ultimate destination is unlikely to offer any explanation or summing up.

But before I risk becoming baffling myself, I should offer some details of the confusing scene Jonke sets. Homage to Czerny opens as the narrator, an alcoholic, depressive composer, arrives at a garden party whose unusual nature quickly becomes apparent. In the moments before the guests arrive, the hosts, a sister and brother, are hurriedly supervising the hanging of minutely detailed paintings from the trees in their garden that:

“. . . portrayed exactly those parts of the garden that were covered by the surfaces of the respective pictures, and the portrayals were so lifelike that they were constantly being confused from every angle with the respective parts of nature itself.”

—which leads the narrator to wonder,

“[I]f a picture of the world is hung on a wall of the world, and if the picture exactly represetes the world in which it hangs, then it can easily happen that the world in which the attentive viewer finds himself is perhaps not a world at all but rather a picture of the world within a world or within a picture of the world, etc.”

The siblings tell the narrator that they also intend for this party to exactly replicate the party they held one year ago; without doing anything but setting the conditions, they expect that the guests will unconsciously go along, repeating the same conversations and actions as they engaged in the year before. The hostess explains,

“For my part . . . I’m above all curious as to whether these people are really as unimaginative and lifeless as they seem, in which case they will once again happily and contentedly amuse themselves with the same nonsense that dominated the party last year, without noticing what’s going on in the slightest.”

And with that, we’re off to the races, with stories unfolding out of stories and oddities multiplying inexplicably. The question of repetition, despite its promise, is dropped almost instantly, taken up again only at the very end, while instead we watch an odd drinking contest, hear some Calvino-esque accounts of the strange neighborhoods of the unnamed city, sit in on a piano recital and a clarinet concerto played with no clarinet, go for an illicit swim, and watch (somehow with closed eyes) a bull shoot water from its horns. Certain themes–such as the relationship of conception and execution in art, and the fallibility of memory, and the conflict between single and group perceptions–do emerge, and Jonke plays lightly with them. He also offers some passages of unexpectedly lyrical (yet still goofy) beauty, like this one:

“Soon the night will have crumbled completely and will form into early morning mist down here, I said to the reporter: when the first rays of sun creep through the holes in the sky net, you’ll see the last night lichen will fall from the clouds and flutter down and sink into the forests, which soon will be the only places left in this landscape where there’s still any darkness, look the last remaining streaks of night are already flying through the air in the form of swallows, you absolutely must report on all this in your newspaper!”

But for the most part, Homage to Czerny is simply a romp, content to be surprising and funny and entertaining even when treating emotionally difficult subjects. Reading it is not unlike trying, in the light of morning, to recall the course of the previous night’s party; you remember many a great conversation, but it’s almost impossible to reconstruct how one bled into another, or quite what you and your friends were getting at in the course of them. At one point the narrator urges another party-goer who is doing a poor job of telling a story, “But it must have gone on somehow, and then it must have somehow come to an end;” it must and it does, and the result, while certainly not for everyone, is exuberant, vertiginous fun.

Reviewed by Levi Stahl

Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique by Gert Jonke, trans. by Jean M. Snook
Dalkey Archive Press, 2008
Paper, 148 pgs, $12.95
ISBN-10 : 1564785017