Call me PoMo: The Weather Fifteen Years Ago

The publication of the second half of John Domini’s essay on postmodern fiction is a great occasion to talk about The Weather Fifteen Years Ago, which I finished over the weekend. I think it would fit in comfortably somewhere between Michael Martone and Zeroville as a book that absolutely thrives off of metanarrative and modern entertainment culture but that also manages to fit in quite a bit of what would generally be construed as novelistic.

The book is written in the form of a series of interviews with an author named Wolf Haas (also the name of the author of Weather) about his latest book. The book “Haas” is discussing is a love story, and one of the striking things about this form of narration is that we quickly learn that the fictional lovers in his book are modeled on “real-life” lovers that “Haas” discovered while watching TV. So right away we have a number of levels of reality interspersed: the twice-invented lovers that are created in the book by the authorial persona “Wolf Haas”; the singly-invented lovers that the real-life Haas creates for “Haas” to discover in the reality of the book’s world; and the authorial persona “Haas,” whose words we get to hear first-hand. The whole state of affairs is summed up well in this review of the German-language edition of the book:

It’s a neat reversal: early in the novel we learn that “Das Wetter vor 15 Jahren” had been written from Kowalski’s perspective, so that many aspects that concern only him are not raised. As Wittgenstein said, you can’t see your own eyeballs. Das Wetter vor 15 Jahren, in contrast, is written from Haas’ perspective so we only get his reading of the story. The aspects he selects to make the fictitious novel palpable, are those that his individual critical mind would consider relevant. The discussion of the limitations of Kowalski’s point of view are allusions to this. Thus, the book becomes a Chinese box of poetological reflections.

Weather is indeed a delight for people who enjoy play with metanarrative and conceptual games, but it also has quite a bit of what, for lack of a better name, I might call good old fashioned realism. “Haas” and his interviewer spend a lot of time fleshing out the four principle characters (as well as a handful of adjuncts) and their motivations, and the result is that–though we only know all of these people secondhand–they come across as better realized and more interesting than characters in many books I read this year that attack the matter of character-creation head-on. Oddly enough, if I were to complain about characters in Weather, it would be about the ones we know most directly, “Haas” and his interlocutor. It’s not that they’re done badly, just that compared to the characters they discuss over the course of the interviews they don’t quite feel as richly imagined.

Ariadne Press–publishers of Elfriede Jelinek, Arthur Schnitzler, and Gert Jonke, among other notable Austrians–has done great work by bringing this book into English. Though it was a best-selling award-winner in Austria, it’s the kind of book that I have a hard time seeing many U.S. publishers taking a chance on. But it really is an excellent execution of a find concept, and it sits well among a lot of what has been going on in American postmodernism these days. And the translation here is first-rate. These interviews move back and forth between conceptual lit-crit talk and idiomatic spoken language, and I’m guessing that it took some work to bring both into authentic-sounding English. But time and again I was forced to stop in admiration at how translators Stephanie Gilardi and Thomas S. Hansen handled (what I imagined to be) another translation challenge.

More from Conversational Reading:

1. Reading Resolutions 2009: Ryan Call (Ryan Call is af requent contributor to The Quarterly Conversation. He most recently reviewed boring boring boring boring boring boring boring by Zach Plague.) See...
2. Kazuo Ishiguro: Don’t Call Noctures a Novel Round these parts, it's big news when Kazuo Ishiguro has a new book out. Nocturnes doesn't hit the States till fall, but the UK...
3. Quarterly Conversation, Issue 13: Call for Submissions We are reading book reviews, essays, and interviews for Issue 13. We’re got a number of reviews already set and are especially looking for features...
4. Summer 2008 Call for Submissions We are now taking submissions for the Summer 2008 issue of The Quarterly Conversation. This includes book reviews, essays, interviews, and whatever else you think...
5. Call Me Jealous We get Dwight Garner to write about Beckett's letters, and the British get . . . Gabriel Josipovici. That's not fair. Luckily, we have the...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.