Secret rendezvous
Beaten
but unbowed (well: perhaps a little bowed), I delved straight
back into the literature of Nobel laureates after my recent failure.
After falling in literary lust with Melville House’s Art
of the Novella series, I was pleased to see them expanding into
modern fiction, with the unsnappy but unarguable Contemporary
Art of the Novella series. That, plus at just over 100 pages,
I felt this was a Nobel winner even I could get through.
I have mixed feelings about the way I found this
book. On the one hand, it was the blurb which interested me in
it ahead of others in the series, and yet I know my enjoyment
- and puzzlement - could have been enhanced if I had approached
it cold. The description sounded, probably to misuse an overused
term, Kafkaesque (Martin Amis points out that the word has become
so devalued that a long queue in the Post Office is now described
as Kafkaesque). Perhaps a better one would be ‘Ishiguroish’:
I’m thinking in particular of his wonderful but overlooked
1995 novel The Unconsoled. Its atmosphere of mystery
and foreboding, an unknowable man with an unclear purpose in a
strange town, seem just right for the blurb of The Pathseeker:
In a mysterious middle-European country,
a man identified only as “the Commissioner” undertakes
what seems to be a banal trip to a nondescript town with his
wife - a brief detour on the way to a holiday at the seaside
- that turns into something ominous. Something terrible has
happened in the town, something that no one wants to discuss.
In quoting this I have stopped short of the giveaway
words, of which there are two: one repeated just in case you didn’t
pick up on it the first time, and one which kills stone dead the
vaunted sense of mystery, the sort of word which comes with its
own capital letter. For the blankness and openness of the story
itself, the white, uncluttered cover seems to suit it nicely.
This is a new translation, but The Pathseeker
is one of Kertész’s earliest works - though ‘early’
is not quite right, as it was published when he was 47, two years
after his debut and most famous work Fatelessness (also published
in English as Fateless). Tim Wilkinson has done a fine
job as translator, and in the Michael Hofmann tradition has thrown
in a free afterword, which helps the reader with some of the more
obscure references in the book, and suggests a tangential connection
with Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’.
So what can I say about this book, or story, without
spoiling it? It has a dramatic opening, where the Commissioner,
visiting the unnamed country and hosted in the home of a man named
Hermann, in the middle of a friendly conversation, suddenly becomes
an unwelcome guest.
He took the pipe from his mouth and cut him
short with calm, premeditated hostility. He then informed him
in a single terse sentence who he was and the objective of his
mission and the investigation that he was to pursue. Hermann
turned slightly pale.
The Commissioner proceeds with his investigation,
and along the way Kertész makes references to relationships
of predation and submission, and how willing people are to submit
to power. Even passengers on a train - a symbol pretty heavy with
meaning in this context - are “blind instruments of a higher
design, they faithfully fulfilled their roles, dutifully meeting
the calculation that was attached to them.” The Commissioner
admits he wants “to make a splash with his presence, advertise
his superiority, celebrate the triumph of his existence in front
of these mute and powerless things,” which leads to notions
of the objectification of human life. He visits a factory, with
German language ironwork on the gates, and an exhibition of “defunct
instruments of past ages, contraband curiosities … cheerfully
illuminated.”
What could this collection of junk, so cleverly,
indeed all too cleverly disguised as dusty museum material,
prove to him, or to anyone else for that matter? Its objects
could be brought to life only by being utilized. The only test
of their efficacy could be experience.
The Pathseeker is both nebulous and forceful,
obstructive and direct, which leaves room for the reader’s
own responses while directing them artfully along Kertész’s
chosen path. There is a ghostly creepiness to it, and the sort
of calm silence around the setting which settles after a period
of calamitous noise. Tim Wilkinson tells us that the story took
twelve years for Kertész “to wrestle into a form
he was happy with,” and was then rejected by the publisher
he submitted it to. And more than three decades after that, it
has been finally been translated into English, so we can benefit.
The Pathseeker made it at last.
John
Self
To read more of John Self's book reviews, check
out his blog at
The Asylum.
