Mark HaberRezensionen
Autor von Saint Sebastian's Abyss
Rezensionen
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So says second wife about our man Schmidt, a Bernhardian character straight outta Austria with a John Bolton mustache. I’ve read only a couple of Bernhard’s works but unlike second wife I have not yet, at least, found all the misanthropic ranting very funny. More than in its Bernhard tribute act I found some amusement here in the novel’s Lars Iyer tribute act, a couple of ridiculous art critics subbing for a couple of ridiculous philosophers. A page about the holy donkey was, indeed, fairly amusing.
While reading this novel I felt cause to think of David Foster Wallace’s comments on how irony has become an end in itself, how “few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving.”
Haber does try to escape the prison of irony, however, to his credit. His narrator, contra the miserable Schmidt, believes that art should be felt through the heart and the emotions, a sentimental approach that leads to “the horrible thing” that his narrator says, and writes, which turns the miserable Schmidt against him, which is that art is subjective and for everyone to experience as they will. The miserable Schmidt becomes his narrator’s enemy, breaking contact until calling him to his deathbed, where the miserable Schmidt does the Bernhardian ranting thing before proclaiming with his dying breath that he’s discovered evidence that their life’s work is all wrong.
The death of Schmidt is thus not the death of irony to be sure, but a way out is there.