Published 3.15.2017. Seagull Books: The German List. Translated by Alexander Booth. 401 pages.
A certain passage of informational text toward the beginning of Gunther Geltinger’s Moor seemed to me so pregnant with meaning that my breath caught in my throat as I read it and I began to tear up. It wasn’t the exposition of some woeful event in the main character’s story or an Oscar-bait scene of supererogatory sobbing. No, what made the passage in question so remarkable was a sudden, subtle shift in the register of the paragraph, and the significance of that shift conjured by what had preceded it.
Jacket design by Sunandini Banerjee
The main character of the novel, Dion, is a speech-impaired teenager—a stutterer, to be less delicate—who lives alone in the rural town of Fenndorf with his widowed mother Marga. The Fenn in Fenndorf says what you need to know about the landscape: moorlands in north Germany—wet, fetid, and as murky as the at times excessive nature imagery Geltinger uses to describe it. But a wealth of naturalistic detail is but one of a battery of stylistic techniques by which the novel defamiliarizes us out of our comfort zones and signals the profound Otherness of what we are about to experience. The story begins where Dion’s childhood mind lives, in a fairy tale, that region of metamorphosis and myth that the ancients used to explain the breath of trees, the movement of the sun, the irruptions of earth and waves. It is a story of a dragonfly larvae turned into a boy, who is then subsequently reclaimed by the moorland that produced him. A similar fairy tale occurs later with the story of an ancient corpse preserved in the peat-bogs of the town—a boy who archaeologists determine was ritually raped and murdered; it suffices to say these are not happy fairy tales, but they allow Dion to begin to make sense of the extremity of his upbringing, the trauma of that teenage criminal conspiracy (because that’s what it is) that drives some young people to suicide and Dion, for his part, into the wilderness, into the moor.
The moor in this book is an actual character, described in lucid, Cormac McCarthy-ian vividness; as Geltinger establishes in the novel’s first paragraph, the moor has a voice that Dion hears:
The closest thing to words is the rain. In flowing sentences it falls, comes to a standstill in the trees, stutters consonants on leaves, gurgles dark vowels through the runnels . . .
While Dion lacks the confidence to speak—his voice produces a gurgle of muddled consonants—Geltinger allows the moor, the wasteland to which Dion, the dragonfly boy, belongs, to act as narrator on his behalf, to say the things he can’t say and explain things he doesn’t yet know. When the moor narrates Dion’s experiences, it uses the second person “You” to create an experiential effect reminiscent of the panorama in H.G. Adler’s novel of that name.
No less strange is Dion’s mother Marga, ostensibly an artist who paints in the barn, has a day job in a “fashion house,” (scare quotes intended), and who every morning goes with her little boy to a filthy, dank pond on the moor where she strips buck naked in full view of her son and bathes. Something’s really off about this woman, you think. Or maybe she’s just one of those new age, back-to-nature types. It could be totally innocent and one of the beauties of Geltinger’s way of plotting the book is that, at least for a time, he allows the reader to feel uncertain about such things. For the moment, we just don’t know. What Dion experiences as a child is an endless ball of loose narrative threads, and it is only the moor that allows these threads to be followed to their (rather cruel, rather devastating) conclusions.
So, about that passage I mentioned before: Dion has been assigned to give a presentation for his German class. Dion’s presentation is called The Lifecycle of Dragonflies, inspired by the dragonflies which populate the pond and the moor, and whose empty carapaces he collects in his room. But Dion will never give that presentation; in order to do so, he would have to get up in front of the class, open his mouth, and invariably humiliate himself in front of everyone. Geltinger shows him agonizing at length about this event, furiously consulting the dictionary to edit the difficult-to-pronounce consonants out of his paper, obsessively trying to limit his exposure, but all this is to no avail. There is no way he can go through with this, he decides. It’s impossible. His whole situation, his whole life, is one continuous impossibility. But then Geltinger shows us something else; he shows us what Dion would say, if only he could, and he accomplishes this through a sudden shift in the register of his prose. Here’s the passage:
‘What’s the matter,’ she asks, shakes you and the numbness from your limbs, pulls the towel away and bows. Once upon a time the child would clap at the end of the pantomime, now you stare into the trees, wish you could go back under the umbrella with her again, into the warm towel-cover where the world would shrink back into a trusty, old feeling. There you would tell her everything you’ve learnt about the lifecycle of dragonflies from books and observations in the moor over the last few years. With the rhythm of the drumming and dripping rain and in long sentences that would pearl out of your mouth like the beads of water from the umbrella, you would initiate her into the secret of the insect [ed. note: right here] which lives a long and boring childhood on the bottom of the pond until the strange and the most dangerous moment of its life when in the early morning hours it has climbed up a reed, shed its old skin and stands defenceless before its enemies. The act of metamorphosis can go wrong if the young dragonfly’s still-awkward wings get caught in its skin or hung up on a thorn. Its first attempt at flight, the maiden flight, is clumsy, the insect a new-found snack for birds, for in this phase the adolescent dragonfly, called an imago, is completely concentrated on trying out its new body which is still somewhat familiar to it. But the higher it rises into the air, the more confident and elegant its circles become and soon enough it is able to get around the birds’ beaks and fly off into the moor from where, you say in the final line of your presentation, it comes and where it belongs.
I admit that when I first read this passage I didn’t understand why it made me get all misty-eyed. Is it just that, for the first time in the novel, we finally hear Dion speaking in unconstrained sentences? Yes, but there is also what this tone shift towards informational text represents—not boring, dry informational text either, but told in the vivid manner of an enthusiast, like a nerdy teenager whose passion in life is dragonflies, whose heretofore voiceless passion suddenly flies out of that tone shift and unexpectedly buzzes across our page: we are finally seeing Dion as a person, fully alive, and not a speech impediment.
Moor is the story of a confused, desperate young man trying to come to terms with the dire, seemingly unspeakable circumstances of his upbringing. Dion is not just an Other due to his speech impediment; he is an other because he lives in the shadow of shame, of undignified, un-Disneyfied reality. What do you do when fate has left you preternaturally doomed?—or as Dion himself puts it in an eloquent expression (which we must have the German of, to enrich our stock in English of soulful Germanisms), mother-soul-abandoned alone:
The dictionary explained that the expression mother-soul-abandoned alone was derived from people-soul-abandoned alone and served to emotionally reinforce the adjective. A being that has been abandoned by a mother’s soul, you deduced, is one that has been abandoned by all others or even by the very soul itself and is, therefore, not only lonely but also downright damned to remaining forever expelled, with neither help nor home, speechless and therefore soulless, full of mute rage and yet filled to the brim with words that it would scream.
—this is life beyond cliches. Life has dealt with you so severely that people who spout bromides about when life hands you lemons need to shut the hell up because they don’t know what you’ve gone through, the utter catastrophe of a life that you were thrown into from the very beginning, which puts the lie to fairyland myths of meritocracy and cosmic justice. The plot elements PW.com’s reviewer found grotesque could, going by this idea, be interpreted as Geltinger telling readers to get that judgmental prudeness outta here, to open a space within themselves to contemplate a radically different experience of life and learn to empathize with it.
I admire the artistic fearlessness on display, however I have to concur that Geltinger’s rush to explore seemingly every angle of this experience gives the novel a formless, haphazard aspect. I found myself frustrated that so much stylistic brilliance has been intermixed with sections of decidedly less compelling material. Some of the book’s more compelling stylistic moments are achieved through striking juxtapositions and shifts of point of view between Dion and his mother Magda. In order for this to work, however, the author must maintain consistency and control of his narration (not to mention the translator, in this case Alexander Booth, who must faithfully reproduce that consistency in another language.) In this, both author and translator have largely succeeded: despite numerous shifts of viewpoint and even locale, sometimes cross-cutting back and forth across time and place from paragraph to paragraph, rarely did I find myself confused about what perspective the narrator was speaking from and which part of the complex story Geltinger was dealing with now; which is not to say there wasn’t odd paragraph here or there where Geltinger got caught up in his own complex web of signification. On a sentence-to-sentence basis, Geltinger’s grasp of perspective and free indirect narration is impressive and allows the moor-as-narrator device to seem not obtrusive but useful for opening the reader’s eye to the moorland as a world that mediates Dion’s understanding of even the more hurtful experiences he goes through.
If Dion’s perspective is shrouded in fairy tale phenomenology and the raw sensations of the spoken word, his mother Marga’s is an unspooling yarn of ever deepening depravity and woe. There is nothing storybook about Marga, and we are given ample reason to be as appalled by the woman as Dion sometimes is. Why didn’t Marga breastfeed the boy? Why did she drink and smoke during the pregnancy? Why won’t she now take him to a speech pathologist? But while some of Marga’s maternal sins are useful as a foil to show the narrowness of her Fenndorf in-laws and neighbors, others are harder to forgive and Geltinger doesn’t seem altogether too interested in exonerating her. Make no mistake: Marga is a morally exhausted, somewhat depraved person, but she is given a much more morally complex treatment than, to borrow an analogous plotline from recent film, Chiron’s mother in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, who is a crack-addict and a prostitute and on some level loves her son, but that’s about it; however callous Marga may seem, however degraded, at least her love has teeth, and we are shown how circumstances conspired to make her the person who makes the decisions she makes. Like the half-drunk sagas of Semyon Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment, there is something glorious and oddly ennobling about hearing a long sordid tale just unroll itself in front of you, of witnessing a person endure hell and survive by hook-or-crook to tell about it. We see something of the emptiness of the art gallery world, the way women are taken advantage of in the workplace and by powerful men, and the capricious, highly irresponsible behavior of Marga and her friend Gila as teenagers as they fled the stultifying environment of their Catholic group home into the arms of booze, clubs, and men. We are meant to dislike Marga, to see her as a bad mother and a bad person, but Geltinger includes enough nuance in his depiction of her that we see how life has put her on tracks, how for every bad decision she’s made there have been two or three accidents of ill-fortune that were not all her fault. Her defiance of a snooty Employment Agency representative in one hilarious scene is an example of how her endurance of the world’s ill usage makes her more likeable.
Something needs to be said about Geltinger’s sentences. The reviewer for PW.com characterized the book as “dense,” but while that’s true I think it is possible to delineate what that density consists of and sort the good from the bad. Geltinger’s running-style sentences have a general tendency to burst beyond their edges, to simultaneously throw out and grasp at threads of (symbolic/mythical/psychological/Jungean) signification. It is a tendency reminiscent of Hermann Broch, and one that is effective when the underlying narrative is full of matter—as in the relation of Marga’s backstory. At times, however, this reaching after significations leads to sections of the book where this tying and untying of images and ideas feels like a huge waste of time; if I were the editor, I would have cut the pages-long mythopoeic exegeses of toilet training and dragonfly fucking, not because (as PW.com’s reviewer would have it) they were grotesque, but because they were boring. Furthermore, the running-style sentence is a tool better suited for some situations than others; generally it conveys a sort of uncontrollable excitement, but there are times when Geltinger seems to use it on autopilot, and you just want to tap the author on the shoulder in the middle of one of these more-leaking-airbag-than-stemwinders and say, “Hey. Whoa there! You don’t have to do that right now.” Overall though, I feel Moor is a book with many powerful moments and uncommon formal mastery, and this goes far (with me, at least) to compensate for when the author’s searching instincts and over-attachment to one sentence type make the narrative hover mistily in place like a pool of standing water.
Correction: The character I was thinking of who unfolds his half-drunk woeful tales in Crime and Punishment was Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov, not Dmitri Razumikhin; time to revisit that book!
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