Prodigies

May 18, 2015
Written in 1994, this is the third book by Argentinian writer Gorodischer to appear in English. Ursula K. Le Guin translated the first, Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was (also published by Small Beer), which established Gorodischer’s stature in the worlds of SF and speculative fiction. This book is neither genre, however: it’s a fable-like story of a house in the small German town of Weissenfels—a house that was the home of 19th-century German Romantic poet Novalis. Solidly built on a pleasant street, by the mid-19th century it is a boarding house run by the efficient Madame Helena. Gorodischer inhabits the minds of various residents—the general refighting past wars, the tea salon manager dreaming of travel, a retired opera singer and her sullen daughter, a man obsessed with miniature figures, and the cook and maids—around the time a Japanese pearl seller moves in. Although short, the book reads slowly: long, complicated sentences unfurl, mixing prosaic detail about meals (heavy and delicious sounding) with dreams and dread. Despite the house’s many comforts, hauntings penetrate its quotidian world—not witches or ghosts, exactly, but the past, the imagined future, and a kind of unease that stems from being alive, fearful, guilty, human. The residents’ thoughts and routines can charm or chill the reader, and though the book requires patience and tolerance for oddity and open ends, as a picture of the strangeness of life at its most ordinary, it’s a compelling curiosity.

June 15, 2015
Pensive, slowly paced study of decidedly nonromantic lives in Romantic-era Saxony. Put strangers around a common table and you have possibilities, in life and in literature. Thus the driving premise of The Magic Mountain, and thus Argentine novelist Gorodischer's slender book, which she has called her most worked-through. The common table in question is in the home of German mystical poet Friedrich von Hardenberg, pen name Novalis, who once said "Philosophiren ist delphlegmatisire"-paraphrased, to philosophize means getting off your butt and doing something. But Novalis died in 1801, and now, later in the 19th century, the inhabitants of his home, now a boardinghouse, have retreated into themselves. One dreams of a room with a view, preferably "in a country in the Americas," where she can lean out the window and see flowers and sun and sea, but here in inland Saxony she must make do with a less appealing view, if one with the virtue of placing no one else's window within sight of hers. An officer of long-ago wars; a fellow "coughing, sunken-chested, with red rashes on his cheeks and white patches beneath his eyes"; and a proprietor with "large, strong hands, amazon legs, and nervous eyes" all live in (and perhaps, it seems, even haunt) the house on Scheller Street, with its distant view of the Danube and its tobacco-impregnated air (thanks to a nearby cigar factory). There is much languorous talk and not much movement; Gorodischer uses long, unhurried sentences to suggest the contours of a way of life that, if civilized, is on the edge of collapse, a world of toasted marzipan rolls within warm kitchens, while just outside are "strange things...presences, as if they were little animals that cannot be heard and yet proper Christians, heads held high, saying no, not at all." Gorodischer writes a poetic, vigorous prose. Her story, dreamlike and start-and-stop, takes effort, for though brief, it is dense-and well worth the trouble.

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