At three in the afternoon—the hour when, all over the world, the Literary stewpot boils over, when gossip in the book-reviewing departments of newspapers is most untamed and swarming, and when the autumn sky over Stockholm begins to draw down a translucent dusk (an eggshell shielding a blue-black yolk) across the spired and watery town—at this lachrymose yet exalted hour, Lars Andemening could be found in bed, napping. Not that there was anyone to look for him there.The question that burns in Ozick's densely chimneyed Stockholm - what drives a man? Or specifically, what drives Lars Andermening when nobody is looking? A Polish-born orphan brought up in Sweden, Lars is the archetypal man of error: constantly misunderstood as a book reviewer, he writes a column for a middling Swedish newspaper which nobody reads. His speciality of books is dangerously brooding, consisting of obscure and existential Eastern European authors. Spiritually friendless, twice divorced and with his only daughter in America, there seems very little for Lars in Stockholm other than his obsession with these dated books. First and foremost, The Messiah of Stockholm is a salute to the literati; the few actual concrete settings within the novel's Stockholm are dedicated as temples for the written word: a newspaper office; a bookshop; the bedroom where Lars reads and writes his review, as well as the omnipresent aura of the Swedish Academy which lingers throughout the book [and perhaps functions as a high-brow Easter egg for the novel's readers]. The Messiah of Stockholm is a writer's book through and through, and because of its overall narrow focus on literature the book feels rather affected as such, intellectual but with the unshakeable feeling of being introverted. The Messiah of Stockholm doesn't make you fall in love with literature; you read The Messiah of Stockholm because you already do. 'She warned him that she wouldn’t allow her merchandise to look shopworn before sale; he was in plenty of trouble with her—she had been watching him turn the pages over; a hundred times. It was true. He had washed his fingers in that half-familiar dread print like a butcher with a bloody sheep in his grip, or like a tug dragging a river for a body.' Thus this book of entelechy works on a tripartite system of literary drives: between the character's search for God, for his father, and for the author. Ozick pushes together these three universal usurping cerebral quests and uses them as the pistons for which the novel shrugs along. Lars is not only searching for meaning [and perhaps redemption] but he is equally obsessed by the combination of the author and father figure, here embodied through the history of Bruno Schulz. The Messiah of Stockholm is as much the story of Schulz as it is of Lars, and sewn within Lars' narrative are snippets of Schulz's writing and life whilst we the reader dip in and out of the domestic fabulism for which Schulz is renowned for, which seeps itself into Lars' slowly hallucinating mind. Thinking he is Schulz's long-lost son, he fixates over the details of Schulz's meagre literary output. Although never for elucidation because in Lars mind there can be no question as to his history. There is only faith: Schulz's word is holy - it is the law and passed down to him by default. Lars Andermening is Bruno Schulz. Ozick's natural oddness of writing comes from Schulz's weirdness of narrative: although the question of Lars' origins are questionable at best, he himself is haunted by the image of his supposed father - skeletal, moonlike, with his father's lone eye canonised in Lars' dreams. A father [or is it author?] who would have gone on to win the Nobel Prize, Lars proclaims rather feverishly at one point. 'Thus the stewpot in the early winter dark. Cigarette smoke like torn nets hanging. All over the world the great ladle was stirring, stirring.The poets, dreamers, thinkers, hacks. The ambitious and the meditative. The opportunists and the provocateurs. The cabalists and the seducers. This stewpot—these hot tides—Lars under a quilt a short walk away had shut out, week after week: for the sake of catching his father’s eye.'Is Lars the messiah? Or is Bruno Schulz the metaphysical resurrected messiah? Or is it the mysterious appearance of Schulz' lost manuscript - incidentally titled The Messiah - which heralds a new testament for Lars lacklustre life. Ozick's short novel manages to be not only economical and linear to the point of exasperation, but it is within her mature construction of lines that we find such an intelligent complexity of philosophy as mentioned. The father-searching narrative is nothing new to literature but somehow Ozick adds to it with a clarity of an old, heavy sort of symbolism seemingly out of its time, turning the book into a psychoanalytical dream quite literally. Whilst the novel's prose is sparkling, The Messiah of Stockholm feels vaguely naturalistic. I do not know whether it is because of the novel's rather small and closed system, or the occasional distanced coldness of writing - especially when related to the characters - which makes this novel feel more like a philosophical experiment than a story. The novel appears to be one of Ozick - as the author, the father and the experimental maker - peering into the slow unravelling of Lars as his loathsomely paranoid character begins to ferment at the possibility of The Messiah's existence. '"An impostor. Another refugee impostor. It’s nothing new, believe me! Half my customers have made themselves up. Fabricators. Every Pole of a certain age who walks in here, male or female, used to be famous professor in Warsaw. Every Hungarian was once ambassador to Argentina. The French are the worst. I’ve never had one of those in my shop who didn’t turn out to be just the one who got Sartre started on the Talmud. By now I’ve counted twenty-five female teachers of Talmud—poor Mlle. de Beauvoir"'Unsurprisingly Lars' mind is a 'stewpot' of turmoil, torn apart from an underlying victim and messiah complex, which in turns elevates him to martyrdom. Not only is he an orphan, but he is also an exile, a mental refugee; Schulz's eventual death at the hands of Nazis seems to echo within Lars who is defined by such a persecution. [Although Lars is not explicitly Jewish, it is worth mentioning that Ozick quite famously is.] He is not merely Schulz's son, but he is the lost hope of Schulz winning the Nobel Prize, the lost pages of the manuscript, the paralysing and suffocating coldness of history and its apathy towards art and 'literary passion'. Consumed by this static reality he cannot handle the appearance of Adela, supposedly Schulz's long-lost daughter and thus Lars' step-sister, who brings into Lars' cold life the strange, found manuscript lest it skews his own plagiarised existence. He struggles between trying to disprove Adela's origins [and by consequence admitting to his own usurped flimsy foundations], or admitting to Adela's right to his story, one that he has found solace in for so long. The novel's rushed latter half becomes a quest in its literary detective capacity, where we where we begin to find out if Lars becomes condemned or saved by a manuscript which should not even exist in the first place. Although the plot may feel overall somewhat naturalistically contrived, and whilst Ozick does struggle when it comes to pacing and describing the dynamic external, the The Messiah of Stockholm is an admirable curious little thing, with enough rewards once you put in the effort.
I appreciate the stylish modernist writing. I also saw myself in the character of the main protagonist Lars Andeming a 40-something book reviewer for a Stockholm daily. I read books everyday letting them up only when I am in the office, at the gym or inside the church. When at home, I almost always read except when I sleep (but you know sometimes I see pages and texts of a book in my dream), eating, doing household chores, talking to my loved ones (I close the book when they try to communicate to me), writing my thoughts about a book (like this one) or when taking a bath (I have to specify that one because when I am doing something else inside the toilet, most of the time I also read a book). Then there is this once-a-month meet up (we call it a book field trip) with my bibliophile friends to talk about books the whole day. That basically is my reading habit.And sometimes I wonder, like Lars, who am I as a person. We all sometimes ask ourselves about that, right? We sometimes turn philosophical about it. I have come to meet so many fictional characters and yet I still do not know who am I really and what is my role in life. That's why lately I am also been reading religious books instead of the usual 1001, 501, Pulitzer, Booker, National, Nobel, Pinoy, etc. Turning 50 this year requires me to be more introspective and reflect on what I did the past half of my life and how will I spend the second half. I do not know really. That's why I was able to relate to the doldrums that Lars probably feels while writing all those book reviews and when he starts imagining that he is the son of a great Jewish novelist Bruno Schultz (1892-1942), who I only learned from reading this book that he was a real novelist and has a collection of short stories, The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories included among the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. According to Wiki, at the time of Schultz's death, he was writing his masterpiece entitled The Messiah and its manuscript disappeared after he was shot by a Nazi commander in 1942. That basically is what American Jewish novelist Cynthia Ozick (born 1928) finely used as a springboard of this book, said to be her best so far. Her writing, being stylish, is harder to understand than those of my favorite Philip Roth who also writes a lot of novels with Jewish setting. Ozick's style is modenist, philosophical and almost magical. Roth's is more straightforward, conventional and almost mainstream. This is my first Ozick but I will definitely read her other her other books that I already have in my to-be-read folder: the novel Heir to the Glimmering World (2004) and her collection of essays The Din in the Head (2006). I only bought these when I was desperately looking for a copy of this "The Messiah of Stockholm" in our local bookstores. Only to find one online at Amazon.com.
What do You think about The Messiah Of Stockholm (1988)?
I followed the "action" of the novel but the language was so convoluted & circuitous only willpower kept me with it, despite it being a short book. Strikes me that I'm too Midwestern, straight forward & yo the point, to revel in this as reviewers have, although I usually enjoy evocative language. This just made me feel most of the time that I was as tangled in the bedclothes as the main character, not quite awake & not quite asleep. That may be the point, but was not a sensation I particularly enjoy.
—Barbara
"The elevator was an inconvenience that could accommodate two persons, on condition that one of them was suitably skeletal" (10)."There were heaps of books on every surface. The mice made an orderly meal of them, prefaces for appetizers and indexes for dessert" (10)."It came of being partly Finnish on his mother's side--you wouldn't expect a sunny disposition in a Finn. 'Spits in his own soup,' Gunnar persisited" (12)."O the chimneys of armpits, moist and burning under wool" (18). "His rings blazed their sea-chest glints" (115).
—Katherine
On the face of it, this should have been the ideal novel for me, sucker as I am for fictions about books, bookstores, writing, literary conundra and the like, especially if they have some element of fantastication. Lars is a lowly book reviewer in Stockholm convinced that he owed his orphan childhood to having been brought here from Poland as a refugee from the Nazis, after his father, Jewish literary genius Bruno Schulz, was gunned down during a massacre in the ghetto. Schulz published just two books but is reported to have written a third, Messiah; with the help of elderly bookseller Heidi, Lars hopes to track down to lost manuscript of this work. Into the tale come Heidi's husband, Dr. Eklund, who purportedly spends his time using his scholarly career as a cover to smuggle refugees from Communist Poland into Sweden; and Adela, Schulz's supposed long-lost, unaccredited daughter -- Lars's half-sister -- who claims to have been able to recover the Messiah manuscript, or at least much of it.There's enough story here to fill a novella. Although The Messiah of Stockholm is quite a short novel, far too much of its wordage is made up of a sort of hysterical babbling, with bad analogies and outlandish metaphors crowding each other from the page. The net effect on the reader (well, this reader at least) is rather like one of those dreadful conversations you have at a noisy, crowded party, where the two of you have to shout at each other in order to be heard; afterwards you stagger away feeling bruised, having identified all the words but been unable to cling onto the overall sense. To give an idea of what I mean, here's a passage from page 101. Adela has brought along the manuscript in a brass amphora to protect it from the weather. Dr. Eklund tips out the contents of the amphora to have a look:With both hands Dr. Eklund took hold of the brass amphora and raised it above the table. There it was, high up, traveling at a decent steady speed -- a torpedo; a whale with its mouth wide; a chalice. Midway he tipped it over, until the mouth hung upside down, vomiting disorder, chaos: a shower of ragged white wings, a jumbled armada of white sails. A hundred sheets spiraled out -- crumpled, splotched, speckled, aged. What had littered Lars's quilt that morning came tumbling now out of Ali Baba's jar."Smart!" Heidi said again. "Keeping everything dry!"Dr. Eklund clanged down the emptied-out amphora. It hit the floor with the reverberating note of a cymbal and rolled on its side toward Dr. Eklund's feet. It was plain that Dr. Eklund -- sorcery! -- had instantly understood what to do with this peculiar vessel. He had seen that it was there to be turned upside down and emptied out.To repeat: Dr. Eklund tips out the contents of the amphora to have a look.This sort of gross overwriting permeates the entirety of the book, dulling whatever gleams of inspiration or insight that might be present, as if we were trying to see Ozick's world through grimy, steamed-over glass. And yet, every now and then there's a moment of shining clarity, where all this McGonagallish embellishment falls away and, for a while at least, we're exposed to wry, imaginative or even beautiful ideas expressed in quite exquisite prose. Virtually the whole of Chapter 13 -- all seven merciful pages of it! -- is like this, as we're told the story related in the Messiah manuscript: a sort of fairytale populated by images of the Holocaust and earlier slaughters, plus a quasi-Golem. There's a similar spirit at work in some of Ozick's throwaway flights of fancy, like this one from page 132:[Lars] kept -- this was the [gossips'] view of it -- a robot woman under his bed. She was stored in an old vodka case. In the middle of the night Lars smacked a button and she clicked herself into position, constructing itself part by part. She was made mainly with styrofoam and hinged with old wedding rings bought wholesale from a divorce lawyer who had batches of them . . .But, as noted, these are rare shafts of sunlight darting through murky air. I've no wish to quote further illustrative passages -- my typing finger is getting sore and I have other things to do -- but here are a few individual lines that caught my eye:The look of Polish had begun finally to fit his eye-sockets without estrangement . . . (p33)"He's on his way," he heard Heidi call from the back room. A moan: or not exactly a moan. Rather, the sound of indecipherable syllables evaporating at the bottom of the sea. (p59)One idea remained like an exclamation mark in the sweet-tasting pink wax of their heads: the stewpot, the stewpot! (p68)Lars threw off the quilt and stared as if his own eyeballs were two breathing bellows inflated by the bottommost power of his pumping lungs. His head was filled with the battering, plodding, butting force of that staring, that bulging. (p86)Lars, looking with all his strength, felt his own ordinary [eye] pupil consumed by a conflagration in the socket. As if copulating with an angel whose wings were on fire. (p104)Dr. Eklund, meanwhile, was nodding his big face up and down, cheering her on like a human baton. (p118)The final line of the book might seem to fall into the same category: "And then, in the blue light of Stockholm, among zebra fumes, he grieved" (page 144). The zebra reference does make at least internal sense, though, because on the previous page we're told that "It was as if Stockholm, burning, was slowly turning into Africa: the smell, winter or summer, of baking zebra."As I say: internal sense. Hands up all of you who know what baking zebra smells like, and why it smells different to other baking meats.
—John
