“Picnic at Hanging Rock,” by Joan Lindsay
In the seemingly limitless pantheon of gone-girl literature, “Picnic at Hanging Rock” might take the prize for best setting. The book opens on the morning of Valentine’s Day, 1900, on the grounds of an Australian boarding school: the cicadas shrilling and dahlias drooping, the lawn steaming in the sunshine, the “shimmering summer morning warm and still.” Girls flutter around like butterflies, exchanging “madly romantic” cards and preparing for the fateful picnic—during which three girls will disappear, in their corsets and ribbons, while exploring the Jungian monolith in the title of the book.
Lindsay’s novel was published in 1967 and recently reissued by Penguin Classics, with a foreword by Maile Meloy. It’s a proto-“Virgin Suicides,” dreamy and haunting, animated by a sense of slightly sickening erotic mystery. (Peter Weir’s movie adaptation was released in 1975.) I picked up the book because I suspected it would help address a desire I’ve been having lately, to lie down for hours in a hot secluded garden, crushing flower petals under my skin. It did. Just before the girls disappear, they’re “overcome by an overpowering lassitude,” and they fling themselves onto the rock and fall asleep. Lizards and beetles crawl over them, and the scene is “beautiful and complete,” Lindsay writes: “the ragged nest, Marion’s torn muslin skirts fluted like a nautilus shell.” Their bodies soon vanish, and in doing so become sites of sanctity and degradation. The town imagines the girls bloodied, angelic, their bones broken in the sun; a clock on the wall of the boarding school sounds like “a heart beating in a body already dead.” Lindsay prefaced the novel with a coy note that suggested the story was factual. It isn’t, but the plot still bears traces of her original (and openly supernatural) ending—moments of unexplained mystery that, oddly, end up anchoring the book.—Jia Tolentino
“Berlin Alexanderplatz,” by Alfred Döblin
“Berlin Alexanderplatz,” Alfred Döblin’s masterpiece from 1929, is a raging cataract of a novel, one that threatens to engulf the reader in a tumult of sensation. It has long been considered the behemoth of German literary modernism, the counterpart to “Ulysses.” Making a clean break with the late-bourgeois monumentality of Thomas Mann, it unleashes a barrage of news items, pop songs, weather reports, police reports, rants, gossip, and monologues from the streets, bars, and bedrooms of a hyper-modern metropolis. Into this epic montage is threaded the grim but not altogether hopeless story of Franz Biberkopf, a laborer turned pimp, who walks out of prison at the beginning of the novel—he accidentally killed his fiancée—and tries to find his way to the straight and narrow. Soon enough, he is pulled back in: he consorts with vicious thugs, loses an arm, is falsely accused of another murder, and winds up in an asylum, where he imagines himself being hacked to pieces by Death in the guise of a ballad singer. He somehow emerges intact, and, we are told, finds a respectable job as a factory doorman.
Döblin’s pinpoint use of dialect, slang, and jargon renders “Berlin Alexanderplatz” even less exportable than most modernist tours de force, but the veteran translator Michael Hoffmann, in his fluid, absorbing new version for New York Review Books, has found plausible equivalents, largely British in flavor. What makes the book eternally uncanny is, of course, the Hitlerian guillotine that hangs above the scene. Döblin’s all-devouring gaze registers the Nazi presence: we see the apolitical Franz hawking copies of the Völkischer Beobachter, the Party newspaper, even as he exchanges friendly banter with Jews. The Weimar Republic was in a relatively healthy condition in the late twenties, and “Alexanderplatz” reminds us that doom was not written on every wall. But a stomach-turning seven-page description of the operation of a slaughterhouse has an effect that not even this visionary author could have calculated in advance. He becomes a camera, and ghosts of the future move across the frame.—Alex Ross
“Catastrophe: And Other Stories,” by Dino Buzzati
I discovered the bard of nervousness last week, and I confess I feel a bit nervous about recommending him. His name, for those placid souls who don’t know, is Dino Buzzati, an Italian writer and journalist who died in 1972. Ecco is reissuing his collected stories, deftly translated into English by Judith Landry, this month.
A Buzzati tale is merciful in only one respect: it lasts for just several pages, about the length of two subway stops. You dip in, you meet your protagonist—a passenger convinced that his train is hurtling toward disaster, a woman who can’t remember where she left her daughter—and, in minutes, the vague unease becomes a febrile dread. I am not entirely sure why I like these stories, though certainly they capture something of the national mood. They portray delicate psychologies, and are themselves psychologically delicate, full of premonitions and subtle turns. In “The Collapse of the Baliverna” (from the French baliverner, “to talk nonsense”), a man is certain that he has caused a freak accident and killed hundreds of people. In “The Epidemic,” a government official wonders whether the state has developed an influenza that afflicts the inwardly disloyal. The prospect of being wrong, and thus crazy, here seems as terrifying as being right. Buzzati’s prose can have a hard brightness, like the glazed eyes of a fever patient. I think I find him interesting, and unsettling, because he makes me feel saner than his characters—but only just. Don’t we all cart around nebulous guilt? (Or am I simply Jewish?) In “Landslide,” a journalist drives in search of a landslide his editor has told him to cover, but it’s nowhere to be found. He goes from village to village; it never materializes. But surely, somewhere, there’s a landslide? Or perhaps this—the life happening around the journalist—is the landslide? Does anyone know?—Katy Waldman
Sourse: newyorker.com
