Review published in Numéro Cinq: http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2014/02/02/the-flood-of-recollected-images-begins-...

Until recently, Anglophone readers wanting to investigate the fiction of Austrian writer Josef Winkler faced only one option: the exacting and elliptical novel The Serf (1987/1997; trans. Michael Mitchell). Published in English by Ariadne Press, The Serf joined Winkler's Flowers for Jean Genet (1992/1997; trans. Michael Roloff), his biographical and readerly homage to the French writer Jean Genet, whose influence is felt throughout Winkler's own fiction, as the only works available in English

But the reader requires an immersive education in Winkler before undertaking The Serf. And even Flowers for Jean Genet, while critical to comprehending Winkler's aesthetic—his queer appropriation of high camp, religious and perverse imagery; and his homoeroticism (I would suggest, from Ronald Firbank as well)—fails to give the reader a cogent glimpse into his creative output, an oeuvre for which Winkler has garnered many accolades including the Alfred Döblin Award in 2001, the Grand Austrian State Prize in 2007, and the Georg Büchner Prize in 2008.

Luckily, two additional fictions by Winkler were published in the past year by Contra Mundum, When the Time Comes (1998/2013) and Natura Morta: A Roman Novella (2001/2014), both translated assiduously by Adrian West, who, to use his own words (as applied to Winkler's prose), is able to render the painstaking "visual detail" and "attention to the musicality of phrases" found in the original German texts with a skill that honors Winkler's writing as a "writing-against."

Winkler eschews a traditional plot; instead, narrative fragments work together by means of repetition to complicate his vision of modern life. But single scenes can also be understood on their own terms, if one considers the images and their relation to the overall thematics of the text.

Subtitled A Roman Novella, Natura Morta is less a novella than a series of poetic vignettes, a succession of glimpses of life around the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele in Rome where various figures appear, disappear, and then reappear: people "festooned" with commodified and locally popular "colorful plastic pacifiers"; "two teenaged Moroccan rent boys"; and a man whose "eyelids and eyelashes [are] painted black with mascara" and who is taunted with the homophobic "Sida!" There are plenty of "bloody chicken heads and yellow chicken feet" in the marketplace juxtaposed with iconographic images like "a doll of the Christ child" parked in bowl surrounded by "dried pineapples, dates, and figs" and "the Virgin Mary ... look[ing] over the fingertips of her clasped hands toward a box of Mon Chéri chocolates." These images constitute a fixed yet fluid tableau, a natura morta, a still life echoing its literal translation: dead nature.

Winkler is primarily concerned with the fig vendor's son Piccoletto, "[a] black-haired boy, around sixteen years old, whose long eyelashes nearly grazed his freckle-studded cheeks." Piccoletto's function is to join the seemingly disparate images of the city and its inhabitants in a way that allows Winkler to explore the religious history of Rome, particularly as it deviates from contemporary vice and greed. "Sacred kitsch" litters the city; the text works by juxtaposing religious iconography and a marketplace saturated with "one crucified Lord after another," juxtapositions that in turn inform and reflect the distorted sexualities, the myriad "perversions" and vices paraded before the reader and the young, impressionable Piccoletto: from "[t]wo nuns ... lick[ing] the chocolate toes of an ice cream bar shaped like a child's foot" to Michelangelo's Pietà, "framed with bulletproof glass," an icon fetishized by "[a] toothless Pole" with the desire "to clasp the mother of God in her fingers."

Winkler's imagistic prose shows debts to the cinema. In one scene, Piccoletto spies a videocassette of "the film Sciuscià by Vittorio de Sica ... [a]top the apricots and white peaches" carried in a plastic bag by an anonymous woman on a streetcar. This mention of de Sica's first major work as a director—filmed in 1946 and translated in English as Shoeshine—reveals how images in Winkler function similarly to those in a neorealist film; not only do many of the series of images contain potent mixtures of the sacred and the profane, but they overvalue the image itself (in its repetition and in its recurrence) in ways also reminiscent of auteurs such as Michelangelo Antonioni.

Winkler has likened his authorial role to that of a human camera[2]: he would undoubtedly have had Antonioni's famous montage of images in mind—I am thinking of Antonioni's L'Eclisse (1962), with its stress on images as storytelling vehicles—when compiling his own scenes of natura morta. Consider the following two passages:

A dog on its hind legs with a protuberant member snapped over and over at the small crucifix hanging from the wrist of an exhausted woman leaning with her eyes closed against the wall. A kneeling girl bumped her forearm against the thigh of a young monk holding a clear plastic bag of freshly watered cherries.

And:

Aroused, staring into the girl's leg holes and sniffing at her map, the boy [Piccoletto] bit down on his tongue, coated in bits of fruit bar, then stopped as he became aware of the taste of blood filling his mouth and glanced self-consciously as the mincing red feet of the pigeons. Piccoletto stood, daubed his lip with a handkerchief, passed the city map of Rome to the girl with the words "Mille grazie!" and looked for the toilet.

Winkler wants us to regard a teenaged boy, who is always "playing with his sex," as a Christ for our times, in a world comprised of tourists, clergy, tradespeople, sex workers, and drug addicts. The fragmentary glimpses of city life in Natura Morta are refracted through the sexualized consciousness of Piccoletto whose observation of two other boys "gnawing on a fig, fresh and purple" is followed up immediately by "[t]he two boys huddl[ing] together, whispering and giggling, eyeing Piccoletto's broad buttocks."

Even more crucial to Winkler's sexual vision of modernity is Piccoletto's interest in soliciting both male and female gazes, and how he can arouse and also express sexual interest across the gulf of gender. Winkler's aesthetic construction of modern-day Rome conjoins sex and the city, forcing individuals to confront the past in a present whose greed, lusts, and sensual pleasures—e.g., "Frocio wrapped fistfuls of ice chips in tin foil, pressing them into the form of a phallus, held the cold fetish at his hips, and squeezed the ice chips out of the tin foil in front of the fig vendor's son, as though releasing kilos of ejaculate"—contrast with the iconographic and architectural reminders of latter days: "a stone phallus" in the Piazza San Vittorio the scene where an ambulance "pick[s] up a young drug addict, passed out and foaming at the mouth"; "the exit of the papal tombs" of Saint Peter's Cathedral "leaking blood in the filthy streets," streets littered with pages of the Cronaco vera, "in which tragedies from throughout Italy—illustrated with hearses, eyewitnesses, chesty women, and Mafiosi...—are reported every week."

In contrast with Natura Morta's portraits of city life, Winkler's When the Time Comes takes rural Austria as its focus (Winkler's native Carinthia). But like Natura Morta, When the Time Comes centers on a young boy whose intellectual and sexual maturation are influenced by his attempts to compile the stories of those who have come before him. In When the Time Comes, the storyteller is "the bone collector" Maximilian, whose "black bone stock ... smell[s] of decay" and yet, because it contains the bones of the dead, has within it a history to decipher, record, fathom. Maximilian is Winkler's anchor point; other characters' stories are woven into his "clay vessel" of bones, creating a portrait of life in rural Austria spanning generations.

The town's pastor has erected a terrifying painting representing God's judgment at the town center, an icon that oversees the lives and deaths of the townspeople in a "town built in the form of a cross." It depicts a man "who dragged a life-sized statue of Jesus through the forest before the Second World War and threw it over a waterfall," causing Jesus to lose both arms; the painting shows the man's retribution in life, since he "lost his own arms in Hitler's war," and after, in the fires of Hell. The often vindictive Old Testament God's relationship with his flock, one built on fear as much as veneration, is a paradigm that repeats at the secular and personal levels. One is never free from one's history, and even rewriting history, placing bones upon bones—as is the bone collector's iterative, inscriptive task—cannot pry the individual from his or her community and the repressive social and religious structures of the past.

Winkler inverts the famous "begat" passages in the book of Genesis, opening the sections of When the Time Comes with his characters' often tragicomic deaths rather than with their births; because of this, their lives seem to take on a more purposeful and even allegorical meaning. For example,

Willibald, who had worked for decades in the Heraklith factory on the other bank of the Drava, was dead from long cancer. His hands in the air and his pants around his ankles, he stepped out of the bathroom and called [to his wife]: Hilde! Hilde! Help me! then fell over and died on the spot.

"Death is my life's theme," Winkler has stated, and its presence—impending or otherwise—is felt on every page of When the Time Comes.

Most of the narrative in When the Time Comes, however, is taken up with the story of two boys, Jonathan and Leopold, names that allude to religious and popular examples of queerness—the first, a reference to Jonathan's homoerotic relationship with David in the book of Samuel, and the second recalling Leopold of the Leopold and Loeb murder scandal in 1920s Chicago. It is typical of Winkler to fuse extremes: love alongside fear, pleasure alongside pain, and loyalty alongside greed: in this case, Jonathan and Leopold achieve an extreme jouissance combining pleasure (mutual masturbation) with pain (autoerotic asphyxiation):

The two boys tied the two ends of rope behind their ears and jumped into the emptiness, weeping and embracing, a few meters from the armless Christ who had once been rescued from a stream bed by the priest and painter of prayer cards. ... With their tongues out, their sexes stiff, their semen-flecked pants dripping urine, Jonathan in pajamas and Leopold in his quicklime-splattered bricklayer's clothes, they hung in the barn of the parish house until they were found by Jonathan's sixteen-year-old cousin...

Neither the bone collector Maximilian nor the townspeople condemn the boys for their homosexuality; instead, the townspeople grumble about the senseless act itself, not its queer connotations ("those two idiots who did away with themselves together!" in "this godless village"), and Jonathan's mother Katharina grants her dead child unearthly powers, certain that he will return like the resurrected Christ to be again among his family. Whereas "[i]n death they were separable," the intermingling of "their tears, their urine, and their sperm" in life had rendered them inseparable: they can now be mourned as individuals, despite the fact that, curiously, "Leopold was buried in Jonathan's death mask."

W. G. Sebald notes that Winkler's use of repetition points to something personal in his work, an act of self-definition that requires sifting through and making sense of one's origins:
"Josef Winkler's entire, monomaniac oeuvre ... is actually an attempt to compensate for the experience of humiliation and moral violation by casting a malevolent eye on one's own origins." If repetition is the sole way to work through trauma, as Freud has suggested, the rural portraits in When the Time Comes suggest that trauma is as endemic to everyday life as is a kind of quiet joy, and the ways in which collective and personal traumas are eventually reconciled with one another are mediations intrinsically bound to the storyteller's sociocultural function.

Sebald's remarks on Winkler's work also point to a moral complicity that individuals need to recognize, one that carries the weight of the past and also points toward a future—though, just what that future constitutes is bleakly uncertain. The teleological aim of the future, as Winkler sees, points only toward death. Thus, the reader meets each character in When the Time Comes at the moment of his or her death, the narrative then working backward through the character's life. Winkler's vision privileges the figure of the artist as conduit between past origins and present traumas, interpreting "the flood of recollected images [as it] begins," but just what the artist or storyteller figure does with these "bones" is undefined, as is who will replace Maximilian when his own time comes.

Like Sebald and like his own Austrian compatriots Peter Handke, Elfriede Jelinek, and Thomas Bernhard, Winkler flags memory and history—collective and individual—as inescapable traps that affect present experience. Winkler is concerned with the individual's role in history, how it is necessary to acknowledge complicity with the past, and how one must grapple with the external forces of inhumanity, greed, and immorality and ultimately reconcile with that past. And yet, while it is essential to remember the stories of the dead, sadly, we erase all memory of them before we have had time to absorb all that they can offer us:

Tomorrow morning or the day after, they will scrape it [candlewax] off with a kitchen knife and sweep it up with the leftover flowers strewn about, then there will be no more traces of a dead man in the house, the mourning house will smell no more of rotten flowers, burnt spruce twigs, and wax candles.

( )

Books that don't have some sort directional unity rarely impress me: I want to feel like I'm going somewhere. I recognize that this is terribly [insert your favorite theoretical term of condemnation here] of me, but I think books are objects that should have some kind of drive to them.

The drive in Winkler's book is pretty weak, though the conceit is glorious. He tells the history of a small Austrian town from the nineteenth century through to the, roughly, 1980s, but he does so by describing the ways in which the town's inhabitants have died. After they die, they're put into a cooking pot, and the resulting goo is used to keep flies away from horses' orifices. That's pretty grim.

So are the individual tales, and I should, by all rights, have found this a pretty easy book to skim. But Winkler, and his translator Adrian West, have done something special. The repetitions and other structuring devices (snatches of a Baudelaire poem; Catholic songs and prayers) work as a good refrain or poetic form should work, helping the reader forward rather than making her roll her eyes; many of the individual stories are heart-breaking and/or hilarious; and the book's narrator is filled with both loathing and almost superhuman compassion for a group of people who are oppressed by their religion, but also find their only consolation in it. ( )

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/65035265179/forget-about-any-content-just-read-my-...

It has been widely enough reported that Josef Winkler is scornful to a degree I think I can be enamored with. He despises the Catholic church, and I would think most religions because of it. He feels contempt toward the Germans, specifically Nazis, and any authority meant to restrain and contain its populace. He is definitely not a lover of hard labor, and farming he despises. He did not like his dad, and in one article written by translator Adrian West it was reported Winkler was only hugged once by him and that was for helping to exterminate all the rats in the cellar of their farmhouse. I have yet to discover if Winkler has had any children of his own in which to alter the family history into something a bit more palatable for those yet to come. Josef Winkler is well-versed in tragedy and his family and acquaintances are riddled with it. What he believes and remembers he feels important enough to keep repeating. And history, he shows, is his great reminder.

It is true that in this book When the Time Comes there is no clean plot and no readily identifiable characters in which to relate to. But I took notes. Three legal pages full of my scribbling. I began to construct a pattern and soon was amazed at the number of names Josef Winkler used to produce his gargantuan ossuary. Pleasantries within these lives escaped my reading of this vast collection of family, friends, and acquaintances who all would find their place among the other many dead with none no longer left near dying. In approaching the end of my reading it supposed on me the awful truth that none of us escape this final act, and the categorical reporting here was supersaturated to the extent that the reader should come to accept the same fate would happen, and specifically in my case, to me. And it did, and does for my time being on the page and for the remaining moments left for me to ponder this fate before getting back to the object for my living on this earth and developing in my own mind its meaning.

Josef Winkler regularly employs in his writing the use of repetition. He is not the first to do so and it is an effective way to make ones point clear even in the face of ambiguity of which there is none too little of in this book. Instead of naming names outright Winkler instead writes the person out by signifying them with phrases such as, "Lazarus with the fat earlobes" or "my fat and toothless grandmother". So these became my notes, and at some point along the text a name would occur to him and be applied mysteriously to one or another of his secret characters. There would be no possible result of my remembering or keeping these people straight without my taking thorough notes. And in the process of my taking them I wondered why and the reason for this seeming nonsensical behavior. It felt early on I had come too far to stop, and it wasn't until I neared the end of the book that I knew I no longer needed to take them. Which was my hope in the first place, and now the proof of my lost time and possibly useless labor.

The title When the Time Comes reveals the essence of the book as it applies to all of us the same. There will come a time and we, or others in our stead, should come prepared for it. I shan't bore you with all of the details, but I do believe the following information will be of use to you, the next reader, of this tale. In no way does what follow ruin anything for you, the reader, or act as a spoiler of sorts as there really is no rhyme nor reason for any plot or accounting except an almost complete listing of the dead and how they got that way. I am still not even sure of what I read.

The bone collector, Maxmilian Kirchheimer, is the main character. His youngest brother is Reinhard Kirchheimer. These boys are both still living, getting on in age, and almost everybody else isn't except for their dad whose name the best I can figure, given the abundant labyrinth of information, is Oswald Kirchheimer. The most seriously important details you need to know about Maxmilian is that he was an acolyte who took iron pills and read Karl May books. He also spit in his cousin Egon's face but also enjoyed playing football with him. There is nothing of note about his little brother Reinhard other than he is one of five children born to father Oswald and a mother who for some reason remained nameless and for the most part unmentioned throughout the text. Her parents were Paula and August Rosenfelder. August was an alcoholic and mean enough that his daughter-in-law bleached his throat. At some point old August discovered his wife Paula strangled by a calf halter up in the attic. Some time after this grave event August hung himself as well.

It wasn't clear to me in which order the children born to Florian and Elisabeth Kirchheimer came other than the first being a son Lazarus and the last also a son named Friedham. There were only two girls, those being Hildegard and Helene. Somewhere stuck in the middle of the lot were Maxmilian's father Oswald and another brother Eduard. Aunt Waltrid owned a pastry shop and was married to Eduard. She died two days before Christmas and Eduard was too drunk to attend her funeral. Friedham grew up to be a war correspondent and also at some point threatened to cut off Maximilian's genitals with a knife. Oswald's hunchback sister Hildegard was childless and married to Willibald Zitterer who smoked a pipe and died of lung cancer. Hildegard had arthritis and in her old age urine would constantly stream down her legs. Sister Helene was married to a carpenter who revered Hitler. The couple had a daughter named Karin who would run to her Aunt Hildegard and Uncle Willibald to escape her violent and fascist father. As a child, Oswald had a finger cut off while working in the hay fields and he also almost died in a nasty fall from high up in a hayloft. Oswald's uncle Ingo took a bullet in WWII and ended up in an insane asylum. Oswald's father Florian, brother to Ingo, commissioned the first power plant in Pulsnitz. He had cancer of the gallbladder and enjoyed dressing Maxmilian before school until the young boy complained of improprieties enough that his mother told her father-in-law to stop.

Maxmilian's father Oswald had many relationships that were southerly at best especially when he was chosen to take over the farm ahead of his older brother Lazarus who was described as having fat earlobes and who also drove a Mercedes. George Fuhrman pissed in some sausage meat and pushed Oswald's face in it. Otmar Hafner was Oswald's best friend who didn't walk until he was six years old. Otmar had a brother named Klaus who had a son Roman who hung himself in a hayloft with a calf halter which set off the rash of suicides in the first place. Klaus went on to try killing his own self twice before finally succeeding by being poisoned, trapped within his car's exhaust.

I am not sure what it was about the Hasslacher family but after young Leopold hung himself along with his friend Jonathan Stinehart by using the same rope, two of his other brothers decided to do likewise albeit separately it is assumed. Adam the Third Philippitsch was unlucky and found Leopold and Jonathan hanging from the rafters and was good enough to cut them down and notify their families. The mother of Jonathan, Katharina Stinehart, had her breasts removed as did Anita Felfernig who was the village's first television owner despite having seven hungry children and who also died of breast cancer despite her own actions taken to control the disease. It just dawned on me that Anita was most likely the mother of Ludmilla Felfernig who at fifteen years old started her first menstrual period and not knowing what it was began to run when the other schoolchildren teased her. She smeared the blood that was drifting down her legs on Calvary which was erected in the center of town by the pastor and painter Balthasar Kranabeter. Ludmilla then proceeded in her frantic despair to hurl herself off the Drava Bridge. She drowned caught in the grating far below. In addition, a friend of Katharina Stinehart's was struck by a truck while riding her bicycle to the Stineharts. Her name was Ms. Lakonig who was married to Mr. Lakonig who went by the name of Wilfried.

And there are just so many others to list and profile such as Miss Dorflinger who was a sorceress who refused to die, standing outside, being pelted by hail, and I would be remiss if I did not mention at least Leopoldine Felsberger, daughter of Paula and August Rosenfelder, married to Matthias Felsberger and mother to Maximilian's mother as well as brothers Kajetan and Michael who died in WWII as did so many others also worth mentioning but out of time to do so now.

One thing all of these fine people had in common was that religion did not save them. In fact, much was done in the name of religion to harm them. And keeping the family farms profitable and working was not always the best of ideas given the number of fingers and lives lost in the process. But my reading of this history was great fun, but hardly a laugh a minute. It was instead a piling up of bones. "In the clay vessel in which, from the bones of slaughtered animals, the putrid-smelling bone stock was distilled, to be painted on the horses with a crow's feather in the summer heat, around the eyes and nostrils, and on the belly, to protect them from the pricking and bloodsucking horseflies and mosquitoes...."

Perhaps not wrapped as tight as the text I read, it still feels as if the effort was justified, though not so convinced enough to bet another life on it. But I would certainly be interested in hearing what any others not willing to hide behind their mother's skirts might have to say about their reading of this too. The closest reading of late that I can compare this fine work to would be [b:John the Posthumous|18002361|John the Posthumous|Jason Schwartz|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1378832049s/18002361.jpg|25264166] by Jason Schwartz. Both writers seem to lyrically compile major lists and study their history in words that make it an awful lot for a body to consume. Even in light of several balanced servings. ( )