The Weight of Things is a little book (140 pages including afterword; small, square format), but it’s the tip of what sounds an extraordinary iceberg of writing. Translator Adrian Nathan West provides illuminating background on Marianne Fritz (in his afterword, at The Paris Review, and in conversation with Kate Zambreno at The Believer). During her lifetime (1948-2007), Fritz produced some 10,000 pages of an unfinished project that she called ‘The Fortress’ – in West’s words, “a vast fictional work analyzing what aspects of Austrian society had conduced it to the twin disasters of the First and Second World War.” Over time, Fritz’s work drifted further and further from convention, as though language itself had been complicit in the atrocities of the 20th century, and she needed a different mode of expression. She went from deliberate misspellings and unusual grammar, through to elaborate diagrams and arrangements of text on the page (just take a look).
This first novel of Fritz’s (originally published in German in 1978, now in English from Dorothy, a publishing project) is in fairly straightforward language, though the shadow of that iceberg is never far away. In the first few pages, we have established some basics: in 1945, Berta Faust’s husband Rudolf did not return from the War; his comrade Wilhelm Schrei came back in his stead, and married Berta. By 1960, Wilhelm has married Berta’s friend Wilhemine; and Berta is in an asylum (‘the fortress’). In 1963, Wilhelmine suggests paying Berta a visit for her fortieth birthday (which just happens to coincide with Wilhelmine’s and Wilhelm’s wedding anniversary); but we sense that Wilhelmine isn’t doing this just to be friendly…
The stage is set for a blackly comic farce, and there are indeed moments of wry humour. Here, for example, is Wilhelmine talking to Wilhelm when he first brings the news of Rudolf:
What’s your story, sir? Are you planning on staying in Donaublau, then? Nowadays all the cities look more or less the same. A heap of rubble is a heap of rubble no matter where you go. Nowadays everyone has to start from scratch.
But this lightness of tone is deceptive. Even the title isn’t as innocuous as it first seems in context at first, not when you start thinking through what it means: “In February of 1945, Berta experienced a moment of freedom from the weight of things, in particular from that weighty circumstance historians call the Second World War.” Berta carries an existential burden with which she struggles to cope, just as the four little words of the novel’s title can’t hold all their meaning in. Wilhelm is too equivocal and reticent to be of much help: “He believed all and nothing, doubted all and nothing, was a born dreamer who never dreamed. In a nutshell: he was a worthy representative of his nation.” In that last comment, Fritz seems to suggest that here is a seed of war in microcosm.
The Weight of Things moves restlessly backwards and forwards in time, which enables the narrative feints that I won’t go into here… More fundamentally, though, it disrupts the reader’s feeling of progression: a period of history flattens out into timelessness, a sense that these circumstances cannot be escaped. When I’d finished The Weight of Things, my immediate feeling was one of waking from a beautiful nightmare – but it’s a nightmare that demands to be revisited.
Now read on…
I read The Weight of Things as it’s the first choice for the new Reading the World Book Club organised by the University of Rochester’s Three Percent blog. The Book Club has its own tag onNew for ‘ Three Percent, and Lizzy Siddal from Lizzy’s Literary Life has also been taking part.
Book details (publisher link)
The Weight of Things (1978) by Marianne Fritz, tr. Adrian Nathan West (2015), Dorothy, a publishing project paperback
29th January 2016 at 1:10 pm
This sounds like something I would like. I also hadn’t heard of the book club, so thanks for that.
3rd February 2016 at 4:12 pm
My pleasure! I think you would like it.
1st February 2016 at 7:56 am
My copy of this has just arrived and I’m looking forward to reading it. I can’t help but be intrigued by what I’ve heard!
3rd February 2016 at 4:16 pm
I’ll be interested to hear what you think of it.
4th February 2016 at 3:10 pm
Very interesting David. How much of her writing took the form of completed novels? Do you have a sense?
9th February 2016 at 10:06 pm
It’s fascinating to read about, Max. After The Weight of Things, Frotz published ‘The Child of Violence and the Stars of the Romani’, which is about 600 pages; and ‘What Language You Don’t Understand, which is over 3,000 pages. And then came a trilogy called ‘Naturally’, which ran to 6,000 pages; the first two ‘Naturally’ books were published (though only as manuscript facsimiles), and the third remained unfinished – the website I link to in the post has PDFs of that unfinished volume.
According to Adrian Nathan West’s interview (also linked above), Fritz’s second novel is probably the only other one that could feasibly be translated into English. And West only heard about Fritz when he saw a mention of her work in the footnotes to a poem by Sebald. It makes you wonder what else is out there, unknown to Anglophone readers.