2024-03-01 13:00:14
Christoph Ransmayr explores the diversity of storytelling in his volume “When I was still immortal”.
In addition to his novels and stories, Christoph Ransmayr has been writing a series called “Play Forms of Storytelling” since 1997. A field of literary experimentation in which he publishes speeches, ballads, fairy tales, tirades and much more. Now he has put together a selection volume from it, with texts that, as he says in the foreword, “come closest to the classic and most popular narrative tone”.
Centuries-old songs and fairy tales
Apart from the foreword, he collects 13 texts, pardon: 12a! He adopted the trick to avoid the unlucky number from his previous home address in a Viennese Wilhelminian style house. A world in which superstition certainly also played a role, a childhood in the country between siblings, farmers, craftsmen, a Bible-savvy maid and a mother familiar with “centuries-old songs and fairy tales,” is for Ransmayr a kind of cradle of storytelling. A plate of alphabet soup was enough to form a story about carp or devil jellyfish.
From the second text onwards, Ransmayr takes us on his travels, to Lake Phoksundo in Nepal, to Sri Lanka, to Hong Kong and again and again to Ireland, where he lived for a long time. And we learn a lot about his worldview, his criticism of colonialism (“Europe has never paid the bills for its centuries-long raids across all the continents of the world…”). He addresses the urge for expansion combined with ecological destruction in “Radiant Downfall”, his oldest text in this volume, which is written in lyrical prose and which already lays out the dystopian principles of later works.
World tour in the library
Much of it can also be read as a good supplement to better-known works. The text “Raft Trip,” for example, is about Ransmayr’s research in the Austrian National Library on the trail of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition, which led to the discovery of a group of islands that was named “Franz Josef Land” after the emperor, and about the “The Horrors of ice and darkness”. “Raft Trip” is also a declaration of love to the archives and libraries in which the author sinks into. Using globes and maps, he travels to the ends of the world and at the same time exposes the dangerous fascination with “terra incognita”.
The text “At the bier of a free man” can be read as a preliminary study for “The Fallmaster,” in which Ransmayr talks about his father, whom he calls “Kohlhaas” after Kleist’s character, a righteous man who fails in good faith because of local political intrigues. However, the volume ends on a humorous note. “Ladies & Gentlemen under Water”, originally published in conjunction with underwater photographs by Manfred Walkobinger, also works without them. A museum guard, a waterbed salesman or a swimming instructor cavort in the deep sea – transformed into chatty sea creatures such as squid, shrimp or jellyfish.
With his “plays of storytelling” Ransmayr once again proves himself to be the Homer of our strange times.
Buch
- When I was still immortal
Christoph Ransmayr
Stories. 224 p., hardcover,
€ 25,50 (S. Fischer)
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