Bright Magic: Stories by Alfred Döblin

Alfred Döblin was a titan of modern German literature. This collection of stories--astonishingly, the first collection of his stories ever published in English--shows him to have been equally adept in shorter forms.

Included in its entirety is Döblin’s first book, The Murder of a Buttercup, a work of savage brilliance and a landmark of literary expressionism. Mortality roams the streets of nineteenth-century Manhattan, with a white borzoi and a quiet smile. A ballerina duels to the death with the stupid childish body she is bound to. We experience, in the celebrated title story, a dizzying descent into a shattered mind. The collection is then rounded off with two longer stories written when Döblin was in exile from Nazi Germany in Southern California, including the delightful “Materialism: A Fable,” in which news of humanity’s soulless doctrines spreads to the animals, elements, and molecules of nature.

Goodreads description

Alfred Doblin is not as well-known as he should be. It is a sign of how insular English-language publishing has been and how easily it is for magic realism lovers to get a distorted view of the history of the genre and its major writers. This collection of his short stories published in the NYRB Classics series and translated by Damion Searls starts to address this. The style of magic realism you get here is a sometimes dark fabulism shot through with humour. I do not know how much Doblin's work was influenced by Kafka's. Is it merely a coincidence that two of the stories, The Metamorphosis and The Little Fable, have the same titles as two Kafka stories?

The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 consists of twelve short stories written between 1904 and 1911. Part 2, Later Tales, were written between 1935 and 1945. I don't usually mention the dates of the works, but I think it is remarkable that Doblin was playing with forms, such as flash and micro fiction, which I tend to think of as modern. Not all the stories are short; indeed Traffic With The Beyond, about how a medium is persuaded to contact the spirit world in order to solve a murder, novella length.

The early works tend to be dark, often displaying Doblin's fascination and discomfort with women's bodies. In The Ballerina and the Body the central character learns to tame her body to her will: how to compel her elastic ligaments, her too-straight joints, but then her body is stricken with a terrible disease and she is unable to compel it to do anything. Of course this story is still relevant today. Young women are still compelling their bodies and becoming sick with eating disorders as a result.

Whilst you will find Doblin's humour in the early stories, it really shines in the second half of the collection. Sometimes the humour comments on politics and society as in The Little Fable (the people... to the south celebrated freedom so much that they kept it locked up in an undisclosed location in the ruler’s own castle and never let anyone get near it).

And sometimes the humour is basically absurd - as in the story Max, in which a mother adopts a hippopotamus as a brother to her daughter.

I am very grateful to NYRB classics for allowing me a copy in return for a fair review and I recommend the book to anyone with an interest in European magic realism.

Music of Sacred Lakes by Laura Cowan

Peter Sanskevicz doesn’t belong anywhere. He doesn’t want the sixth-generation family farm his great great-grandfather unwittingly stole from its Odawa owners, and can’t continue his jobs serving “fudgies,” tourists in Northern Michigan who seem more at home than he is. He can’t seem to take charge of things or do anything but make a mess. Then, Peter accidentally kills a girl.

Seeing his life is at risk, his friend takes him to his uncle, a pipe carrier of the Odawa tribe, who tells him he must live by the shores of Lake Michigan until the lake speaks to him. Peter lives and loves and rages by the shores of the great lake, haunted by its rich beauty, by strange images and sounds that begin to pursue him through his waking and sleeping hours, and by the spirit of the dead girl, who seems to be trying to help him. One day, he finally finds an inner silence. And then, he hears what the lake has to say to him. A story about reconnecting with the source of your life and your joy, Music of Sacred Lakes gives voice to the spirit of the land and lakes that gave birth to us all.

Part of the Goodreads Description 

This is the latest in my series of reviews of books by members of the Magic Realism Facebook Group and it shows what an interesting bunch we are. 

The Goodreads description goes on to describe Laura as an American Fabulist and a writer of spiritually-oriented magical realism, literary fantasy, and visionary fiction.  I confess I am not much up on these sub-genres and American fabulism was new to me. Now despite a bit of online searching I am not much wiser, indeed the definitions of fabulism I found suggested that it was just another word for magic realism. Ah well, let's leave that there. I am sure someone out there would like to put me right.

The spiritual element in the book is well to the fore. The young man at the centre of the novel is lost spiritually and his journey of spiritual discovery is the subject of the story. There is a lot of frustrated anger on his part, as he hits out literally and verbally. He finds himself through listening to the lake, as the old pipe carrier instructed him. The other instructor in Peter's transformation is the dead girl who comes to him in dreams and tells hims that It's okay.... It's all lake. As if to emphasize this the girl's name is Marissa (meaning: of the sea). 

At about the same time as I was reading this book I was also reading Living With A Wild God: A Non-believer's Search for the Truth About Everything by Barbara Ehrenreich. In the latter book the author recounts her experience of the wild god  - the Other - manifesting itself through nature. Ehrenreich is an atheist but a mystical one. The Christian mysticism which Laura Cowan describes in this book is very similar. It requires a sublimation of the self in the whole, symbolized by the lake but actually meaning all of nature - it's all lake. It is interesting that Cowan feels it necessary to use the native American intermediary and his traditional beliefs to help Peter discover or rediscover the wild god. 

I was having an interesting conversation with a fellow writer the other day over a coffee. She said that she had seen a rise in the number of young authors writing magic realism. We agreed that one for reason for this is that in this agnostic, even atheist, world many people are looking for magic, for something unexplained and unpredictable. I argued that for many people the "realist" approach is two-dimensional and excludes some of the most important experiences in people's lives. Some theists would argue that magic realism is an inappropriate description for books featuring Christian or other religious beliefs, but I have no problem with it and I think Music of Sacred Lakes is a good example of why magic realism and Christian mysticism sit well together. 

In a way not much actually happens in the novel - the turmoil is almost entirely internal. There is the presence of two very different young women who in different ways are attracted to Peter and are attractive to him. However the writer does not make too much of this area of potential tension. Personally I would have liked to have seen more made of the relationships, if only in the way the two girls impact on Peter's awakening.

The writing is positively poetic at times, but also tends to be a bit repetitive. This is a book which you should allow to wash over you - rather like Peter's lake in fact - and you may well find yourself pondering the profound.