The real and the possible: Ransmayr is also interested in the north and its effects in the cold: northern lights over western Greenland
Foto: imago/UIG
In an essay, Christoph Ransmayr describes his years on the Irish Sea and creates an image of the “third air” there. The first air contains all the smells and sounds of a person’s closest and most secret environment, “the smell of the mother’s wool jacket and skin, the sound of her voice.” The second air carries the smells and sounds of the entire coast. But it is only in the third air that what is still missing from the complete picture of the world is added; it is the air of “dance halls and theaters, of smoky pubs, the air of stories and the enchantment of life in song.”
Christoph Ransmayr, Austrian from Wels, is a traveler by writing. A picture painter whose beguiling language combines exotic colors, names and sounds with the geographical and mythical fabric. Lamentations to the sarcophagi of Sha Jahan. A polar night in the Bay of All Saints in Novaja Zemlja. Muddy roads between Lahugala and Kitulana. The Valley of the Temples of Agrigento.
The love for the individual and the belief in the narrative value of every biography – both are inviolably great for Ransmayr. So this can be said for this novel and travel prose: whether a Tibetan semi-nomad in a sooty stone hut, a Buddhist monk in the mud-flooded forest of banyan trees or a wandering Viennese painter in the wilderness of Mafate – for this writer, every person is a center: »Deep within Within his very own story he is at the same time in the middle of the world.«
Recurring pair of contradictions in the novels: the real and the possible. Between the words the many faces of the weather, the silence of a starry night, the crunching of the ice and the racing of moon-white crests of waves. Again and again there is talk of departures, of darkness of the paths, of the power of a nature that is nothing more than itself.
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Whether “The Last World” or “Kitahara’s Disease” or “The Flying Mountain”: Ransmayr’s novels have sung the human song where people do not belong – that high song of temptation to make sure of oneself at the edges of the earth. In order to receive (and endure!) an answer that leads back to the most exciting journey around the world that we are capable of: the journey into our own unknown mind. Arriving and being lost, happiness and fear – where it is particularly dark and icy, life and death condense into an incomprehensible point of an existence that is becoming increasingly unreal. Ransmayr opens wounds that longing would otherwise scar.
“Up and away” is the epitaph he wants. Up and away: the motto of life. When Reinhold Messner read Ransmayr’s first novel decades ago, he thought the author was a professional adventurer. “The Terrors of Ice and Darkness” is the book about a North Pole expedition in the 18th century; it tells of the desire to discover the secret of infinity. Such reflection can only end as we know from the beginning of the novel: »Josef Mazzini often traveled alone and on foot. As he walked, the world didn’t get smaller, but bigger and bigger, so big that he finally disappeared into it.
For Ransmayr, dreams of a happy ending to every beginning intersect with the knowledge of human beings being trapped in the inevitable laws of weathering and disappearance in the cycle of a larger order. Because no idea, no matter how powerful, can save us puny people. Of course, storytelling, poetry, saves us from the despair that rushes ahead. And because this despair wears seven-league boots and quickly gains speed, Ransmayr writes very slowly in order to forestall it. Or so it seems. He worked on a novel for about seven years.
“Cox or The Flow of Time” is the name of the fascinating, linguistically baroque book about a renowned English watchmaker from the 18th century. He travels to China to build watches as a gift to the emperor there that do justice to the diversity of human sensibilities. For the time of a child is not comparable to that of the dying person, and the hour of the happy person beats differently than that of the desperate person. Expressing the changing rhythms of the mental state in readable time signals – an impossible task for Cox. The unattainable as a lure without alternative.
Born in 1944, Ransmayr started as a reporter for “Geo” and “Merian”. He is a friend of Claus Peymann and Anselm Kiefer; he received prizes named after Kafka, Brecht, Hölderlin and Böll. I will never forget how Ransmayr talked about his father during a big nd interview. Who once read the original Russian classics as a prisoner of war in Crimea. A poorhouse child, but who did not give in to that understandable educational ambition of wanting to escape his misery and get into a career. Because: It would have been a career under Nazis. The father: “I didn’t want to be among them.” Oh honorable example. The son: “Anyone who doesn’t want to shine in barbarism doesn’t work to save the world, but rather to improve the world as light as a feather.”
When reading this literature, it feels as if everything that has existed has risen to the surface and come to light, only to sink again at some point into a tremendous depth. One feels oneself, on a distant shore, close to a secret of existence – and one suspects that everything we call secret was at its origin absolute clarity, simplicity, simplicity. Passion takes one person into space, another into the depths of the ocean, another into deserts of ice or sand – and we, the less heroic, are led by a thirst for adventure in books by Christoph Ransmayr. In the midst of the world, they invent a world that reflects more than our pale faces.
This important European writer has been 70 years old since Wednesday.
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