Ma Erickson è così…

Col contagocce, arriva anche in Italia un altro dei romanzi che compongono la scarna bibliografia di Steve Erickson, particolarmente inatteso in questo caso poiché si tratta di un’opera del 1989, che in ordine cronologico rappresenta il terzo libro dell’autore.

Ancora una volta si tratta di un romanzo inclassificabile, con una collocazione che va oltre le categorie letterarie consuete, attraversandole più o meno tutte con spavalda nonchalance, dalla distopia al thriller, dall’ucronia al romanzo d’azione, dal romanzo storico alla fantascienza e al bildungsroman e potrei aggiungerne altri perché “I giri dell’orologio nero” riesce ad essere anche romantico, violento, avventuroso, grottesco, decisamente surreale.

A questo punto mi ero cimentato nell’abbozzare quanto meno una traccia delle vicende narrate, ma sono andato in confusione (fra scrittori di pulp pornografici nella New York degli anni ‘30, nazisti che risalgono la scala gerarchica fino a Hitler in persona o forse un suo avatar ossessionato da un amore giovanile, foreste sudanesi, suicidi e infanticidi nella Vienna dell’Anschluss, fughe da prigioni veneziane, fratricidi in Pennsylvania, invasioni dell’Inghilterra da parte dell’esercito tedesco, isole fluviali in località imprecisate degli Usa dove un ambiguo traghettatore attende per decenni l’oggetto del desiderio, ecc)...e ho cancellato!

Va da sé che durante una lettura come questa ci si trova spesso “spaesati”, per usare un eufemismo, e se ne esce abbastanza sfibrati, pur con la consapevolezza di aver attraversato un territorio inesplorato, a tratti magnifico, a volte incomprensibile e (vedi sopra) indescrivibile. Al punto di dover resistere al segreto impulso di mandare Erickson a quel paese, ma anche al desiderio audace di ricominciare da pagina 1, non certo nell’intento di riuscire a comprendere tutto, ma quanto meno per ricollegare una parte dei fili narrativi smarriti nel corso della narrazione.

Ma Erickson è così, si tende a dimenticarlo per le sue uscite a cadenza quinquennale, offre pagine ed anche intere “sezioni” di intensa suggestione, filtrate da una sorta di caleidoscopio virtuale ed inserite in un labirinto narrativo che sempre ci sbalordisce; l’originale introduzione e la scrittura in apparenza lineare dapprima seducono il lettore poi, quasi a tradimento, a un certo punto (un punto che varia secondo la concentrazione, la pazienza e le esperienze pregresse con lo stile dell’autore) gran parte delle traballanti coordinate acquisite vengono sovvertite.
Però resta un gran bel viaggio!
(aggiungo sempre un’avvertenza: non si confonda l’autore col quasi omonimo Steve Erikson senza la “c”, ennesimo scrittore di saghe high fantasy, ovviamente ben più popolare del nostro.)

Ethereal. Good read. Hitler triumphs in an interesting alternate realty which only meshes with ours at a few romantic(?) points.

Interesting. This is the second book in my own tour of Steve Erickson's novels. It has an original concept, and his writing style and story structuring are engaging, but grew kind of tired of the pitiable and repulsive central character and his porn fantasies and stories that supposedly create an alternate version of reality where the Germans win the war. Please.
The main female character's main role is first as the imagined niece of Hitler reveling in her starring role in degrading porn being performed and written for Hitler's amusement (because he's obsessed with his niece), then as a woman who is fine being repeatedly molested by an alternate reality personality (the porn writer) before being implanted with semen from an aged Hitler without her consent! Wow. From the rape that takes place early in the book to the end, women are not well served here, that's for sure. I think that a sequence where the main female character starts dancing and men across Europe simultaneously drop dead is meant to show that she has power, too—but it really ends up making her seem like more of a victim.
Erickson has a habit of almost saying something directly, or almost identifying someone specifically, or almost directly referring to a historical moment, and then drawing back—instead dropping tons of clues from which the reader is encouraged to infer it on their own. My feeling is that while there is some entertainment value initially, it wears off quickly. Just say it!

Time shifts and contorts. Ripped open by a single artist, Banning Jainlight alters the regular course of time in his role as personal erotica-writer to Der Fuhrer when he somehow captures the specular image of his now-dead love obsession, niece Geli Raubal. As Jainlight’s writing reignites Hitler’s obsession, it changes the course of the war, causing unstable peace with Russia while England falls to the Germans.

It’s hard to write about Erickson’s works because the use dream-logic in ways that elude our ability to pin down specific meaning or total clarity on how the plot unfolds. And Erickson uses the rules of a dream to weave tales that are at once political without being prescriptive or pedantic—they cut to the human soul of the political to expose how the politics of lives, and people (and governments) are just an extension of humanity in general.

Like his most recent book, Shadowbahn, Tours of the Black Clock also shows us alternate timelines to the reality we know, re-writing history into a myth of The Real to expose the kernels of meaning behind all truths. He also de-mythologizes a figure like Hitler to expose how humanity builds myths to protect ourselves from The Real—things we divorce from reality, by creating monsters rather than reflecting on the deepest darkness of humanity. As Jainlight ushers the aging, decrepit body of Hitler out of Europe in the 1970s, and as the war still rages on, he hesitates telling some American soldiers who the old man really is when asked to provide identification papers:

“Because there’s always the one awful chance that they will believe me, that they’d look into his face and eyes and see that it’s true, at which point the pure righteous wrath of their fight would have to accommodate the humanity of his evil. They’re fighting for an age in which the heart and consciousness have not been stripped of the references points that have become denied to time and space: they’ve stared into the bloody Rorschach of the Twentieth Century and seen the budding of a flower”

Jainlight, responsible for undoing the threads of history, tries to correct his wrongs by not breaking the myth of the monster.

Erickson’s books stick in your mind for months, if not years after. They alter your mind, and the course of your history. The trajectory of your thinking is changed by his crepuscular dreamtales. You may find yourself darkened by them, deep inside yourself. But you are enlightened, too. Illumination often comes at the risk of making you cynical, but when one human is capable of such evil, and when time, like a black clock with no numbers, revolves around itself over and over, destined to repeat, is optimism really going to save us?

For some unfathomable reason - and no doubt also to other devotees of his early novels - Erickson has gained only a small readership, although he has garnered some impressive reviews by a number of critics both in the US and Europe. Sadly, I just don't think Erickson has ever been marketed or promoted properly or with any real understanding of how amazing and original novelist he is.

`Tours of the Black Clock' is his third novel, and should have been the key to his literary stardom; his `breakout' fiction that should have, but didn't, take him to new and more popular heights, following his marvellous `Rubicon Beach' and equally wonderful `Days Between Stations'.

Sadly, this has not been the case, and his novels since, while still gaining some excellent reviews, have led him to a readership that is tiny by comparison to many other more popular `literary' novelists. For this fiction at least, there is no doubt that Erickson deserves more attention and celebration, and popularity. His fiction has a stark, poetic and haunting brilliance, reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison (at her most intense; i.e., with her novel, 'Beloved'). It is a fantastic, fantastical work that cannot - should not - be ignored and is a wonderful alternative modern history twist and take on key events/people in the 20th century.

The novel begins with Banning Jainlight, who is found dead in a boarding room, along with Dania, the obsession of his life, and Marc, their son - a product of surreality itself. Dania's and Marc's presence acts as a sort of catalyst, enabling Banning to narrate his story and, by doing so, reveals the myriad and complex memories that connect them and shape their histories.

Banning's life is experienced in a non-linear way; chronology and space become multi-dimensional as one memory merges with another. At the same time, his thoughts often assume a physicality, shaping the history of Dania's life, and extending and weaving the web of characters and stories that are being told.

Without his at first realising, Banning becomes a writer of erotic, strange stories for Adolf Hitler's consumption during WW2; stories which - unbeknownst to Banning - fuel Hitler's megalomaniac passions. History overturns itself, becoming a nightmarish Wonderland, and the world becomes bleak and decidedly Orwellian in this alternative reality.

The last few lines ending this tour de force are a match for (and an homage to) James Joyce's ending in his famous Dubliners' story, The Dead, when the main character Gabriel watches the snow fall. And are brilliantly, beautifully done.

This is truly mesmeric modern fiction at its best. It portrays an overwhelming knot of obsessions of voyeurism, erotic desire, of the licentious nature of power unchecked, and of the pain and anguish that make up the absurd time (black clock) that ticked away on the face of the 20th century. Amazing.

Found it at the used bookstore in Antigonish when I was 16. The first book I ever re-read. Twisted, weird, foggy, awesome.

I never fail to enjoy postmodern history... In the postmodernist’s hands history unavoidably turns into a farce – however dark but farce, anyhow.

I also knew such a version of the Twentieth Century was utterly counterfeit. That neither the rule of evil nor its collapse could be anything but an aberration in such a century... in which the black clock of the century is stripped of hands and numbers. A time in which there’s no measure of time that God understands: in such a time memories mean nothing but the fever that invents them: before such memories and beyond such clocks, good views evil in the same way as the man on a passing train who stands still to himself but soars to the eyes of the passing countryside.

All the personages of Tours of the Black Clock are refugees and pariahs of time and space...
Maybe we all are nothing but refugees and pariahs of time and space.

Maybe 3 stars. It had its moments. But ultimately I didn't love it.
Also, what's with his writing of women characters? Dreadful. And so many 'erotic' rape scenes. Barf