Zwischen Alptraum und Glück: Thomas Glavinics Vermessungen der Gegenwart ed. by Andrea Bartl, Jörn Glasenapp, and Iris Hermann (review)

It is difficult to suppress a surprised laugh that the subtitle of this first-ever collection of essays on the works of Thomas Glavinic takes its cue from Daniel Kehlmann’s award-winning novel, Die Vermessung der Welt (2005), because it so accurately reflects an ongoing preoccupation in Glavinic’s entire body of work, that perhaps Glavinic is not exactly the talented writer he or his readers and critics think he is and that Kehlmann, not Glavinic, is “der beste Autor seiner Generation” (Glavinic, Das bin doch ich 41). One could almost imagine Glavinic’s heavy sigh when he read the subtitle to this collection, implicitly comparing Glavinic to Kehlmann once again, but would it be Glavinic the author or Glavinic the antihero, the main character in Das bin doch ich, who is disappointed? The tendency of Glavinic’s autobiography to bleed over into his fictional writing as well as his preoccupation with fears that verge at times on hysteria are, among other topics, the subjects of analysis in the nineteen articles contained in this volume.

The articles evolved out of the Bamberger Poetikprofessur in 2012 at Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, when Thomas Glavinic was the invited to be guest lecturer for the year. Some of the participants in the year-long seminar are contributors to the collection. Other contributors, representing academic institutions primarily in Germany but also in Austria, the Czech Republic, and the United States round out the rest of the collection. The entire volume is bookended by two contributions from Glavinic himself, the first a brief foreword in which he takes a typically self-deprecatory tone about his work, and the second a transcript of a reading and interview with Glavinic, focusing on four of his novels, Carl Haffners Liebe zum Unentschieden, Das bin doch ich, Die Arbeit der Nacht, and Das Leben der Wünsche. The articles are organized somewhat loosely, though some are clustered together because they address the same set of novels or a specific theme. Four of the essays near the beginning of the volume, for example, analyze Glavinic’s first novel, Carl Haffners Liebe zum Untentschieden.

One of the volume’s editors, Andrea Bartl, offers the first essay, an introduction, focusing on the tandem of fear and happiness in Glavinic’s works. She situates Glavinic’s interest in writing books, “die leichtfüßig von der Schwere erzählen” (25) within the context of a Mitteleuropa free from the tensions of the Cold War but dominated by the vast, uncontrollable power of technology. Indeed, other essays in the collection, such as Felix Forsbach’s “Spur der Existenz: Die Hauptfigur in Glavinics Die Arbeit der Nacht als medial vermittelte Existenz” and Christoph Houswitschka’s “‘Unfassliche Isolation’ in der Medienwahrnehmung des Thomas Glavinic,” focus specifically on the alienating, even uncanny effect of media on the main characters in Glavinic’s novels. Fear, the uncanny, and alienation as themes are treated specifically as an “Ästhetik des Grauens” in an article by Marta Famula. A series of articles in the final third of the volume deals with the interplay between fiction and autobiography in Glavinic’s novels. One particularly strong article in this group, Sandra Potsch’s “Thomas Glavinics Das bin doch ich: Ein Spiel zwischen Autobiografie und Fiktion” analyzes the extent to which this novel belongs to a longer tradition that combines autobiographical fact with fiction (e.g. Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit) but, in Glavinic’s case, distinguishes itself specifically as a postmodern Inszenierung of the author himself through the deliberate fictionalization of his autobiography as a novel: “Zwar erzähle Das bin doch ich auch etwas über den Autor Thomas Glavinic, jedoch, so Glavinic, nicht mehr oder weniger als jeder andere seiner Romane; denn prinzipiell schreibe er eigentlich immer nur über sich selbst” (264). A couple of the essays provide different points of entry into...