Gert Jonke

I have been promising for a while to post about the Austrian author Gert Jonke, whom I have mentioned previously.  Today I finished a book of  his, Schule der Geläufigkeit.  Literally that means "The School of Velocity," although there is an English translation with the title Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique.

I have read the English version before, but not the German.  It is a delightfully quirky little book.  It consists of two parts.  In the first, a brother and sister plan a garden party with an unusual twist: it is to be an exact replica, down to the last detail, of a party they had thrown on the same day one year earlier.  The plan apparently comes off, though when it does, they are unaware of it, because their memory of the day's party blends together with their memory of the earlier party... and of who knows how many similar parties before that.  Only the narrator, a composer who has more or less stopped composing, seems aware of what is happening.  Along the way we get conversations about the part of town that is always covered by smoke, because no matter how high they extend the factory's smoke-belching chimneys, the winds above the town always recede by exactly the same amount, so that the smoke is never blown away; or about a past summer that was either, depending upon whom one believes, extremely hot and dry or else so wet that the water seeped right up out of the ground.  Along the way there is a piano concert by a pianist who has achieved such a high level of technical mastery that he entrances his audience by pounding furiously on the keys without ever producing a single sound.

In the second part, the narrator of part one returns, now accompanied by his brother, himself a former pianist who has now become a mover, specializing in moving (of course) pianos.  They find themselves trapped in the secret attic of the conservatory where they had formerly studied, which is filled with 111 gradually deteriorating pianos, about whose existence no one must know.  The brother regales us with all kinds of bizarre monologues about the proper care and moving of pianos, while the narrator, an alcoholic, suffers fits of delirium tremens.

All very strange, but quite enjoyable, in part due to Jonke's playful use of language, which has a musical quality to it.  And appropriately so, not only because music plays an important role in many of Jonke's works, but also because the title of this particular book is the same as that of a well-known collection of piano studies by the composer and pianist Carl Czerny (like Jonke, an Austrian).  Reading it reminds me of a painting by Luigi Russolo, Music, that is in the Estorick Collection in London:

Jonke, who died in 2009, is buried in a grave of honor in Vienna's Central Cemetery, where I have seen his tombstone (pictured on the German wikipedia Jonke page).  You can find a number of his books available in English translation.