The Problems of Absurdity

Hildesheimer's "Tynset" records a man's nocturnal ramblings, both in his mind and around his house, during one sleepless night. It has absurdist or surrealist moments -- a man frozen in his car, a narrator who used to dial people at random and tell them they should be afraid, a harmonium playing out of tune in a cavernous space, a Renaissance bed that slept seven people -- but those moments are rendered ineffective by the novel's framing: after all, a sleepless night, filled with miscellaneous memories, is going to be full of leaps and incongruities. If such a novel is going to work, then, it needs something other than playful absurdity or surprise to hold it together (or to demonstrate that it is fragmented, like its narrator's mind).

The title is the name of an actual town in Norway, a few hours south of Trondheim. The narrator has picked it a random from a train schedule, which he reads, along with phone books, as an engine for his imagination. It's a thin conceit by definition, and it never becomes poignant. The book has two or three long set pieces: a party, during which hymns are sung; an extended Boccaccian fantasy about seven people who one slept on the narrator's antique bed; and an inventory of the house.

The problem here is that set-pieces, especially in a narrative structure that will by its own definition be looking for coherence and thematic continuity, need to be magnetic: they need to work to pull the novel together (or to provide proof it is fragmented). These do neither.

"Tynset" is undecided between two more promising poles: a thronged, purposeless, desperately lonely night spent with an anti-social insomniac; and an entertaining, stream-of-consciousness showpiece of the novelist's (and the insomniac's) bursting imagination. Or, to add a pole: the novel could also have drawn us, hopelessly, toward the chimera of Tynset, the place that the narrator had never visited, planned to visit, but would in fact never visit. It's too bad this wasn't reworked in one of those directions, or in some other, because as it stands it's an indecisive mixture, afraid of deep despair, infatuated with colorful stories, inconstant in its allegiance to its narrator's empty life.

L'insonnia mette in moto un treno di pensieri che ferma a Tynset, Norvegia.
Tra ricordi, elucubrazioni, aneddoti di vario genere e bollettini del traffico e del tempo, in attesa del sonno che non arriva si fluttua nel dormiveglia.
A tratti (molti) delizioso, a tratti (alcuni) irritante le quattro stelle le "sfanga" tutte, secondo me.
[Ecco fatto il primo commento, avanti il prossimo ;-) ] ( )

Tynset is considered among the best literary works of the German author Wolfgang Hildesheimer. Foremostly trained as an artist in the plastic arts, a career he never gave up, Hildesheimer turned to writing at a later age. He was a member of Gruppe 47 (Group 47), and his first collections of short stories and novels were published during the 1950s. As a playwright, Hildesheimer belonged to the German avant-garde in the "Absurd" or "New Theater" movement, together with other members of the Gruppe 47, such as Günter Grass and Peter Weiss, likewise born in 1916. Wolfgang Hildesheimer was of Jewish descent. The traumatic experience of the war made him leave Germany permanently after 1957, settling in Switzerland and Italy. The nausea experienced living in post-war Germany is an important motive in the novel Tynset.

Although the author has repeatedly referred to Tynset as a novel, literary critics regard the work as a long piece of lyrical prose. The influence of the theatre of the absurd can be clearly felt, and it would not be far-fetched to compare Tynset to, for instance, Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

Tynset is an internal monologue or a sleepless man. The story covers a time of about six hours, although some of the reminiscences and thoughts of the man extend the time frame over a longer period. A large part of the novel is taken up relating how the man used to spend sleepless hours reading telephone directories and railway timetables. Reading the telephone directories led to making telephone calls to strangers, and confronting these strangers through insinuation with their gruesome past. From a light entertainment this develops into such a scary game that the man develops and existential fear. Further thoughts, then, focus on leaving Germany, by train, to the Norwegian township Tynset. The Scandinavian connection brings the man to think about his father, thoughts which become connected with the Hamlet-motive of the indecisive son versus the absent, ghostly father. Apart from drinking a bottle of wine in the middle of the night, nothing ever happens.

Tynset is not a boring book. It is very well written, and the telephone game really conveys the sense of nausea and fear, what the German would call das Unheimliche, of the obscure tension between the offenders and the victims in post-war Germany. The complete impotence of the sleepless man is present throughout the novel, finding a climax in the absurd of the man believing to trigger cocks crowing all over Greece. This section of "die Hähne Attikas" is an unforgettable prose fragment. ( )