In his Translator’s Afterword, Vincent Kling describes The System of Vienna as a “parody-tribute to the art of autobiography as construct,” which is a good way of putting it (109). The book starts with the story of the narrator’s birth, as told to him by his mother: the language of it makes you aware of the story-as-story, the way lived experience gets remembered and told and re-told: “The story begins with a description of that cold winter night and how my mother allegedly started out not being able to find her shoes for a long time, locating them only after a frantic, extensive search and disappearing into the darkness of the February night after putting them on” (9). There follows the story of a trip to the hospital, a locked side entrance, a paragraph-long sentence about what the night porter is “supposed to have” said to the narrator’s mother, and then finally the narrator’s birth and, apparently, near death: “and, bringing the story to its end, there’s a description of my skin, at that point completely blue” (10-11).
Other really useful bits from Kling’s afterword are this:
Jonke’s convoluted structures are clear as music, since music needs to express only its own utterance, unhampered by lexical meaning, but they are bound to grow bewildering as elaborate verbal statements careening through obsessive repetitions. Units that as musical notes reveal “meaning” obscure it as words. (116)
And this:
Elevating elaboration to an essential value in his Baroque art encourages clauses of such convolution as to gradually slip away from due proportion and begin sprawling over whole pages, gestating storms of thunderwords and getting snarled in syntactic structures no mind could follow, let alone unravel. (115)
The System of Vienna is full of humor and absurdity and really great long tangled sentences, and also lots of repetition on the phrase or sentence level, which is structurally/stylistically interesting but can sometimes be a slog to read, though less so if you do think of it as musical, rather than as words/sentences. I love the whimsy of the images in various stories, like the description of a haberdashery where “the owner scampers excitedly among his shelves trying to put down a revolt by buttons leaping out of their boxes,” or the idea of walking through a town “until it all becomes too much for you and you can’t take any more, whereupon you simply wrap the Old Square up in thick brown paper with great care and neatly tie string around the package, which has ended up rather long” (13). (Followed, a page later, by this: “Someone must have spread out the Old Square, which not long ago you had wrapped up in thick brown paper and tied very carefully with string, making it a longish package”—gah, I love it.)
The urban landscapes of this book (and the landscapes on the city’s edge, too), were really satisfying to read about: buildings and streetcars (including one that the narrator feels “wanted to roll straight onto some pile of scrap metal”), the Danube Canal with its bridges and lighted signs and reflections, a public restroom at the Nussdorf station, garden plots by the Danube and a chain ferry that’s out of service. Meanwhile, I like the plot of the last story a whole lot:the narrator discovers he can speak with the caryatids and “atlantes” (plural of “atlas,” he says) holding up columns and balconies on Vienna’s buildings, and becomes a “creative sleep artist” who teaches these statues the theory and practice of sleep, something previously unknown to them. But what if the statues can learn how to sleep: what happens to the city and its buildings then?
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