Reiner Kunze: The Lovely Years

Many thanks, once again, to Philip Ward for setting me on the track of this remarkable author. This book possessed every virtue that I normally look for in a book--layered, metaliterary, resonant and epigrammatic, to name a few--and one that I don't normally look for, that of brevity. In form and texture, the book was very Joyceian. It's simply a collection of vignettes, some startlingly short, that serve to convey the feel of East Germany and Czechoslovakia during the cold war. Often, Kunze uses the perspective of a father observing the maturation of his daughter, and it is these scenes that feel like the center, the pivot of the book. He often returns to this character--which may or may not be the same father--as he treads the line between wanting the daughter to escape youth unscathed, and wanting her to think honestly about the political situation. the daughter, of course, chooses her own path as the father watches helplessly.

When not in this mode, Kunze often adopts the character of a publisher visiting Czechoslovakia as tensions over the partially East German invasion mount. Through him, Kunze introduces a string of obscure Czech poetry. At first I thought he might be pulling the Borgesian move of writing poems in the voice of a fictional writer, but research revealed that the writers were real, and this makes Kunze's choice decidedly more political than Borges'.

Peppered among these narratives are seemingly unconnected glimpses into the lives of others affected by Cold War politics in the countries of the Warsaw Pact. The narrator of these scenes usually is anonymous, which makes it only natural to hear them in Kunze's own voice. The arrangement of the stories is fluid, rhythmic, almost musical in its artistry.

Which brings us to the element which sets the book in an entirely different bracket. I always train my students to look for the things that don't fit, and trust the writer that they are often the keys to the entire book. Kunze does not disappoint. The scene "Organ Recital (Toccata and Fugue)" is set apart by its form-- the paragraphs line up on the left margin. This seemingly insignificant formatting choice cues the reader to look more deeply at this scene than at the others, and is rewarded for that inspection with he revelation that it is really almost an "Easter Wings" style shape poem, a pipe organ spread over four pages.

Although superficially prose, the refrain "all organs--" gives it a poetic rhythm that build as the clause is left dangling, setting in the mind like an unresolved chord. After wondering what the narrator is trying to say about "all organs" for three pages, the reader is rewarded with " . . . should all suddenly burst into sound, sweeping away the lies with which the air is so thick that those striving for honesty can scarcely breathe . . . at least one single time, at least one Wednesday evening" (70). The Lovely Years is that single time, the moment when all pipes of all organs, "those thirty feet tall, and with the highest those measured in inches" let loose a simultaneous blast, and clear the air--if only for an instant (69). The voices of The Lovely Years, window washers, teenagers, soldiers, fathers and others of all flavor, including of no flavor, roar out and "thunderously [dispel] the terror of the spirit" (70). A poignant message, and written with such musical artistry that one must be seduced by it.