Palace of Flies - Walter Kappacher

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Palace of Flies

by
Walter Kappacher

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	Palace of Flies
Author:	Walter Kappacher
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2009 (Eng. 2022)
Length:	143 pages
Original in:	German
Availability:	Palace of Flies - US
	Palace of Flies - UK
	Palace of Flies - Canada
	Der Fliegenpalast - Deutschland
	El palacio de las moscas - España

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

	directly from: New Vessel Press

German title: Der Fliegenpalast
Translated by Georg Bauer
With an Introduction by Michael P. Steinberg
ACFNY Translation Prize, 2020/1

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Our Assessment:

B+ : neatly wrought portrait of the artist and the times

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
FAZ	A	12/3/2009	H-J Schings
Die Presse	.	24/4/2009	Wolfgang Straub
Der Standard	A	23/1/2009	Hans Höller
Die Welt	.	21/2/2009	Ulrich Weinzierl
Die Zeit	.	20/5/2009	Andreas Isenschmid

  Review Consensus:

  Very impressed; like Kappacher's approach

  From the Reviews:

"Dies ist ein Buch über Hofmannsthal, wie es feiner, behutsamer, dezenter und doch todtrauriger nicht sein könnte. (…) Ein stiller Sog erfasst den Leser, ohne dass der weiß, wie ihm geschieht. Denn Kappacher bietet nichts Sensationelles auf, keine Entlarvungen, keine Denunziation, keine radikal neue Sicht. Nirgends erhebt er sich über seinen Autor. (…) Nirgends wird man Kappachers nüchterne Sympathie und seine dichte Prosa bei Sentimentalitäten ertappen. Und doch stimmt die unaufhaltsam absteigende Linie, auf welcher er H. in ruhiger Sachlichkeit begleitet, unendlich traurig." - Hans-Jürgen Schings, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

"Kappacher gönnt sich vielmehr, mit Hofmannsthal die Vorliebe zu teilen, Gespräche und Briefe zu erfinden. Die gefährlichen Untiefen der Larmoyanz umschifft Kappacher ebenso souverän, sein „H.“ ist zwar ein aus der Zeit Gefallener, der sich in ausgiebigen Rückblicken ergeht, aber er verfällt angesichts ungepflegter Spazierwege und der Veränderungen der Nachkriegsgesellschaft hin zu mehr Lärm sowie weniger Eleganz und Etikette nicht ins Jammern, er bleibt ein stiller Beobachter. (...) Es ist faszinierend zu lesen, mit welcher Leichtigkeit es Kappacher gelingt, diese Krise in ein atmosphärisch dichtes Landschafts- und Zeitbild zu platzieren, dabei (mitunter ironische) Distanz zum historischen Vorbild zu wahren und zugleich hohe Präzision obwalten zu lassen." - Wolfgang Straub, Die Presse

"Kappachers Hofmannsthal-Roman -- aber es spielt ja auch so offensichtlich eine Henry-James-Erzählung in das Sujet herein -- ist vor allem ein Kappacher-Roman. Das Hinhören auf Hofmannsthals Sprache der Höflichkeit, die Zurückgenommenheit und Indirektheit der Rede- und Gedankenwiedergabe, dieses erzählerische Eisberg-Prinzip, das mehr mitzuteilen vermag als jede provokante Direktheit, das ist der Ton der Kappacher-Sprache, der sich hier bricht im Idiom des Hofmannsthal'schen Werkes und in dessen Denk- und Schreibmotiven die eigenen literarischen Intentionen zu behaupten weiß. Allein darin, wie es Kappacher gelingt, diese Nähe und Distanz zum Werk des andern herzustellen und im Ton des andern diskret den eigenen Erzählton zu finden, stellt der Roman ein Meisterwerk zeitgenössischer Erzählkunst dar." - Hans Höller, Der Standard

"Walter Kappacher ist ein Hofmannsthal-Verehrer und -Kenner von Graden. (...) Kappachers große Leistung: Ohne die Diagnose auszusprechen, beschwört er ein Zustandsbild emotionaler Zerrüttung herauf, buchstäblich wunschloses Unglück. Es ist die Tragödie des alternden, sich als gescheitert empfindenden Künstlers, dem ein "Another Go", wie Henry James den neuen Anlauf nannte, endgültig verwehrt ist." - Ulrich Weinzierl, Die Welt

"Kappacher hat für den seltsamen Zustand des Heimkehrers eine wunderbar angemessene Sprache und eine ebenso überzeugende Erzählweise gefunden. Das Buch besteht aus kurzen, meist nur drei, vier Seiten langen Episoden, die in sich assoziativ gefügt sind und die in ihrer Folge an uns vorüberschweben wie die Stimmungen eines müßigen, wenn auch nicht immer unbeschwerten Sommerurlaubs. (…) Die Episoden werden farbig durch Kappachers genauen und kenntnisreichen Blick. Sie werden weich durch die Art, wie er sich Hofmannsthals Gedanken nähert. Er lässt ihn nicht nur sinnieren oder Erinnerungen nachhängen, erschrecken oder zweifeln, er entlockt ihm auch nicht wenige in Gedanken verfasste, aber nie abgeschickte Briefe, die dem Ganzen innere Weite geben." - Andreas Isenschmid, Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Palace of Flies is set in August, 1924, and focuses on then-fifty-year-old Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who has come to the small Austrian summer resort of Bad Fusch in the hopes of getting some work done. He has come alone to Bad Fusch, determined to concentrate on his work, and yet it all feels like little more than an impasse. Bad Fusch represents something of a crossroads, with Hofmannsthal constantly questioning whether it is the right place and situation for him at this time. He repeatedly looks towards the immediate past and future, wondering whether he might not have been better off staying in Lenzerheide, in Switzerland, where he had been visiting his friend, Carl Jacob Burckhardt, thinking: "Perhaps I would have been able, after Carl's departure, to get some work done" there, while he's also pulled ahead to Aussee, imagining joining his family there sooner rather than, as planned, later, even as he knows: "from experience that nothing would change if I did", the busy-ness there certain to keep him from his work. Rather than a place of release -- away from it all, where he can finally get down to work -- Bad Fusch becomes a frustrating limbo; it even seems Hofmannsthal has reached a sort of end of the line.
       Hofmannsthal is now best-known for the librettos he wrote for Richard Strauss' operas, but he was a leading cultural figure of his times -- "the principal spiritual and institutional founder" of the Salzburg Festival, as Michael P. Steinberg notes in his Introduction, and a very well-known writer. But Hofmannsthal doesn't feel like he's on top of things; if the world hasn't exactly passed him by, he feels like he's having trouble keeping up; it's not just in Bad Fusch that he feels out of place. It manifests itself in little things, such as simply keeping up with the piles of mail he gets, but more frustratingly in his inability to move ahead with the things that matter, especially his literary work.
       The summer of 1924 is well-chosen by Kappacher, as even the show won't go on that year, the country's dire economic situation preventing them from putting on the Salzburg Festival that year. (One might think that that at least would be one less distraction for Hofmannsthal, but there's no sense of relief, much less of any time or opportunity won by that turn of events.) A child of the Habsburg Empire, a one-time "teenage prodigy" of the fin de siècle, the world has changed around Hofmannsthal -- down to the upcoming introduction of a new currency, where: "the krone would be replaced by the schilling" -- the krone ('crown') harking back to the days of monarchy, while the new currency is one: "which in Vienna they were already calling the Alpine dollar". Modern advances have come even to Bad Fusch, as for example: "they have all had electric lighting since last year" -- but can't fully be relied on yet, Hofmannsthal noting that: "there is still one kerosene lamp in each room, because power outages are quite frequent".
       Hofmannsthal is unsure of his place in this new world -- another reason he chose to come to Bad Fusch, as it is a place he has fond memories of, having spent many summers there, years earlier. The last time he was here was in 1908, before the war; he hopes to recapture some of the magic of those times -- and his ability to actually get some work done -- but it's all a struggle: it's not just home you can't go back to again. He doesn't seem entirely sure of what he wants, either -- fiddling with several works (primarily Timon and The Tower), but clearly also looking for something more, including human connection and conversation:

He had wished for an undisturbed stay in Fusch, and -- so far, at least -- his wish had been fulfilled; at the same time, he had the impression that he had never before been so alone anywhere in the world.

Hofmannsthal is someone who needs that human connection; so too, typically: "made-up conversations and letters were really one of his favorite genres". He is both a dutiful and avid correspondent, and he at least makes one connection in Bad Fusch, someone he can talk to: right at the outset we learn that: "the best thing here in Fusch had in fact been his acquaintance with Doctor Krakauer" -- a man who is now there as the private physician of a rather demanding baroness. Krakauer had studied in New York, in part to avoid the war, and tells Hofmannsthal that: "When I returned after the war, I had trouble getting my bearings. Suddenly everything seemed so lifeless and diffuse, even vicious" -- leading Hofmannsthal to lend him a story he had written years earlier, The Letters of the Man Who Returned. They later discuss it a bit; it is one of several of Hofmannsthal's works that clearly influences Kappacher's novel.
So also Hofmannsthal comes to reflect on the path he's taken (and remains on), and one of his most famous stories:

What guides us out of the labyrinth, he thought, is language. Everything, he had realized in his younger years, was dependent on us constantly rethinking the true meaning of our words. Perhaps it would be a boon, in inauspicious times like these, when language is degraded to mere convention, to be silent for a while, much like I have tried to demonstrate in my Lord Chandos letter. All my friends, and I myself, for a long time did not understand that I anticipated my own future with this letter. But I, unlike Lord Chandos, have failed, have been unwilling to bear the consequences, the abandonment of all literary activity ...

Kappacher determinedly situates Hofmannsthal in this specific time and culture, with Palace of Flies chock full of references and allusions not only to Hofmannsthal's own life and work but to may others' as well. At times the density of reference is almost comic, as in a scene where Hofmannsthal wonders:

How the blazes had he come to write to Alma Mahler the previous night ? He crumpled up the two pieces of paper that had been weighted down by the Henry James book, and also the note from Alfred Kubin, the hand-copied, almost illegible chain letter. That Kubin, what a lunatic.

From hoping that his wife sent him the copy of Marcel Schwob's Imaginary Lives he had asked for ("These whimsical, very poetic, partly fictional ancient biographies, he thought, might make it easier for him to find his way into the era of Timon") to registering the death of Joseph Conrad (and noting also Kafka's recent death) and reading Henry James, there's some engagement with the broader literary world, but much more with the one closer to him, the German and Austrian circles he doesn't very comfortably fit in. The novel is full of mentions of avoidance and awkward encounters; among the things that seems to weigh on him is an ongoing dispute he has with old friend Rudolf Borchardt.
Hofmannsthal is aware of some of his writing weaknesses -- as critics have long noted, he acknowledges -- as, for example:

(W)hen he sat over his writing case, he could not manage to set down a taut, convincing dramatic structure. These characters seemed to him mere templates who couldn't come alive for any true communion in the scenes.

       There's his personality, too, with Kappacher including the well-known anecdote of Robert Walser approaching Hofmannsthal at a reception at the home of publisher Samuel Fischer and exclaiming: "Can't you ever forget that you are famous ?" But his peculiar kind of fame is also defining; Steinberg describes him as having been: "a matinée idol among the literati of the imperial capital in the 1890s", and like an aged movie he hasn't fully managed the transition to a very different era. Hofmannsthal is self-aware enough to have a sense of the problem, and he recognizes that it holds him back -- but he can't reïmagine himself either.
       One of the things that Kappacher is getting at is how much Hofmannsthal gets in his own way. So much of Palace of Flies is personal reflection and questioning -- yet for all that Hofmannsthal also has to admit: "never could I write a book about myself ...". His most successful literary works are the imagined dialogues and letters he wrote -- a continuation of sorts of what he was, in actual life, best at as well. In his fiction and drama his characters remain dustily dry; typically, too, his one attempt at a novel, Andreas -- which he is also at work on during this time -- remained unfinished.
       Hofmannsthal could conceive the Lord Chandos-letter, but could not imagine following the same path. So also, his thoughts here frequently turn to a friend from his youth, Leopold von Andrian, who had also published a highly-regarded and influential work when still very young, Der Garten der Erkenntnis, but then turned away from his poetic nature. Andrian's transformation -- including fervently turning to Catholicism, as well as marrying (after a clearly homosexually-inclined youth) -- puzzles Hofmannsthal repeatedly here. (He's pleased that Andrian: "had finally found someone, a wife" but can't help but see her face as: "completely heartless, cold".)
       Hofmannsthal continues to write, and try to write, but feels little sense of accomplishment -- and not just because so much remains fragmentary and unfinished. At one point he:

recalled the difficult years before and after his marriage. I entered life, he had once thought, years later, and my poetic abilities exited through the other door.

It's something he continues to struggle with,. He imagines withdrawal, from life at large, -- such as here, in out of the way Bad Fusch -- might lead him back to being creative in the way he longs for, but he isn't really capable of that kind of complete withdrawal any longer. Even as avoidance -- especially of human contact -- has become almost instinctual, he himself recognizes the futility of it -- a motion he goes through, without really meaning it --, and he can't help but to seek out human contact and exchange, clearly also missing family and friends much of this time.
Kappacher even closes the story with Hofmannsthal pulling his head back from the window after hearing a woman call out (though not to him):

He quickly retreated. How stupid of me, he thought. It was nothing.

       Palace of Flies is an impressive character-portrait, steeped in the culture and conditions of the time. Very little actually happens, the 'action', as it were, largely limited to Hofmannsthal being annoyed at his inability to get any work done and puttering about -- going on walks, going through his daily routines -- with the occasional short conversations with Dr.Krakauer. Hofmannsthal doesn't really get anywhere, neither with his work nor physically -- but in this going in what amount to circles (and reflecting on the past) we get a good sense of the artist at this point in his life.
       Kappacher relies heavily on reference -- much of it literary -- for context; Steinberg's Introduction is useful in this regard in giving some sense of many of the figures that are mentioned, though Kappacher clearly assumes a greater familiarity with them and their work. Still, enough here is in the broad brushstrokes that don't demand that greater familiarity -- though certainly more of the novel's detail-work can be more greatly appreciated if one has it.
       Though a fairly slim novel, Palace of Flies does also range wide -- down to a mention of Peter Altenberg's warning that: "this artist Hitler would one day be talked about far and wide" (with Hofmannsthal reading about Hitler's reduced penal sentence in the newspaper -- and learning: "So, now he's writing a book", while Hofmannsthal struggles with completing any of his projects ...). While very much a portrait of Hofmannsthal, it also gives a good sense of those times and conditions more generally.
       Hofmannsthal's inability to continue with his creative work boils down to much more than just being in the wrong place; he might not be able to get much of anything done in Bad Fusch, but it's hard to imagine he'd manage any better anywhere else. The problem is more fundamental -- and Kappacher captures and conveys this very well in this impressive little artist-novel.

       Note that this translation was awarded the ACFNY Translation Prize, 2020/1, and I was on the jury that awarded translator Georg Bauer the prize. The translation certainly does justice to Kappacher's original, and captures the Hofmannsthalesque qualities of the narrative, making it a very worthy introduction to both author and subject for English-speaking readers unfamiliar with one or both.

- M.A.Orthofer, 20 April 2022

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Links:

Palace of Flies:

New Vessel Press publicity page
Residenz verlag foreign rights page
dtv publicity page
New Books in German information page
Editorial Pre-Textos publicity page
ACFNY Translation Prize 2020/1

Reviews:

Hugo von Hofmannsthal:

Hugo von Hofmannsthal at books and writers
Hugo von Hofmannsthal-Gesellschaft

Walter Kappacher:

Official site

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of German literature
See Index of Real People in Works of Fiction
Other books from New Vessel Press

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About the Author:

Austrian author Walter Kappacher was born in 1938.

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