August Müller, Liebesglück – der Tagebucheintrag (Detail), ca. 1885, oil on canvas, 12 3/4″ x 10 1/2″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

When I think of books or works I love that reference the “note” in their titles, I begin to realize that it’s not the note as such that is the defining feature of these books, but the preposition that accompanies the word: Notes OF a Native Son; Notes ON Camp; Notes FROM Underground. In the first case, the weight falls on the particular subject position of the writer. What makes the note signify is the “Native Son,” James Baldwin, whose notes these are. In the second case, the phrase deflects our attention away from polemic even though the essay overflows with assertions. There is a certain authorial insouciance that becomes possible when I deign to publish my “notes on” anything, as if to say one can only claim such indefinite a phrase for a title if one is feeling very definite about oneself. But, then, to combine the “note” with “camp” is to ironize the note itself, decked out as an Oscar Wildean aphorism, and Sontag’s “notes on,” in this case, is more audacious than strictly philosophic. In the case of the marvelous Dostoyevsky title (and I have to say I don’t know how it sounds in the original Russian), the place from which the notes issue takes top billing, and this requires that we heed the type of notes these are (like those secreted in a bottle or furtively slipped through the chink in a wall); their intended recipient (surely not me, not you, but some accidental or imagined Other); and the ambiguity of their authorship (are they those we’d rather suppress, sent from unconscious to conscious? those scripted in a hand not our own but issuing through us? those that will tarnish the minute they hit the light of day or the piercing eye of the wrong recipient?).

Notes are never neutral.

Take the “extreme literary empiricism” of Georges Perec’s post-Holocaust, post–May ’68 An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (translated by Marc Lowenthal) alongside Dziga Vertov’s post–Bolshevik Revolution manifestos on the camera eye as an exceptionally attentive note taker. Both projects are underscored by a distinctive politics of noting, in the first instance of the “infraordinary,” or as Lowenthal describes it, “the humdrum, the nonevent, the everyday—‘what happens,’ as [Perec] puts it, ‘when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds,’” and in the second instance, of what Vertov calls “life caught unawares.” The constraint that Perec gave to himself was to return to the same Parisian locale over the course of three days, and to record “that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance.” A fastidiously observed record of quotidiana, the book erupts into a subtly divined poetry of all that slips past the surveying gaze of the omnipresent police. Read More

Aerial view of the Munich Residenz after bombings, 1945. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Wolfgang Koeppen’s novel Pigeons on the Grass, first published in 1951 as Tauben im Gras, is among the earliest, grandest, and most poetically satisfying reckonings in fiction with the postwar state of the world. What have we done to ourselves? What may we hope for? Is life from now on going to be different? Is it even going to be possible? These are the unasked and unanswerable questions that hover around this great novel composed in bite-size chunks, a cross section of a damaged society presented—natch!—in cutup. I once described it as a “Modernist jigsaw in 110 pieces,” but it is as compulsively readable as Dickens or Elmore Leonard. The form catches the eye, but the content is no slouch either. It must be one of the shortest of the universal books, the ones of which you think, If it isn’t in here, it doesn’t exist.

The setting is Munich, a place to which Koeppen had first come toward the end of the war. It is where, in his own words, he “lay low and made himself small,” where he met Marion Ulrich, his much younger wife (they were married in 1948), and where he lived until his death in 1996, at the age of almost ninety. More to the point, it is “the little town out of which death sprawled over the classroom map,” as Joseph Brodsky calls it, the epicenter of the developments that an Austrian corporal and failed watercolorist had initially set in train with the Munich Putsch of 1923, developments that, it is calmly suggested near the end of the novel, might be on the point of getting going again. Amid the destruction and the rebuilding, the novel, set in that same 1948, is looking for early signs of a pattern. Is the cycle of violence, exhaustion, and resentment about to get going again, as happened after World War I (as Koeppen, born in 1906, knew very well from personal experience); or is there some higher meaning in it, as Mr. Edwin the visiting poet-intellectual would have us believe; or is there perhaps no meaning at all, is it all random patternlessness, “pigeons on the grass,” as Gertrude Stein wrote, or, as she is ignorantly—and rather well—paraphrased by Miss Burnett, the visiting Massachusetts schoolmistress: “the birds are here by chance, we are here by chance, and maybe the Nazis were here by chance, Hitler was a chance, his politics were a dreadful and stupid chance, maybe the world is a dreadful and stupid chance of God’s, no one knows why we are here, the birds will fly off and we will walk on”? Read More