Under the information “Nevada July 13, 2016. Everything in order Jonathan” you will find the following entry:
“Modern/ I won’t show you, I won’t create a picture of you / Landscape replaced by a comment. /Jonathan said: Don’t describe, I want to see for myself. “
The book, which is the subject of the following, is structured like a travel diary or a logbook, and in the virtual space that it opens up like every book, scenes, moments, fragments, photographs of a trip through the United States of America are shown. But there are also aphoristic reflections on the state of the present.
The descriptions are mostly not descriptions of the landscape, but rather those of a changing interior, the reflections on the landscape in the face of a landscape. However, the traveler intervenes in the image of the landscape by garnishing it with images.
“We are in the deepest desert, see no one. Only the portrait of Kafka accompanies us. Where have the people gone? “
Travelogues is the name of a series in the newly founded cupid Publisher appears. The publisher and translator Frank Henseleit could not have chosen a better time, and for economic reasons probably not a worse time, for the publication of the volume “In Amerika”, said Jonathan “, than the pandemic year that lies behind us, and how we all hope now expires. Travel was frozen in a broader sense, and when you left the house it was with your face covered.
Due to another illness, which for the most part ties me to the house, I saw the remnants of society go to my night-time level, which, however, did not give me any relief, but rather took away the exclusivity of my existence due to the illness. Suddenly they all became bugs.
“Fear of heights and fear of excessive space in front of his eyes. Like someone who has to stand permanently in front of a wall and on solid ground. Jonathan feels that he needs walls. He values everything that closes the horizon. “
However, this becomes difficult in the face of a deserted desert.
In the book, however, the author also reports on a dream. At the entrance to an amusement park, he is asked about prostheses and begins to put his legs down on his whole body, which is basically completely made up of artificial components.
My own beetle existence, however, makes it a little easier for me, that is, this bondage to the house. I can read. And reading sometimes replaces travel for me. So I can read how a Portuguese author moves through America. He is accompanied by a fellow traveler named Jonathan and a painted portrait of Kafka.
Gonçalo Manuel Tavares was born in Luanda in 1970, a Portuguese colony that would soon achieve independence and from which the Carnation Revolution began. The text was translated by Christiane Quandt and Frank Henseleit.
Of course, reading Kafka’s fragment of the novel “The Lost One” shoots through your head. That story of Karl Roßmann who, as an outcast, embarks on a journey on an ocean liner, which in the novel then silts up in the New York demi-world after he is released as a lift boy. Kafka’s novel does not end, it breaks off. Up to now hardly anything has been seen of America.
At Tavares now a certain amount of reparation. But it is not Rossmann who moves through the American cities and landscapes, but his author, or at least that very picture of his author. Documented on a series of color photographs, of which the text is shot through.
However, we cannot be sure. Never. And that is probably one of the basic patterns of modernity, that especially in moments of security, nervousness grows and one morning after waking up we find ourselves as huge vermin or confronted with an unknown virus. And postmodernism seems to increase this nervousness even more.
What you absolutely have to emphasize, and what connects Tavares with Kafka, is this unfathomable, fascinating humor that sedates itself in the lyrics. In addition, the book is beautifully designed. A gem.
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