{"id":290026,"date":"2012-05-23T20:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-23T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2012\/05\/23\/the-brummstein\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:11:37","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:11:37","slug":"the-brummstein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2012\/05\/23\/the-brummstein\/","title":{"rendered":"The Brummstein"},"content":{"rendered":"

By examining the minute connections, unlikely coincidences, and painstaking natural processes that give shape to the daily world, the work of Danish author Peter Adolphsen encapsulates\u2014both in form and content\u2014Blake\u2019s image of \u201ca world in a grain of sand.\u201d This has never been more literally true than in his most recently translated work, The Brummstein.<\/em> Beginning in 1907, and ending over eighty years later, the novella follows a mysteriously humming stone found deep within a Swiss cave through its series of unlikely owners: a hapless German anarchist and his young Jewish sweetheart, a retired ticket clerk at a railway station lost & found, an orphan boy living alone in the woods, an avant-garde artist, and a museum curator. In following the ownership of the stone, The Brummstein<\/em> also traces a crash course through European (German) history\u2014in less than 80 pages, the reader experiences both World Wars, Spanish Flu, the rise of the Soviet GDR<\/span>, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. But, rather than focus on a larger, more sweeping narrative, The Brummstein<\/em> is told on a much more personal, human scale. <\/p>\n

Adolphsen has not yet been fully translated into English, but a good start has been made with the 2009 translation of his excellent novella Machine<\/em>, and excerpts from his collections Small Stories I<\/em> and Small Stories II<\/em>, which were included in 2011\u2019s Best European Fiction Anthology.<\/em> Readers familiar with these other works will recognize many of the author\u2019s prevailing thematic interests, as well as his favorite formal constraints in The Brummstein.<\/em> <\/p>\n

The book starts with a playful explanation of \u201cthe constant orogeny of the Alps,\u201d and how the formation of the earth might be conceptualized on a time-line. \u201c. . . if we apply the famous metaphor which depicts the Earth\u2019s age as a calendar year,\u201d the narrator begins,<\/p>\n

\n

when dinosaurs became extinct on Boxing Day, hominids emerge on New Year\u2019s Eve, and when, at the time of writing, ten seconds have passed since the Roman Empire\u2019s five seconds expired, then these events took place on December 19 and 23 respectively. In the West, the process of comprehending this vast expanse of time commenced just one and a half geological seconds ago . . .<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There\u2019s a PBS<\/span>-narrator quality to Adolphsen\u2019s explanations of the natural world, which manage to be clinical and dignified while simultaneously geeking out about how awesome geology is. (Machine<\/i>, with its first page explanations of the petrification of a prehistoric horse, which eons later becomes a drop of gasoline, maintains the same delightful tone.) <\/p>\n

But the book\u2019s concern is not really the Brummstein\u2014the mysterious humming stone that an amateur explorer looking for the entrance to another world finds at the beginning of the story is basically a MacGuffin. This has been true for many other “lives of objects” narratives as well\u2014Jenny Erpenbach\u2019s Visitation<\/em> and Nicole Krauss\u2019s Great House<\/em> come to mind\u2014and is not in itself that unique a premise. What makes The Brummstein<\/em> special, then, is Adolphsen\u2019s incredible specificity and gift for compressing deeply incisive observations into just a few short passages. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s rare that the full emotional weight of a relationship or a life can be concisely summarized\u2014just think of how bland many obituaries are. But this is precisely what Adolphsen excels at. Consider a passage in which we\u2019re introduced to Georg Wiede, an elderly retiree in Germany during WWII<\/span>. After his apartment was destroyed by Allied air raids, Georg moves to a railway station lost and found hut:<\/p>\n

\n

It wasn\u2019t until December 1943 that Georg finally overcame the inhibitions which had so far deterred him from helping himself to the lost items. He was driven by a noble motive: hunger. One of the suitcases might contain a tin of goulash or a bag of boiled sweets. He organized clothing such as coats and hats in neat piles at one end of the hut, making sure that each item retained its original ticket. Then he turned his attention to the suitcases, briefcases, et cetera. One by one he placed them on the table, and feeling like a surgeon with a patient on the operating table, he opened them up and laid out the contents in regimented lines. Then he returned the items in reverse order less anything he needed, which included two fountain pens, a small pile of books, a little money, some clothes, and an antique pocket watch. Whenever he took something, he would replace it with a small note with a brief description of the object and the following sentence: “I, Georg Weide, took this item of lost property in a time of great need.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When it doesn\u2019t work, The Brummstein<\/em> tends to undercut its emotional resonance with an unsettling sense of absurdity that borders on nihilism. More than one character is dispatched in a freak accident\u2014for instance, a married couple survives Spanish Flu only to be crushed by a chaise lounge falling from an apartment window. The narrative also drops off abruptly and unresolved, which may be alluding to the continuation of the story outside of the novella, but instead feels slightly apathetic. <\/p>\n

If, in the end, The Brummstein<\/em> has some shortcomings, these are mostly recognizable only in comparison to Adolphsen\u2019s more polished Machine<\/em> which, it should be noted, was written a few years later. Overall, it is a remarkably creative, unique, and resonant work, which can\u2014and should\u2014be read in one satisfying sitting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By examining the minute connections, unlikely coincidences, and painstaking natural processes that give shape to the daily world, the work of Danish author Peter Adolphsen encapsulates\u2014both in form and content\u2014Blake\u2019s image of \u201ca world in a grain of sand.\u201d This has never been more literally true than in his most recently translated work, The Brummstein. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[43376,46436,19916,16686,14766,19906],"class_list":["post-290026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-amazon-crossing","tag-brummstein","tag-charlotte-barslund","tag-danish-literature","tag-larissa-kyzer","tag-peter-adolphsen"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290026"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":341176,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290026\/revisions\/341176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}