Like Celan's Lovers by Oto Horvat

Abstract

Reviewed by: Like Celan's Lovers by Oto Horvat Biljana D. Obradović Oto Horvat Kao Celanovi ljubavnici [ Like Celan's Lovers] Novi Sad, Serbia: Akademska knjiga, 2016. 141 Pp. ISBN 978-86-6263-144-2 Like Celan's Lovers is a collection of twelve stories which won the Koralj Sirmai award. This is the final of my Horvat book reviews here. As I stated earlier, this book comes before Night Projection in which he has atoned for his sins and moved on, so that he dedicated this collection to Michele Federico and Veronica Prada Moroni, his son and his second, Italian wife. At the end of this book in the notes he ends with the words, "Nothing is accidental. The characters, events, and places in the texts are real. We are an illusion"1 (p. 139), making us again question whether these are made up stories (fiction), or creative nonfiction essays. The genre is never clear with Horvat, nor what is true and what is not. He dedicates some of these stories to various people, some familiar to all (Alen Bešić, Petar Matović, Vesna Goldsworthy), some not. The stories range in length from a two-page fragment to six pages and even sixteen pages. He begins with "Fragment 1," a story loosely based on the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, with references of his finding his own father dead. He continues to use the catalog form in his writing as in "Illuminated by the Sun" (p. 17), in which he uses the word "more," as anaphora, "More than the streets, the facades of houses, more than the Danube whose level of water has not fallen, but has instead constantly risen, but that interested no one. More than the travelers without eyes and noses who entered the trams …" (p. 17). [End Page 173] He, interestingly, uses his last name, with a Hungarian spelling here, Horváth, as that of a musician, the main character. The story takes place in Budapest, Berlin, and Novi Sad—the places the author has lived in. Horváth is a kind of alter ego to Horvat, the author. As in other previous works, here also, he uses foreign words and even whole long passages (p. 22). Sometimes through the years of living abroad, away from Serbia, away from the language he writes in, as is the case with many immigrant writers, transnational writers, he, too, tends to reach more easily for a foreign word adapted for Serbian, rather than finding the original, Serbian term—"noutbuk" (notebook; p. 106), and, "Kam in." (Come in.; p. 115). He is philosophical, "everything remains fragmentary, in spite of the fact that death gives us the wrong impression of being whole, of circling our lives, our creative work, loves, fates," he says (p. 22), and goes on to say, in the same piece, "without suffering, there is no art, suffering cleanses" (p. 24). As before, in his other works, he shows us that he is willing to experiment to try new things and he does. This whole piece is one long paragraph that goes on from page 13–26. And like Baudelaire, he finds his life an ennui, and says, "My life, since I know of myself and of others, has been a constant battle between laziness and boredom" (p. 46) He has great, original details in his writing (except not so great when he occasionally includes body functions, like farting), "The tattooed neck barman with earrings in his nose and eyebrows served us" (p. 28), that can be sensual and erotic as well, "She caught me staring at her nipples that clearly, in my thoughts even more clear, showed through the think dress (p. 29). Often there are dreams and surreal passages as well, like names erased, or rather disappeared from documents (p. 36). He uses figures of speech often in his writing and writes about writing of poetry (negatively, p. 53), writing of plays (p. 51), translation (p. 53), self-censorship, right to publish…all things that have to do with a writer's life, while "Between Movies" is kind of crime story, but there are others. Impotence is a recurring theme, his catastrophic love life (p. 132), as...