Walter Abish's Fictions: Perfect Unfamiliarity, Familiar Imperfection

Abstract

Writing somewhat sceptically of “recent experimental fiction” in 1975, Morris Dickstein saw a great deal of it as “ebulliently parricidal and cannibalistic,” but detected at the same time “the celebrated ‘cool’ tone…, a cleanness of manner that partly redeems the pervasive irony and emotional distance.” In the case of Walter Abish, the “hot” is the high-spirited inventiveness which grows out of the self-set limitations of a predetermined system; it is part of his own response to the craft of writing: “I was crossing the parade ground in Ramle during my second year in the Tank Corps when quite suddenly the idea of becoming a writer flashed through my mind. A moment of pure exhilaration.”Abish, who was born in Vienna in 1931, spent the formative years of childhood and adolescence in Shanghai, then eight years in Israel, and finally settled in New York City, where in 1960 he became an American citizen. In his writing (a collection of poems, two novels, and two books of short fiction) he has retained an affinity for things European and for the literature of the German-speaking world.