Moran Meis on Esterhazy

Morgan Meis introduced a conversation between Peter Esterhazy and Wayne Koestenbaum (who was fabulous at the Walser event) at PEN World Voices a few weeks ago. He was kind enough to put his introduction online today:

Esterházy is trying to make it work. It is a literary approach that comes down directly from that incorrigible drunk, Jaroslav Hasek, the author of The Good Soldier Svejk. Svejk is a rube all the way through and sometimes a scoundrel, but he always chooses life over death. It is there even in his way of talking, a style that Hasek gives his favorite literary creation which is both straightforward and evasive at the same time. It’s a kind of irony, middle European irony, that is neither Socratic nor the blasé irony of Western intellectual boredom. Actually I think it is much better than both of those things. Always it is a language, a style or a manner of comporting oneself that finds a way to skirt through the cracks. Again, life. Here’s Svejk on being locked up in an insane asylum, “I really don’t know why those loonies get so angry when they’re kept there. You can crawl naked on the floor, howl like a jackal, rage and bite… There’s a freedom there which not even Socialists have dreamed of.”

It’s a nice introduction, mentioning Hasek (whose Svejk, one of my favorites, is in desperate need of a re-translation) and Hrabal.