The fashion of those books continues, the subject matter of which is more or less random events of a year and whose pure simultaneity can sometimes provide attractive projections of people and events without being fatefully compelling. Timo Feldhaus does the same thing in “Mary Shelley’s Room”: “When a volcano darkened the world in 1816”, is the subtitle. So Feldhaus arranged Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Caspar David Friedrich and Napoleon, Thomas Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore, not to mention the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia in 1815. In fact, this eruption is considered to be the hitherto most powerful in the history of mankind, the effects of which also massively influenced the meteorological conditions in Europe and America, turned summer into winter, darkened the sky, let crops perish in constant rain with all the dramatic consequences for people and animals worldwide.
It may be true that it rained in Waterloo in 1815, but Napoleon’s defeat cannot be directly and solely derived from the Tambora eruption, nor can Goethe’s preoccupation with Luke Howard’s epoch-making cloud observations and theories. The other historical figures also shimmer in their own right, from Bengali-demonic like Lord Byron to German-brown like the raging nationalist and anti-Semite Turnvater Jahn. Even Franz Schubert has a cameo appearance in Timo Feldhaus’ puppet theater, which you can just as well and without loss read over. Therefore, one could also ask: what was Beethoven actually doing in the volcanic summer of 1816? But that doesn’t happen at Feldhaus, why should it.
The English poets have nested on Lake Geneva, with free love in all directions
The fact that Feldhaus moves his truly impressive protagonists so close to their respective skins and stomachs that one seems to discover unsightly spots and hear the rumbling of the intestines does not make them any more human, but rather undeservedly banal and similar.
Thankfully, Feldhaus sticks to Mary Shelley, née Godwin, as a guiding figure through his multifaceted panopticon, who throughout the course of this book created her far-reaching The Baron Frankenstein invents new people with her novel “Frankenstein”. The starting point for this is a typical Lord Byron game: Who writes the best horror story?
The group of English poets has settled on Lake Geneva to live a new life with free love in all directions. This includes equality, freedom from family ties, informality of manners and the development of one’s own creativity. Feldhaus succeeds in telling Mary Shelley’s astonishment about life and the world, her fantasizing about the future and beyond her own bladder, her love of play and spontaneous curiosity, her mood swings and ruminations about herself and the others: “Time blurred and Mary didn’t know if it was yesterday or two weeks ago when they had taken the boat out, Claire had played the guitar, Percy had been reciting the most elegiac poems of his beloved William Wordsworth, Byron had been singing Albanian songs and howling like a wild dog all at once European desert, if such a thing even existed. There were days that flew where Percy went with Claire and Mary with Byron, and everything was open.”
(9783498002367 (1).jpg) Mary Shelley’s room
(Photo: Timo Feldhaus: Mary Shelley’s room. When a volcano darkened the world in 1816. Rowohlt, Hamburg 2022. 317 pages, 24 euros.)
Otherwise, the same gloomy rain clouds hang over the summer on Lake Geneva as over Goethe’s Weimar or Caspar David Friedrich’s increasingly lonely landscapes and horizon views with pompous sunsets à la Tambora. Incidentally, William Turner was also painting orgiastic sunsets in England, but Feldhaus does not have them.
Despite some doubts about the problematic principle of composition, what captures the parallels for this book is its empathetic tone. Feldhaus does not betray his heroes in terms of what is only entertaining or monstrously interesting, but tries to do them justice to some extent without alienating them through accurate lexicalization. The revolutionary nature of this group of poets and artists in the middle of a world in which the great dictatorship of Napoleon collapsed and the restoration of crowned heads celebrated an unfortunate long time of origin comes out quite well and partly amusing.