Wolf Wondratschek’s novel “Dante, Homer and the Cook. A Comedy ”- Culture

It must be a heavy burden for an author if his most famous work was also his first and was more than half a century ago. Wolf Wondratschek, born in 1943, wrote a lot in his life; but the title that has made a name for itself is the 1969 published “The day used to start with a gunshot wound”.

This title also reveals what the author meant by saying that what matters most is the individual sentence. The sentences appear at a distance from one another, thus generating a text in a rather indirect way and in some cases have a quality that is easy to hear and remember. Other representatives of this type in the same volume who did not make it to the title page are, for example, “Beautiful girls don’t buy paper”, which somehow makes sense without needing to be voted, or “Homework is a matter of luck”, or “On Sundays families look like they were stolen from the cemetery “.

One way of preserving this priority of the sentence over the text without falling into the vain trap of the aphorism is through dialogue. Wondratschek chooses “Comedy” as the generic name for his new book “Dante, Homer and the Cook”. But a comedy in the true sense of the word, in which the plot is the decisive structural feature, would not achieve what Wondratschek wants. The tradition in which it really stands is, however, hardly less venerable and also of Hellenic origin: the conversation with the dead, the conversation of secluded people in the underworld, as the Greek Lukian developed it in the 2nd century.

You look like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. And Shakespeare calls too

Homer and Dante appear as characters. Nowhere is it explicitly stated that they died; but it is obvious that they are operating in a no-man’s-corner, somewhere in rural Italy, where the fact that they are still in circulation is no surprise. (When it does come out later, they have their hands full to get to safety from authorities and paparazzi.) They like it best when fog comes in, “Fog that envelops the world like a gift on which ‘Please do not open!’ stands”. A nameless but energetic cook who can neither read nor write, has never heard the least from Dante or Homer, and fortunately does not need to be surprised about her protégés, takes care of her.

Homer and Dante are not chosen by chance; together they encompass the epitome of western literature from its sensual-worldly and its ascetic-spiritual side. They are also quite different in type: Dante not without glow, but very emaciated, in his dark habit resembling a scarecrow (as his companion mockingly notes); Homer, on the other hand, whose seerism, rooted in blindness, plays a rather minor role, has a good fodder and is turned towards this world. They look a bit like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Shakespeare sometimes calls, but the author did well to keep him away altogether, because he would not have added anything to the Homeric aspect of poetry and would have had the disadvantage of not having been with us for 400 years – clearly too little for us the clarified, if not to say well-left, state of mind of the two protagonists.

Wolf Wondratschek: Dante, Homer and the cook. A comedy. Ullstein, Berlin 2021, 237 pages, 24 euros.

Thankfully, James Joyce’s widow only gets a brief appearance. The two old fighters have their little regulars’ table, a round that is not very clear, except that, with a ghostly logic, it is true: “Everyone here is even older than everyone else.” Of course, the couple also quarrel, and once they even want to duel, which luckily does not happen: They could both have been dead! With this kind of humor, one thinks of the shadow passengers in Charon’s leaky boat, who make Lukian fearful of drowning.

And what are the two talking about? At least not about literature; after all these centuries they really have that behind them. “Anyone who still remembers the title of their own book cannot be helped.” Instead, they talk about how to make the cook’s hard work easier.

“Dante: She doesn’t admit it, but it took her strength to cut the blackberry hedges that had already overgrown the paths. Hands off, Mr. Dante, that’s a man’s business. Get out of the way with you, she said.

Homer: I can’t believe the bitch.

Dante: And how conscientious she was, impressive. You would only have to get her a new pair of secateurs when the opportunity arises.

Homer: There should be something to buy in Venice, right?

Dante: There are in every village.

The two men, more like summer guests than poets, feel protected by so much masculinity. The night air after the scorching heat is good. “

This is where the narrator’s voice comes in, and the book’s problem of form comes to light: He’s talking to them where they could get along quite well on their own. But only with the chats of the two ex-poets, since nothing really happens, the 240 pages of the volume could hardly be filled. So something is mixed up in between, the world, as I said, tracks down the two almost ghosts; The result is a series of scenes that are less comedic than farce-like, but since the global hype is soon followed by perplexity and the two wisely withdraw, they end in nowhere.

Dante wants to blow up his monument to be forgotten

The two talk about the desire to be forgotten and about silence. This is unfortunate insofar as speaking cancels silence, but silence, if one does not talk about being silent, does not become recognizable as silence. Silence therefore presents itself as a paradoxical impossibility – at least if it is to become a book. The way out they find does not even turn out to be a shot in the oven: Dante wants to blow up his monument on the piazza in Naples named after him (which, as one would like to note, should not promote the desired oblivion). The dynamite has already been bought and loaded – there it is, after all, we are in Naples, stolen from the car. Homer and Dante comfort each other easily, they find other subjects. “Why, Dante wants to know, must happiness not repeat itself? Of course it can repeat itself, but not too often! But why? Because it makes you stupid, that’s why you stupid!”

The old poets no longer argue whether it might not be wiser, especially in their position, to be happy than wise; the book ends here. It could go on like this forever. But when you put it down, you still have the feeling that it is about twice too long for what it wanted.

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