Homage to Czerny

Ack! That title! It's enough to send you running from the bookshop screaming in horror at the awful pretentiousness of translated European fiction. But do not despair! Playwright Gert Jonke's novel is a madcap exploration of perception and reality which circles round and round before landing somewhere equally odd. You won't find any answers to the big questions of life here, but you'll have a good time (and even a laugh) as Jonke's wild vision unravels before you.

The novel actually comprises two parts. In the first, The Presence of Memory, a brother and sister decide that they want to replicate their previous year's garden party in every way. They commission paintings of the garden, which they hang in the exact space represented by them, and they invite the same people. Only the siblings and the sceptical narrator know of the scheme:

'You're trying to change memories back intothe present moment, I said, but the laws of nature won't allow that.

The laws of nature, Johanna replied, are you really talking about the laws of nature? Isn't it a law of nature that not only has next to nothing changed in the past year but in fact that everything has remained just the same, and is exactly as unbearable, unjust, and miserable now as then?'

Thus the party commences. The city's finest artists and administrators are assembled: an undertaker who buries artists for free; an architect whose insane asylums likewise admit artists gratis; a city gardener and a building inspector - Mr Jacksch and Mr Jagusch - who, like a sort of anti-Thompson and Thomson from Hergé's Tintin books, can't agree on whether the weather one summer was hot and dry even though the ground was soaking wet or vice versa; a poet who repeatedly demonstrates that he can empty a bottle of beer faster by drinking it than by pouring it on the floor.

And so it goes on, the stories and conversations looping and flowing in a mesmeric and curious (yet somehow completely normal) way. Like the instruments of an orchestra,  each character comes to the fore, then retreats, making room for another as the symphony proceeds, until we find ourselves recognising the initial refrain at the end of the piece.

The second story, Gradus Ad Parnassum, is just as odd. Two brothers revisiting the Conservatory where they studied music 'years, much more than a decade, in fact almost twenty years' ago, get stuck in an attic of abandoned pianos when they fail to find the lift door from which they emerged. That Jonke doesn't merely say 'twenty years ago' sums up the remarkable nature of his writing, as it plays continuously with our perceptions and expectations.

First published in 1977 as Schule der Geläufigkeit, Homage to Czerny reminded me of  Kazuo Ishiguro's much more recent The Unconsoled in its ability to utterly displace the reader in an illogical world that  nevertheless makes sense to us; the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day (it certainly has the humour of the latter); and filmmaker Stephen Poliakoff's obsession with photographs and what they tell us about the past and the present. I don't know whether Jonke has been an influence on any of these artists, but his crazy slant on reality deserves to be read in a world that is becoming increasingly unreal by the day.