Schattenblog
This blog is an idiosyncratic reading blog of the galley version of Schattenfroh, a novel by Michael Lentz, in translation from the German by Max Lawton, published in US English by Deep Vellum.
I didn’t have the time to review this title conventionally, but since it is about Early Modern Northern Europe, and the theory of the image, amongst other things that I love, I thought I’d make something that could serve equally as a reading companion once the book comes out. I’ll be writing entries intermittently as I read. They will contain spoilers, so if you’re looking to avoid that, only go up to the page you’ve read.
--A.V.Marraccini
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Current Posts Below-- Click Here For Full Archive
Post 1: Shadowblog -- 10 March 2025-- Pages 01-29
If you have read pages 1-29 you can the wing of the bird on the hat you are wearing is Dürer’s bird wing, because it’s so very Hochdeutsch to imagine that and Scattenfroh himself has told you speak German, the infinite combinatorical noun-language of thingness, -keit suffix there IYKYK. Anyway here’s the wing I see on the hat.....
Post 2: Seductions-- 10 March 2023-- Pages 30-40I want the image to layer me up and peel me down like a Mandarin orange with its unclear complexities, play me out. Let me die impure then. Sorry, Schattenfroh....
Post 3: Daddy Issues -- 16 March 2025-- Pages 40-137You’re going to find this disgusting, but if the copyist is in the service of God (potential corruption of script and letters notwithstanding), the critic is in the service of no one, or perhaps constantly wrestling angels to read, mis-read, para-read etc (we love our corruptions).. I pinned my angel to the floor long ago....
Post 4: Eat The Book -- 23 March 2025-- Pages 137-151
.... They play Bach and Bruckner at the anniversary of the city’s near-total destruction, which is a very German thing to do, picking Bach and Bruckner for this, but also starting on page 144 describing the (actual) German regulation against naming your child Jesus. I grew up in Miami, a place where every second boy child seemed to be named Jesus, pronounced He-zuz instead of the Anglophone Jesus. Jesus Hernandez was in your second grade class; you saw Jesus Gonzalez park his 1996 Toyota Corolla and pick up a sandwich at Publix in Coral Gables.....
Post 5: Écriture procrastinatrice -- 25 March 2025-- Pages 152-171
A friend of mine said this blog was a form of parallel writing, not Écriture feminine per se, but a way of writing around and with and behind Schattenfroh. I think I have to admit tonight it’s really Écriture procrastinatrice going on, because I should be entering grades in the online platform for ordering grades that is frankly such a demented mode of ordering that the Frightbearing Society should look into it....]Post 6: Systems Trials -- 31 March 2025-- Pages 172-207
....Like God, I haven’t rehearsed today. This is because I had to take migraine medication which loosened my muscles too much to put on my pointe shoes. Humans can’t cope with constant change in the world, the narrator tells, we ignore the Heraclitan River never being the same twice by fusing it into one continuous image. I do this, but I also slam my toes into paste boxes to approach Platonic forms of lines I will never reach....
Post 7: The Treachery of Images -- 5 April 2025-- Pages 208-219
....Still, Schattenfroh and I agree, we grow accustomed easily to suffering and its images. “The true artists is a flagellant” but also “… the flagellant is a tourist attraction as such.” We aestheticize pain; we instrumentalize images. For the narrator language is a more complex game but I’m not sure I buy it. Maybe I’m just doing it here, mushrooming it out at an Orientalized distance, suffering as essayistic counterpoint. Maybe I should just do what our narrator proposes and offer you only a black page in lieu of the naming of pain, or as a sideways way of naming without aestheticizing....
Post 8: The Tree-Man Looks Back -- 14 April 2025-- Pages 220-251
.... So much of Schattenfroh is a self-reflexive looking back like this. The dramas of the narrator’s childhood, inscribed forward again into the metaphysical broader narrative, the way the book references itself, the way the language the book is translated from is always implicit in its conviction that this is an unstable meaning, configured by and also configuring the world. When the narrator suddenly shifts, “… sitting on a stone in a flowing pink robe that drapes its robes into seven neat tiers,” he’s in another Bosch, this time as St. John of Patmos, witnessing the future apocalypse again...