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A review by arirang
How Pale the Winter Has Made Us by Adam Scovell
4.0
Strasbourg lay all around me, familiar streets with cobbles, old buildings constructed in a mixture of styles, most of them incredibly preserved considering the many conflicts that had befallen the city over the years. My eyes, yet to be slashed in dismay, stared out of the window at the small groups of wandering tourists, who were thankfully blind to the Erl-King.
How Pale The Winter Has Made Us is the second novel from writer and filmmaker Adam Scovell. His first, Mothlight was also an excellent read my review) heavily influenced by the two greatest post war German language writers, Thomas Bernhard and WG Sebald:
The influence of both writers is clear again here, although for this specific novel, the author has said, in his discussion of the book, that its three real pillars of influence were Georges Perec’s [b:Life: A User's Manual|28293|Life A User's Manual|Georges Perec|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1416690677l/28293._SY75_.jpg|1953902], Elfriede Jelinek’s [b:The Piano Teacher|219879|The Piano Teacher|Elfriede Jelinek|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328823912l/219879._SY75_.jpg|2179325] and Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession the last a cult movie (NSFW trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTB15PPtMyA_).
How Pale The Winter Has Made Us is narrated by Isabelle, a young English woman staying in Strasbourg with her partner, although to the reader she seems more in love with the city than him (he seemed to have an aversion to things I found interesting).
He has just left for an extended trip to South America, and she is about to return to South London, when she learns of the death, by suicide, of her father, whom I had admittedly hated, which is delivered in the most deliberately blunt and uncaring fashion by my spiteful mother.
Immediately she finds herself beset by visions of a lurking, shadowy figure, which she later identifies as the Erl-King, or Erlkönig in German. From Wikipedia:
With her harridan mother (the adjective qualifies the noun so often in Isabelle's account that it almost becomes an official title) urging her to return home immediately to take care of the will, and funeral, she decides instead to stay in France:
Strasbourg was to be my island upon which to explore and seek refuge: to lose myself in the arms of the Erl-King. Anything to avoid the responsibility of such paperwork.
The gothic horror element of the novel, inspired by Possession, has Isabelle being nocturnally carnally possessed by the Erl-King, although this forms more of a background to the novel.
The foreground is the city of Strasbourg and the history of those who have lived there, including Goethe and Herder. As noted before Sebald is perhaps Scovell’s key influence and in a recent article on WG Sebald he notes:
This book is Sebaldian both in its style, but also its use of evocative, often melancholic, sepia and black and white photographs (people often looked unhappy in older photos, as if the process of having it taken was still something suspicious, something to be cautious of.), which Isabelle, like the author himself, acquires in Strasbourg’s flea markets and curio shops. Some are included in the text, more can be found at a specially created Instagram account.
Interestingly the reason the photographs are not all in the novel is (from Granta interview below) is to partly shake off the ghost of Sebald:
Most of the other tables and stalls had boxes of old photographs too, but Brice’s table had just this one, half hidden under the paperweight like a secret. It was an old picture, black and white when it was first produced but now rendered coffee-coloured by the passing of time. In the picture there sat a well-dressed man on a chair. It seemed unusual as the chair was clearly designed for indoor use and yet the picture was outside. The sitter had perhaps thought that it was a good idea for this portrait to be taken in the garden, and I imagined his pompous hassling of those around him as a chair was fetched from some great French house and sat on the grass of a large, expansive garden.
Her exploration of the city proceeds rather by chance based on the photographs she finds and conversations she has - the seller of the first photographs tells her the story behind it - and a chain of chance discoveries (*), the author noting the inspiration here of another film, Michael Haneke’s 71 Fragments Of A Chronology Of Chance.
(* Isabelle is, it has to be said, an unworldly character at times. One such coincidence comes when after viewing The Matterhorn disaster by Gustave Doré, she, to her spooked astonishment, finds the same mountain pictueed on an unusually shaped bar of Swiss chocolate in a tabac: that would be a Toblerone then, denizen of duty free shops the world over as well as most confectionary stores.)
But she is always haunted, literally, at least in her mind, by the figure of the Erl-King, and figuratively by thoughts of her father’s death, to which she often reaches by way of comparison to an excessive extent.
Recommended. And I look forward to the third volume of what, with Mothlight and this, will form a thematic trilogy:
Granta
The Republic of Consciousness blog
How Pale The Winter Has Made Us is the second novel from writer and filmmaker Adam Scovell. His first, Mothlight was also an excellent read my review) heavily influenced by the two greatest post war German language writers, Thomas Bernhard and WG Sebald:
I think the majority of the voice techniques come from European fiction of the post-war period. Sebald was and always will be the biggest influence on my writing, but the main voice that dictated the OCD recursions in Mothlight was Thomas Bernhard.Both novels are from small independent Influx Press, 'committed to publishing innovative and challenging fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction from across the UK and beyond’ and the winner, with Eley Williams’s stunning [b:Attrib. and other stories|33656486|Attrib. and other stories|Eley Williams|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1483286761l/33656486._SY75_.jpg|54524159], of the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize, which I had the pleasure to judge. This book came courtesy of the Prize’s excellent bookclub.
The influence of both writers is clear again here, although for this specific novel, the author has said, in his discussion of the book, that its three real pillars of influence were Georges Perec’s [b:Life: A User's Manual|28293|Life A User's Manual|Georges Perec|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1416690677l/28293._SY75_.jpg|1953902], Elfriede Jelinek’s [b:The Piano Teacher|219879|The Piano Teacher|Elfriede Jelinek|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328823912l/219879._SY75_.jpg|2179325] and Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession the last a cult movie (NSFW trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTB15PPtMyA_).
How Pale The Winter Has Made Us is narrated by Isabelle, a young English woman staying in Strasbourg with her partner, although to the reader she seems more in love with the city than him (he seemed to have an aversion to things I found interesting).
He has just left for an extended trip to South America, and she is about to return to South London, when she learns of the death, by suicide, of her father, whom I had admittedly hated, which is delivered in the most deliberately blunt and uncaring fashion by my spiteful mother.
Immediately she finds herself beset by visions of a lurking, shadowy figure, which she later identifies as the Erl-King, or Erlkönig in German. From Wikipedia:
The name is first used by Johann Gottfried Herder in his ballad "Erlkönigs Tochter" (1778), an adaptation of the Danish Hr. Oluf han rider (1739), and was taken up by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his poem "Erlkönig" (1782).Indeed, the novel’s title indeed is inspired by a line of Herder’s poem: Wie ist dein’ Farbe blaß und bleich?
With her harridan mother (the adjective qualifies the noun so often in Isabelle's account that it almost becomes an official title) urging her to return home immediately to take care of the will, and funeral, she decides instead to stay in France:
Strasbourg was to be my island upon which to explore and seek refuge: to lose myself in the arms of the Erl-King. Anything to avoid the responsibility of such paperwork.
The gothic horror element of the novel, inspired by Possession, has Isabelle being nocturnally carnally possessed by the Erl-King, although this forms more of a background to the novel.
The foreground is the city of Strasbourg and the history of those who have lived there, including Goethe and Herder. As noted before Sebald is perhaps Scovell’s key influence and in a recent article on WG Sebald he notes:
With place occupying a key role in his novels, to the extent that several of them can be literally walked and explored in the same detail as the books’ various narrators, the writer unconsciously created journeys and highlighted places that now sit unusually within what could be called the “Sebaldian.”In another article Scovell takes the same approach to Thomas Bernhard's Vienna.
This book is Sebaldian both in its style, but also its use of evocative, often melancholic, sepia and black and white photographs (people often looked unhappy in older photos, as if the process of having it taken was still something suspicious, something to be cautious of.), which Isabelle, like the author himself, acquires in Strasbourg’s flea markets and curio shops. Some are included in the text, more can be found at a specially created Instagram account.
Interestingly the reason the photographs are not all in the novel is (from Granta interview below) is to partly shake off the ghost of Sebald:
I started with around forty photographs I’d picked up from stalls around the flea markets of Strasbourg, and, as they were all of old Europe, they already had a Sebaldian flavour of sorts. I have mostly removed them to avoid the comparisonThe first is one the narrator herself discovers on a flea market stall just after she has learned of her father’s death:
Most of the other tables and stalls had boxes of old photographs too, but Brice’s table had just this one, half hidden under the paperweight like a secret. It was an old picture, black and white when it was first produced but now rendered coffee-coloured by the passing of time. In the picture there sat a well-dressed man on a chair. It seemed unusual as the chair was clearly designed for indoor use and yet the picture was outside. The sitter had perhaps thought that it was a good idea for this portrait to be taken in the garden, and I imagined his pompous hassling of those around him as a chair was fetched from some great French house and sat on the grass of a large, expansive garden.
Her exploration of the city proceeds rather by chance based on the photographs she finds and conversations she has - the seller of the first photographs tells her the story behind it - and a chain of chance discoveries (*), the author noting the inspiration here of another film, Michael Haneke’s 71 Fragments Of A Chronology Of Chance.
(* Isabelle is, it has to be said, an unworldly character at times. One such coincidence comes when after viewing The Matterhorn disaster by Gustave Doré, she, to her spooked astonishment, finds the same mountain pictueed on an unusually shaped bar of Swiss chocolate in a tabac: that would be a Toblerone then, denizen of duty free shops the world over as well as most confectionary stores.)
But she is always haunted, literally, at least in her mind, by the figure of the Erl-King, and figuratively by thoughts of her father’s death, to which she often reaches by way of comparison to an excessive extent.
Recommended. And I look forward to the third volume of what, with Mothlight and this, will form a thematic trilogy:
For reference, the follow-up to How Pale The Winter Has Made Us (due in 2022…) has a narrator actually taking the photos featured, so a healthy trilogy of novels using different techniques of photographic contexts will hopefully be the end point here.Two illuminating interviews with the author:
Granta
The Republic of Consciousness blog