Jörg Magnau’s first novel “The Canadian Night” tells about art, life and moments of remembrance

by Jana Lee Knittel

Discussed Books / References

Born in 1961 in Ludwigsburg, Swabia, Jörg Magnau is an accomplished literary critic and a recognized literary biographer. His work includes monographs on the brothers Martin Walser, Christa Wolf, Ernst and Friedrich Jünger, and the mythical group 47 Meeting at Princeton. In addition, Magnou is present with numerous reviews in national dailies as well as on the radio. Together canadian night He has now made a solid narrative debut. And say it right from the start: the novel is a masterful entanglement and reflection of literary and biographical-autobiographical writing. In his debut, Magnau created a linguistic web of stories and biographies, a dialogue of memories and experiences, a mirror cabinet of reflections, and first-person drafts. Their canadian night There is a father-son novel, a novel about distant closeness and near distance, a story about love, about saying goodbye and starting over and, last but not least, about cast and language. a novel.

The anonymous first-person narrator receives a call from faraway Canada. His 90-year-old father, a former physician, who after leaving practice moved to the Rocky Mountains with his new partner and with whom the son has had little contact in the nearly 40 years since he left to study in Berlin. is die. So after a few days, willy-nilly, the narrator leaves for British Columbia, hoping that his father is still alive. Behind him is not only a wedding in Berlin and a new beginning with philosopher A and his young son, but also the unsuccessful book project “Dream Sailor” about the many entangled lives of a poet and a painter: “In this way both multiply in art”, argues the narrator of the “Dream Sailor” biography,

How one multiplies itself from time to time, so that naturally more and more images, thoughts, passages and insights accumulate during the years of one’s life.

this is the story slide NS canadian night Not only in a life with its insights and passages: a poet and a painter who multiplied himself in his art, and a biographer who is about to write about the poet, but whose book was on the painter’s veto for two years. After work fails, a long drive through Canada at night towards the dying father. Journey, with his Holderlin memories (the father is an avid Holderlin reader after his retirement; Magneau already sends a quote from Magnau as the motto) In “open” to Canada, Magneau is a journey into his past. As with designs, memories appear as a fine line between fiction and fact. The result is a narrative, dense, and reflective text that doesn’t feel constructed.

In quarterly paragraphs, the biographer combines memories of the past with his father, the internal history of the failed book project and the reality of the life of the painter and poet, as well as his own reality of life with new partner A. At the same time, the first-person narrator repeatedly draws parallels to Holderlin’s biography. The ‘image of the father’ is maintained at every level. For example, the poet of the “Dream Sailor” project “finally visited his absent father once he was already living with the painter”, while the narrator thinks of his emotionally absent father from childhood. Is He “That’s Why He Keeps Thinking” Biography Famous Writers Wrote [hat], since […] The father figure was missing. The absent father was a blank that had to be filled. “And”[a]Also Holderlin grew up without a father, and that was probably the closeness my father felt to him.”

Against the backdrop of the Canadian landscape, the novel portrays not only a linguistic, but also a philosophical work of art, replete with commentaries on the homeland, origin and its own existence, on questions of the autonomy of art and authorship.

How does life go on and how can one tell life (based on the biography)? Biographical writing interprets a life as a reinterpretation and thus writes its reality. The failure of “Dream Sailor” suggests that the subjective narrative component of biographical rewriting may become a problem. Not only does biographical writing as a form of life highlight and accentuate life, but one’s own memories are also exposed for later constructions, not least through the motto of Goethe’s commentary in the text. alternate parallels Emphasizes that there is no line in it that is not experienced, but also that none is included as experienced. or as a narrator NS canadian night Sources: “Which life story would not be a later creation?” And Finally, in a reflection on storytelling, it says: “To write means to put the past away.”

In this way the novel becomes the text of the language. Language is reflected as well as questioned as a means of reflection. Memory is the essence of the text. Memories are artistically preserved and – yes – manufactured: “Every story is an improvisation.” The text provides answers to questions about the author and meaning of a text, if “art” is not to be understood as a “guessing game”. Because “knowledge and truth are transformed in that because they arise only in encounter with the viewer or reader.”

At the end of his path and in the past, the biographer writes: “I was a writer, but was absent beyond this function.” How the first-person narrator told of an artistic and acceptable “perfection”, a link between art, a wide and rich carpet of literary memories. so will canadian night For a dense and readable text fabric, rich in philosophical, aesthetic and existential reflections, in which an “I” – writer and reader alike – is always at stake.