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What is really going on here? For decades Renata Adler has been asking and answering this question with unmatched urgency. As a staff writer at The New Yorker. Adler reported on civil rights from Selma, Alabama; the wars in Biafra, and the Middle East; the Nixon impeachment inquiry; cultural life in Cuba. She also reported on politics and culture in the United States, films (as chief film critic for The New York Times) , books, television, pop music, the press. She has taken risks in order to give us the news, not the "news" we have become accustomed to--celebrity journalism, conventional wisdom, received ideas--but the actual story, an account unfettered by ideology or consensus, when too many other writers have joined the pack.
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January 2016 Edition: "The White Review" To Siegfried Unseld, From Wolfgang Hildesheimer
Speedboat is an eminently American book, and sometimes I lack the key to the metaphors. But its structure allows you to open it up at random and read it, without being aware of the context, like a breviary.
Now you ask me why the book is so good. I may assume that you have read it, so that my answer can only be seen as a recommendation to those who have not read it. To sum up this answer in a sentence, I would say: here journalism has grown far beyond its own boundaries to create a masterpiece.
That has, to my knowledge, never happened before, not least because journalism, however outstanding it may sometimes be, must be measured by its currency value, and thus has to respond to a precise theme. But I have never read a report whose theme, as here, is nothing less than our life.
In general, it does not take any particular analytical perspicacity to unmask our life as an absurd and potentially catastrophic sequence of events, deliberate or otherwise, an implementation of something that is essentially impossible. But this book does more than that, it deals with the vanity of the demand to be able to lead a meaningful existence as a sophisticated and sensitive intellectual with precise standards and moral commitment, and the ability to depict the melancholy of this vanity with such a truly sublime, almost floating lightness clearly remained Renata Adler's intention. At the same time, everything that is said here, is only recorded in the margin, so to speak, as a provisional report, a flashback or a digression.
But it is in the formally perfect whole that arises out of these apparently sober, sometimes poker-faced, but in fact brilliantly trenchant - and never excessively trenchant - notes that great art lies. And thus the book justifies its subtitle of 'novel'. A novel 'as if written by life', but truly, not everyone's life, not a novelist's life, but the life of a highly intelligent and spirited individual, with a many-layered and seismographic consciousness and an irresistible sense of comedy, beneath which, by way of counterpoint, and only in delicate hints, deep grief shines forth over the fact that everything is as it is and not as it should be. The book is on my bedside table.
With best wishes,
Yours, Wolfgang.
Best known for his bestselling biography of Mozart, Wolfgang Hildesheimer was a polymathic novelist, translator, painter and dramatist. A member of the influential literary association Gruppe 47, with Günter Grass, Heinrich Boll and Paul Celan, he was extremely well-connected in the world of German publishing and an astute observer of the literary scene. As this 1980 letter to his publisher Siegfried Unseld, the formidable director of Suhrkamp Verlag, reveals, he was one of the first to notice the importance of Renat
