Wolfgang Hildesheimer (1916–1991)

The Problems of Absurdity

Hildesheimer's "Tynset" records a man's nocturnal ramblings, both in his mind and around his house, during one sleepless night. It has absurdist or surrealist moments -- a man frozen in his car, a narrator who used to dial people at random and tell them they should be afraid, a harmonium playing out of tune in a cavernous space, a Renaissance bed that slept seven people -- but those moments are rendered ineffective by the novel's framing: after all, a sleepless night, filled with miscellaneous memories, is going to be full of leaps and incongruities. If such a novel is going to work, then, it needs something other than playful absurdity or surprise to hold it together (or to demonstrate that it is fragmented, like its narrator's mind).

The title is the name of an actual town in Norway, a few hours south of Trondheim. The narrator has picked it a random from a train schedule, which he reads, along with phone books, as an engine for his imagination. It's a thin conceit by definition, and it never becomes poignant. The book has two or three long set pieces: a party, during which hymns are sung; an extended Boccaccian fantasy about seven people who one slept on the narrator's antique bed; and an inventory of the house.

The problem here is that set-pieces, especially in a narrative structure that will by its own definition be looking for coherence and thematic continuity, need to be magnetic: they need to work to pull the novel together (or to provide proof it is fragmented). These do neither.

"Tynset" is undecided between two more promising poles: a thronged, purposeless, desperately lonely night spent with an anti-social insomniac; and an entertaining, stream-of-consciousness showpiece of the novelist's (and the insomniac's) bursting imagination. Or, to add a pole: the novel could also have drawn us, hopelessly, toward the chimera of Tynset, the place that the narrator had never visited, planned to visit, but would in fact never visit. It's too bad this wasn't reworked in one of those directions, or in some other, because as it stands it's an indecisive mixture, afraid of deep despair, infatuated with colorful stories, inconstant in its allegiance to its narrator's empty life.… (meer)