Innerfar by Gerhard Kopf

Innerfar by Gerhard Kopf

Actually the book I have contains both Innerfar and Bluff, or Southern Cross, by Gerhard Kopf. But I’m going to read a library book before I get back to Bluff.

To oversimplify, greatly, and to leave out the cultural significance which is everything but which I am not yet able to describe sufficiently: a once-famous poet turns up in a psychiatric hospital for dementia and schizophrenia, nobody quite realizing who she is, and nobody being able to tell when she is completely disoriented or when she has her moments of absolute clarity and insight which she often expresses in allegory, quotations, or poetic storytelling. This is juxtaposed with the narrator’s remembrances of earlier times with the poet.

The editing in this book is a bit off- sometimes they forgot periods and such, and this was in the afterword by the translator so I know it wasn’t part and parcel of the novel experience. It didn’t make too much difference, the story being so liminal; it just added to the disorientation. Still, one would think they could have attended better.

From reviews (on the linked Amazon page):

Loss and fulfillment cohabit uneasily in the novel as Kopf purposefully blurs the distinction between reality and fantasy, truth and illusion, in order to make a rather Romantic point about the redemptive powers of the imagination.

[T]he book is a search for identity through memory and storytelling.

Here are two quotes from the book that both vie to be my favorite:

Every breath taken is an omission (p. 79)

&

“Praised be the subjunctive and its knight Talander.” (p.102)

(Now I must read August Bohse, who wrote under the pen name Talander.)
and my favorite passage:

Even at the table the doctor has her notebook ready. The murmuring is mentioned as well as several times the expression: “Sausage in your eye.” Also that the patient then points in turn at the sausage slices on the plate and at her left eye, which she has closed.

She kneads false teeth out of the bread.

Carefully she makes the incisors and the jaw teeth, molds a lower jaw- the likeness is astonishing.

Suddenly and unexpectedly she shoves the creation in her mouth.

The doctor asks, writing down at the same time:
“What are you doing, Mrs. Piloti?”

“You don’t play with your food.” Nurse Angela has a serious expression on her face.

“My father always used to say that before he went to Billi. Billi, my teddy bear. But you can see what I’m doing.

I’m making a mouth shoe.”

(p. 55)

It’s a trip. At one point, I was reading such as the above (basically the whole novel is like this), and thinking how familiar it seemed somehow, when son interrupted to tell me, apropos of nothing, that a bank is a wolf house that sells money. And then I looked around at my life with a different perspective and realized why the story was so familiar after all.

But I am not disconsolate at all. That would be out of place.

Finally experience has overtaken longing. Out of the reconciliation of reality and dream she draws unending strength. (p.110)