Here’s a chance to impress your friends at the bar with two genres rarely associated with BookTok: poetry in translation and the book-length essay. A single poem by the brilliant Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, ‘Salt and Bread’, is the jumping-off point for this lively and highly discursive essay from Berlin-based novelist Tom McCarthy, who chews through Aeschylus’ Oresteia, David Lynch’s avant-kitsch films, a bizarre late Kafka short story, bits of Shakespeare and James Joyce, and Bachmann’s masterpiece novel, Malina.
McCarthy resists torturing readers with too close a reading, instead offering a conversational and short literary journey – clocking in at just under 70 pages – that’s in turns erudite, smug and clever. He draws out beauty from the poem, originally published in Bachmann’s 1953 collection Borrowed Time: “So I gather the salt / when the sea overcomes us, / and turn back / and lay it on the threshold / and step into the house. / We share bread with the rain; / bread, a debt, and a house.” It’s a satisfying read for Bachmanniacs (which many of us at The Berliner’s book section are). The uninitiated, though, might do better to start with her work directly.
- The Threshold and the Ledger by Tom McCarthy is available from Notting Hill Editions, details.
