Chinese calligraphers write poems in water on stone slabs which evaporate before completion.
A Cambodian fisherman, his extensive family long ago butchered by the Khmer Rouge, lights the candles on a bamboo model of his boat and bows in gratefulness that the Mekong river has accepted his sacrifice.
In a village on the west of Ireland a father rescues a child from mourning for a lost snowman by praying to its melted remains.
In the Bolivian highlands a woman raises her fist in anger at four passing aircraft of a military dictator and cries out ‘No pasarán’. One the jets turns rounds and fire at her and her companions.
A German businessman, an escapee from Nazi Germany, dies in his new home in Brazil, having led a perfect life with a perfect love. Araucaria seeds rain down on the grave, bringing with them an intimation of eternity.
On New Zealand’s South Island, despite lashing rain and gusty winds, a young albatross takes off from the ground for the first time and utters a triumphant shriek as it enters the storm.
Huge blocks of stone marked with mantras surround a Tibetan lake. The writer has been engraving these for centuries, a guide says. The writer is a child.
I do not have a favourite book, but Atlas of an Anxious Man, by the Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr, is the book that I might keep if all other books were to be taken away from me – not because it is the greatest but because it best fills gaps left by the others. It is a book with something illuminating to say about everything.
Atlas of an Anxious Book is a travel book without travel. Instead of taking the reader on a journey, the narrator appears in places around the world where each time he witnesses something extraordinary. Even when what he documents is humdrum in that it is a part of the daily process of living for someone, he makes it extraordinary. It is a book where everyone throughout the world is engaged in the serious business of living, and in so doing become an object of wonder.
There is no progression from place to place; Ransmayr is simply there in Chile, Iceland, Brazil, Turkey, Morocco, Japan, Australia, Poland, Laos, Russia, Sri Lanka, Nepal. There are seventy episodes, as he calls them; seventy short chapters or essays. But unlike a standard book of travel essays, where the subject is ultimately the author (or set of authors), Ransmayr is only the lens through we are encouraged to see things more clearly. He is both himself – one poignant essay is about the death of his father at an Austrian park bench – and Everyman.
Each episode begins in the same way, with the words ‘I saw’, and each opening sentence is the key to the mysteries within. Collectively they read like the lines of a mysterious poem:
I saw a girl with a bamboo fishing road by the Bagmati river in Pashupatinath, Katmandu’s temple district
I saw the gardener’s weeping son on the steps outside a manor in the Irish county of Cork
I saw a three-toed sloth on the veranda of a blue wooden house on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast
I saw a cross-bearer on a stony track that ran towards a chain of hills covered with yuccas and prickly pears
I saw a narrow wooden walkway leading out into the mangrove swamps on the east coast of Sumatra
I saw the blue tower of the Bank of China in flames
I saw a hangman’s noose on a billboard the height of a house that towered over the flat roof of a border checkpoint
I saw seven bridal couples at a roadblock on the edge of Moscow’s Red Square
I saw three whispering monks in a cave 4,000 metres above sea level and high above the snow-covered shore of a mountain lake in the western Himalayas
(Arranged so, this selection of opening lines reads remarkably close to Bob Dylan’s song ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ – “I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it / I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it” – about which Dylan said, “Every line in it is actually the start of a whole new song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one.” Given that Ransmayr references Dylan’s song ‘Highlands’ in one of the book’s episodes, perhaps this is not accidental.)
Ransmayr appears to have been everywhere, and always at the most opportune times – he is in Nepal at the time of the royal family massacre, in New Delhi when Indira Gandhi is assassinated. One wonders at times how much of what he witnesses was a reality, and how much a product of the imagination. In an intriguing short note at the start of the book he writes that all seventy episodes are about “places I have lived in, visited or travelled through, and exclusively about people I have met … with only one exception – only once is there mention of a place that I have never been to, but with which I became familiar through my wife’s descriptions.”
But which episode? He will not say, instead reminding himself, and us, that “we know much of what we believe we know about our world only from other people’s accounts; and that (almost) every episode in this book could have been recounted by someone else who had ventured out, to distance lands or even just into their immediate neighourhood, and into close quarters with the unknown.” Here is the key. What he saw, anyone might see, if they had the seeing eye. The mysterious and the marvellous are everywhere about us, indeed are within us.
Atlas of an Anxious Man is like a travel book of old in which the writer travelled away from the familiar into a world of wonders. Its antecedents are Marco Polo, Thomas Coryat and Ibn Battuta, fearless adventurers with an eye for everything and a gift for uncovering and being able to relate that which makes the reader marvel at a world of which they are but a tiny part.
One episode, ‘Visit from Afar’, can be used to describe the method. He sees an Indian girl playing the accordion on the pavement outside a jeweller’s shop in a shady Mexico City street. She has her back to a jeweller’s shop, in which sits a coffin brimful of pearl necklaces, bracelets, brooches and the like, while in front of her there is a deep road excavation. Passers-by squeeze through the narrow gap between her and the hole, ignoring the cloth she has laid out with its small quantity of coins.
From this set-up Ransmayr delves into the traditions of the Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’, with its origins in Mayan, Toltec and Aztec cults, strangely merged with the Christian All Hallows and All Saints. The writer has seen the girl’s face with its “strange, light-green eyes” before. He remembers at last seeing such a face on a fresco in Oaxaca showing a young victim being led up the steps of a pyramid to human sacrifice. She is untroubled by her fate, instead being “completely steeped in the Aztec belief that transcendental happiness awaited every sacrificial victim once the obsidian knife had sliced open their breast on the block and their heart had been torn from their body”.
The hole, some ten metres deep, reaches down to the wonder of the world that once was, the sunken city of Tenochtitlan, destroyed by the Spanish conquistadors. History, myth, belief and the day-to-day all combine in the resonant image of the girl and her accordion, with her past yawning deeply beside her in a Mexico City street. Then the jeweller feeds her two candy skulls with the instruction to be gone, and she vanishes “along the confused golden-yellow trail of flowers of death into the stream of pedestrians”.
I came across the book through the travel writer Will Atkins, who had asked his online followers to recommend overlooked travel books that were out of the ordinary. This sent me to the website of Seagull Books – a Kolkata-based publisher with a stimulating list of arts and culture titles, exquisitely designed. The book had a terrible title, but in all other respects looks like an essential purchase. A copy arrived. The cover sported a haunting image which might be the outline of some uncertain land or maybe a representation of the anxious mind. I opened the first pages and I was transported, by the prose (an exquisite, precise English translation by Simon Pare), by the vision, by the consistent originality, and by its humanity. It was – and this is a great part of the appeal – unclassifiable. In a bookshop or a library it would have to sit on a shelf of its own.
Being unclassifiable is Christoph Ransmayr’s stock-in-trade. He is an essayist, novelist, playwright and poet. His major works, mostly fiction, have all been translated into English (not all of them published by Seagull). He first made his mark in 1984 with The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, a part-fictional, part-historical account of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition of 1872-1874 that resulted in the discovery of Franz Josef Land. His 1988 novel, The Last World, is an ingenious novel about the exile of the Roman poet Ovid, which uses the idea of metamorphosis (an Ovidian theme) to mind-bending effect. Among his more recent novels, The Flying Mountain (2006), breaks the most rules, being a tale in verse of two brothers who climb a lost Himalayan mountain. The idea sounds too much for any reader; the reality is a lyrical quest through hardship and love, a companion piece in thematic preoccupation with Atlas of an Anxious Man.
Ransmayr is a traveller and a writer who always takes the hard road. He ventures up mountains, walks through the toughest regions, finds himself on far-off islands. He cherishes the people he meets, making their world our world. He frequently looks up to the stars. He sometimes gets compared with W.G. Sebald, another writer who combines journeying with history, reality with fiction, but Sebald’s work focuses on memory, history and the specifics of Germany and the Second World War. Ransmayr is preoccupied by the present and its relationship to the mythical, and his area of interest is global. Not entirely global, however. The anxious man has journeyed widely, but there are few visits to Africa or North America, and some of his travels are ventures into his Austrian childhood.
Atlas of an Anxious Man does have a terrible title (it is just as bad in German: Atlas eines ängstlichen Mannes). Nevertheless, the title does make the idea of a personal atlas clear, and that anxiety is the underlying theme. Anxiety as in a disordered mind. Anxiety as in the attentiveness of apprehension. Anxiety as in a liveliness of sensation. Anxiety as in coming into close quarters with the unknown. Ransmayr himself says this about anxiety (translated from an interview in German):
Anxiety, as a form of caution, can, in the best-case scenario, complete our picture of the world, for it is aware not only of what is, but also of what could be and happen. Our lives are only truly present in their most fleeting, transient aspects; rather, they consist primarily of what was and what could be. The anxious person anticipates everything, yet does not succumb to paralysis, remain where they are, or disappear into hiding, but instead, even if sometimes uncertain, even if sometimes anxious and doubtful, they continue on their way.
It is a purposeful title, therefore, one that provides the key to the book’s construction, themes and method. We should treasure our anxieties; they makes us peculiarly alive to the moment. They can open up the world for us, if we are prepared to journey with that seeing eye.
All of this may make Atlas of an Anxious Man like an intellectual exercise, rather than something enjoyable. Far from it. It is a delightful, entrancing, humane read. Its episodes can be read in any order, or selectively, or from cover to cover as I have just done once more. An atlas is for opening up anywhere and exploring. Whichever way it is explored, he makes our world a world of wonders.
Links
- Atlas of an Anxious Man is available from Seagull Books in handsome hardback, priced only £16.99 at the moment
- There is an interview (in German) with Ransmayr in which he talks about Atlas of an Anxious Man on his website, which now seems only to be available in web archived form. The interview includes his thoughts on anxiety, quoted above, and a sample episode, ‘Star-Pickers’
- The designer of the distinctive cover of Atlas of an Anxious Mind is Sunandini Banerjee, Senior Editor and Senior Graphic Designer at Seagull Books
