I have just finished reading the quite entertaining book Rumo and His Miraculous Adventures by German author Walter Moers. It is doubtful whether I ever would have purchased this book for myself — it being both outside of my typical choice of genres and relatively obscure — yet I did read it because it was given to me by one of my most intellectually distinguished friends, the anthropologist Alexander Mawyer (an old U of C buddy, now a professor at Lake Forest College). And because Alex is both a cultivated student of fine literature and a voracious consumer of culture both popular and fringe, and also has so often recommended fine reads to me in the past, I trusted his guidance, even though this dauntingly sized 600+ page trade-paperback promised to suck up many long hours of my precious and limited reading time.

After reading the book, I remain unsure as to how to categorize it. It is tempting to classify it as children’s literature. Moers is both a writer and an illustrator, and his book is animated in both words and pictures by a fanciful and delightful wit and whimsy that many people would associate with Juvenile fiction. A blurb from the Washington Post on the cover of my copy shows that its critic so classified it; the writer describes Rumo as “Equal parts J.K. Rowling, Douglas Adams, and Shel Silverstein … a work of monumental silliness.” In truth, that’s an inept and pathetic description, a failure of critical imagination. The only thing Moers has in common with Silverstein is that they are both self-illustrating writers. And while there could be many points of comparison with J. K. Rowling (a male central character, a school, a struggle with the forces of Evil, a prevalence of strange and inventive names and fantastic creatures), it is doubtful whether any of these comparisons would prove particularly fruitful, I think, since Rowling’s fantastic parallel world of English schoolchildren has an entirely different generic feel, literary purpose, intended audience, and, most importantly, stylistic level. Rowling is a writer whose simple style and schoolchildren’s theme is meant to ensnare the minds of (our inner) ten year olds longing to grow up. Her whimsical side is mere color; the humor found in her books has the stale feel of adolescent television programming, and the focus throughout is on the drama of coming of age. Whatever else Rumo may be, it is not really a “coming of age” story. The writing style could be argued to come closer to Adams, I suppose, whose central character in the Hitchhiker’s Guide books also wanders through a series of unfamiliar and fantastic adventures set in a twisted and humorous imaginary universe. But again, the comparison is fruitful only if one highlights the differences. Adams uses extremely economical language, tells a straightforward adventure story, and employs his humor in a satirical and critical fashion entertaining to both young readres and adults. His novels are short and uproariously, bitingly funny. That isn’t Moers at all. Rumo is sprawling, epic in scope, and, while it is occasionally quite funny, humor seems not to be its central purpose. Adams is a humorist; Moers is more like a dungeon master.

Seting apart the German Moers from these English authors, the Juvenile Rowling and the Adolescent Adams, is a literary fascination and preoccupation with violence, bloodshed, warfare, and destruction. Moers’ mixes a dead serious, Homerically clinical poetry of bloody violence with his madcap literary hallucination. In my view, this moves the book out of the category of Juvenile and adolescent fiction and into the domain of geek lit. He is a comic-book Tolkein. The story takes place in a completely fantastic imaginary world (Zamonia). This world doesn’t seem unfamiliar. In literary terms, Rumo seems rather to be a lampoon, or a lark, constructed from an unlikely literary composite of familiar epics, fairy tales, legends, fantasy novels, horror pictures, biology and physics textbooks, and natural history museum exhibits.

As a writer, Moers’ greatest gifts lie in two areas; the first is “the fantastic synthesis of unlikely juxtapositions” (for example, one of the main characters is an amphibious creature called a “Shark Grub”) and the second, even greater gift, is his talent for world-creation through composition of lists.

Hardly a page of this novel goes by without one of Moers’ fabulous lists. Moers uses lists to create and describe scenes, rooms, persons or creatures, histories, landscapes, events… you name it. For an example, consider this scene in which the main character, Rumo, a kind of bipedal horned talking swashbuckling dog called a Wolperting, visits a fairground:

Rumo pricked up his ears. The air was throbbing with sounds that were never to be heard on other occasions: singing saws, glockenspiels, demonic cries, Vulphead madrigals, wooden rattles, mouth drums, foot bells. Laughter rang out on all sides, mingled with shrill cries of terror from the ghost trains and the squeal of bagpipes. Hordes of musicians playing curious instruments competed for the public’s attention and strove to drown each other. Bassophonists made the ground shake, a Bufadista soprano sang of unrequited love in old Zamonian, stallholders did their best to outshout one another, rockets soard hissing into the air, paper ducks quacked, tin drums beat a tattoo (283).

The next paragraph lists the amazing sights that Rumo’s eyes beheld, and then, on the same page, comes this paragraph:

Then there were the smells: cinnamon, honey, saffron, grilled sausages, roast marsh hog, dried cod, mulled wine, smoked eel, baked apples, onion soup, incense, tobacco smoke, goose dripping. Outside most of the booths that sold food were small braziers in which garlic and onion bulbs were burnt to lend the night air an appetising aroma. Goose, chicken and turkey legs encased in clay cooked slowly in pits filled with glowing charcoal. A thick, fragrant soup of pigs’ trotters and peas simmered in a massive cast-iron cauldron. Potatoes and onions were sautéed in thyme-flavored oil, quail fried in lard, trout grilled on sticks. Legs of lamb sizzled over open fires, corn cobs and loaves of bread were baked in clay ovens. A whole ostrich revolved on a spit while ravenous Montanic Dwarfs sat round it clattering their knives and forks. Myrrh was burnt, joss sticks smouldered, masked Moomies tossed curry powder into the air. Rumo continued to cling to Urs.

This is an ancient and epic literary technique, found as early as the Illiad, where Homer makes frequent use of lists, both to sketch vast tableaux of actions and events, and also to describe ornate objects, such as Achilles’ shield. Moers uses and abuses the technique marvelously, transforming it into a style rococo, and in the process giving himself free reign to sketch in and invent the fascinating details of his imagined world. One can flip almost randomly through the book and find scores of them: “Saponic Leeches, Oilsnakes, Dungworms, Suckerfoot Spiders, Bateriomorphs, Plauge Frogs, Trogloticks, Speleovampires — those were the true masters of this dark damp domain” (521).

And his lists aren’t the only thing that remind me of Homer. Rumo’s adventures seem to be modeled after the Odyssey right from the start. When the Wolperting begins his adventures as a prisoner and potential food source, held captive in a floating cave by terrifying but incompetent one eyed “Demonicles,” one is hard pressed not to recall Odysseus and the Cyclops.

Rumo is self-consciously modeled on the form of a saga, retold in the world of the comic-fan convention. Near the end of the novel, Rumo’s telepathically talking sword Dandelion admonishes him for failing to speak up during a campfire session of storytelling:

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Dandelion demanded. “Our own experiences would surely have made the best story of all. The fight in Nurn Forest! Yggdra Syl! The casket! The Icemaggogs! The Vrahoks! General Ticktock’s innards! Ideal subjects for inclusion in lessons on the heroic sagas!”

“I’m no good at telling stories,” Rumo protested.

Rumo may not be a great Bard, but Moers is more than up to the task, the Arrian to Rumo’s Alexander.

I don’t have anything much profound to say about this book. I just want to indicate my appreciation for the imaginative impulse that brought this world to life. It’s a good read, and worthy of your attention, if you like macabre and bloody action stories set in improbable landscapes peopled by talking horned dogs and five-brained absent minded professors. Thanks Alex!

Walter Moers, Rumo and His Miraculous Adventures (trans. John Brownjohn; New York: Overlook Press, 2004; Paperback edition 2007) 688 pages; $16.95; ISBN-10: 1-58567-936-4 / ISBN-13 978-1-58567-936-2.

I recently finished reading Philip K. Dick’s wonderful novel Dr. Bloodmoney, which is perhaps the least read deeply influential masterpiece in twentieth century science fiction. The characters and situation of the novel could only emerge from the mind of Dick. Dick unfolds a tangled story set in post-nuclear holocaust Marin county. The characters include a schizophrenic expat German nuclear physicist who just might have brought on the war with his mind; a hostile telekinetic phocomelus mimic for whom the disaster is the key to personal power; an insouciant psychic fetus in fetu, the unlikely hero of the story; a plucky “negro” TV repairman, who survives by eating rats and sellin traps; a secretive and conniving nymphomaniac housewife, and a preternaturally charming celebrity astronaut who, stranded in orbit, runs a radio show for the end of the world. From this motley assemblage Dick constructs a eerie story of American culture, fear, transformation and redemption. That the plot of the novel is implausible, impossible, and bizarre stands not at all in the way of its greatness. Dick’s creation is a collective fever-dream hallucination, an uncanny exploration of post-nuclear insanity, a space-age cultural freakshow, a novel of race and infirmity, of hatred, stupidity, community, and desire, of madness, politics, and economics. Its imprint is everywhere in the fringes of literature. Highly recommended.

Further Reading

Wikipedia entry on Dr. Bloodmoney

A few days ago I finished reading After Life in Roman Paganism by legendary French historian of religion Franz Cumont. The book publishes lectures originally delivered in English at Yale University in 1921.

My copy, a Dover Publications paperback edition from 1959, originally cost $1.35, was designed to last for a long time in a library, and is “an unabridged and unaltered republication of the first edition published by Yale University Press in 1922.” There is a stamp on the cover page which reads “The University of Chicago / Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion.” And the volume is signed J. M. Kitagawa / U of Chicago in blue pencil. Kitagawa is still a legendary name around the University of Chicago, although he is not very well known.

Back to the volume itself. There are no annotations in the book… at all. Nor was there sign of a lot of reading. Now, I don’t think that means Kitagawa didn’t read it, because my reading of it, which occurred on two coasts and included quite a few nights that ended with dropping the copy on the floor of a beach house, left very little trace as well, and I also did not make marginal notes. It’s a sturdy book, designed to be clothbound and reside on a dusty shelf (unread) for generations.

Concerning the contents of the book, I found Cumont an ingenuously knowing historian, but also a friend to knowledge. He offers discussion of a treasure trove of evidences taken from the Roman era of the broader Mediterranean world, and thus his purview encompasses Greece, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and even further afield. He loves the subject and conveys his love quite vividly. For instance: long flights of fanciful dreamlike prose extol astronomical immortality as the ultimate achievement of pagan eschatological thought. Other passages convey his own deep fascination with the existential problem of human life, namely, it’s apparent end. But such follies of a brilliant scholar are more than matched by the immense learning he brings to the task. Here is a teacher who will for years continue to master many of us students of religion. Cumont gives a variety of learned citations to ancient authors, monuments, and inscriptions from a spectrum of traditions and geographical regions. One could learn a great deal, chasing down the sources cited by Cumont.

Ultimately, Cumont’s approach is the problem. The variety itself cannot be sustained. Cumont uses a safely vague (and so totally implausible) tissue of statements implying causal and actual connection between his scores of points of evidence. He cites so many modes of piety, varieties of belief, common practices, popular expressions, poetic and dramatic utterances, epitaphs, myths and prayers that he apparently has no time left for offering a plausible case that the words things and images he discusses all properly relate to one another, or a common subject, historically. Which is not to say that they don’t — often they clearly do. For example, in the first half of the book, the Pythagoreans appear to have enormous and far reaching influence on many thinkers, and much of his exposition is at least plausible. But the details of the relationship remain unclear in his exposition. So, this book is untamed and speculative, but sometimes right.

More about this book on strata.

Read it on Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=VC4VAAAAYAAJ.