moon_custafer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
moon_custafer) wrote2018-08-31 08:28 am
moon_custafer) wrote2018-08-31 08:28 am
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Lick Your Plate, and You'll Lick the World
My parents had some credit with their local used-bookstore a while back and asked if they could get me anything — I asked for this, because it contains Tubby Schaumann: A Tale of Murder and the High Seas, which as far as I know is the only English translation of Raabe's Stopfkuchen (1891.) It had to be ordered in, but they brought it to me earlier this week.
It’s a very odd novel, and I don’t know how much of that is the translation (apparently “Tubby” is a very inaccurate and much-too-gentle translation of the protagonist’s nickname, which should be something more like “Cake-stuffer”). Structurally, this book is kind of a murder-mystery told backwards. It's also kind of a romance in which a Laurence Sterne character gets dropped him into a Brontë novel, where he looks around, quietly decides to counteract all the tragedy, and more-or-less succeeds.
Is 1891 late enough for this to be a really early deconstruction of the mystery genre? The unsolved murder of somebody named Kienbaum is important to the plot, but until almost the very end, we don’t even find out who Keinbaum was, why anyone might have wanted him dead, or any details of the crime. Like, through the whole novel it kind of serves as the local curse or ghost story that no one ever breaks down in detail because everyone’s assumed to already know all about it, including who did it (spoiler -- they're wrong).
This is also one of those stories where the narrator is the least-interesting person in the story, although I don’t know whether Edward's casual racism was intended, in the 19th century, to be as off-putting as it is now, or just a reminder that he’s lived in South Africa. Since Tubby calls him out on never actually defending him from his childhood bullies and occasionally joining them, I think we’re meant to have some reservations about Edward’s opinions.
Luckily once Tubby actually shows up he (and his wife Valentina) pretty much take over telling the story, and they’re rather more likeable — for one thing, they’re one of the more passionately-in-love married couples in books, and for another, Tubby is.... sort of like if you combined Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim into one person; he’s a bit better than either of those two at getting to the point of his story, but he’s going to take his time getting there; deliberately, even.
I think to an extent keeping his listeners on tenterhooks is his revenge against everyone who considered him slow and stupid as a child, because though essentially benign, he’s not without snark. His marriage to Valentina, happy as it is, is very much a “we two against the world” kind of thing, in which they’ve helped each other overcome their miserable childhoods (like I said, she lived in a Brontë novel until Tubby came along). Absolutely no one in this story comments on the fact that they don’t have kids; like, there’s no mention of it, positive or negative— it’s just sort of a given that their life includes each other, the farm their pets, Tubby’s fossil mammoth that Valentina won’t let him keep in the dinning room (although the coproliths are ok) and no children, even as an absence. I’m only assuming they don’t have kids because none ever appear on scene, and they don’t seem like the kind of people who’d raise their offspring at arm’s length. Oh yeah, this story also involves palaeontology, which is one of Tubby’s obsessions, along with the history of the Seven Years’ War. You see why he and Uncle Toby might approve of one another.
Also—
To sum up: ?/10 for translation, 8/10 for interesting plot structure, 9/10 for heroic fat representation, 10/10 for GERMANNESS
It’s a very odd novel, and I don’t know how much of that is the translation (apparently “Tubby” is a very inaccurate and much-too-gentle translation of the protagonist’s nickname, which should be something more like “Cake-stuffer”). Structurally, this book is kind of a murder-mystery told backwards. It's also kind of a romance in which a Laurence Sterne character gets dropped him into a Brontë novel, where he looks around, quietly decides to counteract all the tragedy, and more-or-less succeeds.
Is 1891 late enough for this to be a really early deconstruction of the mystery genre? The unsolved murder of somebody named Kienbaum is important to the plot, but until almost the very end, we don’t even find out who Keinbaum was, why anyone might have wanted him dead, or any details of the crime. Like, through the whole novel it kind of serves as the local curse or ghost story that no one ever breaks down in detail because everyone’s assumed to already know all about it, including who did it (spoiler -- they're wrong).
This is also one of those stories where the narrator is the least-interesting person in the story, although I don’t know whether Edward's casual racism was intended, in the 19th century, to be as off-putting as it is now, or just a reminder that he’s lived in South Africa. Since Tubby calls him out on never actually defending him from his childhood bullies and occasionally joining them, I think we’re meant to have some reservations about Edward’s opinions.
Luckily once Tubby actually shows up he (and his wife Valentina) pretty much take over telling the story, and they’re rather more likeable — for one thing, they’re one of the more passionately-in-love married couples in books, and for another, Tubby is.... sort of like if you combined Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim into one person; he’s a bit better than either of those two at getting to the point of his story, but he’s going to take his time getting there; deliberately, even.
I think to an extent keeping his listeners on tenterhooks is his revenge against everyone who considered him slow and stupid as a child, because though essentially benign, he’s not without snark. His marriage to Valentina, happy as it is, is very much a “we two against the world” kind of thing, in which they’ve helped each other overcome their miserable childhoods (like I said, she lived in a Brontë novel until Tubby came along). Absolutely no one in this story comments on the fact that they don’t have kids; like, there’s no mention of it, positive or negative— it’s just sort of a given that their life includes each other, the farm their pets, Tubby’s fossil mammoth that Valentina won’t let him keep in the dinning room (although the coproliths are ok) and no children, even as an absence. I’m only assuming they don’t have kids because none ever appear on scene, and they don’t seem like the kind of people who’d raise their offspring at arm’s length. Oh yeah, this story also involves palaeontology, which is one of Tubby’s obsessions, along with the history of the Seven Years’ War. You see why he and Uncle Toby might approve of one another.
Also—
- Aside from his immense weight, I think Tubby might actually have some undiagnosed disability in his legs, like childhood rickets or polio, that no one ever bothered to notice because the people in his town suck. Then again, he’s apparently capable of scrambling in and out to quarries to dig fossils-- but one of the themes in this book is that Tubby is actually really competent as long as (a) it’s something he wants to do and (b) he’s allowed to go about it his own way.
- I think there’s a bit in this story where Tubby has to protect Valentina from an attempted rape and possibly murder by some drunken household servants after her father has a stroke, and in most stories this would be a big action scene, but in this tale it happens so allusively and so far offstage I’m not even sure I’m interpreting it correctly. A certain amount of Tubby’s digressiveness is probably not wanting to trigger his wife with discussions of past trauma. He’s more willing to speak of his own past, because he considers his fat body and his patient personality to be inextricably entwined, which I believe is in keeping with the medical theories of his era (he’s sort of literally thick-skinned.)
- People are cutting down the hedgerows and that’s Bad (at Red Hill Farm, Tubby and Valentina are kind of holding off Industrialization, as well as their nosy neighbours, though they can afford to do so because they leased most of their land to a sugar-beet grower, so it's not a perfect solution.)
- Everyone in this story is German, and Edward seems worried you might forget this if he doesn’t mention it every few paragraphs, but then he’s been out of the country for twenty years so maybe he’s overcompensating.
- He’s writing up the framing narrative on the boat back to South Africa, and every so often we come back to him on the boat, griping about the crew and his fellow-passengers. Meanwhile the passengers, he implies, are wondering who this guy is writing a manuscript, and the Captain complains they're going to run dry on ink.
-
I still don’t know what that bit about “Go forth from the Ark” is about.
To sum up: ?/10 for translation, 8/10 for interesting plot structure, 9/10 for heroic fat representation, 10/10 for GERMANNESS