WINGS OF STONE (Selige Zeiten, brüchige Welt)

Novel by Robert Menasse, 1991

Robert Menasse's most acclaimed novel, Wings of Stone (2000; Selige Zeiten, brüchige Welt, 1991) is actually the second part of his series Trilogie der Entgeisterung ("Trilogy of the Breakdown of Spirit," a reference to G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenlogy of Spirit ). Rather than continuing where the first novel Sinnliche Gewissheit (1988; "Sense Certainty") ends, namely with the story of the novel's protagonist Roman Gilanian, Wings of Stone goes backward in time to narrate the prehistory of two characters who befriend Roman in the first novel, Leo Singer and Judith Katz. Unlike Sinnliche Gewissheit , which is written in the first person, Menasse's second novel maintains a more distant narrative perspective with its third-person narration and its use of style indirecte libre. In addition, although the story centers around Leo and his life, it cleverly shifts the narrative focus at times to concentrate on Judith, denying Leo the same status of hero that Roman has in the first novel, which is perhaps fitting for a work in which the protagonist is unable to fulfill the responsibilities dictated to him by the genre. Billed by critics as a reverse bildungsroman, Wings of Stone tells the story of a character who fails to live up to his own story.

Menasse's novel is not about the Holocaust; indeed, the events in Europe between 1933 and 1945 are not referred to at all, even obliquely. Instead of portraying characters who are overtly affected by the Holocaust, Menasse presents the reader with a world in which the Holocaust, though largely forgotten and somewhat "normalized," continues to figure in the lives of the "second generation," the sons and daughters of those who survived or were forced into exile. In Wings of Stone the history of fascism in Austria and the Nazi persecution of the Jews becomes a silent, massive force that informs Leo and Judith's situation and the ways in which they perceive themselves and the world.

Located on two continents and spanning almost 20 years, Menasse's novel begins in Vienna in 1965, when Leo and Judith first meet, and ends in Brazil with Judith's death. At their first meeting in a university cafeteria, the two find that they have much in common—they are both the children of Viennese Jews who fled Austria in 1938 for exile in São Paulo, Brazil. Leo returned to Vienna in 1959 with his parents, who decided to come back home "since everything was back to normal." Yet, having grown up in Brazil, he feels anything but at home in Vienna and longs to return to São Paulo. Judith, on the other hand, has come to Vienna to study against the wishes of her parents, who had no interest in returning to the country that had intended to exterminate them. She is quickly disappointed, however, by the stifling and provincial atmosphere of Viennese cultural life, the Austrians' arrogant ignorance about Brazil, and the remnants of fascism in Austrian politics and society. In the first pages of the novel, the two revel in their luck at finding in each other someone who feels as alienated and homeless as themselves, and Leo quickly falls in love with Judith, believing he sees in her his own "mirror image." This momentary unity, which slowly unravels throughout the course of the novel, butts up against its first obstacle when it becomes clear that, although the two have almost parallel exile experiences, their feelings of alienation are strikingly different from one another. Leo looks back nostalgically to Brazil as his home, but for Judith the ideal image of home has been destroyed, for she has experienced the military takeover in Brazil and the murderous tactics of its totalitarian regime. As she tells Leo, "The exile of the parents means exile for the next generation, too, and they are in exile wherever they are." Leo later discovers this for himself, when he returns to São Paulo after the death of his father and fails to find the home he has idealized in his thoughts. Homeless and without direction, both Leo and Judith are unable to construct their lives in any meaningful way because of the absence of strong roots that would ground their identities.

Intending (but never managing) to write a doctoral dissertation on Hegel's philosophy that will change the world, Leo attempts to retain the original moment of union with Judith by fashioning her into his muse, an ideal antithesis with whom he could attain a synthesis of both love and intellectual production. Judith, however, resists his attempt to co-opt her, and the novel develops with the slow disintegration of their relationship. At the end, after almost 20 years of struggling with procrastination and literary impotence in which he finds he has written close to nothing, Leo discovers that Judith has secretly recorded his thoughts on Hegel, effectively writing the book that he has spent his life trying to write. In order to claim his life's work, he murders her and assumes the text as his own, publishing it as quickly as possible so that it can begin the hoped-for philosophical revolution. In the end, however, only five copies of the book are sold, and Leo is left with neither home, muse, nor intellectual ambition.

—Erin McGlothlin