Gnaw the fruit of History to its paradoxical core

Telling stories, embracing the world, this does not mean submitting reality to an unstoppable order of discourse, to a fiction that demoralizes the paradoxical element of existence itself. Cioran tells us that at a certain point History dies because it no longer has a paradox. And yet, we see this kind of infestation of the new spirit on the documents of the past, the way in which they try to bring everything back to light and subject it to an ideal hallucination, to this effect of revisionism, which pretends to understand better, but which, in fact, ignores precisely what gives substance to the great myths. We see them rummaging through libraries in search of these intimate parts of the myths, trying to exhume small details, produce naive fictions and puny monstrous forms from corpses that, in their substance, remain untouched. This formula has become one of the great designs of a certain literature that obtains the favor of readers, perhaps because it sells them an idea that the secret we are pursuing would say enough. This is how the reader is trapped, trying to overcome other distractions, entangling and involving him in a more powerful web. This requires absurd efforts, firstly because the general tendency, as Wladimir Kaminer tells us, is for everyone to take their own dreams, illusions and fantasies as reality, and vice versa. “Well looked at, what we call reality results from the absolutely individual perceptions of our sensory organs – just like illusions.” It has long been recognized how the value of experience has fallen, paving the way for the disintegration of reality, which, from now on, adapts to the impostures that each person carries in an effort to adapt to societies marked by paranoia. Perhaps that is why it is difficult to find those who are capable of converting the reality that is close to them, so familiar, into something that is illuminating, and that can escape this meaningless whole and that is being saved by the speed of the shipwreck. Faced with the world as it appears to us today, and this when subject to this poor articulation and the phraseology of bodies that promise to disseminate facts, but that bury us in quite volatile narratives, we can see how they themselves respond to this shipwreck, to a kind of of madness that, as it subjects us to its attraction, seems to swallow us in one distraction after another, no longer able to reproduce any experience. “If you cannot understand something in real life, or if it seems incompatible with the rest, you declare without further ado that it is an illusion”, notes Kaminer. “Time is an illusion, Albert Einstein said. He also took reality to be an illusion, but an especially obstinate one.” It seems that, to some extent, this obstinacy has been replaced by the very paradoxical elements that offer us a glimpse of the true plot that makes up reality. It is curious to note how in these concise formulas through which one generation sought to pass on a certain experience to another, in proverbs or moral tales, what they express so often seems to be nonsense, a defiance of logic. As if the authority that only comes with age gives us the ability to abandon our expectations and illusions in order to embrace a life lesson. Benjamin had long wondered: “Where do you still find people capable of telling a story properly? Are there still dying people who say such lasting words that pass like a ring from generation to generation? Is a proverb useful today? Who still thinks they can deal with youth by invoking their experience?”

Wladimir Kaminer enjoys a tremendous perspective advantage as a storyteller. Born in Moscow in 1967, he trained in sound engineering for theater and radio, and is today one of the most popular chroniclers writing in German, having managed to get the GDR to grant him humanitarian asylum (due to a rule that opened this possibility for Russians of Jewish origin) and gave him a passport a few months before the fall of the Wall. With reunification, he was able to maintain his nationality, moving to Berlin in 1990. He came to writing somewhat accidentally, first came his Russendisko, parties that livened up the nightlife of the German capital, in which Kaminer was the DJ of service, and played music coming from the cold to thaw the bones, captivating other exiles as well as the local fauna. The popularity of these parties paved the way for him to sign a very popular program on the radio, Wladimirs Welt [O Mundo de Wladimir], and it is already in this century that he begins to record so many of the stories and anecdotes or parables that his bumpy journey prepared him to understand and treasure. There is without a sinisterly burlesque element in these episodes that he organizes like beads of a profane rosary, and we sense how the culture and humor, the armor of these people subjected to the absurdity and systematic madness of the Soviet framework, all of this informs these chronicles. Since 2000, Kaminer has published dozens of volumes such as this Breakfast on the Edge of the Apocalypse, and before Ziggurat, Carlos Vaz Marques had already included one of his books in the Travel collection he coordinates at Tinta-da-China, Viagem a Tralalá. But it was with the Cavalo de Ferro label, in 2003, that the author made his debut among us, with Militärmusik, followed, two years later, by Russendisko. Instead of a news treatment, or using the conventions of reporting, Kaminer seems to dedicate himself to studying the elements of the paradox, and uses a caustic irony to portray scenes of existences that so often seem to turn in this or that way. in that sense only to serve as entertainment for dishonored gods. Emigrants from the East are often the protagonists of their narratives, telling us about the adversity and misfortunes of these lives that bring the legacy of wisdom obtained in a sordidly fabulous universe and immerse themselves in German reality, somewhat alienated and uninterested in the framework of values. and European illusions. With a light hand, with a wise and poetic lightness of touch combined with an attraction to picaresque elements, Kaminer manages to capture in his chronicles some of that residue of ancient parables, that luxury of condensing the essential meaning, disconnected from its epic integration into the historical concrete. of reality, human, social and political. His chronicles are daydreams in which Kaminer’s intention seems to be to confront himself with the empty nonsense that absorbs life, capturing those unusual elements that shape everyday reality, in family and social relationships, in History that has long been gave up making any sense. One of the most powerful examples of this way of subjecting the paradoxical aspect of reality to examination appears in Journey to Tralalá, when he recalls how for those who came from the societies of the former Soviet Union, the idea of ​​visiting other countries was to participate in a true temporal journey. and between dimensions, a possibility to venture and understand this phenomenon of contraction and expansion of the senses obtained through the axis of illusions of each society, capable of producing a world in its image. Paris appeared as an “almost unattainable paradise” for these natives of those hellish bureaucratic labyrinths. It is between a series of drifts, while drinking beers in Berlin with a friend and the two enjoying the prospect of their freedom of movement like an immeasurable menu, that Kaminer tells how his uncle Boris, after living for a few years deported to a colony criminal in Kazakhstan, he later found himself rehabilitated by the regime, which now praised him as a hero of work, and which, as a reward, saw him being granted the opportunity to visit “Paris”. We are at the beginning of the 70s, and at that time, the Soviet government rewarded “one hundred proletarians, among the best”, all party members, naturally, with a trip abroad. With a very limited horizon in terms of what lay beyond the motherland, the city of love and the Eiffel Tower largely dominated preferences. But in order not to allow their workers to really fall in love, the authorities decided that the best thing was to condition their own paradise, and so they ordered “their own foreigner to be built in the steppes of southern Russia (…). During the summer, I lived in Paris. At the arrival of autumn, when the clouds gathered and it started to rain, it was quickly transformed into London. The object was classified as a state secret, and only KGB employees could live and work there with their families. They received the necessary instruction to carry out their duties, and in the summer they only spoke in French, in the autumn in English.