The Guesthouse at the Sign of the Teetering Globe by Franziska zu Reventlow and James J. Conway (tr).
My rating: four stars
Franziska zu Reventlow isn’t anyone I’d heard of before, but she certainly had a life. Born into German nobility, she believed the abolition of marriage (and embrace of sexual freedom) were key to women becoming equal to men. She was known for kicking on in Munich’s Schwabing entertainment district, for hanging out with Rilke, and for philosophical jousting with an intellectual circle brought together by appreciation of Ibsen and for freaking out the squares.
(And, later, their embrace of, er, antisemitism.)
She also was a translator, and wrote stories. Several of them are collected in Rixdorf’s presentation of The Guesthouse at the Sign of the Teetering Globe, which originally appeared in 1917.
This is not a long collection, so I’ll attempt to make sure this review is similarly brief. The stories are suffused with an awareness of the awful upheavals of World War I, though everything seems to take place in an oddly suspended world, a place of travellers materially unaffected by the meatgrinder working its way through Europe.
The polished little man appeared in our midst one day; later we couldn’t remember exactly when or under what circumstances.
From ‘The Polished Little Man’
The stories, as translator James J. Conway notes in his afterword, were mostly birthed from events in Reventlow’s life, so it’s unsurprising that upper classes feature throughout. What comes across more than mere diarising, though, is a feeling of the uncanny: the stories tend to feature groups where individuality is subsumed into a kind of hive-mind. Everything that happens happens to the group, even when it’s only involving two people. Allegiances drift and change and separate, like a division of cells with nice luggage.
I can’t put my finger on why these stories entranced me so, other than that they appear to mine the same quotidian oddity that David Lynch or Eric McCormack find so appealing. I’m certainly inspired to read more of zu Reventlow’s works, with their hints of revenants and encroaching death.
I mean, why wouldn’t I? Sounds right up my alley.
Yeah nah. 