Roberto Calasso - K.

New York light? It’s “powerful,” “tangible,” always scattering and regathering — to such an extent that it seems as if “a sheet of glass that covers everything were being continually and violently smashed.”

A New York peril: going out onto your own balcony, on first arriving in your room, and staring at the traffic for hours on end, like a “lost sheep.”

The American spell: in his Uncle Jakob’s house, a spacious freight elevator carries Karl’s piano to the sixth floor. And Karl ascends beside it in the elevator for people, remaining always at the same level as the piano. All the while, he gazes through a wall of glass at “the beautiful instrument he now possessed.”

The “first American poem” that Karl learns by heart is a “description of a fire.” He recites the lines to his uncle, who beats the time, as they stand by a window in Karl’s room and watch the darkened sky.

In the middle of New York, on the sixth floor of an iron-frame building, with the windows open wide to the roar of traffic that rises up, together with eddies of odor and dust, from the street, Karl sits at his piano and plays “an old soldier song from his homeland, which the soldiers, from the windows of their barracks in the evenings, sing to each other, from window to window, as they look out into the darkness of the square.” This is Mahler in words. And Karl didn’t rule out, as he lay dreaming in his bed before going to sleep, the possibility that his style of play might exert “a direct influence on the American scene.”

The Pollunders welcome Karl and shower him with kindnesses. But his evening at their country house has a darkly violent undercurrent — mainly because of Green, the sinister messenger whose gestures are precise and sometimes repellent, who gives Karl the impression that their relationship “will eventually be determined by the triumph or annihilation of one or the other of them.” Karl has no idea, at this point, that the moment of annihilation is nigh; it comes when Green, two hours later, reads Karl the letter with which his uncle dismisses him.

His Uncle Jakob, Pollunder, Mack, Klara, Green: these are meticulously detailed and studied figures, created by a master of his craft who specializes in rubber puppets.

Pollunder and Green sit facing each other after dinner. Each has smoked a big cigar, and now, drinks in hand, they’re talking business. But what business? “Someone who didn’t know Mr. Pollunder might very well have thought they were discussing criminal matters rather than business.” But who really knows Mr. Pollunder?

Lyricism in The Missing Person: it’s all the more intense because the prose doesn’t make a show of it. At the Pollunders’ country house, Karl enters the bedroom that has been assigned to him. He sits on the windowsill and observes the night: “A skittish bird seemed to be moving through the leafy branches of the old tree. The whistle of a New York suburban train sounded somewhere out in the countryside. The rest was silence.” Nor does this lyricism need nature in order to resonate. When Karl is working as an elevator boy at the Hotel Occidental, it emerges once again in the dead of night: “He leaned heavily against the railing beside his elevator, slowly eating his apple, which from the first bite had given off a strong perfume, and he looked down, into a light well that was surrounded by the large windows of the storerooms, behind which hung masses of bananas, gleaming dimly in the dark.”

Twice Karl gets cast out into the darkness. First by his parents, then by his American uncle. And each time he’s pushed farther west: from Germany to New York, then from New York to California. In both cases, the preamble to his expulsion is a scuffle with a woman. A bed, a sofa. The robust Karl is smothered, flattened. The first time by a poor cook, amid eiderdowns, quilts, and pillows. The second by an “American girl,” an heiress with red lips and a tight skirt, skilled in jujitsu.

Again and again Karl Rossmann is restrained, his arms or legs immobilized by the use of force and cunning. The original scuffle is the one that blurs into coitus with the maid Johanna, thereby determining Karl’s fate, since Johanna gets pregnant. But other scuffles follow. First Klara, the heiress, then the head porter at the Hotel Occidental, then Robinson, then Delamarche, and finally Brunelda: they all want to block Karl’s escape from some claustrophobic place. A considerable number of the novel’s episodes revolve around these scenes of struggle. Meticulous, prolonged, exasperating descriptions. Observed from a certain distance, Karl’s defining gesture becomes that of wriggling free — the constantly renewed effort to escape a hold or an onslaught, to regain his status as an outcast, a “missing person,” a wandering foreigner. Then one day Karl finds, in the Theater of Oklahama, the ecumenical place where everyone and everything is welcome, is registered and listed on a scoreboard. In his case, under a fictitious name: Negro — a name that evokes a race more than an individual. And it was Karl himself who wanted it that way. Perhaps he can avoid the abuse he suffers as a lone individual only by camouflaging himself in a set , even an abused one.

There’s always something a little diabolical about the scuffles involving Karl Rossmann. They are evil’s stratagems. Evil knows that “the challenge to fight” is one of its “most effective means of seduction.” It knows that every fight is “like the struggle with women, which ends in bed.” That’s just how Karl’s fate has been decided. Now he is wandering through America, waiting for a brutal hand to grab him by his jacket collar and fling him in some new direction, far away: “And he was looking nervously at the policeman’s hand, which might at any moment rise to seize him.”

Together with the vagabonds Robinson and Delamarche, Karl treks against a current of five unbroken lanes of traffic that are rushing toward New York. Everything that teems produces in the end a sense of stasis and quiet. Just as New York, seen from a height, will later strike him as “empty and useless,” surrounded by “a smooth, lifeless ribbon of water,” so now “it was the general calm that surprised Karl the most. Had it not been for the cries of animals obliviously bound for the slaughterhouse, perhaps nothing would have been heard but the clatter of hooves and the hissing of tires.” These are the acoustics of the new world, as if isolated in a lab. But that’s not what Karl Rossmann, still clinging to his suitcase, is thinking.

Karl Rossmann and Jakob von Gunten are kindred characters. To be a pupil in the Benjamenta Institute or an elevator boy at the Hotel Occidental is to aspire to be a zero. “Of course elevator boys mean nothing,” says Karl; for his part, Jakob sees his best friend, Kraus, as “an authentic divine creation, a nothing, a servant” and himself as “a charming, utterly round zero in later life.” Like Jakob, Karl knows that he might from one moment to the next be swept away, by the anger of a head waiter or a head porter, without anyone caring except perhaps Therese and the head cook, and even the cook will approve his sentence in the end. And like Jakob, Karl too could say: “Some day I’ll suffer a stroke, a truly devastating stroke, and then everything, all these confusions, this longing, this ignorance, all of it… this thinking one knows and this never knowing, will end. And yet I want to live, I don’t care how.”

During the course of Karl’s adventures, pride and raw humiliation are at times conjoined, as if this amalgam were the hallmark of his experience. Never is that mark so sharply felt as when Karl tries on his elevator-boy uniform at the Hotel Occidental. “On the outside,” it looks “splendid, with gold buttons and braids.” But when he puts it on, he shudders, “because especially under the arms the jacket was cold, stiff, and at the same time irredeemably damp with the sweat of elevator boys who had worn it before him.”