1969, reprinted 2000
I found Geometric Regional Novel while doing some library work in the German literature section. Its strange title caught my eye, and when I looked inside, I immediately saw Jonkers' use of unconventional typography and other experimental techniques.
This is a book that was published in German in the late 1960s and translated into English in the 90s - but it plays with a style of novel that was popular with conservatives in the 30s and 40s, which romanticized the preindustrial countryside. There's a kind timeless (or maybe unstuck-in-time) quality to it.
This is a short book, divided into 21 unnumbered sections, usually only a few pages in length. Every other section is titled 'The Village Square,' and is narrated by two people who observe the square from a hiding spot, trying to decide whether the square is empty enough to walk across it together without being seen. They disagree and contradict each other. They only finally go out at the end. Over these chapters, we see trees grow, get cut down, the stumps removed, the stumps replaced with benches. But those are like 4 chapters out of 10 or 11.
The alternating chapters describe other events around the village. In one, we're told what would happen if a hiker killed a bull and brought it to the village to roast ... and then the whole chapter is un-told in reverse as we learn what wouldn't happen if the bull killed the hiker instead. In another, an acrobat comes to town to perform a hackneyed routine that ends badly. We then see the scene again through the town art critic's write-up in the village newspaper, where he lavishly praises the acrobat, especially the daring of his 'decision' to die of a broken back when his tightrope came untied.
In the longest chapter, a new law goes into effect requiring people to fill out a long, intrusive form to travel, because of the threat of bandits, but the chapter also implies that the bandit threat is a pretext for surveillance and limiting travel. In the most lyrical chapter, the villagers defend their town from birds that peck out the mortar between bricks by spraying the flock with water.
Jonkers' writing is deliberately strange and experimental. He describes physical objects using precise measurements and comparisons to geometric shapes. He describes human actions in such precise detail that they sound strange, like reading the technical specifications for the performance of a machine. He emphasizes words by giving them extra spacing l i k e t h i s . He almost never uses a pronoun (including 'this' and 'that') when he can repeat the whole name or a complete phrase again and again, as in a chapter where 'the old blacksmith, and his wife, and his son, the new blacksmith' are listed every time they do anything. He uses lots of synonyms back-to-back, usually 6-12 at a time.
And he fills the book with drawings, diagrams, a song, seemingly any literary technique he could think of to make the familiar strange, to criticize the overbearing nature of authority, and to contradict his own telling, then contradict the contradiction. The cumulative effect, over the 120 pages, is to show village life to be both deeply conservative, but also undergoing changes that the villagers are unaware of or disagree about. And despite the very simple subject matter, the way it's told is interesting.
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