M Sarki

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/72311597736/natura-morta-by-josef-winkler

Initially it must be noted that this Josef Winkler text reminds this reader of particularities similar to a film shot in long, still takes, at times moving in for a close-up of a somewhat remarkable occurrence, none of which would make the evening news but nonetheless important enough to encompass in total the first half of this very fine novella. Every scene focuses on some corner, bench, market kiosk, or alcove located in the vicinity of the park of Piazza San Vittorio. The main character is the fig vendor's son, Piccoletto, with the long black lashes who seems, as other Winkler characters are most often themselves wont to do, obsessed with his genitals and whether others are also noticing it too. Tiny inconsequential incidents occur simultaneously and often enough to resemble a compulsively detailed written report listing anything of note coming to the attention of the spectating author who seems to move about as if attached to the slowly swiveling camera that rolls along as an eavesdropping machine on its well-oiled and quiet dolly.

The sixteen-year-old fig vendor's son with the long black lashes, in a white Beatles T-shirt, stood in front of the streetcar just beside the conductor. When the teenager lifted his right hand to grab a handrail as the streetcar moved jerkily ahead, the young woman with the plastic bag of apricots & peaches glanced into his wooly armpit. Taking a step down in the doorway, squatting slightly, she bent forward, so that she could not only observe the boy's armpit but also smell his sweat.

The observer narrating these numerous events pays close attention to every detail imaginable within and throughout the vicinity of the park of Piazza San Vittorio. There are numerous characters coming and going, vendors and customers alike, and there is no lack it seems for something to say in noticing anything these occasions could deem remarkable on the page.

Near the entrance to the market bathrooms, Piccoletto pulled a splinter from the elbow of the alimentary owner's son and smeared his spit over his friend's wound.

And later, Piccoletto cuts his own head wide open on a fan blade rotating above the fish stall. His friend, the fish monger Principe, called Piccoletto a "bambino stupido" because of it. He continued waiting listlessly on customers the remainder of the day, head-stitched with bandaid, finally biting into a white peach while stroking his buttocks as a young, slim Chinese woman in peach-colored panty hose strolls past the fish stand.

When the now-doctored Piccoletto went to call his parents' house to report his injury, a girl in a skintight outfit stood in an open telephone booth stroking her genitals, which were visible through her tights, and told her listener she would be stepping off the train at nine in the evening at Stazione Centrale in Napoli. When she noticed that her aroused state had caught the eye of the young man with the bandaged forehead, she laughed & tugged several times at her yellow tights so he could better make out the swell of her labia.

Winkler certainly does love to play with himself and his characters. But what strikes me most of all in this text, even more than the obsession with sex, is the teeming life also engaged in the butchering of farm animals and fish, the hawking of these vendors' wares and their sales of bloodied flesh, the sweat and piss and blood of wounds to the head and otherwise. And then the almost spontaneous and accidental death of Piccoletto caught crossing the street in the rain in the commerce of procuring a daily pizza for his friend, the fat butcher, Frocio.

Frocio placed the point of the small, bloody filet knife with the curved blade against the belly of the fig vendor's son, pressed a ten thousand lire note into his hand and, pointing at the thick black cumulus cloud, ordered him — as everyday — to pick up a salami pizza at the nearby pizzeria for the fishmongers' midday meal.

And thus, in the pouring rain and speeding firetrucks our Piccoletto is no more, crushed and bloody broken, and the pages that follow describe in great detail the scrambling and stumbling fat Frocio as he carries the boy's limp body among the stalls and hanging carcasses of dead, or soon to be butchered flesh, and discarded heads of eels and fish, moldy peaches, yellow chicken's feet, flowers and eggs, scavenging rats and cats, and the butchers' blood-spattered aprons laid aside and behind the stands in the park of Piazza San Vittorio.

In the church where the requiem was read…sat Frocio, Principe, and countless other well-known faces from the market:...

It is true that the well-attended funeral service was vigilant in its mourning, and full of suffering for those who did survive his death. His fat friend Frocio, perhaps relying too much on heavy tranquilizers, wanders about in his short-sleeve shirt of blue and yellow butterflies aimlessly searching for a clod of fresh earth that should be discovered covering the newly dug grave of Piccoletto. And thus completes a novella written by none other than Josef Winkler which actually has, in fact and surprisingly, a beginning, middle, and an end. A novella rich in detail, exquisitely language-driven, and perhaps too real for most, but I would rather want us all to attempt, at least, to think otherwise. It is quite difficult to do justice to such a fine book as this is. Josef Winkler deserves a larger audience.