2024-04-08 10:20:44
Literature Author Aris Fioretos
What happens to a rock star when fame fades away?
Status: 08.04.2024 | Reading time: 4 minutes
Sex, Drugs and Rimbaud: Writer Aris Fioretos
Source: Anders WiklundI/MAGO/TT
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In “The Thin Gods” the writer Aris Fioretos tells the story of a rock star. His past catches up with him. The terminally ill ex-lover reports that he has an eleven-year-old daughter. This is just how the confession of life begins.
Autofictional writing has never been his thing. Aris Fioretos’s curiosity about the world is far too insatiable for that. “Literature about myself? No thanks. “It gives me a much deeper satisfaction to learn from other people’s experiences,” he said in an interview. The Swedish author, born in 1960, is a multilingual cosmopolitan, literary scholar and translator, the son of a Greek father and an Austrian mother.
He has a solid reputation among connoisseurs as being gentle but idiosyncratic Literary man who, in his formally advanced novels and essays, stays away from hot topics and prefers to pursue his own particular interests. He started with extravagant conceptual novels and elegantly incorporated his migrant origins into a contemporary historical Greek novel trilogy. It may therefore be surprising, but not really surprising, when Aris Fioretos turns to a material in his new novel and adopts a milieu that could not be more foreign to the intellectual aesthete.
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“The Thin Gods” is a development and artist novel from the Anglo-American rock music scene of the 1970s, a kind of revival of the subculture of clubs, pubs and studios from which iconic rock bands emerged, with frontmen like Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop or Mick Jagger. In his fictional thin gods, Fioretos resurrects this type of emaciated youth and traces the sound and mood of their ecstatic performances and psychedelic studio albums. In order to make this time travel plausible, Fioretos invents a framework plot. His hero, Tim Middler, is an aged New York rock musician who lives withdrawn and half-forgotten in modern-day Berlin. One day he is informed by a terminally ill ex-lover that he has an eleven-year-old daughter. She instructs him to introduce himself as the girl’s father. This is the occasion for the hero’s big confession of his life in 20 chapters, which make up the main part of the novel.
This first-person narrator, Tim, is a provincial boy from Delaware, a loner and runaway looking for his purpose in life. He is driven by a “hunger for intensity,” but he longs for other exaltations than the drug and sex rush that the wild boys around him exemplify for him. Since he “prefers to live in his head,” he longs for spiritual ecstasies beyond the gates of perception. He initially becomes intoxicated by Rimbaud’s poetry, which encourages him to write his own verses – the more absurd and incomprehensible, the better. In shabby New York flophouses, he lives the hard life of a guitar-plucking underground poet on the edge of the anti-social until, after years of experimenting, he decides: he wants to “become a technician for expanding consciousness.” And music should be the means of enjoyment for his thirst for experience.
When fame fades away
Tim forms an experimental rock band with himself as a visionary songwriter and frontman. But the fame of this avant-garde formation quickly fades away, as with their real role model, the psychedelic rock group “The 13th Floor Elevators”. The band breaks up, Tim’s solo career is ruined, the time of exalted genius cult delirium is over, or more precisely: the genius cult turns into commerce after the global music industry has historically won the race. And yet we’re only halfway through the novel. The reader wonders anxiously what Aris Fioretos plans to do in the remaining 300 pages of the novel.
Nothing edifying, as the rather laborious reading of Tim’s lengthy account of his life after the end of his career shows. The banality of everyday life catches up with the former rock star. Melancholy, he somehow carries on and gets by with jobs and changing lovers, first in London, then in Berlin; He falls ill and ages; like most people, he leads an inauthentic life – right up to a stark final adventure that threatens to torpedo the style of the entire novel in the last hundred pages.
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What attracted Fioretos to this material? What formal aesthetic problem did he want to solve with this novel? Perhaps something that Thomas Mann in “Doctor Faustus” and Toni Morrison in “Jazz” have already worked on: How can music, the most spiritual of all arts, be described in words? What linguistic means can be used to transfer the fundamentally non-mimetic musical art – especially fictional music – into verbal art?
Toni Morrison made jazz itself the storyteller by narratively imitating John Coltrane’s rhythms and improvisation techniques. Fioretos, for his part, seeks to underline the creative process behind the psychedelic songs of his invented rock band – with delirious formulations and exalted comparisons and through ever more extreme word images and overwrought metaphors. The text constantly threatens to tip over into the ridiculous; the literary risk of self-parody is high. Aris Fioretos takes it in stride.
Aris Fioretos: The thin gods. Translated from Swedish by Paul Berf. Hanser, 528 pages, 34 euros
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