A highly engaging exploration of existential questions, written in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic.
 
The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul confronts the reader with questions of existential meaning, questions rendered all the more potent by the backdrop of the Coronavirus pandemic: How fragile are we as human beings? How fragile are our societies? What is a “self,” an “I,”  a “community”? How are we to orient ourselves? And what, if any, role does commentary play? In a fashion that will be familiar to longtime admirers of Alexander Kluge, the book stretches both back in time to the medieval glossators of Bologna and forward into interstellar space with imagined travel to the moon Europa. Kluge’s characteristic brief, vignette-like prose passages are interspersed with images from his own film work and QR codes, forming a highly engaging, thoroughly contemporary read.
 

Alexander Kluge is one of the major German fiction writers of the late twentieth century and an important social critic. As a filmmaker, he is credited with the launch of the New German Cinema movement. Alexander Booth is a writer and translator.
 

STATION 1. The Challenge which Began that Gloomy Advent of 2020
STATION 2. Whenever I Think of My Hometown, It Happens through the Ear
STATION 3. How Does One Tell a Story from up close?
STATION 4. A Strange Creature’s Knocking at Our Door
STATION 5. ‘Dependability in the Upper Echelons of the World’s Leaders’
STATION 6. Where Can We Escape to when the Earth is Destroyed?
STATION 7. ‘On the Fragility of the Human Being’
STATION 8. Commentary on a Drawing of Sigmund Freud’s
STATION 9. Habermas / Comment
STATION 10. A Long Line of Clever Greeks
STATION 11. In the Lamp of the Soul’s Flickering Light: Intelligence
STATION 12. The Murmuring of the Pilot Fish
Notes & Sources