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nc_exlibris's review against another edition
4.0
An interesting collection of notes & photographs from an interesting thinker.
tomunro's review
4.0
I read this as part of a university reading list for a class on life writing and archives. It is not a book I would otherwise have sought out so my review should be considered in that light.
Furthermore, the version I had was the translation into English by Esther Leslie. Given that much of Benjamin's thoughts and observations depended on linguistic wordplay, translation presents an additional complication in keeping the writing and the meaning accessible. This is particularly so with the section on Benjamin's riddles and Brainteasers where one admires the solution but knows one could never have guessed at it. However, I am tempted to try some of them on German speaking friends!
It appears that Benjamin was something of a self-archivist, collecting, organising and disseminating his writings to ensure all was preserved for posterity. However, the intervention of the Nazi rise to power in his native Germany and then the second world war and Benjamin's abortive flight to Spain all compromised the collection somewhat. Nonetheless there is a wealth of materiele for the archivists to draw on, collate and organise into 13 chapters and they provide some thematic order to presentation of Benjamin's wide ranging recorded thoughts.
I knew nothing of Walter Benjamin before picking up this book. However, catching glimpses of the life he led between the recorded notes, scraps and pictures, made me curious enough to look up his bio on Wikipedia.
Which is itself a paradox, for Benjamin's entire archive is physical, hard copy - which makes a strange contrast with the vast electronic records that all of us create with each passing moment in a modern technological age. One of Benjamin's most celebrated essays was on the degree to which ease of replication/mass production of works and images might affect the "aura" of the original artwork from which it was derived. What would he have made of the endlessly replicated and unattributed memes and images that are so much a part of our modern life? Not much I guess is the answer.
The archive is not an easy read, though that is perhaps just the nature of archives. Certainly I found myself growing more comfortable with the structure and the distinctions between the archivists reflections and annotations alongside Benjamin's original writing. I found some of the latter challenging, but Benjamin was a gifted writer with a turn of phrase that would have stood him in good stead in fictional writing. This shows up in the letters and asides to colleagues where he is perhaps not quite so driven by academic rigour. Eg describing a winter road on the point of thawing "...with its gleam of snow and mud." Or when exhausted by his friend's tales noting "I am often too tired to listen with both ears." Or when, in tracking down the original town wall he had seen in a postcard image (itself a short but funny story well told), he finally finds it "There in the moonlight, near and unmistakable, stood the wall. whose image had accompanied me for days, and in its custody was the town, to which we were returning home." - I just like that idea of a town in the custody of its walls - again, fair play to the translator.
There is also a very long section devoted to Benjamin's collation of his young son's utterances. Here the archive displays the eternal pride of the new parent in their first born, every magic moment to be recorded as the child's day brings fresh epiphanies for child and parent in viewing familiar concepts from unfamiliar perspectives. It is perhaps ironic that the child's first word was "quiet" - a small boy understanding that his father needed to work undisturbed.
There is also the word confusion that children often have and which the translate does well to convey when the boy describes condensed milk as "White Jam." or tells the adults "Don't expectorate so much from me."
I found quite a few little nuggets that appealed to me, such as Benjamin's observations on the creation of good prose. "Work on good prose has three steps: a musical phase where it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven." Which, in its complex and almost contradictory notions of what prose was, put me in mind of the deconstructions of the human body that you see in encyclopedia anatomy books: skin overlaid on musculature, supported by a skeleton.
With something of a mathematical background I also liked the reference to ellipses as a fundamental model for considering a work because ellipses have two foci and locus of any prose is constrained and shaped by both foci. And that is perhaps a suitable point to close a review on the multi-faceted archive of a multi-focused man. Not an easy read, but an interesting one.
Furthermore, the version I had was the translation into English by Esther Leslie. Given that much of Benjamin's thoughts and observations depended on linguistic wordplay, translation presents an additional complication in keeping the writing and the meaning accessible. This is particularly so with the section on Benjamin's riddles and Brainteasers where one admires the solution but knows one could never have guessed at it. However, I am tempted to try some of them on German speaking friends!
It appears that Benjamin was something of a self-archivist, collecting, organising and disseminating his writings to ensure all was preserved for posterity. However, the intervention of the Nazi rise to power in his native Germany and then the second world war and Benjamin's abortive flight to Spain all compromised the collection somewhat. Nonetheless there is a wealth of materiele for the archivists to draw on, collate and organise into 13 chapters and they provide some thematic order to presentation of Benjamin's wide ranging recorded thoughts.
I knew nothing of Walter Benjamin before picking up this book. However, catching glimpses of the life he led between the recorded notes, scraps and pictures, made me curious enough to look up his bio on Wikipedia.
Which is itself a paradox, for Benjamin's entire archive is physical, hard copy - which makes a strange contrast with the vast electronic records that all of us create with each passing moment in a modern technological age. One of Benjamin's most celebrated essays was on the degree to which ease of replication/mass production of works and images might affect the "aura" of the original artwork from which it was derived. What would he have made of the endlessly replicated and unattributed memes and images that are so much a part of our modern life? Not much I guess is the answer.
The archive is not an easy read, though that is perhaps just the nature of archives. Certainly I found myself growing more comfortable with the structure and the distinctions between the archivists reflections and annotations alongside Benjamin's original writing. I found some of the latter challenging, but Benjamin was a gifted writer with a turn of phrase that would have stood him in good stead in fictional writing. This shows up in the letters and asides to colleagues where he is perhaps not quite so driven by academic rigour. Eg describing a winter road on the point of thawing "...with its gleam of snow and mud." Or when exhausted by his friend's tales noting "I am often too tired to listen with both ears." Or when, in tracking down the original town wall he had seen in a postcard image (itself a short but funny story well told), he finally finds it "There in the moonlight, near and unmistakable, stood the wall. whose image had accompanied me for days, and in its custody was the town, to which we were returning home." - I just like that idea of a town in the custody of its walls - again, fair play to the translator.
There is also a very long section devoted to Benjamin's collation of his young son's utterances. Here the archive displays the eternal pride of the new parent in their first born, every magic moment to be recorded as the child's day brings fresh epiphanies for child and parent in viewing familiar concepts from unfamiliar perspectives. It is perhaps ironic that the child's first word was "quiet" - a small boy understanding that his father needed to work undisturbed.
There is also the word confusion that children often have and which the translate does well to convey when the boy describes condensed milk as "White Jam." or tells the adults "Don't expectorate so much from me."
I found quite a few little nuggets that appealed to me, such as Benjamin's observations on the creation of good prose. "Work on good prose has three steps: a musical phase where it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven." Which, in its complex and almost contradictory notions of what prose was, put me in mind of the deconstructions of the human body that you see in encyclopedia anatomy books: skin overlaid on musculature, supported by a skeleton.
With something of a mathematical background I also liked the reference to ellipses as a fundamental model for considering a work because ellipses have two foci and locus of any prose is constrained and shaped by both foci. And that is perhaps a suitable point to close a review on the multi-faceted archive of a multi-focused man. Not an easy read, but an interesting one.
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