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buddhafish 's review for:
Munich Airport
by Greg Baxter
120th book of 2023.
4.5. This was recommended to me years ago by Dr J, one of my university lecturers. I’ve spoken about her before: she was accused of being cruel and unfair by a number of students and my roommate, who was the head of our student committee had to ask me, if it came to it, whether I’d defend her in a kind of trial that was set up. It all seemed a bit absurd to me. He came to me because my good relationship with Dr J was well-known; in fact, he and others used to joke that I was having sex with her in the long tutorials we had in her office. She was married with two children, if I’m remembering correctly, but we had another male lecturer who was in the same marital position and was sleeping, fairly openly, with a fellow student. I remember I was once sitting outside Dr J’s office waiting for her to call me in. I was reading a battered old John Updike novel I’d bought that morning. She opened the door and asked me what I was reading and when I told her, she screwed her nose up, only slightly, barely noticeably to the naked eye, and said, Come in.
Later, Dr J began recommending me things to read, books, I guessed, she thought more of. My devout love of W.G. Sebald is because of her; she made me read The Rings of Saturn once, a writer I’d never heard of then. She rattled off names flippantly, and I missed hundreds over our meetings together, always cursing my memory or the decision not to write them down. Nicola Barker. Greg Baxter. Nicholson Baker (so similar to Barker that I wonder now if she said one or the other, or if she did say both). Derek Jarman. Crossing the grass outside of the old hall where her office was, some fellow students would sometimes spot me and I could feel their sly, sideways glances, groping at innuendos.
Munich Airport is a meandering and depressing read. It is very Bernhardian. The unnamed narrator is a selfish, lonely and troubled man. The entire ‘present’ of the novel is set inside Munich Airport. I’ll be flying into said airport in a few months so I finally followed one of Dr J’s recommendations. A fog has descended and all flights are grounded. The narrator, his father, and a woman helping with the post-death process, are stuck together in the terminal, waiting. The narrator’s sister had previously been found dead in her Berlin apartment, starved to death. It is a novel with a Bernhardian tone but also Bernhardian themes: suicide, loneliness, madness. There are a good number of negative reviews for this book calling it boring, depressing without reprieve, pointless. The structure of the novel is tremendously crafted: despite being stuck in an airport terminal, the novel also contains an odyssey across Germany. By association, the narrator’s mind in the airport goes back years, jumps forwards, and gives us the story of his life and his family’s life in a fractured, non-linear way. It slowly peels back the events that have led them to the point where they sit, hungry, overtired to the point of mania and claustrophobic in Munich Airport. There aren’t many paragraph breaks and there are no speech marks. In fact, most of the time, the dialogue is imbedded in the long meandering paragraphs. The narrator is depressed, processing grief. There is self-harm. There is not much light in the book. The final pages had me wondering, why are we going here? What is the significance of this memory to end the book? But it unsettled me, made me think, perhaps even felt a little cathartic. Like Sir Percival, I decided not to ask of its significance.
Dr J actually lives a few roads from my parents. I’ve never seen her out and about. At university my other lecturers told me she was always on a limb, never joined them for lunch, rarely said much. In her ‘trial’, which took place despite my presence not being needed in the end, she apparently said nothing. Not once did she defend herself or refute the claims that she was cruel, critical and unfair. My housemate, who had to attend it, had come home and made us coffee (it was already nine or ten o’clock at night but he came home and made two coffees as a way of telling me, We aren’t sleeping soon) to inform me what had happened. I remember him saying that Dr J’s silence was unnerving, and everyone present kept looking at her, almost begging her to say anything. In the end, her colleagues defended her and the students’ complaints were pushed under the rug. Their attendance to her classes dwindled before, I think, dropping off altogether. When I saw Dr J after the trial I wanted to ask her about it, even tell her I was prepared to defend her, but as soon as I was in her office again, that felt like a false and gratuitous thing to do. The truth was, Dr J didn’t care.
4.5. This was recommended to me years ago by Dr J, one of my university lecturers. I’ve spoken about her before: she was accused of being cruel and unfair by a number of students and my roommate, who was the head of our student committee had to ask me, if it came to it, whether I’d defend her in a kind of trial that was set up. It all seemed a bit absurd to me. He came to me because my good relationship with Dr J was well-known; in fact, he and others used to joke that I was having sex with her in the long tutorials we had in her office. She was married with two children, if I’m remembering correctly, but we had another male lecturer who was in the same marital position and was sleeping, fairly openly, with a fellow student. I remember I was once sitting outside Dr J’s office waiting for her to call me in. I was reading a battered old John Updike novel I’d bought that morning. She opened the door and asked me what I was reading and when I told her, she screwed her nose up, only slightly, barely noticeably to the naked eye, and said, Come in.
Later, Dr J began recommending me things to read, books, I guessed, she thought more of. My devout love of W.G. Sebald is because of her; she made me read The Rings of Saturn once, a writer I’d never heard of then. She rattled off names flippantly, and I missed hundreds over our meetings together, always cursing my memory or the decision not to write them down. Nicola Barker. Greg Baxter. Nicholson Baker (so similar to Barker that I wonder now if she said one or the other, or if she did say both). Derek Jarman. Crossing the grass outside of the old hall where her office was, some fellow students would sometimes spot me and I could feel their sly, sideways glances, groping at innuendos.
Munich Airport is a meandering and depressing read. It is very Bernhardian. The unnamed narrator is a selfish, lonely and troubled man. The entire ‘present’ of the novel is set inside Munich Airport. I’ll be flying into said airport in a few months so I finally followed one of Dr J’s recommendations. A fog has descended and all flights are grounded. The narrator, his father, and a woman helping with the post-death process, are stuck together in the terminal, waiting. The narrator’s sister had previously been found dead in her Berlin apartment, starved to death. It is a novel with a Bernhardian tone but also Bernhardian themes: suicide, loneliness, madness. There are a good number of negative reviews for this book calling it boring, depressing without reprieve, pointless. The structure of the novel is tremendously crafted: despite being stuck in an airport terminal, the novel also contains an odyssey across Germany. By association, the narrator’s mind in the airport goes back years, jumps forwards, and gives us the story of his life and his family’s life in a fractured, non-linear way. It slowly peels back the events that have led them to the point where they sit, hungry, overtired to the point of mania and claustrophobic in Munich Airport. There aren’t many paragraph breaks and there are no speech marks. In fact, most of the time, the dialogue is imbedded in the long meandering paragraphs. The narrator is depressed, processing grief. There is self-harm. There is not much light in the book. The final pages had me wondering, why are we going here? What is the significance of this memory to end the book? But it unsettled me, made me think, perhaps even felt a little cathartic. Like Sir Percival, I decided not to ask of its significance.
Dr J actually lives a few roads from my parents. I’ve never seen her out and about. At university my other lecturers told me she was always on a limb, never joined them for lunch, rarely said much. In her ‘trial’, which took place despite my presence not being needed in the end, she apparently said nothing. Not once did she defend herself or refute the claims that she was cruel, critical and unfair. My housemate, who had to attend it, had come home and made us coffee (it was already nine or ten o’clock at night but he came home and made two coffees as a way of telling me, We aren’t sleeping soon) to inform me what had happened. I remember him saying that Dr J’s silence was unnerving, and everyone present kept looking at her, almost begging her to say anything. In the end, her colleagues defended her and the students’ complaints were pushed under the rug. Their attendance to her classes dwindled before, I think, dropping off altogether. When I saw Dr J after the trial I wanted to ask her about it, even tell her I was prepared to defend her, but as soon as I was in her office again, that felt like a false and gratuitous thing to do. The truth was, Dr J didn’t care.