Excerpts from
Ramoth-Bezer
By Niels Brunse
Robert is a retired university teacher leading a secluded and lonely life. He suffers from agoraphobia and feels safe only within his own grounds. He lives alone, and apart from a young girl who helps him with his shopping, he receives few visits. To add to his misery, he is mourning the sudden death of his favourite student, Ulla, an exceptionally bright girl with a photographic memory, who continued to visit him, after he had to give up teaching due to the agoraphobia.
Only a few days before her death, Ulla had handed him a translation of an old German manuscript dating back to the mid 18th century bearing the title ”Description of a journey to the town Ramoth or Bezer, written by baron Eberhard von Erlenberg, for the sake of enlightenment of his sons”. Ulla has done the translation by hand in haste, and Robert decides to start working on a fair copy. Throughout the novel, we follow Robert and get to read the manuscript bit by bit as he works his way through it, and as Robert we wonder if the astonishing tale could be true or whether it is a work of fiction. The manuscript contains a few clues that might solve this question, and for Robert it turns into a piece of detective work forcing him to overcome his fear of the world outside (the novel thus thematizes the therapeutical effects of narration). The book comes to a surprising, yet satisfying end, as Robert completes his work and solves the mystery.
Ramoth-Bezer is written by the acclaimed Danish translator Niels Brunse. The novel reveals that he is not alone an excellent translator, but an ingenious story-teller himself, moving flawlessly, with an unfailing sense of style, between the different levels of the narrative. The literary detective work as well as the metafiction of Ramoth-Bezer brings to mind many fine international works of fiction, such as A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller and the novels of Arturo Pérez-Reverte. Ramoth-Bezer is a fine example of the fact that a good read may well be entertaining as well as intellectually challenging at the same time.
Marie Louise Valeur Jaques
in Danish Literary Magazine 19
Extract from Ramoth-Bezer
Beneath the simple gravestones lay here a farmer, there a nobleman, here a
merchant’s daughter, there a serving maid; and although most of the names were
biblical, there were also names from myths and legends as well as everyday
names amongst them. Only one stone stood out from the others with an
inscription that caught my attention; I later wrote it down as it stood:
+
HIC
IACET
ADEPTUS
ORFFYREUS
1748
I asked Mr Phintias who it was that lay there, and he replied: ‘A strange man,
mad perhaps, just wilful maybe, though of great benefit to the town – he was
the inventor of the drive wheels that lighten so many of our burdens.’
I readily admitted that these selfsame wheels had greatly amazed me, and asked
what drove them.
‘A mechanical force,’ he replied, ‘that is contained within the wheel itself.
More I do not know.’
He seemed unwilling to talk about it and I contented myself for the time being
with his explanation, although I asked him whether this town benefactor had
been given some special permission to adorn his gravestone with a title, albeit
an unusual one, since it was obvious that such permission had been denied all
the others.
‘Nobody has been forbidden this,’ he answered. ‘Everyone can have inscribed on
the stone exactly what he desires. Master Orffyreus decided on this before his
death, claiming that he left behind some particular wisdom in this epitaph –
though most people believe it to be true that when we die, all we leave behind
is a name.’
‘Most people leave both property, children and a reputation behind them,’ I
objected.
‘All these have their own lives and change in the course of time,’ he replied.
‘Only one’s name remains unchanged and our own, as long as it is not
forgotten.’
‘But even when a man’s name is forgotten, his deeds and his family live on,’ I
countered.
‘The great transformation lives on,’ he said, ‘the transformation from which we
all of us have come and to which each of us contributes. But it does not
distinguish between one life and another life, between one person and the next.
Only the name marks a boundary, and when it is forgotten, the last trace of the
person has disappeared.’
‘But what if a man has his portrait painted, or his image hewn in stone?’ I
said. ‘Then, perhaps, his face will remain even though his name is forgotten.’
‘What is a face without a name?’ asked Mr Phintias, answering himself: ‘An
enigma, a nothing. An image is a mere substitute for a face. And if the name is
torn from the image, the transformation has taken place.’
Translated by John Irons
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