It sometimes happens that long-forgotten, or at least neglected, writers are fished out by publishers who understand their value. This is what, for example, Neri Pozza (whom I thank) did with that twentieth-century giant Remarque, famous for his very well-known All Quiet on the Western Front, a powerful novel that recounts the pain and injustice and absurdity of war, and which together with all his other novels was burned by the Nazis in 1933, along with many other works by writers unwelcome to the regime, such as Gide, Joyce, Kafka, Karl Kraus, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Musil, Proust, Schnitzler, Zweig, just to name a few.
All of Remarque’s novels are masterpieces, for their writing, for their outlook on the world, for the stories they tell. Today I focus on the novel The Black Obelisk, from 1956, in which the great Remarque allows himself to do what he wants, going through moments of comedy and great tragic moments, passing from episodes that highlight the ridiculous side of existence to pages of philosophical considerations on God, on religion, on life, on man (mined terrain for every narrator, at high rhetorical risk), which stun with their strength… without ever losing sight of the essence of literature: telling the human spirit.
The Black Obelisk takes place in a small German town, Werdenbrück, during the great inflation of the early 1920s, which gallops at great speed throughout the novel.
It is written in the first person and in the present tense, and the voice is that of Ludwig, the protagonist, employed in a small funeral home, who tells us his stories with merciless irony but also with poetic romanticism. Many characters, women and men, all of great depth, for better or for worse. Pages that flow through the fingers with great lightness, even in the darkest moments.
Reading this novel by Remarque is “fun”, in the highest and noblest sense that can be given to this word, but like all his novels, this one is also capable of opening large rifts within us that never heal.
