Born to Be Alive
could be described as a collage novel. It is assembled from the opening passages of the following 18 novels:
Julian Barnes, Talking It Over / Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders / Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe / Charles Dickens, David Copperfield / Charles Dickens, Great Expectations / Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex / Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated / Max Frisch, Stiller / Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit / Robert Graves, I, Claudius / Nicole Krauss, The History of Love / Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes / Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket / Edgar Allan Poe, The Spectacles / Edgar Allan Poe, William Wilson / J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye / Muriel Spark, Robinson / Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
I joined the beginnings of the novels in such a way that they created a cohesive text, in which the passages of differing lengths refer to one another and keep spinning out a narrative thread. Numbers inserted at the start of each new passage allow you to match the texts to their respective source novels with an index at the end of the book. I used the text passages in their original language; two are in German, the rest are in English. All 18 novels are written in the first person and their protagonists introduce themselves at the beginning, telling us their names and usually also where and when they were born. Inspired by this, I illustrated the novels’ figures with photographs of myself at different ages. For three female characters, I used a photograph of my mother at age 15. I edited the illustrations in Photoshop, and they were printed on Bamboo Awagami Paper with archival pigments (Epson SureColor P7500). The texts are set in Unger Fraktur, a typeface created in the late 18th century by Berlin editor and printer Johann Friedrich Unger. It was intended to be a reformed Fraktur font, lighter and more open, and reminiscent of Antiqua, which was becoming more and more popular in Germany during the Enlightenment. After falling into oblivion, it was rediscovered in the early 20th century and reissued by various foundries. I was able to buy a D. Stempel cut of Unger Fraktur from Rainer Gerstenberg in Frankfurt so that I could handset the texts and use letterpress printing. For English-speaking readers (as well as many younger German readers), the Fraktur font with its round
s and long
s may be confusing, but it is an important part of the effect I wanted to achieve with the book – which I see as a paraphrase of “classically illustrated” novel editions.
Cloth-over-board with front titel label, in slipcase. 48 pages, 24.6/17.5 cm, 30 numbered and signed copies. Flörsheim 2021.