Edifice

Andrzej Klimowski’s Edifice is a wintry dream lingering on the verge of conscious explanation. It may well get there, as in the closing pages the narrator conjectures about next year’s Christmastime – well you wouldn’t say "festivities" – perhaps simply "events" in the fictional city of Engelstadt. These stark, fantastical scenes play out over the course of a Dec. 22 and 23, with Christmas Eve taking up the final forty pages of the book.

We enter into the story through a cab pulling up in front of the apartment complex where most of the action and anomalies take place. There is talk of a forecasted blizzard when the cold weather is commented upon. Once inside, time seems to move in waves different from what we’re used to. The panels are never more than two per page, with many an excellent full or double page spread. Whilst this makes the reading quick, we have a sense of clock hands undulating here, lurching there, a hidden rhythm that nonetheless permeates throughout.

A resident has returned home carrying two suitcases, one of which contains a most curious sphynx-like statue. When he places this on his mantle and falls asleep in a nearby chair, the statue begins to come alive, slowly, over 21 panels, eventually swapping states of matter with her owner. He has been mystically morphed into an obelisk, a structure that will resonate within the building in subtle and not so subtle ways.

The former sphynx-creature, now in the guise of a naked woman, is given two full pages of white text on black background to announce her newfound aliveness, before she sets off to haunt the building and then perhaps disappear, who can tell. But there’s more to it than that. As she passes by the bed of the composer Mr. Pascali, his waking eyes grant her multiple sets of wings and we see her briefly assume the form of a human-shaped insect – a moth? - before her body goes all black, though the wings stay white. The story shifts perspective yet again, and this is only the beginning as we’re introduced to the edifice’s other residents.

What happens to our insect lady is unclear, but it is the image that is important, recurring as the idea/spectre/what-have-you once again comes into play later on. This is not an orgy of transmogrification, however. What mutations there are happen only sporadically, and in syrupy dreamtime slowness. There is Pip, the photographer, who always appears as some semblance of a bat, though only occasionally with wings. And what is the anatomical deal with Pip and his model? They sometimes seem to be in costume – though those ears certainly look real – and then they speak of having radar to fly in the dark and soar off the building to land in a park in pursuit of Nosferatu, the classic film shown to be playing at the local cinema earlier on in the book.

Speaking of which, this information comes at the book’s center. One of four very well-rendered double page spreads, and two of the artistic highlights of the book being the exterior shot of that small movie theater with motorbike and film poster outside and the following interior illustration of the audience watching the film. The book’s panels mostly portray individuals or duos so these crowd scenes – watching films and TV, and especially congregated at the party at the end – really stand out. Klimowski making excellent use of light and shade, and his choices over how much detail to put in a background, often just completely white, make for a pleasant meandering of mood.

Told in such a manner, it is easy to admire individual panels. The lower one on page 84 of Lady Dentrite looking through a magnifying glass is a wonderful image. On page 116, the placement of lights in his film studio make Pip the Bat Boy’s wings look like the species of moth that flits through the fabric of this story. The sidecar-riding lady’s hair on pages 136-7 that becomes a bizarre cloud of controlled zigzags darkening the city, noticed and commented on by disparate parties. And the jittery rendering of the cast during what is perhaps an earthquake is very well done. We can admire the way we’re led through the images as well. Klimowski will focus on one aspect of the object and then move into it, bringing us through the story in this way. A highlight of this technique being the honing in on the painting of Lady Dentrite’s late husband then enlarged – via her magnifying glass, perhaps – into its own lovely two page spread. And, as mentioned with the moth-lady above, these image-ideas will appear again elsewhere in other scenes, in different iterations, obeying the text’s own particular dream logic.

The book is mostly silent, especially at the beginning, though words and dialogue pick up in its final fifth. There is music in the story however – sheets of Mr. Pascali’s new piano sonata, and Peter the cellist’s accompaniment to Professor Dorlan’s lecture and film – and one can almost hear the haunting melancholic strains these images offer up.

And that film! Does Peter have a premonition of it when he falls asleep in the cab over? Is it a recounting of Mr. Pascali’s nocturnal encounter with the sphynx-moth-woman? Or the actual footage of? Is that woman who emerges from the statue a young Lady Dentrite? Could the film be a rendering of a dream? Or something else? Multiple readings enhance the possibility of a solution to this mystery but might not actually reveal it. And what of the digressions in the story itself? The Bat Folks stopover at the deserted bistro? Or the young man in the sanitorium who believes they are in Pisa and that Ezra Pound is still alive? Why does the focus shift to him during that motorcycle ride to the cinema with the crazy storm hair? The deliciousness of these questions draw us in all the more. And despite two x-rays of brains within the pages, each containing a strange treasure, we may have to surrender to something deeper than cerebration to understand. Fortunately, Edifice is a beautiful book that stirs what lurks beneath, making resonance rather than reason its reward.

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