Tormented by paranoia and crises of identity, he tells his students, he sought treatment at the Clinic Zelená Hora, where the doctor often used his texts against him to force confrontations between Sy’s sense of reality and his art. Sy has spent the previous two decades in Eastern Europe, translating German and Czech poets and novelists, and eking out a life of artistic poverty.
THE RUMPUS ROOM SERIES
Chased by adversaries real and imagined, he delivers a mind-bending series of lectures-which form the text of the novel-in which he hunts through various fictional texts to understand himself, old friends, and failed lovers. Sy is on the precipice of a neurotic breakdown when he’s hired to teach an Introduction to Literature course at his hometown college. Understanding these alchemical experiments of identity and authority is central to the wayward translator Sy Kirshbaum in Seth Rogoff’s novel The Kirschbaum Lectures. To enter that sublime space beneath the text requires a radical vulnerability, a subjugation of the self to the author, a surrender of control in exchange for meaning.
When we say we are lost in a book, we often mean that the glint of that reflection has lured us in through its crevices and pores, and once there we have lost track of the boundary between our lives and the world of the story. We look for ourselves in literature-for comfort or for guidance-but the page rarely provides a clean mirror.
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