I’m moving so fast now that it’s likely I’ll forget even more of this process than elsewhere, so I’m creating a quick post as a memory marker. This is towards the end of “The Match Juggler,” an extraordinary story that actually has a slightly longer title: “The Match Juggler—Furtwängler.” The eponymous juggler is introduced early in the story and then left, when Rudolf Stubler says good-bye to him at the Graz station. Stubler continues on to Berlin, where he has a chance encounter, and a long conversation, with the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. The title of the story is ambiguous about whether Furtwängler is his own sort of match juggler. It is a story about art, the death of Beethoven at the hands of the Nazis, the Holocaust, and much more.
The thing I want to remember is the internal rhyme I’ve placed in this paragraph, which does not exist in the source but seems right to me here:
This was what Wilhelm Furtwängler was told, which he, word for word, conveyed to Rudolf Stubler, who would tell the story of these events during family gatherings, when someone got married or when someone was buried. Among the Stublers, as has been noted and as the finale of this family history testifies, they buried a lot more than they married.
I will finish this seventy-page story today, then move on to “The Bee Log,” an internal novella of 170 pages or so.
Russell Scott Valentino 