Konkretion
March 2013
Marion May Campbell / UWAP
In 1969, German journalist Ulrike Meinhof followed Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin into the violent underground of the German left. Seven years later Meinhof, in Stammheim prison together with others of the Baader-Meinhof Group, suicided in disputed circumstances.
In Konkretion Marion May Campbell reimagines the increasingly vituperative attacks on Meinhof by Ensslin in the letters they exchanged in Stammheim, and, in the present day, a return to Paris by ageing Australian lecturer, writer and radical, Monique Piquet. In Paris, Piquet floats, in imagination and decaying body, through the spaces, history, memory, literature, and philosophy of the city.
Don’t go looking for a powerful, single-engine narrative here. At times Konkretion is so dense with allusion that it seems to want to out-Sebald Sebald, but without nailing the hypnotic hold of the German’s gaze. Still, Campbell’s long experience as a writer has her attuned to cross-currents of humour, punning, nostalgia, Australian cultural cringe, narcissism, regret and death in a way that rewards the deep, patient reader. Once it finds its own voice, it reaches toward something quite beautiful.
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