Joseph Walser's Machine

Joseph Walser's Machine
~ Goncalo Tavares

The machine weighs heavy on everything it seems in ‘Joseph Walser's Machine'. Heavier still is the common metaphor running throughout the novella which binds the allegory-laden, sparse and stoic landscape of the book. History is a machine. War is a machine. And the scant rare emotions as well as the excitement, thus generated if at all in the characters' routine existence, get imbued by the machine.
Set somewhere that could be anywhere, the context of war that inspires, terrifies, numbs and disgusts in equal measures, reflects our times bursting at the seams.

“Joseph Walser's expression of perfect concentration irritated Klober
and the other workers, but at the same time it was clear that the act of
pulling the table didn't constitute an affront. It was unthinkable that Walser
could commit an affront.”

In Joseph Walser, Goncalo Tavares creates the hero of this age, the apparently unassuming, self-effacing lead who would survive anything by doing the least, by not interfering, and not questioning the status quo. And yet, here is an existential hero who a Camus or a Kafka would probably be keen to look into. Would the same not go for Dostoevsky?

Walser embodies his own alter-ego, a character trait that defines the postmodern protagonist. While his counterpart, Klober, interweaves the third person narrative with an endless monologic tirade of rhetoric, and thus expressing a closed circuit surveillance device that runs the danger of exploding itself for has it worked or laboured the machine a little bit too much.

The narrative framework gets only a scattered cast. They dice, they play; whittling the weekends of their lives. On the machines they work, assuming to revel in alternating the perfectly ‘rational' rhythm of reality of the times.
Even so, the wars that are fought or avoided, carry a common humming thread. It projects a life that breeds inactivity within an impassioned sense of the mechanical. Guilt, shame, pride or passion are evenly unfelt.
And yet, the writing deploys, emerging slowly like life's own invisible designs, the element of the unexpected, however weak:

“An absurd thought even popped into his head, that he should start
stealing a piece, albeit a tiny one, from each weapon in the city, and thus,
through almost imperceptible means, put an end to all the bother. “A oneman
conspiracy,” said Walser, and he couldn't stop smiling at how
ridiculous the idea was.”

Tavares attempts to halt his tale in an interesting-unforeseen turn of events, in a situation where a series of monotonous actions get overwhelmed by their own mechanistic discipline. In the end, something must give way to the human oddity. For being odd in the perfectly even levelled life is something that still remains at the heart of humanity.

The writing is deliberately succinct, which allows the reader to remain vigilant of the paragraphic climb. The reader feels what lies behind the façade without an actual commonplace deployment of that much used device, irony. The dual character of the linguistic register could be perceived, at times, almost immediately. As a semantic whole, Joseph Walser's Machine must be considered a definitive unit in the “Kingdom” series.