In late September 1940, Walter Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou, Spain. A Jew and a fierce anti-Nazi, the German critic had travelled from Marseilles through the Pyrenees in an attempt to flee Europe for the United States, only to learn that the local authorities planned to return him to France. If you know enough about Benjamin to have read “The Task of the Translator” or “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” you will also know the ironic tragedy of his death: his travelling companions were soon after granted passage to Lisbon, Portugal, from which point Benjamin may have made it to waiting friends in New York. Italian novelist Bruno Arpaia has imagined Benjamin’s last years of life in The Angel of History, a story that contrasts the suffering of the philosopher with that of Laureano Mahojo, a fictional Spanish communist who takes arms against Franco’s fascists.
The novel begins with Benjamin’s arrival in Paris, chapters narrated from the third person, and the philosopher’s meanderings through the city in the shadow of the German menace pale in comparison with juxtaposed scenes of combat. Arpaia’s Spanish Civil War is vivid, and the Laureano chapters have the immediacy of a first-person account. Surely the point is that war is felt at home as well as at the front, but this point is sacrificed to illustrations of a scholar’s inability to function effectively in a world beyond the dusty tomes of a library. It is not the inevitable war that hampers Benjamin as much as his own nature. Foreshadowing the anti-Semitism of Vichy France, The Angel of History is also unable to create sympathetic bystanders, initially, only indifferent ones, and Benjamin’s friends are historical figures introduced to do little more than demonstrate how the whole world comes to inherit the philosopher’s ineffectual mien. By following Laureano, however, the reader gets an opportunity to savor his feisty friendship with Mariano, another communist fighter, and the desperate lust of his passionate affair with Mercedes, a Spanish nurse. One could be forgiven for drawing the obvious parallel with the best of Hemingway’s war writings as Arpaia here leads us throughout a war-torn Spain. He inherits from his American antecedent a real skill at situating characters on the landscape. Perhaps because Arpaia’s Paris is limp and uninspired, foggy mornings along the Seine that belie a city of lights, Benjamin’s sections do not really pick up until the philosopher is drawn ever-deeper into the corrupt bureaucracy of wartime government. Place is much less important as Kafka emerges as the primary influence for Arpaia’s writing, though the author does an excellent job in describing Marseilles as a maze – or perhaps a trial! – that threatens to ensnare Benjamin until the Gestapo can catch up with him. As befuddled as ever, but crippled further by ill health, Benjamin grows more sympathetic as his fate is decided by the absence of a stamp no one will place on his travel papers. One of the great European minds of the modern period is ennobled as he is reduced to detritus – while a whole culture faces its extinction.
The novel, ultimately, is about fate, about the forces - some external, some internal - that conspire against us. Both Benjamin and Laureano test their wills to live, and while readers may be surprised by that exhibited by the former, the latter does not disappoint in his ferocity. Though Benjamin imagines a hunchbacked dwarf who has accompanied him through his tragedy, a doppelganger from whom he cannot finally escape, Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus remains after the philosopher’s death the novel’s most potent image: “the angel of history” who contemplates our horrific folly and fails to prevent further tragedy. While he is called to paradise, it remains to more worldly beings to tell our stories. Laureano is a fine storyteller, but Bruno Arpaia is a masterful one.
