Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Experiments

Imagine readying yourself for a game of tennis—only to realize that the person on the other side of the net will be using the court to play a completely different game, one that seems to resemble pinball. That is what it felt like to sit down for an interview with Walter Abish, a Viennese-born American experimental writer and thinker. As we chatted at the Bowery Bar, Abish, who turns 87 today, did not dodge my questions: He slowly repeated them, smirking—and then proceeded to address these questions in a way that resembled an avant-garde performance, rather than an interview. “I’ll come to it later, if you remind me, because there’re too many diversions,” he half promised at one point. Between all of the diversions, free associations, and ironic allusions, I felt like I was dropped inside some warped and remixed theatrics of a page of Talmud.

In the 1980s Abish received the prestigious PEN/Faulkner award for his novel How German Is It, as well as a MacArthur Fellowship, aka a Genius Grant. Though experimental and cerebral, Abish’s later work received a fair share of mainstream attention. The occasion of our meeting, however, was the reissue of Abish’s very first novel, Alphabetical Africa, originally published in 1974 by New Directions.

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