Adrian Duncan is an artist and award-winning writer based in Ireland and Berlin. His debut novel Love Notes from a German Building Site was published by The Lilliput Press and Head of Zeus in 2019. It won the 2019 John McGahern Book Prize. In 2020 he was shortlisted for the Dalkey Literary Awards Emerging Writer. Duncan's second novel A Sabbatical in Leipzig was published by The Lilliput Press in 2020.

I have worked with Adrian before on a collaborative project with Red Bird Youth Collective as written for Paper Journal of Visual Art, of which he is co-editor. Having followed his art making practice for several years, I was extremely interested to read his novels. Due to time constraints, our conversation centred ore on his second novel. A Sabbatical in Leipzig. His début, Love Notes from a German Building Site is an intimate exploration of a young Irish engineer, Paul, at the point of transition in his life. The sense of grief is not so much about what is lost, but that the time and motivation to uncover his true identity and desires is running out. Happy moments with Paul’s partner are overshadowed with a tension that this happiness could dissolve at any moment, or may never reoccur.

A Sabbatical in Leipzig examines grief from another perspective, that of an older man, Michael. Inhabiting the purgatory between finishing his morning coffee and beginning his day, the reader is invited to participate in key moments in this retired engineer’s life through memory, objects and ritual. These key moments are not seminal, major life events, but occur when epiphany is reached through a change of perspective, the handling of an object, examination of a work of art. While Paul in the authors début cannot gain mastery over the self and time, Michael in A Sabbatical in Leipzig finds, in the solitary vacuum of time, that the self is ever changing, through small, forensic examinations of seemingly minor events and thoughts.

I met Adrian over Zoom. He is based in Berlin.

A Sabbatical in Leipzig, features multiple layering of images, and the joining of time and space through images. I began our conversation by asking Adrian if this was a conscious act or something that is part of his creative practice, which occurred with very little conscious prompting / instigation.

“There was very little conscious planning or plotting, in this novel,” Adrian begins, “So the space in the novel is the same as my apartment in Berlin. I was in Bilbao once before, staying with a friend and one morning I noticed a patch of their parquet flooring his their apartment glowing in the sun. I started writing Michael and knew that he would live near that glow of light, wherever that was, and then I remembered that it was in Bilbao. So in that first instance, there was that happenstance glow of light in my mind’s eye. The novel is based on Michael’s movements through an apartment, which is based on my own. I started at the back window - I’m standing at the same window now - a lot of things here acted as triggers which led me into memory, fabrication and a mix of the two. So there was nothing planned, the images came from moods produced by the text itself. It was very unconscious. The first draft was written in five weeks without a break, weeks after Lilliput took Love Notes from a German Building Site. I had been labouring over that book on for five years. I didn’t plan A Sabbatical in Leipzig, the images came about from moving through this room and the objects that could be placed in this space.”

The material triggers that spark the character’s memory include two different recordings of Schubert’s Trout Quintet: the traditional version and an experimental version from 1970 with Caspar David Friedrich’s Morning Mist in the Mountains on the record sleeve. There is also a postcard with a collage of mountains and a photograph of him with turf cutters taken by his brother. These, and the rest of the objects and artefacts, journey to Michael: he unpacks memory through secondhand and antique objects rather than objects he has created: he was a bridge engineer. This collection of artefacts contrasts with the protagonist’s early life:

“Until I met Catherine, I spent most of my life trying to shed objects from which I felt I had extracted my use.” [1]

I asked Adrian to talk about the selection and importance of these objects in the novel, which have a dynamic relationship with each other and with the main character;

“I actually own the Shubert’s Trout Quintet album, it’s a strong piece of music for me. The image on the record sleeve is very beautiful. I was drawn to the music first but the image on the sleeve is something I’m very aware of.  The secondhand postcard belongs to me and was found in Bologna or somewhere like that I think. I stuck it up on wall for no other reason than I liked it. Regarding the things in this book - if I were to remove everything else from my apartment here, these would be what remain. They’re unimportant in many respects, and have value only because I’m drawn to them. They appear in a book, unselfconsciously depicted and take on an importance to Michael that I pursued through writing. Then there are the connections that you as the writer don’t even know about, the fictional character learns these himself: you learn together. The selection is only curated in so far as they are important in an unselfconscious sense. There’s very little design at play. There’s room for exploration - Why is that on the record sleeve? - asking why of an image. Exploring the material condition is also important to me - they are not just projected images, one is a postcard, one is in a notebook. The images are also setting up moods for the person reading that postcard or listening to that album. Exploring all of those all layers, and travelling into the image, they seem to me like fertile ground.”

There is a section in the book were Michael recalls time spent working in India. He has a photograph of a person holding a section of a ‘living root bridge’ in his notebook. This is an opportunity for Michael - and the reader - to think about a different type of engineering and also a different experience of time. I asked Adrian how he navigated this without it becoming too metaphorical or weighed down in symbolism.

“I don’t think Michael would be someone with any interest in symbols or metaphors - that for the reader - he’s not going to be playing with them. The living root bridge is an image that really struck the Lilliput Press editor Antony Farrell. I suppose between all the glass and the steel this is a completely different texture. These photos of a root lying across a person’s hand denote the passing of time, and they might tell Michael something about the time of the place which he sees as something outside of that he might be used to: production time, scheduled time or even Western time, to a certain degree. Because these images are so potentially romantic - two living things meeting (like in the introduction to the book), Michael has the approach that this is interesting and that’s it, he kept the photograph because time is interesting and of value to him and not the metaphoric value. Because I’m close to Michael in terms of personality, those judgements weren’t too difficult to make for me. Of course editor draws things out, Sean in Lilliput Press is a really good judge of how these metaphors and symbols can be presented. It would have been a huge mistake if it came across as heavy handed.”

Moving into the effect these artefacts have on the main character Michael and how is story can be told through them, Adrian continues;

“They are ways into his relationships with people as well, and as he ventures into them, we learn about other characters; his brother, other family members, and in particular, his partner Catherine. The objects are portals, they arrive to him in different ways and then allow him back out to the people that brought the objects to him. The only real concrete things he has created are the bridges in different countries that he’s too old to travel to, that he can’t see or explore anymore. A drawing of one still remains and that’s really the only artefact he has from his working life as it were. All of those things come to him and Michael is responding to them within a quietness that comes as much from the fact that he’s an older person but also comes from that particular moment in a day when you don’t actually have anything to do, after your morning coffee and just before you leave your house. It’s in that nondescript period of time, which I find interesting, that he’s time he’s choosing to reflect.”

This nondescript in-between time is mirrored in several points in the novel. Michael listens to two versions of the same musical piece simultaneously, which creates a third space for reflection and clarity outside of his usual routine of listening to the two pieces one after another. This third space could also be seen as a break in time, something that is also suggested by the word sabbatical. His past is not a static story; it is a dynamic narrative that changes through memory and reflection. Michael inhabits Ireland, London, Leipzig and Bilbao all at once. Although Michael is living in Bilbao, and engages with the fabric of the city each day, his present is not as richly lived as his time with his partner. The sabbatical referred to was not an idyllic time; this ‘break’  was a time of crisis for the character. However this period of time also contained great joy through his engagement with his work and everyday living with his partner Catherine. This novel hints at block theory, where past, present and future all simultaneously exist. Through Michael’s movements through his Bilbao apartment, he experiences and re-experiences all the things that ever happened to him at every time and place, and are all equally real.

“Bilbao emerged out of the idea that Michael would live there because of the colour and light.” Adrian explains. "Two years before I started writing A Sabbatical in Leipzig, I wrote the introduction. Michael and Catherine are holding each other in bed and he imagines bridges holding them together. That was written as a short story and I remember thinking that there’s something behind that warmth and more there to explore. It wasn’t until I started writing A Sabbatical in Leipzig, starting with looking out of this window, I thought that short story belongs here and that became the introduction. I went to Bilbao for four days, and I went there as Michael. Because of that there were certain routes I wouldn’t take, and then certain places I would definitely go to, such as a church and a hospital. I found where he lived and where he’d go out for a coffee. Then I realised that he would be really interested in all of the bridges in Bilbao so I decided to survey all ten bridges, in order to understand them. When I was doing that I came across this particular bridge that Michael really loves, the one with two cantilevers that meet in the middle. Then there’s the Guggenheim Museum which I don’t think he admires but he greatly admires Serra’s work inside. So that’s what he would do everyday, he would walk along the bridges and go to this amazing sculpture in the middle of the Guggenheim. This and listening to the two versions of the Trout Quintet continue to be a focal point for him, habits of his day.”

Drawing is an extremely important element in the novel, and maybe resonates more as Adrian is also a visual artist. Adrian refers to a specific section of the novel where Michael draws on tracing paper and layers drawings together: 

“The tracing paper drawing is a a really important material and it only become more important as I went on. It’s not a transparent acetate and it’s not opaque. It produces an interface - if you hold up tracing paper in front of a person, you can tell that there’s a person there but you can’t see exactly what they look like. But you can still make a drawing - even when you can’t see clearly. That is important in this book. What you’re looking at is this emerging series of glyphs and lines on this piece of tracing paper and who this figure could be.”

Sections in the book are separated by ‘orphaned drawings’ - abstract lines and curves punctuate the book, most memorable is the drawing of  two arcs coming together. They present as symbols or partial symbols removed from their context. I was interested to know more about these and the discussion Adrian and the publisher had when creating the book:

“As I was writing there seemed to be about twelve chapters. Once I understood the mood, what was happening, and where things were, I took away this structure and just decided to make it a continuous thought - that’s what it is, an hour in Michael’s morning. However at the same time there are moments of pause, breath-taking or inhalations. When we were working on the book, the publisher thought that as it was really visual. They were really interested in those publishers marks - you know the really ornate things that you see in old books. They’re almost like expanded asterisks, they sit between trains of thought. In one of the earlier drafts they were quite big but I didn’t want them to look like big drawings. There is something slightly illustrative about them - for me it is partly to understand the shape of the text. If the reader doesn’t pick up on this, it’s not essential, the drawings sit on the suggestive rather than illustrative register.”

At the beginning of the book in the place where an author’s note, a quote by someone else or a dedication would be placed, is a Leaving Certificate Technical Drawing exam question. I asked Adrian about the significance of this problem and it’s position at the beginning of the book.

“I did technical drawing in school, it is a very important skill for me and a brilliant thing to learn: thinking in three dimensions and drawing in two dimensions. The solution to that exam question is an unbelievably beautiful series of lines. I wanted readers to be aware of drawing as a fundamental thinking tool. The novel can be seen as an unfolding and expanding narrative, a series of drawing tangents arcs and circles. The book does not pursue a linear narrative, but the opening out of forms and the making it closer to drawing in certain regards. And also I wanted people to read that question and wonder what would that look like? [2] I wanted to introduce this particular type of drawing that is fundamental to Michael’s mindset.”

Michael goes to the Guggenheim museum everyday to view a Richard Serra sculpture. This ritual, a conversation with his deceased partner, is hopeful, showing the infinite number of routes around this large artwork. Michael calculates that even following a different route around the sculpture he will never be done, and in this way his relationship with Catherine is still very much alive. Adrian agrees with this sentiment:

“A Sabbatical in Leipzig is a love adventure: Michael is still looking towards life and towards Catherine. These sculptures are a way of connecting with Catherine for him. Bleak and bewildering as they are, Michael is still very much in the love adventure. Michael is on the edge of something but still looking inwards, still looking in at the thing he is searching for.”

Adrian Duncan is currently working on a collection of short stories and a third novel. For information on his practice, Lovenotes from a German Building Site and A Sabbatical in Leipzig, go to 

https://www.lilliputpress.ie/uncategorized/adrian-duncan-ask-me-anything

and http://www.adrianduncan.eu/index.php/about/

Image by Sean Breithaupt (2019)