Recently another book by Klarisa Rode has come out, which is unfinished. It appears that death surprised her when, according to the plans contained in her notes, she still had at least half left to write. It’s a curious text because, against all logic, the missing part is the beginning. There are two chapters out of four, but they’re the final ones. So for the reader it’s an experience that could justly be called unusual, and yet it would be incorrect to judge it ridiculous. Not otherwise do we know our own parents, in fact, and sometimes even ourselves.
The protagonist of the book is an amateur meteorologist convinced that he can predict the weather on the basis of a statistical method all his own. We can imagine that the first part of the book, the nonexistent part, would consist of an account of the origins of this obsession, but it doesn’t seem so important, after all, when you begin the part that Rode in fact wrote, where she reconstructs the years of research carried out by the protagonist: the goal he had set for himself was to determine the weather every day, in Denmark, for the past sixty-four years. To reach it he had had to put together a staggering mass of facts. Nonetheless, with persistence and patience, he had worked it out. The last part of the book reports that, on the basis of the statistics he collected, the amateur meteorologist was able to establish, for example, that on March 3 in Denmark the probability of sun was 6 percent. That of rain on July 26 was practically none.
To collect the data he needed, the amateur meteorologist used a method that is in fact one of the reasons for the book’s fascination: he asked people. He had come to the conclusion that on average every human being distinctly recalls the weather on at least eight days of his life. He went around asking. Since each person connects the memory of the atmospheric weather to a particular moment of his life (his marriage, the death of his father, the first day of war), Klarisa Rode ended up constructing a striking gallery of characters, drawn with masterly skill in a few bold strokes. “A fascinating mosaic of real and vanished life,” as an authoritative American critic put it.
The book ends in a remote village, where the amateur meteorologist has retreated, satisfied with the results he has obtained and only partly disappointed by the faint echo that their publication caused in the scientific community. A few pages from the end he dies, on a day of cold wind, after a starry night.