On a Day Like This

As with so many of Peter Stamm’s characters, Andreas, in his 2006 novel On a Day Like This (translated, as always, by Michael Hofmann), makes a series of apparently impulsive decisions which will change his life dramatically. Typically, Andreas’ motives are not entirely transparent, though we understand that his life as a teacher in Paris has gradually been drained of meaning:

“Emptiness was his life in this city, in eighteen years in which nothing had changed, without his wishing for anything to change.”

With a secure, if increasingly unrewarding, job and two casual lovers, Andreas considers himself settled into the pattern of his life, but there are signs that he is beginning to long for change, imagining, for example, what it would be like to be run over by a bus:

“The collision would be the end of what had been thus far, and at the same time a sort of fresh start.”

Nothing quite so dramatic occurs – as Stamm has said in interview, “The behaviour of people in daily crisis seems much more varied than when big things happen” – and Andreas continues to feel both the insignificance of his life and his detachment from it:

“He was both an extra in the imaginary film and a member of the audience.”

He will also complain:

“He life was too formless, and at the same time too much of a tangle.”

Much of his dissatisfaction is rooted in a story from his youth, a summer afternoon when he went swimming with two friends, Fabienne and Manuel. While Manuel is swimming in the lake, Andreas kisses Fabienne. Nothing more happens, and later Fabienne and Manuel begin a relationship that will end in marriage, but Andreas feels that “Fabienne and Andreas was a love story that had never quite happened.” This has allowed Andreas to continue to idolise Fabienne – “he couldn’t imagine Fabienne sweaty or tired” – and this, in turn, at least partly explains why he has never sustained a relationship with a woman:

“From that time, she had accompanied him through all his relationships.”

Though Andreas seems, unconsciously at least, to be longing for change, it is, as previously stated, a series of minor decisions, rather than one major one, which lead his life in a new direction. Stamm has described his writing technique as:

“…more to do with feelings than with thoughts. I use my intuition to decide whether a person would do one thing or another. There is no planning, most of the time it’s not even real decisions.”

When Andreas decides to walk one of the younger teachers, Delphine, home at the end of term, and they end up sleeping together, it does not seem particularly out of the ordinary; afterwards, knowing that she will be going to a new job after the holidays, he assumes “that would be the last either of them would ever hear of the other.” This choice, however, coincides with an event Andreas has less control over, a small exploratory operation, which leads Delphine to move in with him while he recovers. This, too, ends abruptly – “I want you to leave” he tells her – but he is not only reacting to the threat of someone getting close to him (“He had always been careful not to be loved too much himself”) but to fear of the results of the biopsy:

“Someone had made a diagnosis and come to certain decisions about him, someone he didn’t even know.”

In the end, he cannot face finding out that something serious may be wrong with him, and he misses the appointment. It is this which leads him to decide to return to his home town in Switzerland, abandoning his life in France by selling his flat and buying a car instead, and asking Delphine to go with him, while at the same time intent on seeing Fabienne again:

“He had to begin a new life. That, he thought, is my only choice.”

The novel then contrasts the relationship with Delphine – casual, uncertain – with his feelings for Fabienne. As with many of Stamm’s novels, this represents a contrast between fiction and reality – if we weren’t sure that Andreas and Fabienne’s ‘relationship’ was ‘fictional’, Stamm has already made this clear by connecting it to the story in an instructional booklet which Andreas uses to teach German. Though he is set on meeting Fabienne again, “He didn’t know what he expected from her. He didn’t even know what he wanted.” It is almost as if he, too, wants to believe that part of his life is not real:

“He wanted to convince himself that the only reason that his love had lasted so long was that it had remained unrequited.”

Fabienne also makes the point clearly:

“What I have with Manuel isn’t a story. It’s reality.”

In many ways Andreas is an unsympathetic character, showing little understanding of others, but it becomes clear that this originates in a lack of self-knowledge – “He had never had a very clear sense of himself.” His failure to follow up on the moments he shared with Fabienne (“You were so dismissive, after you kissed me”) is what he has been missing in holding on to that memory.

On a Day Like This is another fascinating Stamm novel, its title capturing both the banality of Andreas’ world and his long-stifled hope for change.

The Bread of Those Early Years

Heinrich Boll’s fifth novel, The Bread of These Early Years, originally published in1955, is a story of hunger. The hunger originates in the narrator’s childhood: the rationing of the Second World War, and the poverty of the post-war period. But it also encompasses a more ambiguous longing, one which rejects the conventional life he has gradually accrued for the love of a woman he barely knows. As with The Train was on Time, it is short enough to qualify as a novella, and exists within an even briefer time period, a single day, a fact Boll emphasises by echoing the first sentence (“The day Hedwig arrived was a Monday…”) in the opening line of the final part: “It was dark, still Monday…”

On that Monday morning the narrator receives a letter from his father asking him to meet the daughter of a fellow teacher, Hedwig, who is coming to the city to train as a teacher herself. He is already aware of Hedwig’s approaching arrival as he has previously been asked by her father to find her a place to stay. Having lived in the city for seven years, only rarely visiting his father, he remembers her only as a child, “playing with some empty flower-pots in the garden.” In his recollection her hair is blonde and so he doesn’t initially recognise her as the young woman he is immediately attracted to at the train station:

“Her hair was dark, like slate roots after rain, her face white, startlingly white, like fresh whitewash with a bit of ochre shimmering trough…”

This physical description is suggestive of a new beginning – the cleansing rain, the freshening paint – and we are reminded of the narrator’s earlier comments on “how things would have turned out if I hadn’t met Hedwig at the train station”:

“I would have stepped into another life, the way a person mighty step into another train by mistake, a life that, in those days, before I knew Hedwig, seemed tolerable enough.”

His instant reaction is that he must make her his:

“…suddenly I was filled with fear, that fear explorers must feel when they step onto a new land, knowing that another expedition is on the way, might have already planted its flag, taken possession…”

Though the metaphor may feel slightly dated in its description of ‘conquest’, it too conveys the idea of new beginnings, and, in highlighting fear as the primary emotion, emphasises how vital this relationship suddenly seems to the narrator. This is not simply a love story, where the central character leaves one woman (in this case Ulla, the boss’ daughter) for another, but one where that decision is connected to rejecting the life he is currently living for a different one. It is clear that he has already struggled to find a life which satisfies him:

“I didn’t feel like continuing my electrician’s apprenticeship, but I had already tried so many things: I had been a bank clerk, a sales clerk, and a carpenter’s apprentice, each for exactly two months, and I hated this new job too…”

Meeting Hedwig is enough to make him abandoned his current job, fixing washing machines, leaving calls unanswered not only when he goes to meet her, but from that moment on. Even when he is standing in the laundrette he refuses to look at an overheating machine:

“I knew now what I’d always known but hadn’t admitted to myself for the last six years: that I hated this job as I hated every job I had tried my hand at.”

Further, he withdraws all his savings in another sign that he is drawing a line under his old life, this having hardly spoken to Hedwig. This longing is mirrored in his longing for bread as a child – he tells how he ‘prompted’ his father to visit a baker whose son his father taught every Sunday to get a loaf of bread, a gift which ends when his father gives the boy an F. He frequently remembers those who have fed him – Sister Clara, Veronika (“Each time she gave me a piece of bread I had those hands near my eyes”) – and often calculates prices in terms of loaves of bread. He describes his hunger as “the wolf that still slept inside me.” The memory of a visit to his mother in hospital demonstrates he is not the only one marked by this obsession as she says in reference to the woman in the next bed:

“Every time he [her husband] came they quarrelled about the money she gave him to buy food.”

This is perhaps contrasted by his boss’ more abstract attitude to money, also exemplified by his intended Ulla. In the conversation where he ends their relationship, he specifically mentions “the bread that you, that your father, never gave me,” while she speaks throughout in financial metaphors, even telling him, “There are such things a receipts for kisses.” It feels like two different ways of looking at the world are in competition.

The Bread of These Early Years, translated by Leila Vennewitz, is another powerful story from Boll, both a document of Germany’s post-war years and a wider examination of human longing, a longing which, as the ending suggests, can never be assuaged.

The Left-Handed Woman

When it comes to who will win the Nobel Prize for Literature each year (although I may well have an opinion on whether one writer deserves it more than another) what I largely long for is that a writer in a language other than English is the winner, particularly one who has not been widely translated into English, or one who has largely fallen out of print. Patrick Modiano and Svetlana Alexievich would be examples of the former (the translation of Modiano since his win in 2014 has been quite astonishing); J M G Clezio would be an example of the latter, with six of his novels reprinted in November 2008 after his win. This year’s winner, Peter Handke, would seem a perfect example of another writer who falls into this category, with almost all his work out of print in the UK. So far, however, any reissuing is limited to the US (Pushkin Press’ edition of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams had already been planned), with seven of his novels due in December, and New Review of Books reprinting another two next year. Can this be down to the controversy that has surrounded his award, or is he simply seen as a more difficult sell by UK publishers? Whatever the case, it seemed an appropriate time to read the 1982 Abacus copy of The Left-Handed Woman (translator unnamed) I had picked up earlier this year.

The Left-Handed Woman is a novella rather than a novel, not quite reaching 90 pages in this edition. In summary, very little happens: Marianne and Bruno are married with a young son, Stefan, but when Bruno returns from a trip abroad, Marianne asks him to move out and he goes to stay with a friend, Franziska. Marianne is initially quite isolated, but as the story progresses she develops new relationships and the novel ends with a gathering in her house of those she knows, both from before the break-up, and her new acquaintances. The novel explores Marianne’s loneliness and questions whether it is entirely negative.

Our introduction to Marianne immediately suggests she is at one remove from reality, an aspect of her character which is emphasised by the distancing technique of being referred to as ‘the woman’ throughout:

“The woman stood as if in a trance, but instead of going stiff she seemed to bend to her thoughts. The child came and asked her what she was looking at. She didn’t so much as blink.”

This idea is repeated throughout the novella:

“Then for a time she remained motionless in the same posture.”

The word ‘motionless’ in particular applies itself to the character again and again: “For a time the woman stood motionless…” and “The woman sat motionless at the desk.” This has the effect of leaving the reader on the outside of the character, looking on as if from a distance – echoing the way in which Marianne herself is often portrayed looking out of the window of her flat. That we have little access to her thoughts or feelings is best demonstrated by the moment she asks her husband to leave, shortly after he has told her, “Tonight I feel as if everything I’d ever wished for had come true” (suggesting she is also closed to him):

“I suddenly had an illumination… that you were going away, that you were leaving me. Yes, that’s it. Go away, Bruno. Leave me.”

Bruno’s frustration shows in later encounters: “Damn it, you’re not well,” he tells her, and:

“Do you suppose there’s no one else in the world but you? I exist, too, Marianne. I exist!”

Her decision is impossible to judge, however, as we have little insight into their life before – perhaps it is Bruno who is solipsistic.

When Bruno leaves she decides to return to work as a translator and her progress from isolation to a new accord with the world can perhaps be measured against the scenes where she is sitting at her typewriter. Initially She struggles to type at all:

“She sat at the typewriter, in the bedroom. She didn’t type… Suddenly the woman pushed the typewriter aside and it fell to the floor.”

Later we are told, “she folded her arms over the typewriter and laid her head on her arms.” Eventually she begins to type, something that seems to coincide with others coming into her life, for example her father’s visit. She also develops new relationships – an actor falls in love with her, and she also invites a shop assistant – who tells her “you seem so free” – to visit her. When Bruno and Franziska visit her near the end – “expecting to find the loneliest woman on earth” – her apartment is full.

Handke, however, is not making a point about the benefits of company. Marianne’s loneliness seems to have purified her and allowed her make new relationships on her own terms, something, now that we look back at the opening scene, was not the case with Bruno (why else would Franziska say, “At last your Marianne has woken up”?). This is revealed in her final statement:

“You haven’t given yourself away. And no one will ever humiliate you again.”

The Left-Handed Woman can be disconcertingly distant but it is ultimately a rich and subtle novella. Many of its initially banal moments remain frozen in the reader’s imagination. It is a brief but fascinating introduction to Handke’s work.

Berlin Finale

As with Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin, German writer Heinz Rein’s Berlin Finale, published in the same year of 1947, was a best-seller in Germany, and was soon translated into to English (in 1952). Like Fallada, however, Rein’s reputation quickly faded in the UK and US, and, only now, with Shaun Whiteside’s new translation, will it hopefully be restored. Berlin Finale (and here, at least, ‘Berlin’ is uncontroversially in the original title) is set during the final days of the Second World War with the capital surrounded and Germany facing a defeat which Hitler and the Nazi High Command refuse to recognise. Over 660 pages Rein describes in painful detail the delusions of those who still believe the Third Reich can survive, and the defiance of those who wish to end the war and begin rebuilding. Amid the rubble, a dangerous atmosphere of suspicion still exists, with those supposed to be opposed to Nazi victory facing summary execution.

The novel opens as Joachim Lassehn, a disillusioned deserter from the Eastern front, arrives in Berlin. He has only the vaguest idea of why he has returned – his parents are dead and he can barely remember his wife, the result of a marriage that took place only days after meeting, and of which he says:

“It’s quite possible that we could walk past each other in the street and not recognise each other.”

Instead he finds himself in a bar talking to the landlord, Oskar Klose. When Klose speculates that Lassehn has deserted – “you’ve done a bunk, you’re on the run, you’ve high-tailed it, you’ve skedaddled” – Lassehn threatens to shoot him, but Klose, luckily, has been long opposed to the Nazi regime. Rein is quick to establish Lassehn’s innocence: this is partly political but also extends to a lack of life experience in general, particularly when it comes to women. (When he later finds a woman he has just met is attracted to him he doesn’t understand it, “he doesn’t know that there is also an animal lust that requires only the body and nothing else.”) His age, twenty-two, partly explains this, but, as Klose points out, so do the circumstances of his youth:

“You didn’t grow up in normal times… But when you started thinking the trouble-makers had already glued up your brain.”

This is a topic Rein will turn to again and again, the question of how Germany can recover from the war when its young men and women have known nothing but National Socialism. Lassehn himself recognises that, though he has rebelled, he has no other political system to recommend:

“He cannot think of an idea that carries his life and forces its way towards a goal, he knows only rejection of the idea that they had tried to force on him with pathos and brute force.”

Klose introduces Lassehn to a small group of like-minded anti-Nazis including Dr Bottcher and Friedrich Wiegand. Wiegand is wanted by the Nazis and living under a false name. Where Lassehn typifies those who have grown disillusioned and disgusted by National Socialism, Wiegand best represents those who have resisted all along. Wiegand has already spent time in a concentration camp as a political prisoner and, in the course of the novel, he will come under suspicion again, placing his wife in danger. His eldest son, Robert, on the other hand, has fully embraced fascism having “willingly allowed the poison of National Socialism to seep into him.” All live with the fear of discovery, as Wiegand explains:

“Experience has taught me that everyone observes everyone, that everybody suspects his neighbour, whether it’s because he fears he’s being spied upon or because he himself is a spy, quite apart from those creature who, without actually being spies, like to make themselves tools of the party, to demonstrate their loyalty and reliability.”

It is this constant sense of danger which makes the novel feel like a thriller at points (and perhaps explains the endorsement of Lee Childs on the cover). Many of the tensest moments take place in the confined space of an air raid shelter. Lassehn is questioned by an air raid warden when he goes to visit his wife and he is forced to take shelter:

“…in a flash, he is… aware of his situation: a deserter with inadequate papers in a city that is keenly searching for soldiers who have fled the battlefield, a deserter surrounded by strangers, any of whom could give him away…”

Wiegand encounters a different problem when he is recognised by an old comrade and has to deny any knowledge of him. There are later encounters, for example when Wiegand, Klose and Bottcher are questioned in the pub, that end more violently, and, overall, the effect is to have the reader permanently on edge.

The novel is not only the story of Lassehn, Wiegand and the resistance, however; Rein seeks to paint a wider picture of life in Berlin during these final days. This is not only done with set-piece descriptions reminiscent of Berlin Alexanderplatz, but with chapters set aside which take us into the offices of the Gestapo, or tell the story of a man whose wife and child do not return after a raid. One chapter is specifically titled ‘Biography of a National Socialist’. Even within chapters, other characters widen the novel’s scope, like the woman who has lost her daughter denouncing Hitler in an air raid shelter: “something has changed in me.”

Thematically, Rein looks both backward and forward: wondering how Germany will reform as previously mentioned, but also questioning how Germany allowed itself to become enthralled to Hitler in the first place:

“It would drive you mad that a handful of crazy demagogues and charlatans have managed to make an entire people obsessed with their idea.”

Berlin Finale is a classic of its kind: not only detailed and documentary (it seems likely that extracts of Nazi propaganda are verbatim) but incisive and insightful (take, for example, the thought that, “The adaptability of the human spirit is one of the most significant, but also one of the most terrible, gifts of man…”). That it is such a riveting, roller-coaster of a read is an added bonus.