“After a pause, with everyone looking at her, Katja said, ‘Well, to be happy, to go someplace where things function, where you can live reasonably. I would keep trying over and over, or I’d throw myself out the window.’
“‘It’s not always a matter of either-or,’ Adam said without lifting his eyes from his potato. ‘You can’t say that this is nothing here. And besides, it’s enough that people like Andras or my parents didn’t sell themselves, couldn’t be corrupted. That’s worth knowing and thinking about.’”
A snippet from a longer discussion, and probably not particularly clear without context. But anyway. Both Katya and Adam are East Germans, in 1989, before the fall of the Wall; Katya wants to escape West through Hungary, and Adam does not but is on vacation in Hungary and helps Katya out. And this is the most interesting contrast in the book: between Katya who keeps trying over and over, and Adam who has little enough need for freedom.
There are other things here that work well; the book is largely in dialogue, and is presented as a large number of short chapters, each a vignette with a gap between it and the next, so there’s a certain amount of interpolation that needs to happen at the start of each chapter, a reorientation. This can’t be easy; Schulze makes it look easy.
But Adam is the heart of the book, and Schulze tends to get distracted from him too easily; the story is a journey then a love story, and that intrudes; the focus is on Evelyn or on the relationship between Adam and Evelyn; the dialogue gives less information than one would like, and all the information comes at second- or third-hand. The couple of instances Schulze steps out of this — as when Adam reads aloud from Genesis, seeing the Bible for the first time, unable to understand belief, are great (although strains the already-not-great Eden allegory I suppose runs through the book). But too often we’re stuck a step or two away from the real meat that should be packed around the bones of this story.
November 09, 2011, 11:05am Comments
