New Lives
The essayist Joseph Epstein once wrote a piece addressed to people who thought they had a book in them. The gist of it was that they should try their best not to let it out. Among the people who might have benefited from this advice is East German citizen Enrico T眉rmer, the protagonist of Ingo Schulze鈥檚 massive new novel New Lives.
All his life T眉rmer has wanted nothing so much as to write a novel, to pour experience onto the page and make it ripple. 鈥淚f writing was a blunder, then I was a blunder,鈥� he believes.
But he never manages to create a shaped and formed work. The only writing he produces is a series of long letters about his agonies to his sister, friends, and love interests.
As it happens, all of T眉rmer鈥檚 letters are all composed in the first half of 1990, in the months between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of East and West Germany 鈥撀� a strange era, at once a kind of twilight and a dawn.
Despite his failure to write a novel, when T眉rmer re-reads these letters, he finds his literary aspirations renewed. Some of the descriptions and metaphors are 鈥渟o close to perfect I was afraid I had pilfered them from Babel or Mailer.鈥� He believes he now has the material for an epistolary novel in his hands, a work that will 鈥渆ssentially write itself.鈥�
It is these letters, with their mixture of ambition and naivet茅, that are presented to us in 鈥淣ew Lives鈥� as collected and annotated by a skeptical but fastidious literary scholar named Ingo Schulze.
Among the things Schulze (who was born in Dresden in 1962) successfully captures in 鈥淣ew Lives鈥� is the power of the phrase 鈥渢he West鈥� in the lives and memories of East Germans like T眉rmer.
To them it means bigger, brighter, better: a realm of marvellous goods and enviable freedoms.
On a trip across the wall, T眉rmer finds that 鈥渢o my eyes even the snow had a Western look that morning.鈥� Of his sister, he remarks, 鈥淰era is not a beauty, but she didn鈥檛 have a GDR face. I can鈥檛 explain to you just what a GDR face is, but you recognized one at once.鈥�
T眉rmer becomes a manager at a new newspaper, The Altenburg Weekly, and his letters often reprise, in something close to real time, the difficulties involved in setting it up. Among his colleagues is a garrulous but enigmatic nobleman, Clemens von Barrista, who is a fund of moneymaking schemes.
Ugly to look at but at ease in any situation, Barrista is 鈥渁 logician and a philosopher,鈥� a 鈥減oser of Socratic questions.鈥� His notions, and the conviction with which he voices them, are reminiscent of Dr. Tamkin in Saul Bellow鈥檚 鈥淪eize The Day,鈥� or, more recently, the figure of Chuck Ramkissoon in Joseph O鈥橬eill鈥檚 鈥淣etherland.鈥�
Barrista does not give to art the respect that T眉rmer accords it. Instead, he serves as the herald of changing values.
鈥淟ife鈥檚 experiences are not to be found in the theater nowadays, but in commerce, in the marketplace,鈥� he insists (T眉rmer has just given up a job as a dramaturge). 鈥淭he things we see daily are not only more exciting than Shakespeare, but also can no longer be grasped through Shakespeare.鈥�
Schulze鈥檚 novel has some lovely moments, but readers may find it hard to warm to the unprepossessing figure of T眉rmer, who is not particularly appealing either as an individual or as a lens on a changing world. The narration is also bogged down by its massive sprawl.
Schulze鈥檚 translator John E. Woods, whose translations of the novels of Thomas Mann and Arno Schmidt have been highly acclaimed, renders the more lyrical registers of 鈥淣ew Lives鈥� perfectly: 鈥渢he inconsolability that is part of experiencing something all alone,鈥� or 鈥渢he premonition of a redeemed world in the midst of our own.鈥�
But ultimately Schulze鈥檚 convoluted structure and knotty material 鈥� along with the narrator鈥檚 incurable navel-gazing and his references to obscure events 鈥� work against the success of 鈥淣ew Lives.鈥�
Chandrahas Choudhury鈥檚 first novel will be out in India next year.
