Customer Reviews

The Assignment (Picador Books)

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If literature can be compared to art in style content and imagery, then "The Assignment" is closest to surrealist art. Well at least in imagery and style, the content is at times all to earthly. Style: Single sentence chapters; all the chapters; from a half page to six pages. This can be a bit exhausting to read, but the effect is that of well defined, concentrated urgency. There are no unneeded thoughts or phrases, there can't be since the sentence must flow. Imagery: Surreal, vivid, stark. From the first chapter where an occupied coffin is flown back from M. (assume Morocco) to Switzerland by plane. Not in the plane but trailing behind it tethered by ropes over vast stretches of the sunlit North African desert and the Mediterranean. A weird but beautiful image. A few chapters later leaders of a Moslem sect protest the excavation of a large black cube like ruin by sitting in the sand, in a line, at one corner of the ruin while the rest is cleared. They are dressed in black robes which cover their bodies and heads. They sit there day after day in the cloudless dessert, in the blazing sun, in the wind, in the cold clear nights. A female reporter and her film crew approach them in the bright noonday sun, she nudges one to wake him but he simply falls over, there being nothing left but the skeletal remains still wrapped in the black robe, and the next also falls when pushed, and the next, and the next. Content: Philosophical, stark, at times violent. Topics include the need to be observed (hence the title), freedom (the meaning of life is to be free, but freedom can only be achieved when one realizes that life is meaningless), and a nice odd view of the arms race. There is also a interesting point on the emotional frustration of modern war where a man's bloodlust really can't be satisfied. And also on the depravity of rape where a man's bloodlust can be satisfied.

The book is mostly philosophy. In response to an earlier review, the book isn't kind to women, but it isn't kind to men either. The female reporter is a strong not a weak character. The ending, however, is a let down. You get the impression that Durrenmatt got tired of writing single sentences and wrapped it all up in half a paragraph. Read this book, it's very good, then read some of his other books and plays they are also very good but much more normal .... kind of.

I'm a big fan of Durrenmatt's and have read everything of his that I can find that's been translated into English. He's written a pair of amazing plays (the Visit and the Physicists) and a handful of thought-provoking, and playful novels. The Assignment strings together incredibly long sentences that entangle the reader in Durrenmatt's astute observations about voyeurism, paranoia, and pre-destination among other things. Or perhaps it's simply a brilliant riff on let A=A. Check it out.

A filmmaker is hired to investigate the rape and murder of a woman in an unnamed North African country and becomes entangled in a web of secret plots and repressed sadism.

I am generally impatient with experimental literary techniques because they usually strike me as self-indulgences on the part of the author rather than attempts to communicate with the reader. However, there is something to be said for Friedrich Durrenmatt's use of chapters that consist of a single long sentence. It lends a certain breathlessness to the narrative and forces the author to winnow out all extraneous detail. Indeed, this is a very short novel. In the end, I did not find it effective. Durrenmatt is making a statement about the nature of observation, but it was lost on me, perhaps because the headlong nature of the structure did not invite contemplation. It doesn't help that the plot becomes increasingly preposterous until its deus ex machina ending.

With a certain sense of Sadism and adventure, Durrenmatt tells of a tale of a murder, rape, war and international intrigue. The main character, a film maker, is given an assignment to investigate the murder of his wife in some foreign, desert country. The woman is turned around and lea through adventures and lies, both by those that she trusts and those she cannot. The story itself was fascinating, despite the ever-so-slight feeling that it over-indulges in Sadistic tortures of the female characters. The ending was a disappointment. It had that deus-ex-machina feeling, not that the characters had resolved anything or that there was finality, but that the author had created an impossible situation for his heroine which only a ridiculously convenient ending could resolve. All in all this is a fine work, but not meant for those who cannot handle misogyny and weak female characters.