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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Yet another excellent but inexplicably overlooked novel, July 12, 2011
This review is from: A Sad Affair: A Novel (Hardcover)
True, the English-speaking world came late to discovering and appreciating Wolfgang Koeppen (b. 1906, d. 1996). But in the past few years, Koeppen's trilogy of novels - "Pigeons on the Grass", "The Hothouse", and "Death in Rome" - have been belatedly recognized to be in the first rank of German fiction from the decade or so after WWII. Koeppen wrote A SAD AFFAIR much earlier, in 1934, and to my mind it is almost as distinguished as "Pigeons" and "Hothouse" (I have not yet read "Death in Rome"). This superb English translation by Michael Hofmann was issued in 2003. Yet I don't recall ever seeing any discussion of A SAD AFFAIR and this is the first Amazon review of it.
A SAD AFFAIR ("Eine unglückliche Liebe") is much different in scope and tone than the post-War trilogy. Those are set on a big public stage and tackle issues of politics and culture with biting, bitter (and brilliant) sarcasm. A SAD AFFAIR is private; it portrays the peculiar relationship between a young man and woman, Friedrich and Sybille. Friedrich is a hopeless Romantic, and he has fallen haplessly in love with Sybille. She in turn is a gorgeous, enchanting, but irresponsible and mercurial young woman, who simply wants to enjoy her life and beauty. She is like a cat - playful, purring, coquettish, but in the end existentially aloof. She is flattered by Friedrich's lavish dotings and enjoys his companionship, but she rebuffs his love and bolts whenever it threatens to become suffocating. She allows countless other men to sleep with her, but she won't give Friedrich so much as a kiss. But he continues to chase after her, very much the pathetic puppy. (Friedrich's dysfunctional obsession with Sybille reminds me a little of Franz Kafka's awkward worship of Felise Bauer.)
In his helpful Introduction, translator Hofmann tells us that A SAD AFFAIR is largely autobiographical and that Sybille has a real-life counterpart, Sibylle Schloss, who in the Thirties acted in Erika Mann's anti-Fascist cabaret in Zurich, and in 2001 was living in New York City on the Upper East Side. A photograph of her adorns the cover, and another is on page 2. Hofmann also writes that the novel was commissioned by the publishing house of Bruno Cassirer, which, impressed with his journalism, gave Koeppen an advance to write a first novel. He took the money to Italy, spent it, and came back without a novel. Cassirer then locked him in an apartment with a typewriter and plenty of paper and Koeppen hastily dashed off the novel. If true, the story is even more astounding because the writing in A SAD AFFAIR is so fresh and coruscating. It is a delight to read. The Nazis naturally put the novel on their list of condemned books.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Black hole coming, September 19, 2011
This review is from: A Sad Affair: A Novel (Hardcover)
Wolfgang Koeppen was a lost genius. His Trilogy of Failure, written in the 1950s, was among the best fiction written in the German language in the 20th century (and there was much competition!). After that monumental achievement, he more or less dropped out of the literary scene, with few small exceptions. He died in 1996 at age 90.
Here is his first published novel, from 1934. It has a very personal, if not banal subject, but the language is there already, apart from the occasional stuttering, when the grammar doesn't quite hold water. This is Doeblin and J.Roth standard already. And then the man disappeared for 20 years? What did he do in between? We know he worked for film. Did he leave traces?
This first short novel has a young man travelling after a young woman. Their relationship is based on addiction, infatuation, humiliation and revulsion. He must have her, but he can't be with her. She sleeps with nearly anybody, except him. `If I don't want to, I can't', is what she says. But she likes him and spends time with him, fooling around, doing childish things. She is a frivolous, hare-brained girl, and his falling for her is perfectly normal.
The story starts in Zurich. Sibylle travels with a shabby varieté troupe of mostly Russian provenience. Friedrich is unable to pull her out of her world. She is not all that much interested in him. He frets for her, lies in his overpriced hotel bed in Zurich and remembers Berlin and his home town on the river Oder. The narration shifts between 3rd person and 1st person narration, like in some of the later novels. The language is rooted in German expressionism of the 1920s.
Politics don't exist. The only reference to political circumstance is the mentioning of the stateless status of the Russian show people refugees. Despite that absence of historical space, the story has the atmosphere of life on the edge. Is it an edge in history or in geography? The edge of a black hole for sure.
The book is based on autobiographical facts. Apart from real life Sibylle, who graces the book cover, there is a cameo appearance of unnamed Halley's Comet, which passed Earth in 1910, amidst great prophecies of doom, which led many a pleasure seeker to ruin himself on his last day. Any thoughts of parallels to 2011 doomsday predictions are rather exaggerated. After all, the comet was real enough.
Friedrich tells us how he watched, as a 6 year old boy, together with his mother and her officer lover, how his father rose and then crashed in a hot air balloon, in the night of the comet. Sibylle was born in that same night. Talking about fate. No autobiographical facts can turn this wild flight of verbal fantasy into a boring memoir. The book is much better than I expected. Never trust a plot summary as a basis for an opinion!
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tantalus in a Teutonic Spring ..., August 25, 2011
This review is from: A Sad Affair: A Novel (Hardcover)
... up to his classic chin in unconsummated lust! Remember Tantalus, whose name is the root of the English verb 'tantalize'? He was the legendary Anatolian king who was sentenced to Tartarus, the deepest region of Hades, either for passing secrets from the Gods to mortals or for cannibalizing his own son, or both. His punishment was to be immobilized in a pool with delectable fruit hanging just above his head; whenever he tried to lap the water to quench his eternal thirst, the pool receded, and whenever he lifted his face to taste the fruit, the bough lifted out of reach. Wolfgang Koeppen makes no overt reference to Tantalus in "A Sad Affair", written in Germany in 1934, but it may not be accidental that many of the scenes in it take place at the edge of water, a lake shore, a bridge, the deck of an imagined boat ...
Koeppen makes no mention of political affairs of his historical moment, either. That absence will surprise readers of his three powerful political novels -- Pigeons on the Grass, The Hot House, and Death in Rome -- written all in a white-hot burst in the early 1950s. This 'first novel' seems, by comparison, a piece of timeless verbal alabaster, literary beauty for beauty's sake, closer to John Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" than to any of the socially conscious writings of Koeppen's contemporaries. Or to the 'lais' of Guillaume Machaut and the 'Vita Nuova' of Dante Alighieri -- works of chivalric 'idealism' that sought to transfigure both Art and Love by refinement of expression and perfection of genre. "A Sad Affair" is as formally crafted and symmetrical as any troubadour virelai. It's a remarkably dispassionate object d'art, which is all the more remarkable because its protagonist is obsessed by passion, and because the evidence suggests that the story is essentially autobiographical! The 'Belle Dame' of the novel, Sibylle, was based on the real-life half-Jewish actress Sibylle Schloss, whom Koeppen passionately pursued. No mention is made of Sibylle's Jewish identity in the novel; it's not relevant to the Ideal. Ms Schloss, by the way, survived the German insanity of Nazionalsozialismus, and was still living in the Upper East Side of Manhattan in 2001.
Michael Hofmann is the premiere translator of German novels of our lifetimes. I read the German edition of this book, Unglückliche Liebe, but I'm quite sure that Hofmann's English translation will come close to matching the lustrous style of the original.
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