No Tears of Special Pleading
BRICKNER, RICHARD P.
No Tears of Special Pleading Rebellion of the Lost By Henry Jaeger Translated by Richard and Clara Winston Harper and Row. 354 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Richard P. Brickner Author, "The Broken...
...Reviewed by Richard P. Brickner Author, "The Broken Year" In postwar Germany, Henry Jaeger committed 50 burglaries and two armed robberies...
...The theft is no more than a caper until they kill a man...
...Alex, a long-distance runner, expects to represent his country in the Olympic games...
...The boys are easy prey for David: He sells them on the idea of pulling off a huge robbery together...
...Thereafter, as suspense builds, the remorseful brothers Kuhn are, ironically, met with freedom and wealth before punishment comes to relieve them...
...their values do resemble those of their cash-as-cash-can world...
...But he commits a tenuous infraction of the rules in a trial heat and, due to one official's passionate rigidity, is disqualified from the competition...
...Having watched indifference squeeze love and life from the Kuhns, we become less indifferent to indifference for a while...
...Neither as linguistically exuberant as Giinter Grass nor as conspicuously symbolic as Heinrich Boll, Jaeger nevertheless tells his wintry tale with great skill...
...One rarely reads so despairing a novel without a sense that the ink has been diluted by tear drops of special pleading...
...Jaeger has written not strident propaganda but a finely shaded, bitter novel...
...The protest in Rebellion of the Lost is "right" because it is tacit...
...Even though we are certain the demi-Karamazov Kuhns will only be more lost after their crime than before, they are so compassionately drawn that their doom-directed lives demand the reader's intensive concern...
...His characters and their circumstances have the engrossing, convincing feel of unembellished reality...
...Paul is being tormented by Erika, his contemptuous, materialistic mistress...
...My crimes," Jaeger says, "were not the right protest against the circumstances I met, but I hope my books are...
...We join Jaeger's subtle protest...
...Yet, as war-children, they are genuine victims...
...A few years after the War, young Alex and Paul Kuhn are reunited with their stepbrother, David, who has returned to a money-mad Germany from Foreign Legion service...
...But the Kuhns are not portrayed as innocent dupes of society...
...While serving most of a 12-year sentence, he wrote The Fortress, a best seller in Europe, and the far superior Rebellion of tlie Lost...
Vol. 53 • May 1970 • No. 11
