New York as Home
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing NEW YORK AS HOME BY PEARL K. BELL In the dozen years since his first novel, Speculations About Jakob, was translated into English-followed more recently by The Third Book About...
...From the start of Gesine's hopeful new life in America-after a wartime childhood in Mecklenburg, and later years in the Marienfeld refugee camp and in Dusseldorf-she has relied on the imperturbably informative authority of the New York Times as the one mooring in an ocean of unfamiliar customs and bewildering diversity...
...And you still won't know when or why Peru went to hell...
...During the late 1960s, he spent two and a half years in the United States, not as a visiting literary celebrity but as an average New Yorker, working as an editor at Harcourt...
...This is as it should be, since the matrix of his novels is politics-the all-too-clear politics of a divided, defeated nation...
...Now that the first volume of his huge new novel, Anniversaries: From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 504 pp., $10), has been published here-and translated with uncanny idiomatic perfection by Leila Vennewitz-the time has come to clear the air...
...For Marie, with a child's dogmatic arrogance, only Lisbeth's brother Horst comes out of this tragic story unscathed: He had once briefly visited the United States, and "she is convinced that if a person comes to New York he must also come to his senses...
...Yet he cannot convince his wife that England would be a better place for their child...
...The only way to read through all this without sinking into hysterical confusion is to play hopscotch down the page, then go back for the sequence you skipped...
...Gesine's father, Heinrich, a master cabinet-maker, had emigrated from Mecklenburg to England as a young man and found a good livelihood in Richmond...
...If its "unremitting pedagogic compulsion" and solemn liberal righteousness often amuse her, this is all to the good...
...Every day, on the subway taking her to her job as a foreign-language correspondent for a large bank, she reads the paper with sacramental thoroughness, including the personal notices buried at the back...
...He has written a beautiful book, somber and joyous, about the complex idea of home...
...And my whole life spent wanting to believe in something...
...The Times, "our tried-and-true dispenser of reality," is like "an aunt from a good family," Gesine's protector, mentor, taskmaster...
...Uwe Johnson's meaning, on the contrary, is consistently lucid, hard and immediately accessible...
...On a visit home he married Lisbeth Papenbrock, taking her back with him to England...
...In difficult fiction the words on the page suggest much more than they specifically denote...
...Gesine Cresspahl, now 34 years old, has lived on the Upper West Side of New York-more precisely, on Riverside Drive and 96th Street-since her arrival from Europe six years ago...
...Although the 41-year-old Johnson previously dealt only with the two postwar Germanies, he has become, in his maturity, commendably less attached to his native experience...
...Johnson is not a difficult novelist in the sense that Henry James and Melville, Nabokov and D. H. Lawrence can often be difficult, and Tolstoy, George Eliot and Mann are not...
...It is no accident that Johnson's titles usually are flat declarations of unequivocal intent...
...Aside from the obvious point that a country's deterioration can hardly be attributed to one "precise moment," the question smacks of a bleary self-pity that would not welcome an answer...
...Rather, it must be painstakingly stitched together in a collage of deceptively disjointed remarks, a person's stammering conversations with himself, the intrusion of objects and events on the perpetual inner movement of longing, memory and fantasy...
...But just before Gesine was born, Lisbeth impulsively returned to her family, refusing to budge, and Heinrich soon followed...
...His methods of exploring and integrating a narrative so defy conventional realistic ideas of sequence that he has been labeled "difficult" by well-intentioned critics, and this putative encomium has inevitably been confused with "incomprehensible" and "obscure...
...Writers & Writing NEW YORK AS HOME BY PEARL K. BELL In the dozen years since his first novel, Speculations About Jakob, was translated into English-followed more recently by The Third Book About Achim and Two Views-the German writer Uwe Johnson has acquired a flattering but distorted reputation in this country...
...The extraordinary knowledge of the city that Johnson acquired-and which could put most residents to shame-is essential to the architectural balance of past and present in Anniversaries...
...Each fragment in Gesine's reconstruction of the past is introduced with a leading item from the day's paper-casualty statistics of the Vietnam war, riots, individual disasters-that in turn unlocks another door of personal history...
...The book's moral center, to the extent that it has one, is a mediocre journalist, Santiago Zavala, son of a wealthy, corrupt Lima politician, who spends hours in a lowlife bar called The Cathedral, drunkenly lamenting "My whole life spent doing things without believing...
...Marie, her 10-year-old daughter by the deceased Jakob Abs, demands to be told why her parents were unable to marry, and Gesine's response, framed in a scrupulous, witty and loving account of her daily rounds in New York, is the novel...
...How reassuring to have reports from Germany placed "in proper relationship to world news: a minor relationship...
...Yet for all the apparent eccentricity of his technique, Johnson is a remarkable storyteller, and never more, so than in Anniversaries...
...They announce investigations into the human archeology of political conflict, narratives about an East German railroad worker, Jakob Abs, whose mysterious death needs to be explained, or an East German bicycle champion, Achim, whose biography is being written by a journalist...
...As though the question were profoundly searching, and not just a species of rhetorical inanity, Vargas Llosa asks: "At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up...
...And my whole life a lie, I don't believe in anything...
...To give his novel an air of "experiment," Vargas Llosa alternates sentences from one conversation about the paranoid dictator General Odria with snippets from another about different matters...
...Slowly and painfully, Gesine forces her mind to Jerichow, a small town near the Baltic where her parents settled, in 1933...
...Like Germany itself, Lisbeth is going mad, and late in 1938, when Gesine is five, the tormented woman commits suicide, horribly, by fire...
...one intuitively understands that the writer has in mind an equation of meaning and consequence going beyond the language itself, and uncoverable only through a metaphoric, deliberately uncharted, collaboration between reader and writer...
...If you get lost, don't worry-every sophomoric idea, every taxi, whore, housemaid, secret policeman, sister and brother and cousin and aunt will reappear at least a thousand times, in the same way and to the same soddenly embittered tune, before you stagger to page 601...
...It is through Gesine's and Marie's passionate devotion to New York as haven and safe harbor-the one city in America that can absorb two refugees from Europe without destroying their foreign particularity, without scorning them or ignoring their dark burden of memory-that Uwe Johnson pays his own affectionate tribute to the city...
...As a result, Johnson's move from his native Pomerania, in East Germany, to West Berlin in 1959 (disliking both Germanies, he preferred living on the border, and then turned his back on the whole mess and went to England) and the fact that he has won several prestigious international literary prizes are far better known in this country than his books...
...But his third novel, Conversation in the Cathedral (Harper & Row, 601 pp., $12.50), is such a tiresome, repetitious, mindlessly logorrheic bore that only in the cruelest nightmare could I imagine myself reading his greatly praised earlier works...
...Numbers become Johnson's ironic refutation of alles in Ordnung...
...The titles are mockingly Teutonic in their earnest pedantry-the third book, two views (of a politically menaced love affair...
...The Nazi poison is inexorably contaminating every vein of German life, and as the shrewd and hard-headed Heinrich watches the town succumb-its handful of Jews first ostracized, then deprived of work, then victimized by vandals, then beaten by Hitler-jugend hoodlums-he smells the coming of war...
...This work carries the complex tale of Gesine Cresspahl and her lover, Jakob, begun in Speculations, forward into an American future of 1967-68, and back to a past that is every contemporary German writer's inescapable theme-the Hitler era...
...Like Uwe Johnson, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has been awarded fat prizes and lavish critical honor...
...Everything in order, except for the untidy human beings who refuse to conform, who don't want to atrophy in the Socialist Utopia of the DDR, who scheme their crazy plots to leap over the Wall (even before there actually was a Wall), who refuse, like Jakob, to collaborate with Soviet agents, who are foolish, impulsive, irrational, reckless, burning with a chaotic rage to be free...
...For Johnson, the psychological truth of German politics cannot be presented through the traditional device of a detached and omniscient narrator...
Vol. 58 • March 1975 • No. 6
