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|  | | The Balkan wars, a beautiful woman and three journalists
in search of the 'true' story: this often suspenseful triangle forms the
framework for Norbert Gstreins latest novel, The Craft of Killing
, for which he was recently
awarded the prestigious Uwe Johnson Prize. What is the appropriate way to write
about war, should one even, in an age dominated by all-embracing, globalised
media, still be writing novels at all? These are the big questions which
exercise the three male protagonists in this novel – and the author as well, of
course.
Norbert Gstrein has dedicated his book to the memory of
the Stern magazine
reporter Gabriel Grüner, who was shot in Kosovo in the summer of 1999. However,
the death of Grüner, ‘about whom I know too little to be able to tell the story
of his life and death,’ only provided the initial impetus for Gstrein’s novel,
which has no documentary ambitions. Instead Gstrein’s narrative focuses on a
fictitious Austrian war correspondent, Christian Allmayer, who has reported on
the disintegration of Yugoslavia from the very beginning and is killed in an
ambush in Kosovo in 1999.
Besides his reports on the war, Allmayer also leaves behind many personal
notes, plus the tape of an interview with a Croatian warlord, Slavko. This
interview with one of the many whose ‘craft’ is killing is not only the key
event in Allmayer’s life, but also in the novel as a whole. With the answer
Allmayer is given to the central question, ‘What is it like to kill someone?’ he
himself is drawn into the web of guilt and responsibility; at the same the
amoral nature of warfare affects him in a very immediate way: his death is shown
to be another of its consequences.
For his friend Paul, also a journalist and a moderately successful travel
writer, Allmayer’s tragic fate is a welcome opportunity to write his novel, a
project he has been mulling over for years without getting down to it. Despite
his shock at the terrible deed, despite the sorrow he feels, the ‘Allmayer case’
seems to provide him with the long-sought plot for his novel. Obsessed with the
idea of solving the mystery of his friend’s violent death, he devotes an
excessive amount of time and energy to researching Allmayer’s life and work as a
journalist. Among other things, he undertakes a journey through the former
combat zones in Croatia and Bosnia together with his partner, Helena, who comes
from Dalmatia, and a journalist friend, the anonymous first-person narrator of
the novel.
Driven by this obsessive determination to uncover the ‘true’ circumstances
surrounding Allmayer’s death, Paul gets more and more caught up in a tangle of
reconstruction, supposition and myth-making, only to come to the disillusioned
realisation that, ‘One dead man doesn’t make a novel.’ Eventually he is no
longer able to keep living and writing, reality and fiction apart; there comes a
point when even his partner, Helena, only exists in the role he has allocated
her as ‘senior liaison officer to the world of my novel.’ When his projected
novel comes to naught there is, sadly, nothing left for him but to take his own
life.
He commits suicide in a hotel room in Zagreb, leaving,
instead of a farewell letter, just the one sentence from Cesare Pavese’s
This Craft of Living
, ‘I
will not write any more,’ thus documenting the precarious relationship between
the craft of killing and the craft of writing. It is writing about the war
and its consequences for the individual that destroys Paul, as it did Allmayer
before him. When he visits the Balkans, he is forced to recognise that it is
‘landscapes after the battle’ he is driving through and it was too late to write
about them from the very start, since ‘what is written cannot bring a single
dead person back to life.’
After Paul’s sad end, the anonymous narrator feels morally obliged to
complete his projected novel. And the result of this third approach to the
impossibility of writing about war is the novel we have in front of us. The
first-person narrator is ‘in the grip of the same malady’ as Paul, namely ‘the
dream of at some point writing a novel that would make life bearable, a
compensation – though for what I could not say.’
The narrator approaches the whole story – Allmayer’s as well as Paul and
Helena’s – analytically. His novel is consciously designed as a counter-version
to Paul’s, as the latter more and more lost touch with reality in both his
writing and his life. In particular he expunges Paul’s intention of having
Helena die in his novel. This impulse to correct the relationship between
reality and fiction comes from life, not art: like Paul, the narrator has fallen
in love with the beautiful Helena.
Clearly Gstrein’s text is set up as a kind of – at first
sight not entirely uncomplicated – narrative experiment: the triple lens (not to
mention the allusion to Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly
), through which he focuses on the material,
does result in a distancing of the events of the war, but at the same time it
allows him the scope for a forceful demonstration of the second-hand,
‘reality-reduced’ nature of any representation of war.
Firstly, then, Gstrein’s The Craft of
Killing is a literary contribution
to the ongoing debate about the way the media construct reality and the
increasingly functional nature of war reporting. Secondly, the novel illustrates
Gstrein’s hypothesis that it is impossible to reduce the truth about any event
to a single, universally accepted ‘truth’. Thirdly, and this is the decisive
point, Gstrein succeeds in presenting these complex ideas on epistemology and
the nature of language in the form of a detective-style mystery. Together with
the many realistic descriptions of the Balkans and a love triangle, it all adds
up to a multifaceted and fascinating story.
In a pleasantly detached, yet insistent and precise language, and showing
great mastery of style, Gstrein’s latest novel demonstrates how one can talk
about the horrors of war while still avoiding cliché and affectation,
stylisation and journalistic jargon.
Anne-Bitt Gerecke
[Translated by Mike Mitchell]
January 2004
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