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The book begins with an ominous flourish – but it all sounds so subdued and idyllic that the reader does not grasp its import until much later: “Silence at last. Only buzzards above me. On the downward climb the rattle of scree. It sounded as if it were trying to follow him.” Only the novel’s denouement reveals the actual story behind these ingenuous nature impressions: a perfect murder committed by the most peace-loving, conflict-averse person imaginable. It is an act of self-defense; he lashes out with startling cold-bloodedness in an attempt to liberate himself, to regain control of his life. For that, and no less, is what an unscrupulous interloper has so matter-of-factly usurped.
The narrator, a philosophy professor in Basel, remains nameless to the end. His nemesis has a name: Friedrich Grävenich. This scruffy character, who claims to be a piano teacher at the Mannheim Music Academy, clings to the narrator like a leech after a chance encounter at the Strasbourg train station. He is an incessant bloviator, tormenting the people around him with his endless monologues and his churlish behavior. Yet it is the breathtaking vehemence of his audacity that puts the narrator utterly at his mercy, unable to rely on the usual social norms of courtesy and consideration: “For the first time in my life I confronted a creature with no instinctive sense of personal space.”
The narrator’s powerlessness and feelings of aggression in the face of this overbearing egotism are conveyed so vividly that the reader wants to seize the narrator by the collar and urge him to give this insufferable monster the boot. But this is exactly that the friendly philosopher is unable to do; his field of research, aptly enough, is Spinoza’s paradoxical denial of free will.
And so we suffer along with him for one hot, endless-seeming summer as the protagonist, seemingly terrorized into paralysis, tries all kinds of tricks and pretexts to get rid of the uninvited guest and have his apartment to himself again. All these liberation attempts are doomed to failure – until one day it becomes too much to bear. His stuffy university colleagues are not the only ones look askance upon the dissolute life he has begun to lead in the company of this loudmouthed slob.
Ultimately, desperation drives the harmless fellow to liberate himself from his persecutor in a move that is both simple and shrewd. For, as he says, “For me to show myself mercy again at last, there could be no more mercy toward him.” And so he simply arranges a convivial mountain hike on which Grävenich strays from the path and plummets into the abyss.
In his second novel, roundly praised by the critics, Karl-Heinz Ott tells the story of a psychological and physical occupation so vividly and grippingly that the reader shares the feeling of oppression that torments the protagonist for weeks, unable to deny a distinct sense of relief when there is “silence at last”.
This story looks back on nothing less than the emancipation of the self, a self that seems to come into its own again only through the act of violence, asserting itself amorally at the very moment when it is in danger of losing its identity once and for all: “Now, four months later, I will have to live with the fact that this encounter would prove more momentous than any in my life hitherto and that this person will be harder to erase from my memory than any other. I will never be able to tell this story to anyone, however close to me, but the burden of this secret makes me feel, for perhaps the first time in my life, like an adult.”
With utter plausibility Karl-Heinz Ott’s chamber drama conveys the incursion of menace and absurdity into the world of normality; events unfold and come to a head with the inner logic of a nightmare, leavened by black humor. The musical language, the rhythmic voice and the dynamic narrative join together in an enthralling book about the interplay between power and powerlessness, hope and desperation, a book that is both horrifying and immensely comical.
Anne-Bitt Gerecke
March 2006
[Translated by Isabel Cole]
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