'Leonardos Hände' ('Leonardo's Hands') by Alois Hotschnig (Review)

Alois Hotschnig is a writer whose name you may have heard before as his short story collection Die Kinder beruhigte das nicht was published in English by Peirene Press as Maybe This Time a couple of years back.  After enjoying that book, I ordered a further example of his work - and promptly ignored it for the next two years.  Here then, especially for German Literature Month, is a very belated review ;)

*****
Leonardos Hände (Leonardo's Hands) is about Kurt Weyrath, an Innsbruck ambulance driver who stands out a little from his colleagues.  In order to survive their mentally-taxing duties, most of his colleagues develop a sense of detachment towards their 'clients':

"Gleichgültigkeit war ein Berufsinstrument, ohne das ihnen die Arbeit nicht möglich war, und wie die Handschuhe hatte man sie immer dabei."
p.6 (Haymon Taschenbuch, 2008)

"Indifference was a tool of the trade, without which work was impossible, and like gloves, you always had it to hand." (my translation)

However, Kurt, who gave up a white-collar career to join the ambulance service, is much friendlier with the people he transports, developing relationships with the people he sees regularly.

One day, this turns into a regular obsession when he begins to spend all his free time sitting next to the bed of a woman in a coma.  His colleagues are unable to understand why he has become so attached to someone he doesn't know, but that's because they don't know his secret, the one which brought him to the ambulance service in the first place.  You see, he suspects that he's the one who put her there...

Anna Kainz, the woman in the coma, eventually wakes up, and (as you might expect) she is extremely grateful for the attention she received from Kurt, attention which played a large roll in dragging her back into the land of the conscious.  The closer the couple get, and the longer the deception continues, the more difficult it becomes for Kurt to confess his dark secret.  But will she care?  And does she suspect it already?

Leonardos Hände is a gripping story, even if the description above makes it sound like a plot from a soap opera.  Rather than being a story of love triumphing over adversity, it's a dark, complex tale, and the reader can never quite be sure where it's going.  It takes a while before you get past the initial confusion of Kurt's work in the ambulance service, but once you get to the main story of Kurt and Anna, it all starts to get much more interesting.

Kurt is a well-written, nuanced character, a man suffering through a crisis caused by a momentary misjudgement.  In leaving his girlfriend and changing careers, he is punishing himself, attempting to atone for his crime.  Once he finds Anna and a place by her bedside, he actually feels better:

"Dasitzen, stundenlang, ohne ein wort, bloß da zu sein, nebeneinander.
 Ich habe vorher nicht gelebt." (p.79)

"Sitting there, for hours on end, without a word, just being there, next to each other.
 Up until then, I hadn't lived."

Having found Anna, he feels partially absolved - and happy.

Once Anna wakes up though, things start to unravel.  Suddenly Kurt isn't quite so sure that his actions are welcome, and he hesitates before getting involved with the conscious woman he loved when she was comatose.  Matters are complicated by Anna herself as she has a few secrets of her own, a past which has something to do with the crash that put her in the coma.  In many ways, she's using Kurt as much as he's using her...

The second half of the book then is devoted to unravelling the secrets of the mismatched couple, but there's also a lot to like about the first part, in which we are given an insight into the duties of an ambulance driver.  We see the depressing, soul-crushing grind of the job, whether it's picking up terminally-ill patients for dialysis, rushing to accidents in the hope of finding someone still in a condition to be helped or hanging around waiting for news of 'jumpers' in a high-rise part of town.  It's certainly not a job for the faint-hearted...

However, whether you enjoy the book or not may well depend on how you deal with Hotschnig's style.  As with Die Kinder beruhigte das nicht, Leonardos Hände is always slightly off-kilter.  The story jumps around in time, switching from person to person, moving between different situations in the space of a few words.  At times, it's rather a hard book to read and concentrate on, a novel where much is alluded to, but not always explicitly stated.  I suspect that it wouldn't be to everyone's taste.

Did I enjoy it?  Well, yes, although enjoyment seems the wrong word.  It's absorbing and intriguing, and if you think you can endure the oddities I mentioned above, it's definitely worth a try.  And luckily, even if your German's not quite up to scratch, you can give it a go.  There's an English version, translated by Peter Filkin, available from the University of Nebraska Press.

That's not all though - there's more from Hotschnig coming into English next year.  May 2014 sees the translation of Ludwigs Zimmer (Ludwig's Room) appear courtesy of Seagull Books (with Tess Lewis, the translator of the Peirene book, on duty again).  Maybe this time I've shown you a writer you might be able to enjoy in English - now I don't feel so guilty about all those untranslated books I've been reviewing this month :)

Eerie, Austria

Welcome to German Literature Month, thirty days showcasing the best fiction, modern and classic, written in the German language :)  It's very important to note that the month is about celebrating the language, not the country - throughout the month, I'll be trying my best to mix it up when it comes to geography, chronology and genre.

To start off then, it's only fitting that I branch out a little from my usual classic German novels and novellas and introduce a collection of short stories from a contemporary Austrian writer (one which many of you may have heard of...).  Alois Hotschnig's slender collection of stories, Die Kinder beruhigte das nicht, also known by the English title of its Peirene Press translation, Maybe This Time, comprises nine tales, all of which are normal enough on the surface, but which eventually become... well, ever so slightly creepy.

The first story, Dieselbe Stille, dasselbe Geschrei, is a good example of what the collection is about.  A man who has recently arrived in his area tells us about his neighbours, a couple who spend all day lounging around on a deck by the river at the back of their house.  This seemingly innocuous behaviour gradually makes the man feel strangely oppressed, and his waking (and sleeping) moments begin to be filled with his obsession over the neighbours' lack of activity.  Very quickly though, despite the sympathetic first-person narrative, the reader starts to mistrust our guide - especially when he starts using binoculars to spy on the couple...

Hotschnig elegantly plays with the idea of a man unable to move on with his life, caught up obsessing on something he doesn't understand, and it's a theme which crops up several times in the collection.  In Vielleicht diesmal, vielleicht jetzt (the story which gives the English translation its name), it's a whole family which is unable to live their lives, waiting as they are for the mysterious, ever-elusive - and ever-absent - Uncle Walter to join them at a family gathering.  In Morgens, mittags, abends (probably my favourite of the nine stories), a whole area seems to be caught in a loop, people watching people, crossing roads, walking down the street and coming back again, all fixed in time by an event we are unaware of until the last paragraph.  One aspect of this story I loved was a girl playing the flute, practicing the same few bars over and over again, breaking off at the same point each time - very much like a stuck record.

Another idea the writer explores is the idea of watching, and the majority of the stories (if not all of them) contain the verb beobachten, to watch or observe.  In Zwei Arten zu gehen, a woman walks down the street, shadowed by a man who could be either a stalker or a former lover (we're never completely sure which...); Eine Tür geht dann auf und fällt zu, one of the creepiest of the tales, has its hero in a sort of trancelike state, observing himself at various times in the past, while being watched by a rather strange old lady (with a penchant for dolls...); In meinem Zimmer brennt Licht, a story about a man with a hidden past, is full of people observing each other, looking for hints of what might be hidden behind silence.

Most of these observers appear to be watching other people, not because the observees are doing anything wrong, but because the observers are living their lives through other people, needing other people's approval.  This idea is taken to extremes in Du kennst sie nicht, es sind Fremde, a story in which a man's identity constantly changes - an issue nobody has a problem with except the man himself.  One way of interpreting this story is that we are what other people see us as and that our identity is externally created (although this little tale takes the idea further than one would expect!).

The ideas in the stories are excellent, and they are all wonderfully constructed.  I went through the collection for a second time a week after the first reading, and if anything, I enjoyed it more the second time around (a sure sign of a good piece of writing).

However, the success of the book is not limited to the ideas as the writing style is also key to the way the stories unfold.  The majority are told in the first person, unravelling in a near-constant interior monologue mostly uninterrupted by any dialogue (what little conversation there is is reported), and the sense of things being slightly off-kilter is heightened by the frequent use of contradiction within sentences, the narrator backtracking on an idea within seconds.  If the storyteller isn't completely sure of what they are saying, then how on earth can we trust them...

There are a lot more things I'd love to say about Die Kinder beruhigte das nicht, and considering that the book comes in at a mere 120 pages, that probably gives you as much of an idea of how highly I rate this slender tome as a few more paragraphs would ;)  It has been described as Kafkaesque, and I can only agree with that assessment.  While there's little here that could be described as extraordinary or supernatural, you can't help but get the feeling that it's all just a little bit... wrong.  But, in another sense, it's very right :)