The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck

If she'd gone downstairs just five minutes later, she'd have missed the entrance to the underworld, which would have trundled on its way, offering its open hole to someone else instead; or if she'd taken that step with her right foot instead of her left, she wouldn't have lost her footing; or if she'd been thinking not about this and that but about that and this, she'd have seen the steps instead of not seeing them. Even so, some death or other will eventually be her death. If not sooner, then later. Some entrance will have to be for her. Every last person, every he and every she, has an entrance meant for him, for her. So does this underworld consist only of holes? Is there nothing more to it? A different wind is blowing here. Is there nothing that could prevent a person from--sooner or later, here or there--stumbling right into it, flailing, falling, plummeting, sinking?

I started reading The End of Days just as some discourse was brewing about Hamnet on the internet: so-and-so said it was manipulative, another so-and-so defended it as an accurate picture of the grief of losing a child. Of course it's emotionally intense, the argument goes, losing a child is like that. I was thinking about as I read the first of five sections in Erpenbeck's novel, about a young woman in the late Austrian-Hungarian Empire who loses an infant child only a few days old. It's heartrending, and it struck me as utterly profound and sincere in the way that grief seems to gather in objects--the cradle, the sheet over the mirror, the everyday stuff of life transmogrified by grief into something else, yet remaining stubbornly itself. And in defense of Hamnet, which is not really what I want to write about, its best moments are reminiscent of that--empty rooms that were previously filled with life. The family in The End of Days falls summarily apart; the husband leaves, and the tensions grow between the mother, who is now only "daughter" again (wow) and her own mother, who is no longer "grandmother." And then the chapter closes, and the "Intermezzo" comes, and the child is revived: what if, Erpenbeck asks, the mother had reached out and simply placed a handful of cooling snow on the child?

In the second section, the infant of the first section gets a chance to grow up, but death is still waiting for her. In this section she will die as a teenager (bruised by love and entering into a misbegotten pact with another, equally bruised young man), but the intermezzo will come and revive her again. The novel's five sections go on like that, imagining the woman's next death: killed in Moscow by Soviet agents who suspect her for a German spy; falling down the stairs in her early old age; and finally, in a nursing home, well into her 90's. The point of this is all almost stupidly clear, but Erpenbeck says it so well: "Even so, some death or other will eventually be her death." And so it is for all of us. We know this, of course, but we don't like to be reminded of it. And yet I can think of few books who so profoundly confront us with an obvious truth we already know, and so profoundly.

One thing that really impressed me about The End of Days is the way that Erpenbeck makes each section self-contained, and yet somehow, part of the whole. Each section is narratively and, to some extent, stylistically different, and each contains its own fully developed elements while containing also threads that unite the whole. I enjoyed, for example, the satirical bent of the third section, which sees the woman feverishly writing down a defense of her activity in the Communist Party. In this section, everyone is described by initial, as in "Comrade O." or "Comrade Schu." or "Comrade H.," as one might find in the byzantine sectarian squabbling of the time. The fourth section is probably the weakest, though Erpenbeck writes about falling as a symbol quite stunningly. The fifth captures the now-old woman's weakening intellect, and the way that time might seem to unravel or deform for a senile person, in a really effective way.

And when taken as a whole, the stories tell a fascinating historical narrative, too, about the fall of European empire, the cataclysm of war, and the rise of Communism. We know, fascinatingly, that the protagonist's mother is Jewish but has hidden it when marrying the protagonist's father. This information becomes hidden even to herself, and we are permitted to know also that her grandfather died brutally, attacked by his own fellow villagers in a fit of violent anti-Semitism. This information is hidden from the protagonist's mother until she loses her child; of course, when the story is revised and the child revived to become the protagonist, that information never gets shared--but it hangs like a pall over the rest of the book. It's a subtle masterstroke in a novel that's full of them, and I have to admit that The End of Days really blew me away. 

Gretel and the Great War by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

In November 1919 a mute young woman was found wandering the streets of Vienna. She was handed over to the care of a neurologist, who wrote up her case in an issue of Nervenkrankheiten. No lesion, he concluded, could explain her condition, nothing organic, only a childhood deprived of language. Since she could not say who she was or what had happened to her, he welcomed correspondence from anyone with information about her past. He received a single response, from a patient at a Carinthian sanatorium who claimed to be her father. The girl's name, the man wrote, is Margerete--Gretel--and her childhood, whatever its privations, hardly lacked for language! Indeed, until his present confinement put an end to it, he used to tell her a bedtime story each and every night. He wrote now only to resume that cherished ritual. The doctor was asked to read her the enclosed story, titled A: THE ARCHITECT. She would understand it. The next day brought another story, B: THE BALLET MASTER, and the next day another, C: THE CHOIRMASTER, until there were twenty-six of them. Then they stopped, and the man wasn't heard from again.

I got to see Adam Ehrlich Sachs read a section from his new novel, Gretel and the Great War, a few weeks ago. The section he chose to read is among the best of the 26 short pieces, arranged alphabetically: O, the obstetrician. In this section, an obstetrician is brought to the Duchess to take care of her baby, only to find that the baby in question is a porcelain doll. Her other doctors lie to her, but the obstetrician is too upright; he informs her that her child is a doll. Because he proves himself trustworthy, she demands he takes care of her real child--but this, too, turns out to be a doll. The demand is no reward, it's a burden, and his practice suffers from the rumors that surround the doll; as a consequence he embraces his Slavic roots and revolution against the Austrian state.

In this one story, you can see all of principles that govern Gretel and the Great War. The 26 stories, ostensibly written by a father to his mute daughter, have the air of a children's primer, and many of the stories do deal with children and their relationship with adults--the Duchess and her doll, the choirmaster and his choir boys, the toymaker who is beaten to death by the boys on whom he wishes to bestow his toys. They are fable-like in both their innocence and malice. They are anything but simple, and often contain several stories nested inside one another, so that a story that seems to be about, say, a communist revolutionary, actually turns out to be about the armless, legless freakshow performer who secretly turns out to be her father. And yet, as they unspool, they lurch toward the political. "The Duke" and "The Duchess" may sound like fairy tale characters, but there are real Dukes and Duchesses in the world, who are behind real violence and war.

As the stories go on, you're supposed to understand the way in which they are all connected, and how the mute woman Gretel fits into the larger puzzle (as a child, she witnessed the tragic accident of her dancer mother on stage, an accident in which the other characters, the choirmaster, the kindergarten teacher, the lighting technician, are all tightly implicated). I think I really could have used a diagram here. (I got easily confused by what I think are two tragic performances at the City Theater, one which burns it down and one which leads to Gretel's mother's accident, but I can't really tell you how those two moments are connected.) But perhaps it's less important than to get the organization right in your head than to see the themes the connect them: the betrayal of children by adults, the nostalgic desire for simplicity, the way all the various characters seem to end up at the sanatorium of one Dr. Krakauer (are we meant to understand that all these people are, in a sense, just made-up avatars of the father himself?).

The total picture is one of a city, interwar Vienna, descending into hatred and madness. Sachs underlines this in the final sections, "Y for Yid" and "Z for Zionist." No longer are the alphabetical characters identified by their profession, but by terms of race and religion. The "Yid," having taken his daughter--Gretel--to the theater, begins to look around and see that the faces of his neighbors, too, have been replaced by nothing but "German-Austrians," and they in turns look at him and his daughter and see nothing but "noisy Yids." This is the logical endpoint of the madness: the fever of racial hatred that will soon ignite into a war even greater than the one that just ended. The brief "Zionist" section ends on a note of tragic ambivalence, a hope for escape from the madness that, we fear, may only be one of its symptoms.

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer

The wall has become so much a part of my life that often I don't think about it for weeks. And even if I do think about it, it strikes me as no more strange than a brick wall or a garden fence that stops me from going any further. What's so special about it? An object made of material whose composition is unknown to me. There was always more than enough of that kind of thing in my life. The wall forced me to make an entirely new life, but the things that really move me are still the same as before: birth, death, the seasons, growth, and decay. The wall is a thing that is neither dead nor alive, it  doesn't really concern me, and that's why I don't dream about it.

A woman, staying at a hunting lodge high in the Alps, discovers that an invisible wall has separated her from the rest of the world. There's no way over or around it, and even if there were, it may be a mistake to try: on the other side of it the dead are visible, frozen into the gestures they were presumably making when the wall came down. Her world has suddenly been constricted, but it's far from empty: besides the hunting lodge she has a hut in a high Alpine meadow, a dog named Lynx, a cat, and a cow who is with calf. These animals become both the narrator's burden and her salvation; they give her something to care for her in her new life. She quickly sets to the task of guarding her own life and those of her new charges: planting potatoes and beans, mowing hay in the meadow, hunting and freezing meat, creating a byre for the cow, scouting out berries and apples.

Is the wall, perhaps, a metaphor for confining ideas of womanhood? Guess again, idiot: her confinement, it turns out, frees her from the constrictions of gender:

My face was thin and tanned, and my shoulders angular, like those of a half-grown boy. My hands, always covered with blisters and calluses, had become my most important tools. I had taken off my rings ages ago. Who would decorate their tools with gold rings? It struck me as absurd, even laughable, that I had done so before. The womanliness of my forties had fallen from me, along with my curls, my little double chin and my rounded hips. At the same time I lost the awareness of being a woman. My body, more skillful than myself, had adapted itself and limited the burdens of my femininity to a minimum. I could simply forget that I was a woman.

In fact, the overarching story of the novel seems to be the growing awareness of one's self and position in the world by the removal of all social appurtenances. It's a little Walden, in a way: the narrator comes to understand herself better through a life of physical labor and solitude, of facing the black void of the sky and the stars from the alpine meadow with no interpret the scene for her. I was struck by the symbol of her host's automobile, rusting by the lodge, becoming a home again for mice and insects and other things of the natural world:

Here, in the forest, I'm actually in the right place for me. I bear the motorcar manufacturers no grudge now; they ceased to be of interest long ago. But how they all tormented me with things that repelled me. I only had this one little life, and they wouldn't let me live it in peace. Gas pipes, electrics and oil conduits; only now that people have ceased to be do these things show how truly pitiful they are. And back then they had been turned into idols rather than functional commodities. I too have one of those things standing in the middle of the forest, Hugo's black Mercedes. It was almost new when we came here in it. Today it's overgrown with vegetation, a nest for mice and birds. Particularly in June, when the wild grape blossoms, it looks very pretty, like an enormous wedding bouquet. It's beautiful in the winter, too, glittering in the hoarfrost or wearing a white helmet. In spring and autumn, between its brown struts I can see the faded yellow of the upholstery, beech leaves, bits of foam rubber and horsehair torn out and pulled apart by tiny teeth.

It's amazing how gripping The Wall is, for a book that consists of little more than two years of seasonal labor: planting, mowing, hunting deer. These things have their own dramas, of course, the drama of the seasons in which desolation follows abundance; that's part of the point of the novel, I think. In this radically constricted world we are struck by the deep sadness of every loss, the kitten, the dog, the bull--the deaths of these latter two being foreshadowed in a subtle and skillful way that make the novel's climactic moment, so unlike the rest of it, a real shock. These losses are tinged with special sadness because we know they are not unique, and that the longer the narrator manages to survive, the losses will continue to pile up. Someday the last match will go out, and the last bullet will be spent; the cow will lay down its life at last, and the loss of companionship will be more profound than the loss of milk. But in that sense the narrator's loss in not so different from our own.

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth

They all felt that he had summoned Death.  Death hovered over them, and they were completely unfamiliar with the feeling.  They had been born in peacetime and become officers in peaceful drills and maneuvers.  They had no idea that several years later every last one of them, with no exception, would encounter death.  Their ears were not sharp enough to catch the whirring gears of the great hidden mills that were already grinding out the Great War.  A white winterly peace reigned in the small garrison.  And black and red, death fluttered over them in the twilight of the small black room.

When the Kaiser Franz Joseph I is very young, he is saved from enemy fire at the Battle of Solferino by a young Slovene peasant officer whom he elevates to a Barony in honor of his service.  Thus begins the von Trotta dynasty, whose heyday is brief and whose decline mirrors that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself, already withered and irrelevant before the outbreak of World War I.  The Radetzky March begins with the Battle of Solferino, but its focus is on that Trotta's grandson, Carl Joseph, a lieutenant in the Kaiser's army.

Carl Joseph is an unexceptional soldier and a sensitive young man who slowly unravels over the course of the novel.  The military is his birthright, but one which he has difficulty being equal to:

For once, Lieutenant Trotta was rebelling against the military laws that ruled his life.  He had obeyed since earliest boyhood.  And he wanted to stop obeying.  He had no idea what freedom meant, but he sensed that it was as different from a furlough as war is from maneuvers.  This comparison flashed into his mind because he was a soldier--and because war is the soldier's freedom.

Carl Joseph is beset by disasters, some of which are his own making: Alcoholism, gambling debts--and a weak willingness to cover others' gambling debts--but also the death of his only close friend in an honor duel.  The duel itself is a symbol of an old order of prestige that is rapidly passing away, one in which Carl Joseph cannot fit in, but one which threatens to destroy him as it destroys itself.

The Radetzky March is notable for its thorough depictions of Kaiser Franz Joseph, including long passages of the Kaiser's thoughts.  (FYI: Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination sparks WWI, is Franz Joseph's nephew and presumptive heir.)  These passages, which depict the Kaiser as a complex man approaching senility, are the best in the book, I think:

The night was blue and round and vast and full of stars.  The Kaiser stood at the window, thin and old in a white nightshirt, and felt very tiny in the face of the immense night.  The least of his soldiers, who could patrol in front of the tents, was more powerful than he.  The least of his soldiers!  And he was the Supreme Commander in Chief!  Every soldier, swearing by God the Almighty, pledged his allegiance to Kaiser Franz Joseph I.  He was a majesty by the grace of God, and he believed in God the Almighty, who hid behind the gold-starred blue of the heavens, the Almighty--inconceivable!  It was.  It was His stars that shone up there in the sky, and it was His sky that arched over the earth, and He had allocated a portion of the earth, namely the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, to Franz Joseph I.  And Franz Joseph was a thin old man, standing at the open window and fearing that his guards might surprise him at any moment.

Contrast Franz Joseph's serene prescience with the anxious uncertainty of Carl Joseph and the soldiers in the first passage, the "patrolling soldiers" of the Kaiser's imagination to whom he assigns a kind of power.  I doubt very much that this is a historical depiction of Franz Joseph I, but it is compelling one that underscores the great chasm between the perspectives of the powerful and those marked for the trenches.