Dr. Georg Letham, a philosophical man of scientific training, has committed the ultimate offense. He has murdered his wife. What could drive an intelligent man to extinguish a human life, much less that of his spouse?
Praised by Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka, written in 1931 but never translated into English until now, this big 560-page brick of a book is a tornado of fresh air blowing into your reading experience, brutally honest, compulsively paced--a slightly surreal tale with a hypnotic narrative voice that crackles with cynicism and irony and yet remains touchingly human, all of it rippling with gallows humor. It's smart, heady stuff, with the subtle thrill of genius. It's addicting. After a couple hundred pages, the book begins to seem way too short.
The story is a sinuous surprise. You can only grip this hefty tome in both hands and read in horrified fascination as the plot deftly sets off on its own journey, from mental institution to prison hospital to penal colony, full of unexpected detours from the tropics to the North Pole.
As a narrator, Georg is cynical, opinionated and constantly withholding information. He refuses to talk about some topics, like the murder of his wife. Yet his scorn for sentimentality is refreshing, and you learn to see through his harsh judgments, frequently growing to love the very people that he scorns.
For a novel so large, it has relatively few characters, but those few become almost mythic in their imaginative power. There's March, the handsome young prisoner who's chained wrist-to-wrist to Georg and falls in love with him. There's Walter, another doctor and his childhood hero, and Brigadier General Carolus, who would rather make charts than deal with anyone's body.
The novel is strewn with unforgettable images. A bloody laboratory dog with skull partially exposed breaks free of its straps and runs into a classroom of medical students. A burial at sea goes wrong, and the body floats back up to the surface to be played with by dolphins.
Oh, and rats are everywhere in the novel. They torment the convicts in the tropical penal colony. They battle the crew for possession of an ice-trapped ship at the North Pole. And in the flashbacks, they infest the home of Georg Letham's childhood, where his father has devised a particularly hideous trap for them. One of the most heartbreaking scenes in the novel is Georg's father forcing the little boy to kill a rat.
Out of such grim material Weiss creates a literary world of pure reading joy. We're so lucky Joel Rotenberg took the time to give us a fine translation and that Archipelago Books took a chance on publishing it. Read it slowly. Savor it sentence by sentence. Enjoy the bracing, invigorating slap of real literature.--Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: An addictive tale of a murderer--cynical, ironical and yet touchingly human.