The novel follows the journey of Arthur Less, a modestly successful (not to say one-hit-wonder) writer who has embarked on a round-the-world trip largely as an excuse to miss the wedding of his former lover. It's so far a very funny and slightly heartbreaking character study, resonant in about 18 wildly different directions, but the piece that leapt out of the book and hit me in the chest with a cinderblock was a passage set during his sojourn in Berlin.
Less, relieved to be in a country where he [thinks he] speaks the language has been disoriented by how charming his students and lover find him, and seems to gradually be learning that his German language skills are not what he thought they were. (Greer nicely and quickly details how the language, learned in childhood from a tutor who herself learnt it secondhand, keeps failing Less.) Too, he is surrounded by illness: his lover, his students, his faculty, all keep fainting or being overtaken by fever. In the passage I want to quote here, Less has been reading at a subterranean literary event when a ripple of fainting cuts through the audience. Here, lookit:
Less feels a tingling realization. Then you started reading...
He is boring people to death.
First Bastian, then Hans, Dr. Balk, his students, the crowd at the reading.
Listening to his tedious conversation, his lectures, his writing. Listening to his terrible German. His confusions of dann with denn, of für with vor, of wollen with werden. How kind they have all been to smile and nod through his sentences, wide eyed, as if listening to a detective announce the killer before he lands, at last, on the wrong verb. How patient and giving these people are. And yet he is the killer. One by one, with his mistaken blau sein for traurig sein, ("I'm drunk" for "I'm blue"), das Gift for das Geschenk ("poison" for "gift"), he is committing little murders. His words, his banalities, his backward laugh. He feels drunk and blue. Yes, his gift to them is a Gift. Like Claudius with Hamlet's father, he is ear poisoning the people of Berlin.Friends, this book was written for me. Not just in the sense of "oh god my German is terrible and everybody around me knows it, how humiliating" which, yes, very keenly felt from my Vienna/Berlin time those couple of summers ago, but the specific spiral of shame and self-loathing when that inability to communicate in a borrowed language reignites all the feelings of inadequacy that, in some way, owe to a broken past relationship. That's mostly all in the rearview for me right now, but reading this passage was like finding an old photograph of yourself, staring incredulously at the way you used to look, to dress, to be. What I love about Greer's writing is that he's rather unsparing and ruthless about Less, but empathetic nonetheless, carefully and meticulously scraping away at the edges to reveal the coarse terrain of a man repeatedly seen, and described, as mundane. It's just swell.
OK. Coffee shop work ahoy on my last day in the perma-sunshine blue and endless concrete heat of the City of Angels, about which I have very layered and very boring feelings that will probably make this blog sometime in October at our present rate of progress. It's been a great, albeit frenetic friend-packed time, and I know I'll miss it when I run back to Chicago and the glorious rush of rehearsals on the show. Let's goooooooooo.
