Many writers have attempted to write about the essential moments of life in which everything and nothing happens, yet few have achieved the terrifying, numbing accuracy of the young German writer Judith Hermann. Somehow she has managed to move beyond the clichΘd image of a society on the path to nowhere and instead depict individuals suspended in the very act of living, as so brilliantly chronicled by an earlier generation of European writers.
On one level some of her stories are highly philosophical, almost metaphysical, on another they are practical, conversational monologues. With the exception of 'Hunter Thompson Music', written in an urgent, third-person present tense, she is at her most comfortable in the first person.
There are no tricks, indeed no obvious style, and the translation possesses a clarity best described as literal. Hermann is brutally honest, yet her lucidity and intensity evoke the surrealism of nightmares.
Not all of the stories succeed. Her distinct style of deadpan risks falling flat - and does at times. However, throughout this slim collection of nine narratives, Hermann not only confirms her own gifts but reiterates the exciting voice currently evident in German fiction among younger writers such as Ingo Schulze, Thomas Strittmatter, Marcel Beyers, and Thomas Brussig. True, Hermann lacks the humour common to most of them and does not share the lightness of touch that distinguishes Schulze's 33 Moments of Happiness, a highly original debut (1995, published in English translation in 1999), which takes as its theme the celebration of the Russian story. His second book Simple Stories (1998, translated 2000), a Carver-like collage of interconnected stories presented as a novel, is closer to the tone of Hermann's collection. But her tone is calm and reflective, even if the monologues are quietly relentless.
Whereas so many major German writers such as Grass, W.G. Sebald, satirist Herbert Rosendorfer and Hans-Ulrich Treichel remain preoccupied by the great theme of the second World War and Germany's role in it, Hermann is looking to a more disembodied, personalised, stateless form of memory caught largely in the present. In 'Bali Woman', a remark once made by one of a trio of drifters is recalled by the narrator. "I could make a film about us" suggests the young man, "a film about nothing happening, about nothing going on between us and round us, just a night like this with you and me and Christiane". His idea not only sums up their lives but also the heart of Hermann's artistic thesis.
She is not a deliberately difficult writer. Nor is she cleverly contrived. Hermann's offbeat stories are intelligent with a subtle hint of having moved just one stage beyond panic. The title is taken from one of the stories, the narrative that probably comes the closest to being an action story, has a strange subtitle describing the collection as "a book about the moment before happiness". Happiness is not an element here. Even contentment appears beyond her characters, although there is one moment in which a young woman at the moment of fulfilment in what appears a doomed romance experiences what could pass for a postmodernist epiphany. "Too bad," Marie thinks, that you can see things for the first time only once." Happiness in these stories is not so much elusive as irrelevant.
In 'Sonja', a young man, an artist, recalls meeting a young girl on the train while returning from visiting the beautiful Verena of whom he says: "I was very much in love with her. Verena had cherry-red lips and raven-black hair that I would plait into two thick braids every morning." His simple romance with Verena is gentle and light-hearted, as well as uncomplicated and casual, conducted over distance and long absences. The bizarre though believable bond that develops with Sonja, who emerges as passive and even rather sinister, is disturbingly realistic. Hermann succeeds in making her narrator appear utterly selfish yet interestingly bewildered. Her attempts to make sense of his asexual relationship with Sonja prove curiously compelling. "She would walk into the studio with an almost religious reverence, stand in front of my pictures with the respect of a museum visitor, then sit down at my kitchen table as though she was being granted an audience . . . I didn't realise that Sonja was in the process of becoming entangled in my life. During these nights she was for me a small, tired person, obsessed by something, who kept me company in her peculiar way, who sat with me, gave me a vain feeling of importance."
That story's strength, as with several of them, lies in the subtle ambiguities, apparent illogic and plausibility. Earlier in the opening story, a young woman haunted by the legacy of her great-grandmother's bored romances in St Petersburg, adventures that inevitably concluded in a duel, shares her confusion with another victim. The narrative unfolds like a dance of death and the shrewdness of Hermann's candidly flat, observant writing elevates the story into a psychological drama with moments of crazy comedy such as when the narrator helplessly watches "the six hundred and seventy-five red-as-rage little coral beads" spill out over the "sea-blue, deep blue carpet" of her therapist's office.
Published in Germany in 1998, the stories, mainly set against a backdrop of contemporary German life, are impressively free of the usual slavish details and labels writers employ in order to create a sense of contemporary life. She does draw on the obsession city people have with securing their place in the countryside, and with that sense of place an affirmation of identity. This is particularly evident in the title story with its shifts and strange conclusion.
Most of the narrators are absorbed in their own stories yet the narrator listening to Sophie, the girl in 'The End of Something', takes the role of a witness. Sophie is determined to describe her grandmother's final years. It is one of two unusually moving pieces in this most unsentimental of collections. It is also one of the few not concerned with a search for self.
The old lady is not lovable; she shifts between suspicion and pathetic dependence. Sophie's tale told with great effort is an extraordinary portrait of a physical, mental and emotional collapse. "She wet the bed and then lay there crying and miserable till evening. But sometimes she sang and winked with her left eye and laughed about something we knew nothing about, laughed till the tears came." The narrator watches as Sophie stumbles over memory, the reality and the final escape.
In contrast to the snappy dialogue and sensation of drifting Hermann explores throughout the book is the balance of ease and tension achieved in the vividly cinematic 'Hunter Thompson Music', a Coen brothers' sort of story. Thompson arrives at an old haunt, The Washington-Madison Hotel, a hotel that "is no longer a hotel". Despite the sign blinking "Hotel-Hotel" in the darkness. The place is now "a refuge, a poorhouse for old people, a last dilapidated stop before the end, a place of ghosts. It only happens rarely that an ordinary hotel guest mistakenly finds his way here." Hermann does not draw on the wild humour that undercuts much German fiction, but this is a very funny, and oddly touching story.
A couple of the stories, such as the disappointing final one, 'This Side of the Oder' and 'Camera Obscura' don't quite convince and pass quickly from the memory but at its best, the intense, deliberate voice of Judith Hermann persuades the reader to listen that bit closer.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
'Bali Woman', a short story from this collection, appears on page 13
