Friedrich loves Sibylle. But it is far more than love: it is complete, all- consuming adoration.
So in love is this young man turned eager slave, that he can no longer relate to anything without first considering Sybille, her response, her reaction, her face - "This lane here is where I would kiss her!"
Such feelings should be delicious, yet agonising is a more accurate description. Love, for Friedrich, is far greater than a test, it is a life sentence.
More pursuit than affair, this beautifully offbeat romance is more an account of a compulsive friendship between two muddled young people who share confusions than it is a love story. Set against the backdrop of a somewhat chaotic Europe, in which no one is really at home, Friedrich is the swain, determined to suffer for his love. He at least has an object, his loved one, and a purpose, to woo.
Sibylle's plight is, however, the greater dilemma. It is she who must endure a love she does not want, from a friend she needs, while engaged in a series of misadventures of her own. For Sibylle, a struggling cabaret performer, life is complicated by the burden of her beauty. She needs to be desired, but she also wants to suffer.
Wolfgang Koeppen's first novel, first published in 1934, is a graceful ballet of a book, its whimsy brilliantly balanced by its humanity and candour. A young man wants to love, and in this wanting lies the pleasure of the pain that confirms not only that the love is real, but that it is important. As the narrative opens he is travelling towards his beloved. The excitement of the journey is equal to the quest.
Love, not war or adventure, has brought Friedrich away from his home country to an unnamed foreign city. There is a grandeur in this, and Friedrich, for all the uncertainty involved with this particular girl, who could be a free spirit or simply a wayward wanton, is anxious not too appear pushy:
It was idle to hope that she might have been on the platform to greet him. He knew that she was not fond of arrangements that compelled her attendance in a certain place at a certain time, yes, that she suffered from them, as a child suffered from having to go to school.
In this style of reasoning lies much of the book's comedy. Friedrich knows he is obsessive, but he would like to appear casual. His ability to sustain his friendship with the elusive Sibylle, despite the endless rejection, is commendable. As is Koeppen's characterisation of his young femme fatale, who does not so much thrive on Friedrich's loyalty as depend upon it. She has her share of romantic disasters with moody lovers and is presented as lovely although firmly placed in squalid, unglamorous theatre surroundings.
The girl is capricious but not ruthless; she is simply drifting through her youth and beauty, and not quite enjoying either. To the young man's question, "Can you name me anyone who loves you as passionately as I do?", she replies "No" without "raising her clear and beautiful voice, keeping it at a calm level. Her comportment was heroic. No heroine could have been braver".
In Friedrich, Koeppen has created a man doomed to love, yet sympathetic, even likeable for all that. He is also intelligent and capable of perceiving life beyond his dilemma. His observations are heightened and dramatic, as when "the faces of everyone in the room seemed to attack Friedrich. The unfinished masks of the comedians resembled the bloodthirsty expressions of fat ogres in Chinese stories".
Koeppen (1906-96) was a European master, one of the lesser-known greats of modern German literature. This is the first English translation of his first book, superbly rendered as always by poet Michael Hofmann, who continues to serve German-language literature with outstanding results. His translation of The Hothouse appeared in 2002. It is a fine translation, conveying both the clarity and intriguingly surreal beauty of Koeppen's vision.
A Sad Affair, which was banned on publication because of its erotic content (it is, in fact, far closer to idealistic romance than eroticism), is impressively apolitical and personal considering the turmoil of the Germany in which it was written.
It is part of the first phase of a literary career that spanned some 60 years but which only produced five novels, two in the 1930s and a further three, including The Hothouse, in the 1950s. Koeppen was an original, a true literary stylist, and something of a lost soul as an artist. He was certainly, until recently, a lost voice as a writer. The publication of Hofmann's translation of The Hothouse has certainly alerted a wide readership to a writer who, though praised by Günter Grass in his 1999 Nobel acceptance speech, had been forgotten in Germany, never mind elsewhere.
In The Hothouse, published in 1953, the central character, Keetenheuve, is a hero in a way that Friedrich is not. Keetenheuve is an idealist, a politician and an intellectual free of the stain of a Nazi past. He has returned to the hothouse, Bonn, referred to throughout as "the city on the Rhine", following a period of voluntary exile during the Nazi years. He could be a saviour but he can't save anything - he knows too much.
It is a musingly rhetorical interior monologue. Keetenheuve sees no hope. Looking at young people in the streets, he asks: "What were they hanging around waiting for? They were hanging around waiting for life to begin, and the life they were waiting for didn't begin."
It is a blunt elegy about a society crippled by apathy. And it tells the story of a doomed quest undertaken by a hero who fails.
A Sad Affair is about another doomed quest, this time featuring a hapless lover, not a hero. It is not a tragedy and is not even all that sad. It is a young man's book that remains youthful and fresh. Life and energy abound in it, as does a lucid chaos. Possessing grace and style, much truth and open-eyed honesty in the face of crazed self-deception, this little book, written almost 70 years ago, is one of the finest novels of 2003.
A Sad Affair By Wolfgang Koeppen, Translated by Michael Hofmann
Granta, 175pp. £7.99
