Dresden-born Ingo Schulze became famous on the publication of his first book, 33 Moments of Happiness, which so impressed German critics in 1995. Three years later the English translation did well in the US and in turn had British reviewers singing Schulze's praises last year. As expected it emerged as one of the Books of 1999, and Schulze, endorsed by Gunter Grass as "our new epic storyteller", appears to be a master who never had to serve an apprenticeship. The genius of that first book lies in its apparently effortless tone shifts and stylistic diversity, its black humour and bizarre grace. There was also the fact that here was a German writer creating singular variations on one of the finest of literary traditions, that of the Russian short story. All the great voices were present, from Gogol to Chekhov to Bulgakov, yet Schulze left no doubt as to his own originality.
All of which makes the arrival of his new book something of an event. Simple Stories is offered as a novel, which it is not. Whereas his first book is both an exploration and celebration of the Russian tradition, this time Schulze, whose Russia came of six months spent working as a newspaper editor in St Petersburg, seems to have set out to create his version of Robert Altman's Short Cuts, a disjointed collage based on Raymond Carver's short stories. Simple Stories consists of 29 character-driven chapters in which a core group of individuals offer intense if random narratives drawing on a set number of incidents. The tone is curiously uniform. None of the characters are caricatures or grotesques but then they don't emerge as individuals either. The Carver comparison is not a coincidence. These episodic interludes are about as close as one is likely to arrive at a German version of Carver's familiar low-key domestic landscapes.
True, several of the thirty-something, direction-less characters could well have wandered in from the set of any US sitcom rather than from Carverland, but that doesn't really matter. At the heart of the book, far deeper than the shaky relationships and recurring references to specific events - such as the death of a wife and mother novice cyclist at the hands of a hit-and-run driver, or a young woman entrusted with her widower brother's boy - is the story of the new culturally shell-shocked Germany. Schulze handles this theme very carefully. He makes no judgments, there is nothing pedantic or even particularly barbed. While his characters appear to live in personal confusion and doubt in a random, casual society with a messy recent past, he somehow manages to evoke a sense of the old Germany as a country with a complex history. He is too subtle to make such comparisons obvious. Instead they linger, sustained by passing remarks about a school principal finding himself "in trouble".
One character talks about "the old days" and later recalls once saying "I told him I didn't think a revolution in Germany was either probable or desirable". A young man sits silently in a car being driven by his girlfriend and speculates about her driving ability. "Danny (his girlfriend) wouldn't let go of the steering wheel again. From start to finish she sat behind the wheel, and even when we stopped for gas she only did a couple of knee bends beside the open driver's-side door . . . Danny wasn't a bad driver, liked to wind the gears out a little too far maybe. But I usually get sick as a passenger." It seems remarkably mundane. Yet the reader never loses sight of the fact that these are confused, stateless people in dead-end relationships, bad jobs, even no jobs, living in a country that seems to have lost its culture in the political upheaval and change that has left it sounding like yet another outpost of the American empire. None of this is said directly, no character sits down and agonises about what it now means to be German in post-communist Germany, but Schulze with his tight-rope walker's daring makes it quite clear loss of identity is central.
Much of this atmosphere of cultural disconnection comes from the deadpan tone of John E. Woods' translation. In contrast to the fluidity of the tone shifts called upon in 33 Moments of Happiness, also translated by Woods, this translation is flatter, more monotone - all the more curious in a book with a great deal of dialogue. This time he has conferred an American voice on each of the narratives. Most of which, it must be said, sound pretty much the same. The language and choice of words lean towards the US. None of the characters are particularly memorable, although we do get to know the professional lady who obviously ran over the cyclist but has kept it a secret. There is also the suicide writer who takes his rain-hating cat outdoors on a leash.
Despite Schulze's intention, Simple Stories is impossible to read as a novel. It is too random, too diffuse. As a book it certainly lacks the grace of his magical debut. In that book one ill-fated character remarks, "What Russians find tolerable is fatal to Germans." It is a valid comment in relation to the difference between Schulze's two books. The very sense of a vibrant, if determinedly non-idealised Russia, dominating 33 Moments of Happiness contrasts pointedly with the Germany reduced to an auto- bahn emerging from this new work. Perhaps that is both the problem and achievement of Simple Stories. Through its portrayal of a society in personal and domestic chaos, a wider picture emerges, that of a culture not so much on the run as having disappeared. Admirers of 33 Moments of Happiness might well be initially disappointed by what is a disjointed assortment of loosely episodic interludes intent on becoming a novel. Though not as poised or as memorable as his debut, this deceptively deliberate, often flat second book is speaking volumes between even its most offbeat lines.
Eileen Battersby is the Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
