Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
Hans Fallada
(transl. by Charlotte and AL Lloyd)
Melville House Publishing 2009
Fallada wrote this while he was locked up in an asylum in 1944. It apparently took him just over a fortnight. Regrettably, it shows. Whilst the first half details the rapid descent of Erwin Sommer, a small-town German businessman, from respectable citizen to hopeless alcoholic in a coherent (if somewhat unbelievable) manner, the second, where he is imprisoned first in a gaol and then in an asylum, is pretty chaotic. There is a good deal of repetition, and the narrative thrust is lost (we range far ahead in the story before being brought back rudely to a detailed account of his first day of incarceration). That said, the picture of life in the asylum is horrifyingly convincing; Fallada was evidently drawing on his own experiences, to such an extent that on occasions he seems to forget he is telling a story at all. The account of the alcoholism is clearly largely drawn from life too; if Sommer seems manic and possessed, he is probably no more so than Fallada was himself. As with Alone in Berlin and Little Man, What Now, this is always engrossing, and often shocking. It differs from these other novels in that it is told in the first person, it tells of a man who, if weren’t for his demons, would have a comfortable, middle class existence, and, although it is clearly set in the period after the First World War, it makes no mention of the political situation in Weimar Germany or the Third Reich. As Fallada was writing this clandestinely and under lock and key in a state asylum at the fag end of the Nazi dictatorship, this was probably only politic. For me, although this is the least successful of the three novels of his that I have read, this painful, hopeless account of a life destroyed by booze, is still well worth a look.
2 November 2010
http://hansfallada.com/
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