Tales of an American German in Altenburg

"Maybe I'm being unfair, maybe I wouldn't even remember if it hadn't been for the brouhaha later on, maybe I've got the sequence of events mixed up, too, but I'm not inventing any of it."And so it goes-the tone of German writer Ingo Schulze's new volume of vignettes as novel Simple Stories-clear, punctuated, particularly elegant. Written in the spirit of Winesburg, Ohio, Schulze's musings over the post-Wall East German hamlet Altenburg have been compared to the styles of both Sherwood Anderson and Raymond Carver.

True to his guileless prose, Schulze is "not inventing any of it." Yet it would be quite reductive to label his language as pure Americana. It is American in that it is stripped-down, bare of many Old World pretensions, but Simple Stories departs from our modern literary tradition in its lack of sensationalism, redeeming, that Schulze's unadorned language is unadulterated by derogatory shock filler.

This is especially evident in his adept handling of a rape that transpires between Altenburg waitress Connie Schubert and nomadic American real estate salesman, Harry Nelson. The reader is left partially eroticized, partially violated, yet wholly satisfied after a mere six pages.

"He and his hand didn't listen to me. Then came a pain that ran from my shoulders all the way down my back. 'Raise your arms,' someone shouted, 'Raise your arms!' For a moment I didn't know where I was or what had pushed itself into me. My blouse was yanked up. And the same syllables again and again: 'Raise your arms!'...I wanted to talk. I kept talking the whole time I looked for my panties. I was acting just like people in the movies do after an accident."

This is not to say that Schulze's medleys are solely documentary or homages to quotidian occurrences. In perhaps one of the best passages, a Schulze narrator, Danny, is frozen by the singular event of looking into "crocodile eyes," the grainy veneer of a cheap old Stasi desk. "Every time it happens, I promise myself I'm going to talk to the others about this amoeba-like grain in the veneer," he says. "We all have to spend our time staring at these lines and squiggles, which at the far left look like a crocodile's eye. But nobody ever says anything, and I keep forgetting it, too, like some bad dream."

Moments of stasis like this fill a precious few pages. No matter what the situation, Schulze's characters always seem on the move, chugging aimlessly along into their automobiles, usually Plymouths, but sometimes Renaults. Schulze's world is effused with this odd combination of German sensibility and American kitsch. Why Schulze's characters prefer to drive around in Plymouths rather than Benzes is intriguing in that it cannot be a purely economic consideration. We soon begin to realize the tacit commentary that is being made. The Wall is down, but westernization is not restitution enough, leaving more wanderers than homesteaders. Indeed, Schulze's world is more bazaar than bizarre. But this is hardly to say that it's bargain basement Kafka. Rummaging through the apparently artless language leads the reader to discover a finely crafted plot, a great conversation piece for years to come. But admittedly, some of the stories are more worthy of chit-chat than legend.

And perhaps it is the complete lack of the epic scale that hurts the book as a whole. It would take a particularly patient reader to digest the 29 stories in one sitting but an even more intent reader to manage to surmise the complex connections between the vignettes, which are often too based on moniker relations rather than convergence of plot or metaphor. Often one finds the need for a family tree, a flow chart to keep straight the characters.

The invasion of western pop culture is also at a representational disadvantage in this book, as it is a translation. It is literally impossible to discern American colloquial from German idiom, as they become one and the same, written in the equivalent language. No doubt Schulze is a master craftsman, but his few missteps in this new volume lead one to hold back unabashed praise. We shall wait to see if he indeed becomes the "new epic storyteller" that Gunter Grass has pegged him to be. Until that main course, wet your palate on Simple Stories.

SIMPLE STORIES

by

Ingo Schulze

Alfred A. Knopf

320 pp., $25

by

Ingo Schulze

Alfred A. Knopf

320 pp., $25