Reading Bernhard Schlink’s work in German and then in its English translation, as I’ve done with his latest novel, The Woman on the Stairs, can be disorienting. The original obviously affords a more direct encounter with Schlink’s style and literary sensibility. His German is structurally simple yet elegant and poetic — rhythmic and filled with assonance, alliteration, and half-rhymes. Immersing oneself in his language can be a sensuous experience.
But along with the pleasures come frustrations. For the non-native reader, the experience is akin to peering through a scrim veiling the author’s meaning — not unlike the efforts of Schlink’s protagonists to discern truth through the murk of misunderstanding.
In fact, one signature of Schlink’s fiction is the sudden perspectival shift. His plots — sometimes explicit detective stories, sometimes not — often contain elements of mystery. With each discovery, a Schlink protagonist reconsiders his view of his life, his relationships, and ultimately his own identity. Even the genre novels, like his Self trilogy, have an existential dimension.
Schlink himself is a former judge who is now a law professor, and the probing, analytical turn of mind that suits a jurist also informs his fiction. His best-known book is The Reader, an allegory of love and guilt that explores the complicated bonds between the postwar generation of Germans and their elders.
The weight of German history — the problem the Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the past — is a powerful presence in Schlink’s work. Sometimes, as in The Reader, the historical references are both explicit and central.
Hitler, the tumultuous radicalism of the 1960s, the division and reunification of Germany — all are mentioned in The Woman on the Stairs. But they serve mostly as a backdrop to an obsession with a more personal past. The subhead of an admiring online review by Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international public television station, dubbed the novel’s concerns “Vergangenheitsbewältigung light;” the review itself described them as “all too human.”
Schlink’s unnamed protagonist, who doubles as the narrator, is a successful mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who had once sought to be a judge. Stereotypically unimaginative and self-congratulatory, he disdains novels, tears, and the demands of children (including his own).
On the cusp of old age, he finds himself drawn back into the orbit of an elusive woman he had once loved and for whom he had (uncharacteristically) risked his career. Her unexplained betrayal has shadowed his otherwise conventional life, which included a marriage cut short by his politician wife’s fatal car accident.
As a fledgling lawyer, the narrator met Irene, the titular woman on the stairs, because of a legal conflict over a painting for which she had modeled. The relationship between portrait and subject — art and life, fiction and history — is another familiar Schlink theme, linked here to the interplay between past and present that shapes the book’s narrative structure.
Art has the capacity not just to idealize but, as Schlink’s characters note, to freeze time. The fictional painting — titled Woman on Staircase — directly evokes two actual ones. Irene describes the representational work as a response to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, the unsettling Cubist- and Futurist-influenced sensation of New York’s 1913 Armory Show. And in an “Author’s Note,” Schlink acknowledges the inspiration of Gerhard Richter’s Ema (Nude on a Staircase), a deliberately blurry 1966 portrait of the artist’s first wife, based on a photograph.
The novel begins when the narrator suddenly re-encounters the portrait in a Sydney, Australia, art gallery that is part of the city’s Botanic Garden — a place, he tells us, where “time stands still.” Peter Gundlach, the multimillionaire businessman once married to Irene, will later underline the point, declaring that “[p]aintings halt the march of time.”
Flashback scenes offer glimpses of the narrator’s youth, characterized by material comfort and emotional deprivation, and his initial interactions, in Frankfurt, with Irene and the portrait. The occasion of their meeting is a dispute between Karl Schwind, the painting’s creator, and Gundlach, its owner. Irene has left Gundlach for Schwind, and the two men are wrangling over both the painting and the woman, a contest in which Irene is both queen and pawn. The work in question seems to the narrator to embody a “jumble of power and seduction, resistance and surrender.” Falling hard for Irene (or perhaps just his image of her), he helps her escape the two men and abscond with the portrait. But while he fantasizes a life with her, she disappears without a trace.
The portrait, however, surfaces in Sydney, and a private eye finds Irene living, without proper papers, on a nearly deserted Australian island. Temporarily abandoning his responsibilities, the narrator sails off to meet her. Soon enough, rather improbably, Schwind and Gundlach also show up. (Literal realism has never been Schlink’s forte — nor, for that matter, his aim.) The two men argue the respective merits of art and commerce and then depart, leaving the narrator alone with the dying Irene.
The narrative unfolds in a series of short chapters, segueing between past and present in English prose that seems both staccato and unadorned. As the lawyer grows closer to Irene, he struggles with intimacy, closure, impending loss, and the homely rigors of caregiving. He slowly relinquishes his obsession with judgment by questioning his own. At Irene’s request, he becomes a modern-day Scheherazade, recounting their imagined life together as a way of staving off death. He invents a healing “fiction, but fiction in which we appeared as we really were.” It draws on his actual experiences and her suggestions and becomes, like the best novels, more vivid and true than reality.
No doubt some readers and critics will find The Woman on the Stairs unduly sentimental. In the end, the narrator realizes that Irene was not just his fantasy but “a woman with a life of her own.” He thinks: “How courageously she had lived it; how timidly I had lived mine.” The lessons are indeed obvious — precisely the ones he needed to learn. But the narrator’s emotional transformation is also poignant, earned, and utterly convincing. The scrim lifts, and, in the language of the heart he now knows, his way forward becomes clear.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2pq4MM8
Sig Nordal 