Commemorations, by Hans Herlin

COOL AND COLLECTED

Contemporary German novelists so often seem to be rummaging through the past. Their books frequently take the form of investigations or memoirs, with characters trying to penetrate or come to grips with events of years long gone. In Lenz’s The German Lesson, Boll’s Group Portrait with Lady, Andersch’s Efraim’s Book, and Nossack’s (more philosophically oriented) The D’Arthez Case, to cite but a few fairly recent examples, the past is explored and analyzed and certain unsettling truths are revealed. There is little then that is surprising about the methods Hans Herlin employs in Commemorations, which is narrated by a photographer turned printer turned hired assassin who begins to examine his past. In fact, compared with the other books mentioned, which are triumphs of style and invention, Herlin’s novel seems tame and old-fashioned, as if it had been written before these books rather than after them.

RF

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Ronald De Feo

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COOL AND COLLECTED

Contemporary German novelists so often seem to be rummaging through the past. Their books frequently take the form of investigations or memoirs, with characters trying to penetrate or come to grips with events of years long gone. In Lenz’s The German Lesson, Boll’s Group Portrait with Lady, Andersch’s Efraim’s Book, and Nossack’s (more philosophically oriented) The D’Arthez Case, to cite but a few fairly recent examples, the past is explored and analyzed and certain unsettling truths are revealed. There is little then that is surprising about the methods Hans Herlin employs in Commemorations, which is narrated by a photographer turned printer turned hired assassin who begins to examine his past. In fact, compared with the other books mentioned, which are triumphs of style and invention, Herlin’s novel seems tame and old-fashioned, as if it had been written before these books rather than after them.