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(less restful than it sounds), or selling old clothes one can no longer stand to wear. Or perhaps the whole thing is much simpler than all that: perhaps the idea of so much energy in a character is inherently comic.
    A Sad Affair is ingeniously composed, with probably no fewer than three time schemes (or maybe the term time signatures would be useful here too): There is the slow progress through the twenty-four hours or so in Zurich; there is a rather more rapid progress through the weeks in Italy; and fastest of all, in a way, are the episodic flashbacks that are dispersed through the narrative (they are fast at least in the way they bring us up to the present, chronologically, through months, if not years). The square brackets encasing further commentary are a likable and ingenious feature; while the rapid intercutting between Friedrich and Sibylle at the time they are both converging on Venice is utterly cinematic (it is even tempting to think of a split screen at that point). Still, the book throughout has a wonderfully "live" feel. It could be an anticipation of a Beat novel, twenty years later. It doesn't feel like a book written with a plan, from hindsight; it feels adventitious, responsive, open to whatever comes up. If a new character happens along— that strange Neapolitan pimp—put him in. If a new setting takes your imagination, write about it: Sibylle's time in the stiflingly bourgeois world of German provincial repertory theater, where "she suffered nightmares of oversize traffic policemen." If you notice something out of the corner of your eye, don't leave it out: Italian women, "their blue-painted eyelids demurely cast down, and their mouths a shocking red," or drums being carried "in the raw red hands of long-armed young men with unpleasant coughs." It's how someone writes who is in love with writing, who discovers he has talent, senses he can do anything, meet any challenge. This, almost as much as the entanglement with Sibylle, is the story of A Sad Affair. In some ways, it's not such a sad affair at all.
    Michael Hofmann
    Albinen, Valais
    July 2002

 
     
     

     

WINTER HAD come fierce and early. I had been looking around  for a job, probably out of instinct,  the way I've often done things to stay alive, things I really didn't want to do, and that I must have done out of instinct, or pure will, or because it was my destiny to go on living, and so I was the tester in a big lightbulb factory in the north of the city. Not a scientifically qualified rank, like the gentlemen who hand in their reports at the patent office, just a low-grade observer, someone who [put in a room full of circuits where thousands upon thousands of electric lightbulbs were coupled to copper rails, and were left to burn night and day, giving out a dry, stinging, disagreeable heat] had to watch and write down the time when a bulb burned out. The university's labor exchange had fixed me up with that when I'd gone looking for some night work. They said: "You're a literature student, but for this you just need eyes in your head."
    I had pictured the job as being pleasanter than it turned out to be. I thought I would have leisure to think about one or two things that had been occupying me for some time. I had assumed the night in the lamp room of the sleeping factory would be like a watch on a clipper ship, gliding along under the trade winds, bringing peace and contemplation to even the most neurotic characters. In the end I had to pay attention like a hawk. Even though I wore dark glasses, I found the light dazzling. I ran around like a madman, investigating shadows that turned out to be purely imaginary, in constant danger of being caught napping by some works inspector, or in an excess of zeal getting too close to one of the heavily laden copper circuits and receiving a possibly fatal shock.
    Also, it turned out to be a disadvantage, more psychologically than actually, that I understood so little of how the place functioned