Early Review: The Assignment
Concluding my procrastination at fulfilling my LibraryThing responsibilities, I present one final review-in-waiting that came as a result of Early Reviewers.
Saving the oddest for last, I present my review of The Assignment; or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers, written in 1986 by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, translated in 1988 by Joel Agee, and published afresh in October of 2008. For the benefit of those who don't typically look at my LibraryThing profile, I hope the review will turn some more folks on to this decidedly odd little novella.
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I have to give Joel Agee a great deal of credit. As the translator of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's exceedingly quirky 1986 novella The Assignment; or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers, he recognized both potential and difficulty and managed to rise to the challenge with aplomb.
Potential, because the novella, though over twenty years old, manages to speak to the kind of panic that is urgent and contemporaneous. Opening with the wonderfully cinematic scene of a coffin being suspended by helicopter and transported across Europe, the story quickly takes us into the world of a journalist known only as F. She has been hired by the widow of the woman in the coffin, Tina von Lambert, to reconstruct her murder as a documentary in the hopes of solving the otherwise cold case. As F. travels to North Africa, she becomes enmeshed in complex political machinations, switches of identity, and dangerous missions that entrap her in a labyrinth beneath the desert from which she must, against all odds, escape.
Difficulty, because each of the novel's twenty-four chapters consists of a single sentence. The enlightening foreward by Theodore Ziolkowski explains that Dürrenmatt was inspired by Bach, whose Well Tempered Clavier I likewise featured twenty-four movements (in German, we are told, the word for a sentence and a musical movement is the same). The result is a story that must have been a translator's nightmare, as ideas and clauses pile on top of one another and stream-of-consciousness is always on the verge of taking over the narrative's tenuous grasp on order.
The question that must be answered, of course, is does it all work? As a cohesive unit, surprisingly, it does. Agee's ability to keep the single-sentence unity of each chapter intact contributes strongly to the aforementioned sense of urgency: the short chapters glide quickly, the longer chapters gain pace as the reader progresses. The result is a novel that pushes uncomfortably forward while the screws of the plot twist and turn in innumerable ways. That it forces us to slow down but does not allow us to adds to the effect of the book on the reader.
That the book seems constantly on the verge of spinning out of control is in no small part the result of Dürrenmatt's subject matter. The novel's central conspiracy becomes almost completely irrelevant by the end while, as the convoluted subtitle suggests, the theme of constant surveillance emerges. Dürrenmatt's must have sensed that the Orwellian Big Brother of his time was either present or on the verge of being realized, because he presciently ties constant observation with large-scale international conspiracy in a way that makes the novel feel (almost) at home in the present as it did in the mid-1980s.
Perhaps the only piece of the puzzle that doesn't quite mesh so well is that it is incredibly hard to decipher whether or not Dürrenmatt actually ties all the loose ends together. It seems obvious that the central argument of the book is far more concerned with confusion and coercion than with clarity, but a bit of resolution would have been somewhat more helpful. The deus ex machina ending is slightly unsatisfying, but perhaps no more unexpected or unusual than anything else that preceded it. In short, the novella refuses to tidy things up -- and perhaps that's the point -- but it still concludes the work on an uneasy note that feels like it has more to do with merely the themes.
But the fact that the book has become more accurate and realistic since its initial publication in German is a testament to the strength of Dürrenmatt's material. The Assignment represents the work of an author who sensed the need to capture something greater than he could fathom, as well as the work of a translator who sensed a great thing that needed to be realized. Both succeed gloriously, producing a work that feels frighteningly contemporary -- and, to be sure, just downright frightening.
Saving the oddest for last, I present my review of The Assignment; or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers, written in 1986 by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, translated in 1988 by Joel Agee, and published afresh in October of 2008. For the benefit of those who don't typically look at my LibraryThing profile, I hope the review will turn some more folks on to this decidedly odd little novella.
------------------------
I have to give Joel Agee a great deal of credit. As the translator of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's exceedingly quirky 1986 novella The Assignment; or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers, he recognized both potential and difficulty and managed to rise to the challenge with aplomb.
Potential, because the novella, though over twenty years old, manages to speak to the kind of panic that is urgent and contemporaneous. Opening with the wonderfully cinematic scene of a coffin being suspended by helicopter and transported across Europe, the story quickly takes us into the world of a journalist known only as F. She has been hired by the widow of the woman in the coffin, Tina von Lambert, to reconstruct her murder as a documentary in the hopes of solving the otherwise cold case. As F. travels to North Africa, she becomes enmeshed in complex political machinations, switches of identity, and dangerous missions that entrap her in a labyrinth beneath the desert from which she must, against all odds, escape.
Difficulty, because each of the novel's twenty-four chapters consists of a single sentence. The enlightening foreward by Theodore Ziolkowski explains that Dürrenmatt was inspired by Bach, whose Well Tempered Clavier I likewise featured twenty-four movements (in German, we are told, the word for a sentence and a musical movement is the same). The result is a story that must have been a translator's nightmare, as ideas and clauses pile on top of one another and stream-of-consciousness is always on the verge of taking over the narrative's tenuous grasp on order.
The question that must be answered, of course, is does it all work? As a cohesive unit, surprisingly, it does. Agee's ability to keep the single-sentence unity of each chapter intact contributes strongly to the aforementioned sense of urgency: the short chapters glide quickly, the longer chapters gain pace as the reader progresses. The result is a novel that pushes uncomfortably forward while the screws of the plot twist and turn in innumerable ways. That it forces us to slow down but does not allow us to adds to the effect of the book on the reader.
That the book seems constantly on the verge of spinning out of control is in no small part the result of Dürrenmatt's subject matter. The novel's central conspiracy becomes almost completely irrelevant by the end while, as the convoluted subtitle suggests, the theme of constant surveillance emerges. Dürrenmatt's must have sensed that the Orwellian Big Brother of his time was either present or on the verge of being realized, because he presciently ties constant observation with large-scale international conspiracy in a way that makes the novel feel (almost) at home in the present as it did in the mid-1980s.
Perhaps the only piece of the puzzle that doesn't quite mesh so well is that it is incredibly hard to decipher whether or not Dürrenmatt actually ties all the loose ends together. It seems obvious that the central argument of the book is far more concerned with confusion and coercion than with clarity, but a bit of resolution would have been somewhat more helpful. The deus ex machina ending is slightly unsatisfying, but perhaps no more unexpected or unusual than anything else that preceded it. In short, the novella refuses to tidy things up -- and perhaps that's the point -- but it still concludes the work on an uneasy note that feels like it has more to do with merely the themes.
But the fact that the book has become more accurate and realistic since its initial publication in German is a testament to the strength of Dürrenmatt's material. The Assignment represents the work of an author who sensed the need to capture something greater than he could fathom, as well as the work of a translator who sensed a great thing that needed to be realized. Both succeed gloriously, producing a work that feels frighteningly contemporary -- and, to be sure, just downright frightening.
posted by Dave at 3/08/2009 02:07:00 PM
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