Botho Strauß

Teilweise ist nur eine individuelle Beobachtung der Welt, dann klingt es fast nach Kafka (nur mit anderer Stimme).
Das Alles ist so scharfsinnig beobachtet und vielschichtig, dass ich es wirklich empfehlenswert finde.

This is a frustrating but occasionally compelling book. The author has a number of interesting ideas but has problems developing them into a smoothly flowing narrative and there are simply too many stories and plots. The whole thing has the feel of multiple unrelated pieces shoved together to make a novel. There’s some very good, evocative writing but long stretches of dull pontificating and lecturing in ways that would be unnatural coming out of any character’s mouth. Not really show more recommended.

The book’s opening section is promising enough – a claustrophobic depiction of a new theater director attempting to manage his two star actresses and his own insecurities. The author has vivid descriptions of the colluding actresses, the director’s despair once one production is over and his increasing desperation as another play spins out of control. While a couple characters tend to go off on rants, it fits with the plot – the director is bursting with idealistic ideas about his interpretation of the play and another famous director that he consults at least seems the type to go off on a lecture. Unfortunately, this tendency gets out of control in later segments.

After that, the book moves into a completely unrelated section, describing the odd magic-realist-sci-fi adventures of a banker who gets lost in the woods. There are some interesting ideas in the whole mess – the banker enters a store, but finds nothing to buy – when she tries to leave, she’s accused of shoplifting. The merchandise is voices and at first she protests, but then realizes that her voice has indeed changed. But a lot of it feels pretty random or blatantly symbolic without being interesting (a blind-leading-the-blind type scenario, which ends up with the leaders cannibalizing their followers).

There does seem to be some attempt to form a cohesive storyline for the extended segments – the tower the banker finds ends up as a development for a new type of society, which in the future has a population under study by the (different?) first person narrator, though it shows up later with the original narrator, the former director, when it has only started to become a closed-off society. To be honest, I didn’t really care. Individual segments could be readable enough, but the whole thing felt very disjointed.

The next narrative was the worst – the first person narrator and his colleague are studying a futuristic society while attempting to remain uninvolved. The narrator soon wants to join the society, is attracted to one of the women there, then gets kicked out. It seemed overly clichéd – especially with the descriptions of the population as feminine, natural and intuitive. There was also a lot of pseudo-anthropological jargon.

Again, a switch in sections. The next one is the same first person narrator – the theater director - but while the first section was realistically described (perhaps some stress-induced hallucinations, but nothing too off) this one has all sorts of flights of fancy. Some work, most don’t. The narrative starts of with the death of the “most evil German” (more too-blatant symbolism) in prose that sounds more like a description in a fairy tale. The director’s back story tells about a woman he met who traps her lovers in her memory and his friend describes her training as a mural artist, subsequent disillusionment, further work as an art restorer and further disillusionment. Both of those pieces worked pretty well, though they didn’t seem at all related. The director and a group of friends debate – or actually, one of his friends lectures at length. Though the narrator says he’s not getting all of it and others complain – there’s still endless babbling. More magic-realist events happen – the narrator also gets lost in the woods (like the banker from the earlier piece) and weird shit happens, but it’s not at all interesting.

The final section has the director’s quiet life interrupted when he again encounters the famous director and one of the actresses from the first segment. The famous director wants the narrator to help him with a film and gives him some of his sketches. They might be some of the random narratives from earlier, but didn’t care at this point. Some of the narrator’s thoughts on the decline of the famous director could be applied to the haphazard construction of the novel. One such example – “He had suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to try something entirely new – using barely recognizable plots and moving the story forward in fragmented sequences – without seeing that this was putting him on the well-worn road toward a sterile modernism.” show less

This could be a good read if you want to discuss ideas of couples, art, isolation, alienation. I can't really view this as a novel. To me, this book read like little essays. The jacket cover calls it vignettes. I still think it is just essays and not a novel. There really is no identifiable characters and there is no plot. The six sections are supposedly linked but even that is hard to see. I think that the author makes some great statements and there are likely many great quotes if you are show more looking for those but over all, this short book was a drag. show less

I have no idea why Both Strauss' novel "Couples, Passersby" exists, what it was actually about or why it was included on the list of 1,001 Books To Read Before You Die. It's easily the worst book I've read this year (and believe me, this year I've read some duds.)

There isn't a story here -- just a series of vignettes and observations by the author, possibly about loneliness or the inability to connect with people. The one I remember the most is the supposition that women are too busy raising show more children to have any capacity for self-reflection, so that's left to the men folk. Ridiculous... after that I really started skimming.

This book was truly awful. show less