IN TIMES OF FADING LIGHT by Eugen Ruge, translated by Anthea Bell (Faber)
Eugen Ruge’s novel about East Berlin, a prizewinner and bestseller in Germany, is unlikely to have the same impact on a readership with little investment in its revisionist project or weakness for Ostalgie [a German term referring to nostalgia for aspects of life in East Germany]. But it might provoke nostalgia of a different kind, being a substantial entry in a genre, the microcosmic portrait of an age, at which English novelists used to thrive.
The novel makes good on its subtitle — The Story of a Family — offering a view of life on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain (and later, the Wall), closer in its emphases to Simon Garfield’s filleting of Mass-Observation diaries, Our Hidden Lives, than to the Oscar-winning film The Lives of Others. This is the German Democratic Republic as seen from a suburban kitchen rather than the corridors of power, with the preparation of Thuringian dumplings (“you needed both raw and boiled potato, half and half, or precisely a little more raw potato than boiled”) receiving a level of scrutiny previously accorded to wire-tapping.
But Ruge also manages to unfold, alongside the story of the Umnitzers, the story of a state, drawing on the porousness of the public and the private, the diplomatic and sartorial. Out with a girl in 1973, Alexander Umnitzer reflects that her flashy outfit was only possible because of the recent Basic Treaty, in which the Federal and Democratic republics acknowledged each other’s sovereignty — and permitted sisters to send each other leather coats and “strikingly short” acrylic skirts across the inner German border. And it is due to another import — bourgeois Western manners — that another of Alexander’s girlfriends, Melitta, visiting the Umnitzer home on Christmas Day, 1976, insists on taking her shoes off, a custom that his mother considers “petty and provincial”.
It is in social scenarios that history makes itself felt. As the book opens, in 2001, Alexander has been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The reader is left in little doubt that the illness is psychogenic, the product of a lifetime’s internal conflict — of longing for the freedoms his family raised him to despise.
The structure of the book is intricate and non-linear, with characters born as far apart as 1889 and 1977 being depicted in parallel narrative.
By dramatising in consecutive chapters events that take place decades apart, Ruge achieves a saga span while avoiding the saga sloth often displayed by chronological treatments, but he refrains from exploiting the potential narrative benefits, such as the licence to postpone detail. Alexander’s defection to the West in the late 1980s is disclosed almost casually. And while there is a detective element to his excursion to Mexico, Ruge is so busy dropping in other periods that he loses sight of it.
The translation demands less virtuosity than some of Anthea Bell’s previous assignments, with Alexander’s thought on the opening page — “The sky was blue, what else?” — providing an early indicator of the interest in natural description. But if Ruge stints the reader on some pleasures, it is because he is devoted to a group of characters who are too busy to serve as vessels for lyrical flights.
It is Alexander, the character closest to Ruge in age and experience, who provides the clearest illustration of his strengths — the eloquent use of fleeting detail, the ability to catch the impact of history through the movement of a mind. Even a decade after defecting, his thoughts are still consumed with shaking off the past, still expressed in negative terms: “He buys the hat to disown his father. He buys it to disown the whole of his life so far, the life in which he did not wear a hat.” — © Guardian News & Media 2013