by Manjit Handa

Love is the oldest and ceaseless emotion that lurks pristine in human heart. Never failing to stimulate, although, "Repeated ad infinitum since the dawn of humanity", as the author Wolfgang Koeppen puts it in his novel A Sad Affair.

A writer, especially a writer never fails to detain its nadir to the paramount detail. How deeply, how intensely can someone love somebody? The German writer answers this question through the love of Friedrich for Sibylle, a seductress who is first a girlfriend of Beck, then Walter, the drama critic, then Bosporus, the Army soldier with a limp and then Fedor who according to her is a "naïve and simple man". And Friedrich, always her lover and a spectator to the string of her lovers. Not only is Friedrich cognizant of these men, hilariously he joins them all until they form a threesome and he burns and consumes in his own inferno of jealousy, yet always convincing himself, "She is destined for me". If Antony was all blinded by Cleopatra and said, "Let Rome in Tiber melt", then for Friedrich, "the Mediterranean proved . . . no more than just another of world's seas. . . [i]t grew to be a matter of indifference to him compared with his love for Sibylle". He is repeatedly swayed by the false truth that, "I will one day prevail". That day never comes.

Borders, boundaries and territories become one of the major themes in the book. The protagonist might have crossed the boundaries of countries chasing his love but can never cross that wall that persistently comes in-between. And he cries out: "If only. . . [I] could manage to penetrate the windings of her brain, even once!" In the beginning it is "a fortress, a bulwark, a concrete wall" and by the end it has attenuated to "the wall of glass", nevertheless it is still there, only now it is endurable for Friedrich, the one that "they now respected".

An artist, having lost his parents at an early age, Friedrich has been in odd jobs like bulb testing (he even names the bulbs, Friedrich, Sibylle and Beck???), but he has pulled it through and could have easily gotten over Sibylle and settled down with someone else. But then he would not be the hero. He is the modern protagonist with the hubris and tragic flaw of his obsessiveness with his object and subject of love-Sibylle. That is exactly and ironically what scares her. As Koeppen articulates Friedrich's feelings:
". . . he was only thinking, as she always said, of himself and his own happiness, Maybe this thinking, this demented desire to possess that went far beyond the merely physical, was the reason why she refused to surrender her life to his claims, because his demands were too steep and too strange and caused a shudder to pass across her back."

Sibylle on the other hand, an actress, is beautiful, well read (her erudition spreads from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and George Stendhal to Baudelaire), easy with communicating, spontaneous, "liberated", very "modern" and "free". The alluring femme fatale, like Salomé. Needless to say, Friedrich's wanting to "keep" her is irrational. The inevitability of this love's doom makes the story a perfect package for its immortality.

Love is also examined from an Oriental point of view when the Japanese traveler tells Friedrich that "he is already dead", only a "shadow" of himself but for the Occident Friedrich it is enough that Sibylle "is in the world", "breathing the same air".

Autobiographical elements have been tracked in the character of Sibylle that render the book an even more interesting tale. She is said to be based on Sibylle Schloss, a young half-Jewish actress, heart-stoppingly beautiful and unconventional in her morality. Even Bosporus, Walter and Fedor are drawn from real life as Michael Hoffman states in the introduction. More material for psychological criticism!

It is a decadent cabaret world of Pre- World War II with much of perfumes, greasepaint and alcohol. Written in 1934, the book does not contain any traces of Fascism but a couple of social issues are raised. For one the dissection of the plight of refugees converges on the theme of boundaries and borders. What do people like Magnus owning buildings like 'Home for the Refugees', "care about someone from another nation, so long as they themselves are free from persecution, not forced to stand at others' doors and beg in others' languages? They turn away and ignore the needs of others". The Home is only lugging on with the legacy and inheritance of that 'unusual man' called his father who might have been a philanthropist, but not Magnus. He is forced to cling to this show of kindness almost like a punishment. How pathetic! Then he is also a pimp. Exploitation has reached its epitome in Magnus. Friedrich loathes him and muses, "How we all torment one another".

Structurally we travel from Zurich to farther South of Europe i.e. Venice and disembark on the Mediterranean shores. There are flashback snapshots that connect the present of the protagonist to the past but the book comes to an end with the questionable and dubious future of his love. An open ending left to the imagination of the complex modern reader? How easily it all ended in the olden days? Existentialism was remote then!

But we give it to the writer. After so many years of its first publication in German (1934), the translated version (by Michael Hoffman) does not leave the reader one bit dissatisfied. Such stuff are classics made of! As if it was written yesterday. Surely a treat to read one of Germany's greatest award winning twentieth-century writers with the translation by an equally prolific Michel Hoffman!

A one sitting book!

A Sad Affair
By Wolfgang Koeppen
Translated with an Introduction by Michael Hofman
W.W. Norton & Company, New York
English Translation 2003, CAN. $36.00, Pages 176
ISBN 0-393-05718-6