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Fiction
A Dark, Eruptive Force Hides Within These Inviting Fables
Adam Ehrlich Sachs reveals a society on the verge of cataclysm in his new novel, “Gretel and the Great War.”
Dustin Illingworth has written for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The Times Literary Supplement.
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GRETEL AND THE GREAT WAR, by Adam Ehrlich Sachs
Interwar Austria — baroque, violent, demented, doomed — flickers into view in Adam Ehrlich Sachs’s new novel, “Gretel and the Great War.” No staid work of history, this. Sachs draws from the madcap, darkly comic tradition of postmodern European fiction to reimagine the continent’s catastrophic destiny.
The novel opens in November 1919, when Gretel, a young mute girl, is found wandering the streets of Vienna. The neurologist who eventually treats her receives a letter from a sanitarium patient claiming to be her father. Included in the letter is a story — “A: The Architect” — which he asks the neurologist to read to the girl as a bedtime story.
The next day brings “B: The Ballet Master,” the next “C: The Choirmaster,” and so on. Readers allergic to whimsy might bristle; how could a rondo of alphabetical tales not veer into tweeness? But the novel’s charming formal sequence conceals an eruptive, ungovernable force.
The stories, with their alliterative and sometimes zany subtitles — from “The Architect of Advanced Age at Last Builds an Abode” to “The Zionist Zigzags” — evoke both the familiarity and menace of fairy tales. They are interconnected in setting, protagonist and event, though this becomes clear only over time. The various characters — an aging starlet, the director of a theater that burns to the ground, a possibly pedophilic painter, a duchess who nurtures a porcelain doll, a murdered toymaker — circle one another ominously. Taken singly they are toylike, parabolic oddities. Together they reveal the cracked facade of the “contrived, hypocritical, highly populated city.”
The stories rarely finish where they seem to be heading. Reversals of fortune abound. Characters seek solutions to a baffling, largely unstable world. A physiology student seeks to “reupholster” reality by overhauling language, cutting away all that is dead or redundant; a dance instructor discovers a “realm of naturalness and simplicity” through the study of human movement.
The topsy-turvy, paranoid society they describe intimates the larger psychic darkness consuming Vienna, that of the merciless war they’ve only recently suffered and the larger conflict they cannot yet envision. Our foreknowledge of the fascist wave on the horizon stirs sympathy and angst, even if — as when a tormented obstetrician places a bomb inside the head of the duchess’s doll — we can only await the inevitable carnage.
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