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Out of the Line of Fire
Wolfi Schönborn, self-confessed Wunderkind, chose as his PhD thesis ‘Reality: Beyond the Limits of Perception’. Wolfi didn’t think much of limits. Or reality.
Then Wolfi vanished - leaving a fellow student a pile of photographs, letters, philosophical notes and sexual passages.
Narrator and reader are left to piece together, clue by clue, a bizarre patchwork of intellectual brilliance, deviant sexuality, farcical horror and wilful innocence to reveal at last, stripped of illusion, the final bare reality that is Wolfi. Or is it?
Detective story, Bildungsroman, sexual chronicle and philosophical odyssey. Out of the line of fire is a multi-layered masterpiece - the most highly praised Australian novel since Peter Carey’s Illywhacker.
Then Wolfi vanished - leaving a fellow student a pile of photographs, letters, philosophical notes and sexual passages.
Narrator and reader are left to piece together, clue by clue, a bizarre patchwork of intellectual brilliance, deviant sexuality, farcical horror and wilful innocence to reveal at last, stripped of illusion, the final bare reality that is Wolfi. Or is it?
Detective story, Bildungsroman, sexual chronicle and philosophical odyssey. Out of the line of fire is a multi-layered masterpiece - the most highly praised Australian novel since Peter Carey’s Illywhacker.
207 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
137 people want to read
About the author
Mark Henshaw
11 books29 followersMark Henshaw was born in Canberra, has studied medicine and music and has lived in France, Germany, Yugoslavia and the United States. He currently lives in Canberra. His first novel, Out of the Line of Fire (1988), won the FAW Barbara Ramsden Award and the National Book Council/Quantas New Writers Award. It was also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Age Book of the Year Award. Out of the Line of Fire was one of the biggest selling Australian literary novels of the decade, and is being republished in the Text Classics series. Mark has also published a sequence of meditations, translated into French by Pierre Alien, Last Thoughts of a Dead Man (1990).
In 1989 Mark was awarded a Commonwealth Literary Fellowship, and in 1994 he won the ACT Literary Award. Under the pseudonym J.M.Calder, in collaboration with John Clanchy, he has written two crime novels, If God Sleeps (1996) and And Hope to Die (2007). His work has been widely translated. For many years he was a curator of International Art at the National Gallery of Australia. He recently returned to writing fiction full-time.
In 1989 Mark was awarded a Commonwealth Literary Fellowship, and in 1994 he won the ACT Literary Award. Under the pseudonym J.M.Calder, in collaboration with John Clanchy, he has written two crime novels, If God Sleeps (1996) and And Hope to Die (2007). His work has been widely translated. For many years he was a curator of International Art at the National Gallery of Australia. He recently returned to writing fiction full-time.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
August 17, 2016
I really loved this metafictional, psycho-philosophical striptease from Canberra writer Mark Henshaw, which I bought at Perth airport and proceeded to devour in a single day, tearing through most of it in one gulp during a bumpy flight to Melbourne. It's been a long time since I had the opportunity to read a book so devotedly, and it made me think about how much the circumstances in which we read a book can affect the way we react to it. This is a not inapposite reflection, since one of the things this book is about is how we relate to fiction, and whether fiction is, in the final analysis, actually distinguishable from ‘reality’.
It's about a lot of other things as well; this book is jam-packed with ideas. It's about sex, or rather that time in adolescence when life seems to become ‘permeated with a sense of strange and relentless erotic presentiment’, when girls start to feel an inherent sense of power and boys start to feel an inherent sense of predation and desperation (these roles can also be reversed, but – for reasons we must hope are more societal than genetic – they often aren't). It's about language and its limitations, specifically Wittgenstein's conclusions about language's ‘ultimate incapacity to articulate the world’ (something WG Sebald has also written about…I feel differently, but it's a debate I like). It's about translation and what it means, what is lost in translation, the eternal mystery of how so much survives translation (large chunks of the text are given twice, first in English and then, in square brackets, in the ‘original’ German – the book is set in Germany). And it is about the relationship between truth and fiction, a subject with which Henshaw has enormous fun, starting even before the novel itself has started: opposite the usual publisher's reminder that ‘Any similarity between persons living or dead is purely coincidental’ we have the writer's dedication ‘FOR WOLFI’. Wolfi is the name of the central character.
Opening lines. Well. There are many famous openings to novels, but this is the most audacious I've ever seen. He begins:
I was laughing straight away. Where the hell do you go after a theft of this magnitude and specificity!? Henshaw turns it into a playful commentary which also establishes the book's tone.
You might notice here that ‘traveler’ is spelt thus, the American way, in the first instance and with two Ls, the British way, in the second instance. But already I felt confident enough in the author that I assumed it was deliberate, and sure enough, he immediately goes on to reference this tension between regional translations while also introducing the subject of multiple languages which will be so important later:
So now you've read the two opening paragraphs. I realise this is a slow way of reviewing a novel, but since there are currently no other reviews of this on the site, you might as well have a sample.
I think this is a wonderful way to open a book. Even though it's probably too clever for its own good, the tone is light enough and funny enough that he gets away with it.
It is very hard to discuss the plot without giving away important details, because the book is in part a sort of metafictional thriller, where the ‘truth’ of what we are reading is always in question. An Australian narrator meets a brilliant philosophy student called Wolfi while studying in Heidelberg. Wolfi disappears; our narrator returns to Oz. Years later, a box arrives containing Wolfi's writings and letters, which are presented in the first person. From these disparate elements we as readers attempt to piece together the story of Wolfi's life – the life of a fictional character who might even be fictional within the world of the novel. But these possibilities are part of the book's point; bear that in mind as you approach the ending, which I imagine has annoyed several readers.
The narrative mode switches between the erotic and the philosophical. Perhaps it's just because they're both published by the excellent Text Classics, but I kept being reminded of Rod Jones's Julia Paradise, another 80s novel about an expatriate Australian and a childhood story of transcendent psychosexual trauma which may or may not be true. Henshaw forces his themes to crash into each other in striking ways, discussing, for instance, the translation of philosophy, or the sexiness of metafiction. Or there's continental philosophy and sex: one character, overthinking his first blowjob as some men are apt to do, reflects on this milestone in the following way (which I sincerely hope is intended to be hilarious):
There are many nice descriptive set-pieces. A woman having an orgasm ‘surrenders to the short percussive rebuttals of her body’; a character a few pages earlier is described as looking ‘like the young Mahler might have looked just after someone had told him a joke’. But mostly what we are concerned about here – what, I think, the other themes are all feeding into – is how the ‘gap between fiction, between abstract speculation and so-called reality became blurred’…or perhaps more specifically, as it's restated 250 pages later, the notion that
There are many ways in which this book is not perfect; many people will dismiss it as clever-clever, not without reason, and there is something slightly adolescent in its male-centric sensibilities. But despite its flaws, as I said above, I really loved it. It's the sort of book I wish I had written – and indeed, given the book's message, I feel encouraged to walk away thinking that maybe I did.
(Oct 2014)
It's about a lot of other things as well; this book is jam-packed with ideas. It's about sex, or rather that time in adolescence when life seems to become ‘permeated with a sense of strange and relentless erotic presentiment’, when girls start to feel an inherent sense of power and boys start to feel an inherent sense of predation and desperation (these roles can also be reversed, but – for reasons we must hope are more societal than genetic – they often aren't). It's about language and its limitations, specifically Wittgenstein's conclusions about language's ‘ultimate incapacity to articulate the world’ (something WG Sebald has also written about…I feel differently, but it's a debate I like). It's about translation and what it means, what is lost in translation, the eternal mystery of how so much survives translation (large chunks of the text are given twice, first in English and then, in square brackets, in the ‘original’ German – the book is set in Germany). And it is about the relationship between truth and fiction, a subject with which Henshaw has enormous fun, starting even before the novel itself has started: opposite the usual publisher's reminder that ‘Any similarity between persons living or dead is purely coincidental’ we have the writer's dedication ‘FOR WOLFI’. Wolfi is the name of the central character.
Opening lines. Well. There are many famous openings to novels, but this is the most audacious I've ever seen. He begins:
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
I was laughing straight away. Where the hell do you go after a theft of this magnitude and specificity!? Henshaw turns it into a playful commentary which also establishes the book's tone.
These are the words Italo Calvino selected to open his novel If on a winter's night a traveller. Astonishingly he sets them out in the same order. Had Walter Abish chosen the same words he might have begun, after, of course, placing them in alphabetical order: You, Italo Calvino, are a winter's night traveler about to begin reading a new novel If. But as yet he has not, and until he does we will have to wait.
You might notice here that ‘traveler’ is spelt thus, the American way, in the first instance and with two Ls, the British way, in the second instance. But already I felt confident enough in the author that I assumed it was deliberate, and sure enough, he immediately goes on to reference this tension between regional translations while also introducing the subject of multiple languages which will be so important later:
In fact Calvino begins his novel: ‘Stai per cominciare a leggere il nuovo romanzo Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore de Italo Calvino.’ Thus the original avoids a peculiar problem which arises only in the translation – ‘viagiatore’ with a single ‘g’ would simply be wrong.
So now you've read the two opening paragraphs. I realise this is a slow way of reviewing a novel, but since there are currently no other reviews of this on the site, you might as well have a sample.
I think this is a wonderful way to open a book. Even though it's probably too clever for its own good, the tone is light enough and funny enough that he gets away with it.
It is very hard to discuss the plot without giving away important details, because the book is in part a sort of metafictional thriller, where the ‘truth’ of what we are reading is always in question. An Australian narrator meets a brilliant philosophy student called Wolfi while studying in Heidelberg. Wolfi disappears; our narrator returns to Oz. Years later, a box arrives containing Wolfi's writings and letters, which are presented in the first person. From these disparate elements we as readers attempt to piece together the story of Wolfi's life – the life of a fictional character who might even be fictional within the world of the novel. But these possibilities are part of the book's point; bear that in mind as you approach the ending, which I imagine has annoyed several readers.
The narrative mode switches between the erotic and the philosophical. Perhaps it's just because they're both published by the excellent Text Classics, but I kept being reminded of Rod Jones's Julia Paradise, another 80s novel about an expatriate Australian and a childhood story of transcendent psychosexual trauma which may or may not be true. Henshaw forces his themes to crash into each other in striking ways, discussing, for instance, the translation of philosophy, or the sexiness of metafiction. Or there's continental philosophy and sex: one character, overthinking his first blowjob as some men are apt to do, reflects on this milestone in the following way (which I sincerely hope is intended to be hilarious):
For the first time in my life, with Andrea bent tenderly over me, I became conscious of the real implications of the Hegelian dialectic….
There are many nice descriptive set-pieces. A woman having an orgasm ‘surrenders to the short percussive rebuttals of her body’; a character a few pages earlier is described as looking ‘like the young Mahler might have looked just after someone had told him a joke’. But mostly what we are concerned about here – what, I think, the other themes are all feeding into – is how the ‘gap between fiction, between abstract speculation and so-called reality became blurred’…or perhaps more specifically, as it's restated 250 pages later, the notion that
there is essentially no difference between a fictional world and the real world – that each world is particular to the mind that simultaneously perceives and creates it.
There are many ways in which this book is not perfect; many people will dismiss it as clever-clever, not without reason, and there is something slightly adolescent in its male-centric sensibilities. But despite its flaws, as I said above, I really loved it. It's the sort of book I wish I had written – and indeed, given the book's message, I feel encouraged to walk away thinking that maybe I did.
(Oct 2014)
March 3, 2017
A novel about the usual…… life, death, love, sex, the ever nagging [bohrende] question about truth vs. fiction, the impossibility of language to abstract from experience and thought, and, finally: translation, because the book is in small parts written in German (with English translations added to demonstrate the point.)
I suggest that you don’t believe everything you perceive in here; the narrators (one Australian, one Austrian) seem unreliable.
I picked the book under the assumption I would get away for a while from these heavy philosophical stuff I have to read in the Pinkard book. But how was I mistaken. It’s Kant and Hegel all over the place here too; implicitely, explicitely and extra-explicitley in form of a Hegelian dialectic sex-scene. And there’s loads of references to other literature and authors.
Highly recommended!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
I suggest that you don’t believe everything you perceive in here; the narrators (one Australian, one Austrian) seem unreliable.
I picked the book under the assumption I would get away for a while from these heavy philosophical stuff I have to read in the Pinkard book. But how was I mistaken. It’s Kant and Hegel all over the place here too; implicitely, explicitely and extra-explicitley in form of a Hegelian dialectic sex-scene. And there’s loads of references to other literature and authors.
Highly recommended!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
April 15, 2015
Ah, back when you could write a perfectly realistic story and surround it with a meta-narrative framework and felt fresh! I don't remember the days, but I'm sure they existed, and Henshaw writes so cleanly and amusingly that I can even forgive him the genuinely precious moments. I have no idea how this novel would sit with someone even less familiar than I am with Henshaw's discussion group (Musil, Calvino, Kant, etc...) But if you have some idea what those fellows were up to, you might enjoy this book.
I enjoyed it, I think, because its *positive* about literature's unreliability etc., rater than bemoaning the inability of words to adequately represent reality. Also, it has a gleefully scurrilous 'plot' and very funny set-pieces. I've been reading a lot of Sebald lately, in an attempt to work out why people like him, and I see a lot of Henshaw and Sebald in each other, with the important caveat that Henshaw seems smart, is funny, and, implausibly enough given the sections on German idealism and how it developed or was challenged by phenomenology and Heideggerian thought, *less* pretentious.
So if you like Sebald, or don't like him that much but do like the whole "is it him or isn't it? how much of this is real, and how much is not?" thing, try Henshaw.
I enjoyed it, I think, because its *positive* about literature's unreliability etc., rater than bemoaning the inability of words to adequately represent reality. Also, it has a gleefully scurrilous 'plot' and very funny set-pieces. I've been reading a lot of Sebald lately, in an attempt to work out why people like him, and I see a lot of Henshaw and Sebald in each other, with the important caveat that Henshaw seems smart, is funny, and, implausibly enough given the sections on German idealism and how it developed or was challenged by phenomenology and Heideggerian thought, *less* pretentious.
So if you like Sebald, or don't like him that much but do like the whole "is it him or isn't it? how much of this is real, and how much is not?" thing, try Henshaw.
February 8, 2017
‘A dazzling debut. A tour de force. This book is imaginative, virtuosic, and awesomely assured. It is compulsive reading.’
Don Anderson
‘Experimental, extraordinary…Out of the Line of Fire, published in 1988, remains one of my favourite Australian novels.’
Stephen Romei, Australian
‘An Australian writer heads to Germany, where he gets strong doses of philosophy, violence, taboo sex, and unreliable narration…The novel feels like an id laid bare, and Henshaw keeps the story in line while constantly pointing out the limitations of words to capture reality. A remarkable and brainy work of metafiction.’
STARRED Review, Kirkus
‘A clever and playful text, offering both a decent story that includes quite a few sordid episodes and behaviour as well as lofty (but accessible) literary and philosophical speculation, and more than a few mysteries…It’s an interesting take on the literary-philosophical novel, with a deceptively light writing touch that differentiates it from most continental novels playing with similar tricks. The scenes, the asides, and the speculation are, both separately and together, good (if sometimes somewhat creepy) fun, and Out of the Line of Fire is a smart and smartly twisted novel.’
Complete Review
Don Anderson
‘Experimental, extraordinary…Out of the Line of Fire, published in 1988, remains one of my favourite Australian novels.’
Stephen Romei, Australian
‘An Australian writer heads to Germany, where he gets strong doses of philosophy, violence, taboo sex, and unreliable narration…The novel feels like an id laid bare, and Henshaw keeps the story in line while constantly pointing out the limitations of words to capture reality. A remarkable and brainy work of metafiction.’
STARRED Review, Kirkus
‘A clever and playful text, offering both a decent story that includes quite a few sordid episodes and behaviour as well as lofty (but accessible) literary and philosophical speculation, and more than a few mysteries…It’s an interesting take on the literary-philosophical novel, with a deceptively light writing touch that differentiates it from most continental novels playing with similar tricks. The scenes, the asides, and the speculation are, both separately and together, good (if sometimes somewhat creepy) fun, and Out of the Line of Fire is a smart and smartly twisted novel.’
Complete Review
October 16, 2021
Were I to have ever managed to set myself up as the proprietor of a licensed bookshop and gallery as I'd planned to have done by about now when I was in teacher's college, then the display for this novel that I'd have set up in the window would have had this strapline:
You'll come for the saucy tales of incest, but you'll stay for the Hegelian teleological meta-narrative!
...which is probably why it's best that I'm not in the licensed bookshop and gallery business.
So I had no idea about this novel, except
a) that is was published by Text, which is a very reliable outlet for lost or forgotten Australian and New Zealander novels,
2) that is was set in Germany, and
iii) that it followed the adventures there of a young Australian word-enthusiastic in the 1980s
So that was enough for me to borrow it to my Kobo and start reading.
I appreciated the way that Henshaw integrated German words and idioms, and even just whole slabs of text into his narrative. Being a bit of a German speaker, I found myself reading the text and understanding it, and then he'd give you either a direkte Übersetzung [direct translation], or else he'd give you a pretty good hint, damit du es verstehst, which helped you understand.
I especially enjoyed how he would just drop into the narrative in square brackets - because there was something especially wonderful about the sound of the language - the actual word or phrase that they would have used [wie es verwendet wurde].
Apart from that (or "furthermore", as students would say), the novel was being terribly clever in the way that it told its story. I just recently re-read Slaughterhouse Five, and the sort of step-back-and-pull-the-curtain-aside writing Vonnegut used in that is even more interestingly applied here. In the introduction, the introducer describes how he always enjoys a little chuckle how on one page in the preliminaries there is the disclaimer that the characters and events are not real, and then on the facing page the book is dedicated to one of the characters...
It's totes meta.
Written in three quite distinct parts, the novel adopts a completely different approach for each. In ways that fans of talking cleverly about that Ian McEwan novel Atonement would appreciate, there are things in here that the storytelling process shapes in ways that will wish you'd read this with a book club, so that you could all be clever about it together, on Google Meet, over wine and cheese and cornichons.
I'll leave you to discover the cleverness on your own. If you need any help, read the introduction out loud at the start of the meeting.
I did sort of let slip at the start (pun intended, as you will soon understand) that there is a bit of incest going on in this, so if that is a problem for you, BE WARNED. The novel lurches onto its rails at a point when, in a holiday hotel bedroom, Wolfi awakens to find that the left breast of his sixteen year old sister - with whom he is sharing the room - has escaped her nightdress. It hasn't gone anywhere, it's just sort of lying there on her ribcage in a beam of sunlight. The sight of this breast reveals to him an essential truth about the universe, one that he is very interested in pursuing to its conclusion. As things unfold, there is some peeping, some planned peeping, some time spent with an understanding prostitute, and more such things. Had Elena's breast not slipped from inside its nightdress, this whole thing would have turned out very differently, that's for sure.
So surely this is an admonition against insecure nightdresses. BE WARNED.
But the one thing you take away from this is how bloody clever it all is. This novel was up for the Franklin against Carey's Oscar and Lucinda, which gives you (or me, at least) pause to wonder why it's not a title that people (or me, at least) have heard of. At the time, many Australian critics panned it for being... go on, have a guess. It was the 1980s, and it was in Australia, and it was talking about European ideas and philosophies and ways of thinking...
Give up?
It was accused of trying to be too clever. Of being a poseur text, written by an Australian who should really have been writing about car chases in the Outback, or young boys befriending pelicans. That sort of thing.
Now, if I had set up that licensed bookshop and gallery and decided to mount a retrospective of Mr Henshaw, it would be a pretty light-on display. He wrote this, then he went on with his day job of writing catalogues for the NGA (National Gallery of Australia), and then, in 2014, wrote one other book that you've never heard of either: The Snow Kimono
He also contributed to a serially-written "dirty book" overseen by former 1970s bass player and microphone user Red Symons, but the less said about that the better.
So, alles klar. But a main reason I wanted to read this was because it was set in Germany. Mainly in the old university town of Heidelberg (apparently a preserved city not destroyed by the British and American Allied Bomber Command because a prostitute whose home town [Heimat] it was convinced a high ranking Allied Major General not to bomb it) but also in other places, such as Berlin, of which we hear this...
So much indeed.
The other thing I am a big fan of, and one of the reasons I gave it five stars (which means I wish I'd written it myself, in the backroom of that licensed bookshop and gallery) is the ending. Not the twist ending (it's a sort of mystery thriller, so expect a twist or two), but the... other thing.
You'll know what I mean when you get to Klagenfurt. Well, after you've been in Klagenfurt for a while, anyway.
Viel Spaß!
You'll come for the saucy tales of incest, but you'll stay for the Hegelian teleological meta-narrative!
...which is probably why it's best that I'm not in the licensed bookshop and gallery business.
So I had no idea about this novel, except
a) that is was published by Text, which is a very reliable outlet for lost or forgotten Australian and New Zealander novels,
2) that is was set in Germany, and
iii) that it followed the adventures there of a young Australian word-enthusiastic in the 1980s
So that was enough for me to borrow it to my Kobo and start reading.
I appreciated the way that Henshaw integrated German words and idioms, and even just whole slabs of text into his narrative. Being a bit of a German speaker, I found myself reading the text and understanding it, and then he'd give you either a direkte Übersetzung [direct translation], or else he'd give you a pretty good hint, damit du es verstehst, which helped you understand.
I especially enjoyed how he would just drop into the narrative in square brackets - because there was something especially wonderful about the sound of the language - the actual word or phrase that they would have used [wie es verwendet wurde].
Apart from that (or "furthermore", as students would say), the novel was being terribly clever in the way that it told its story. I just recently re-read Slaughterhouse Five, and the sort of step-back-and-pull-the-curtain-aside writing Vonnegut used in that is even more interestingly applied here. In the introduction, the introducer describes how he always enjoys a little chuckle how on one page in the preliminaries there is the disclaimer that the characters and events are not real, and then on the facing page the book is dedicated to one of the characters...
It's totes meta.
Written in three quite distinct parts, the novel adopts a completely different approach for each. In ways that fans of talking cleverly about that Ian McEwan novel Atonement would appreciate, there are things in here that the storytelling process shapes in ways that will wish you'd read this with a book club, so that you could all be clever about it together, on Google Meet, over wine and cheese and cornichons.
I'll leave you to discover the cleverness on your own. If you need any help, read the introduction out loud at the start of the meeting.
I did sort of let slip at the start (pun intended, as you will soon understand) that there is a bit of incest going on in this, so if that is a problem for you, BE WARNED. The novel lurches onto its rails at a point when, in a holiday hotel bedroom, Wolfi awakens to find that the left breast of his sixteen year old sister - with whom he is sharing the room - has escaped her nightdress. It hasn't gone anywhere, it's just sort of lying there on her ribcage in a beam of sunlight. The sight of this breast reveals to him an essential truth about the universe, one that he is very interested in pursuing to its conclusion. As things unfold, there is some peeping, some planned peeping, some time spent with an understanding prostitute, and more such things. Had Elena's breast not slipped from inside its nightdress, this whole thing would have turned out very differently, that's for sure.
So surely this is an admonition against insecure nightdresses. BE WARNED.
But the one thing you take away from this is how bloody clever it all is. This novel was up for the Franklin against Carey's Oscar and Lucinda, which gives you (or me, at least) pause to wonder why it's not a title that people (or me, at least) have heard of. At the time, many Australian critics panned it for being... go on, have a guess. It was the 1980s, and it was in Australia, and it was talking about European ideas and philosophies and ways of thinking...
Give up?
It was accused of trying to be too clever. Of being a poseur text, written by an Australian who should really have been writing about car chases in the Outback, or young boys befriending pelicans. That sort of thing.
Now, if I had set up that licensed bookshop and gallery and decided to mount a retrospective of Mr Henshaw, it would be a pretty light-on display. He wrote this, then he went on with his day job of writing catalogues for the NGA (National Gallery of Australia), and then, in 2014, wrote one other book that you've never heard of either: The Snow Kimono
He also contributed to a serially-written "dirty book" overseen by former 1970s bass player and microphone user Red Symons, but the less said about that the better.
So, alles klar. But a main reason I wanted to read this was because it was set in Germany. Mainly in the old university town of Heidelberg (apparently a preserved city not destroyed by the British and American Allied Bomber Command because a prostitute whose home town [Heimat] it was convinced a high ranking Allied Major General not to bomb it) but also in other places, such as Berlin, of which we hear this...
Arriving in Berlin by air is a bizarre experience. The Wall runs through the city like a huge scar through a beautiful face. One side is expressive, vibrant, alive; the other is inert, pale, and vacant. Or so it seems. West Berlin is an elegant city, self conscious, chic, and vital. There is a sense of energy, an energy that is fuelled by the manifest absurdity of its partitioning. People seem to be aware of living their lives at the very cutting-edge of the East-West conflict. It is a city where tomorrow doesn't exist, where the only moment is NOW.
So much for Berlin.
So much indeed.
The other thing I am a big fan of, and one of the reasons I gave it five stars (which means I wish I'd written it myself, in the backroom of that licensed bookshop and gallery) is the ending. Not the twist ending (it's a sort of mystery thriller, so expect a twist or two), but the... other thing.
You'll know what I mean when you get to Klagenfurt. Well, after you've been in Klagenfurt for a while, anyway.
Viel Spaß!
December 13, 2022
An interesting, sometimes meta fictional novel about a writer meeting Wolfi, Interesting young man, in Heidelberg, Germany. Wolfi is a brilliant philosophy student who recounts his life verbally and in writing. Wolfi has a sister, Elena, and a inquisitorial father and passionate mother. Wolfi becomes friends with a rogue, robber and drug addict named Karl. Wolfi disappears and the writer, some years later, tries to find out what happened to Wolfi. Has what Wolfi wrote about himself, fact or fiction?
This book was shortlisted for the 1989 Miles Franklin awa4x.
This book was shortlisted for the 1989 Miles Franklin awa4x.
May 8, 2019
Excellent! I highly recommend it!
May 5, 2023
Out of the Line Fire is a book of three parts.
In the first, the nameless narrator meets an eccentric young Philosophy student at Heidelberg University, named Wolfi. We soon learn that Wolfi had a somewhat traumatic childhood which, in combination with his intense studies, has left him psychologically withdrawn, always 'looking out a window at a world from which I was in fact permanently disconnected' (34). The section ends with Wolfi's disappearance, and the narrator's return to Australia.
Unfortunately, this first section is also punctuated with often obscure literary reflections on the nature of language and narrative which seems out of place and interrupt the reader's flow. In Chapter 8, for example, Henshaw asks us to consider a rather interesting question about the nature of the fictional character. Then, out of know where, comes a graphic account of two women having sex and some semi-formed philosophical musings concerning the work of Wittgenstein and Machiavelli. 'What, I ask, are we to make of this?' Henshaw says. I have literally no idea. 'How far can one go before the narrative fabric breaks down?' Henshaw asks a little later in this section. About this far, I'd say.
In the second section, our narrator begins to piece together the life of Wolfi after he receives a box in the mail full of 'bundles of papers, news-clippings, letters, postcards and God knows what' concerning his life. Throughout, it is not at all clear how much of these accounts are true. Henshaw leans strongly on epistemic ambiguity. Two key stories are told: the first a beautiful account of a family holiday to coastal Yugoslavia where Wolfi experiences the emerging womanhood of his sister and his own bubbling early adolescence. Again, however, we are interrupted by bizarre reflections of the epistemological thought of Immanuel Kant throughout. Perhaps these are Wolfi's notes. But they seem to not serve any identifiable purpose for the narrative. Finally, we are treated to a more light hearted story about Wolfi's time living in Berlin and his escapades with an avant-garde junky, thief and amateur account: Karl.
The third part is by far the most intriguing. The narrator tries to find out more about Wolfi's life by returning to Germany. Questions are answered, and discoveries made about Wolfi's life. Uninterrupted by irrelevant meta-narrative reflections, this sections breathes and flows.
Out of the Line of Fire is book about sexual desire, truth, narrative and fiction, involving valuable reflections on all these topics. It's just a shame that its style and content could be so intrusive and abstract (especially in the first section, and a little in the second) and more is not made of Wolfi's life - a tale with so much potential.
In the first, the nameless narrator meets an eccentric young Philosophy student at Heidelberg University, named Wolfi. We soon learn that Wolfi had a somewhat traumatic childhood which, in combination with his intense studies, has left him psychologically withdrawn, always 'looking out a window at a world from which I was in fact permanently disconnected' (34). The section ends with Wolfi's disappearance, and the narrator's return to Australia.
Unfortunately, this first section is also punctuated with often obscure literary reflections on the nature of language and narrative which seems out of place and interrupt the reader's flow. In Chapter 8, for example, Henshaw asks us to consider a rather interesting question about the nature of the fictional character. Then, out of know where, comes a graphic account of two women having sex and some semi-formed philosophical musings concerning the work of Wittgenstein and Machiavelli. 'What, I ask, are we to make of this?' Henshaw says. I have literally no idea. 'How far can one go before the narrative fabric breaks down?' Henshaw asks a little later in this section. About this far, I'd say.
In the second section, our narrator begins to piece together the life of Wolfi after he receives a box in the mail full of 'bundles of papers, news-clippings, letters, postcards and God knows what' concerning his life. Throughout, it is not at all clear how much of these accounts are true. Henshaw leans strongly on epistemic ambiguity. Two key stories are told: the first a beautiful account of a family holiday to coastal Yugoslavia where Wolfi experiences the emerging womanhood of his sister and his own bubbling early adolescence. Again, however, we are interrupted by bizarre reflections of the epistemological thought of Immanuel Kant throughout. Perhaps these are Wolfi's notes. But they seem to not serve any identifiable purpose for the narrative. Finally, we are treated to a more light hearted story about Wolfi's time living in Berlin and his escapades with an avant-garde junky, thief and amateur account: Karl.
The third part is by far the most intriguing. The narrator tries to find out more about Wolfi's life by returning to Germany. Questions are answered, and discoveries made about Wolfi's life. Uninterrupted by irrelevant meta-narrative reflections, this sections breathes and flows.
Out of the Line of Fire is book about sexual desire, truth, narrative and fiction, involving valuable reflections on all these topics. It's just a shame that its style and content could be so intrusive and abstract (especially in the first section, and a little in the second) and more is not made of Wolfi's life - a tale with so much potential.
January 1, 2015
A really nice discovery of an Australian author I hadn't heard of before. This 1988 metafictional novel was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin that year and has been revived by the Text Classics imprint. It focuses on an Austrian philosophy student living in Germany and his unusual family and is very fragmentary in form. Henshaw has only just recently published his second novel after all these years and I'll been keen to check it out.
July 3, 2018
Ein junger australischer Student lernt in Heidelberg Wolfi Schönborn kennen, a child prodigy, der promoviert “Jenseits der Realitätswahrnehmungsgrenze”. Dieser WS, dessen Vater logischer Positivist in Klagenfurt ist, verschwindet nach Berlin und schickt dem Erzähler ein langes Manuskript. Darin erzählt er von erstem sexuellen Erlebnis (mit Prostituierten, arrangiert von Großmutter) und von seiner Schwester und seinem Freund Karl. Schließlich gerät er mit Polizei in Konflikt, weil er bei Raubüberfall beteiligt war. Autor macht sich auf Suche nach WS. Was ist wahr, was nicht. U.a. stellt sich eine von WS intensiv verfolgte Kriminalgeschichte als von Kleist abgeguckt heraus. Und das Kind der Schwester ist zwar von WS aber in Wirklichkeit von der Mutter.
Sehr, sehr schön. Es gibt immer wieder Exkurse auch über die Philosophie und Erzählperspektive, z.B. über Camus, Calvino. Aber es wirkt nicht aufgesetzt, sondern macht Geschichte, die Grenze zwischen Wahrheit und Fiktion zerfließen läßt, andererseits ganz und gar real. 9/10
Sehr, sehr schön. Es gibt immer wieder Exkurse auch über die Philosophie und Erzählperspektive, z.B. über Camus, Calvino. Aber es wirkt nicht aufgesetzt, sondern macht Geschichte, die Grenze zwischen Wahrheit und Fiktion zerfließen läßt, andererseits ganz und gar real. 9/10
June 18, 2018
And this is a debut novel, as far as I can make out. It's like the quote from Scotland on Sunday on the back of my edition says: Proof that a first novel need not necessarily come with L-plates attached....
The story leaves one with a puzzle which gives one something to think about long after the book is finished. Extremely well done.
The story leaves one with a puzzle which gives one something to think about long after the book is finished. Extremely well done.
September 26, 2022
If I'm being completely honest, I read the introduction to this book and thought, "God, is this going to be too smart for me?" And, really, the main reason I thought that was because the person writing the introduction quoted part of the book and said something about how that was probably one of the funniest lines he's ever read -- but I had no fucking clue why it was funny.
Going in with that mindset probably wasn't the best thing, but I don't think it really affected my overall experience. I gave it 2 stars not because I didn't "get" it, but because I didn't like it very much.
There were some interesting philosophical ideas presented, and I appreciated the fact that it made me think about certain things in a different way. The story, though, just didn't do it for me. I typically love the mindfuck story within a story, but this -- I don't really know what this was.
Out of the Line of Fire had its redeemable moments (which is why I gave it 2 stars instead of 1), but overall it's not something I really enjoyed.
Going in with that mindset probably wasn't the best thing, but I don't think it really affected my overall experience. I gave it 2 stars not because I didn't "get" it, but because I didn't like it very much.
There were some interesting philosophical ideas presented, and I appreciated the fact that it made me think about certain things in a different way. The story, though, just didn't do it for me. I typically love the mindfuck story within a story, but this -- I don't really know what this was.
Out of the Line of Fire had its redeemable moments (which is why I gave it 2 stars instead of 1), but overall it's not something I really enjoyed.
May 30, 2019
Lots of the philosophy quotes were way over my head, but I loved it nonetheless. Great twists and turns. How do we know what is real?
October 30, 2023
Not as engaging as I remembered decades ago.
Disjointed in parts.
´
But still worth a Viennese/Freudian stroll.
Disjointed in parts.
´
But still worth a Viennese/Freudian stroll.
October 14, 2015
The narrator (Henshaw?) befriends Wolfi (Wolfgang) Schonborn, an enigmatic Austrian student of philosophy, when they are studying together at a university in Heidelberg, around 1980.
Wolfi begins to relate his life story, and from the beginning we suspect that Wolfi may be an unreliable witness to his own life.
Wolfi disappears at about the time the narrator returns to his native Australia, but soon after he receives in the mail a box of papers and photographs from Wolfi, accompanied by a cryptically brief note " Perhaps you can make something of this."
Thus resumes Wolfi's story, as he relates key incidents in his life and his relationships with his family, particularly the fractured relationship with his father and the seemingly intense, and potentially dangerous, relationship with his beautiful younger sister, Elena.
The novel contains some explicit sexual content, some of it perhaps gratuitous, but the scene of Wolfi losing his virginity to the passionate and patient prostitute, Andrea, as organized and paid for by his grandmother (Omi), is pivotal and arguably the most erotic (not pornographic) scene I have ever read in quality literature.
On arriving home after spending a passionate and instructional afternoon with Andrea, Wolfi declares to his family "I am a man."
In the final section, the author returns to Germany, and attempts to track down Wolfi, from whom he has had no contact for quite some time, and other members of Wolfi's family.
From this point, the novel becomes an intriguing mystery, with ultimately, for me at least, a very surprising ending.
This is a very intelligent, cleverly crafted novel, and one suspects the author is having just a little bit of fun with his readers.
The book contains frequent asides detailing philosophical ideas, particularly the views of Kant and Wittgenstein, musing on the nature of reality and whether it can be separated from the lived experience.
In fact, the key theme of the whole novel is an examination of what in fact is fact and what in fiction is fiction.
As noted by Henshaw's colleague, who wrote the Introduction, a valid alternative title for the novel may well have been 'Where Truth Lies'.
All in all, a fine and important piece of Australian literature and well worth reading.
Wolfi begins to relate his life story, and from the beginning we suspect that Wolfi may be an unreliable witness to his own life.
Wolfi disappears at about the time the narrator returns to his native Australia, but soon after he receives in the mail a box of papers and photographs from Wolfi, accompanied by a cryptically brief note " Perhaps you can make something of this."
Thus resumes Wolfi's story, as he relates key incidents in his life and his relationships with his family, particularly the fractured relationship with his father and the seemingly intense, and potentially dangerous, relationship with his beautiful younger sister, Elena.
The novel contains some explicit sexual content, some of it perhaps gratuitous, but the scene of Wolfi losing his virginity to the passionate and patient prostitute, Andrea, as organized and paid for by his grandmother (Omi), is pivotal and arguably the most erotic (not pornographic) scene I have ever read in quality literature.
On arriving home after spending a passionate and instructional afternoon with Andrea, Wolfi declares to his family "I am a man."
In the final section, the author returns to Germany, and attempts to track down Wolfi, from whom he has had no contact for quite some time, and other members of Wolfi's family.
From this point, the novel becomes an intriguing mystery, with ultimately, for me at least, a very surprising ending.
This is a very intelligent, cleverly crafted novel, and one suspects the author is having just a little bit of fun with his readers.
The book contains frequent asides detailing philosophical ideas, particularly the views of Kant and Wittgenstein, musing on the nature of reality and whether it can be separated from the lived experience.
In fact, the key theme of the whole novel is an examination of what in fact is fact and what in fiction is fiction.
As noted by Henshaw's colleague, who wrote the Introduction, a valid alternative title for the novel may well have been 'Where Truth Lies'.
All in all, a fine and important piece of Australian literature and well worth reading.
tasted
August 22, 2016This novel has a unique structure, at least in the 3/4 of it that I read: it begins with a story about the narrator’s friend, then moves on to excerpts from the friend’s diary and philosophy thesis, and then further stories within stories told by others. But finding the prose nothing special, the novel increasingly less successful (especially the story about the friend's damaging relationship with a narcissist), I finally put it down.
July 3, 2016
This brilliant work of metafiction has everything! Unreliable narrators, exotic world locations, sex, drugs, murder, family secrets, and a bunch of philosophy!?! Fans of Italo Calvino will love this book (just read the first two pages to get hooked). This hidden Australian classic was an absolutely great reading experience for me and I look to reread this someday.
March 30, 2017
How could I resist a novel that opens with the purloined line: “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler” and then invokes the name of Walter Abish, one of my favorite writers? "Out of the Line of Fire" reads like a compelling mystery, except that it is laced with bite-sized doses of philosophy drawn from the likes of Kant, Husserl, Hegel, and Wittgenstein. Most of the quotations that Henshaw extracts from their writings deal with the broad question of how language works and how we believe we experience the world, all of which he uses to raise questions about the nature of literature itself (and, by extension, the nature of the book we are reading).
Henshaw’s unnamed narrator in is an Australian studying in Heidelberg, where he meets Wolfi, another student who rents a room in the same house. But just as their friendship seems to be taking off, Wolfi mysteriously moves to Berlin. Eventually, the narrator returns to Australia having not heard from Wolfi again. Then, a year later, he receives a package in the mail containing “bundles of papers, news-clippings, letters, postcards and God knows what” along with a note from Wolfi: “Perhaps you can make something of this.” The second part of Henshaw’s novel is comprised of Wolfi’s story, which ends with a shocking revelation. In the third and final section, the narrator finds himself in Berlin for a conference and tries to find out what happened to Wolfi. New shocking revelations seem to replace the original shocking revelation, pulling the rug out from under the reader’s feet more than once. Sadly, these twists and turns cannot be revealed without spoiling Henshaw’s book for the next reader.
This is a finely-written and engrossing novel that keeps asking us what it really means to read a fictional story. There's a longer version of this review at my blog https://sebald.wordpress.com/2017/03/27/hall-of-mirrors/
Henshaw’s unnamed narrator in is an Australian studying in Heidelberg, where he meets Wolfi, another student who rents a room in the same house. But just as their friendship seems to be taking off, Wolfi mysteriously moves to Berlin. Eventually, the narrator returns to Australia having not heard from Wolfi again. Then, a year later, he receives a package in the mail containing “bundles of papers, news-clippings, letters, postcards and God knows what” along with a note from Wolfi: “Perhaps you can make something of this.” The second part of Henshaw’s novel is comprised of Wolfi’s story, which ends with a shocking revelation. In the third and final section, the narrator finds himself in Berlin for a conference and tries to find out what happened to Wolfi. New shocking revelations seem to replace the original shocking revelation, pulling the rug out from under the reader’s feet more than once. Sadly, these twists and turns cannot be revealed without spoiling Henshaw’s book for the next reader.
This is a finely-written and engrossing novel that keeps asking us what it really means to read a fictional story. There's a longer version of this review at my blog https://sebald.wordpress.com/2017/03/27/hall-of-mirrors/
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