September. Fata Morgana

by Thomas Lehr

Two fathers with two daughters: Martin, professor of German, writes but is studying Earth Sciences at MIT; Tariq, a doctor in Baghdad and Muna, is studying the archaeology of a region that is seen as the cradle of civilization. These two parallel relationships in two very different parts of the world expose the human similarities beneath cultural differences. In Thomas Lehr’s moving and realistic novel, the similarities between these men become a similarity of suffering as well. Martin’s daughter dies with her mother in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and though Tariq survives three wars and Saddam Hussein’s regime intact, his family does not—in the last days of the conflict, his daughter is raped, her lover is murdered, and she sees her sister and mother die in a bomb attack. Out of these tragedies that almost seem to define the first decade of our century, Lehr has fashioned a richly woven, multilayered tapestry that not only explores the human side but brings out the cultural, historical, social, and political context within which the tragedies occur. The alternating interior monologues of the four main characters engage the reader in language which reaches an unforgettable poetic intensity.

Genres: German Literature

477 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Sepp · Rating 2 out of 5]

Das dt. Feuilleton stritt darüber, ob ein so schwer lesbaren Roman zumutbar sei: Ohne Satzzeichen, scheinbar regellos mit Zeilenumbrüchen aufgelockert, ab und an mit Großschreibung ganzer Wörter. Glücklicherweise blieben die Leerstellen zwischen den Wörter noch erhalten. Der Roman liest sich über 478 Seiten wie ein langes Prosagedicht mit langen inneren Monologen.
Der Vorwurf lautete zb, Lehr wolle damit zum Ausdruck bringen, dass sein Roman Kunst sei, nicht nur Erzählung. Stellenweise glückt diese lyrische Erzählweise (wechselnde Erzähler: Martin, Tarik, Sabrina, Muna) und erlaubt ein Leseerlebnis besonderer Art, aber insgesamt bildet sie tatsächlich eine große Hürde. Aus all der Lyrik muss das angedeutet Erzählte erahnt werden; tatsächliche Gedichte sind auch eingestreut. Als Feierabendlektüre ist der Roman kaum leichter als zb Ovid im lateinischen Original zu lesen.
Die ersten 100 S. sind fast nur Hinführung auf die Geschehnisse und Rückblenden in die Vergangenheit. Dabei sind die Andeutungen über den Irak, den Aufstieg Saddams zum Gewaltherrscher, den Krieg mit Iran etc. sicher stärker als die Restaurantbesuche des Deutsch-Amerikaners Martin mit seiner Tochter am Main.
Tochter Sabrina kommt am 11.9. im WTC ums Leben, die Tochter des irakischen Arztes Tarik, Muna, bei einem Bombenattentat in Bagdad.
Der Stil erinnert mich an alte Inschriften und er droht oft zu einem „Nicht-Stil“ zu werden, weil man sich nicht an ihn erinnern kann.
Bis zuletzt wollte ich mich keinem der beiden Lager der Literaturkritik anschließen (weder verdammen noch loben) – aber mich ermüdete die Lektüre so, dass ich das Ende des Romans so herbeisehnte wie das Ende eines Konzerts mit Zwölftonmusik. Nichts zog mich in den Bann, und nichts lernte ich durch diesen Roman dazu. Man kann ihn nur lieben oder weglegen.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 4 out of 5]

A New West-Östliche Divan

The first thing you notice about Thomas Lehr's substantial novel (in the fine translation by Mike Mitchell, but in the original also) is the absence of punctuation. There are paragraphs, a lot of them, but no periods, colons, semi-colons, or commas. No capital letters either, except for proper names, which makes the English look even sleeker than the German, which of course capitalizes all nouns. The following is a sample, almost at random:

I began to bleed on Long Island in New York City in

my mother's gardens

there is no soil for me but it (the blood) was a sign of growing up of becoming a woman I found the

restless poem

by Hafiz

black water camels forever on the move the jingling of morning bells pilgrims with no goal

which I actually only read to impress my father and because the Arabic script in the bilingual edition seemed so mysterious there were too many goblets too many taverns too many drunken nights in it

the intoxication of despair

could well be great music but not for 17-year-olds who realize…

The strangely intoxicating mixture of poetry and personal confession—a mirage, like the subtitle—makes this book seem more like a long narrative poem than a novel in prose. However, I have deliberately avoided any of the longer paragraphs here (I'll add one below), which can be very much more down to earth, even outright political. The subject, after all, is the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers and the ensuing war in Iraq, and no one could say that Lehr is adopting this style to be pretty.

Why, then? I think because the poetic approach enables him to build bridges of thought in place of walls of hatred. The structure is simple: a father and daughter in America and a parallel pair in Iraq. Tariq is a Paris-trained surgeon, returned to work in Baghdad; his daughter Muna, in her late teens, is a student of ancient history. Martin, in the US, is a Professor of German at Amherst; his daughter Sabrina is beginning her study of earth sciences at MIT. The two pairs may once have passed in the night, but do not know one another. They are linked in their imaginations, however, whether by thinking of counterparts in the other culture or referring to a similar body of knowledge, including the Arabian Nights and Arabic poetry, and also the ancient history of the Middle East as the cradle of civilization.

Martin, in particular, is a Goethe scholar, and I cannot help seeing this novel as an expansion of the spirit of his late-period work, the West-Östliche Divan, twelve books of poems (a Persian "diwan") based on the works of Hafez and other Persian lyricists. Poems by these and others dot the narrative, in English, plus a few poems by Goethe or Rückert in German, scraps of Emily Dickinson (Amherst, after all, but a similar aesthetic), and some original poetry. The philosophical or literary structure of a rapprochement between West and East, moderated by a German, is a strong one. At its best, it manages to marry continents, faiths, and eras, literature and life. All leading to a moving epilogue in which the two girls, German-American and Iraqi, metaphorically become one.

The power figures have already become indistinguishable. Goethe's era was overshadowed at the end by Napoleon, who admired the writer. This one has smaller but no less domineering heads of state. In Lehr's comparison between Iraq and America, there is little to choose between the Presidents of either country. "Saddam is murdering my daughter," says Tariq; "Bush will kill my son." Behind the personal tragedies that will strike both families, there is universal condemnation of the follies of their leaders. There is a particularly strong chapter on George W. Bush at the end of the second of the novel's three parts, a brilliant piece of political invective if you happen to agree, partisan slander otherwise. In the end, this is every bit as much a political novel (or rather an outcry on behalf of the ordinary citizen) as it is a poetical one. It is the combination that makes it so special.

But it is a difficult book to read, and I almost gave up several times. Yet I was intrigued by the style and increasingly admiring of the humanistic premise. And every so often, Lehr can come up with passages of acute description, such as the inside view of Occupation Baghdad in the last part of the novel. But I have chosen to quote a shorter one, closer to home. It is scenes like the following, whose run-on sentences match perfectly the chaos in the streets of Lower Manhattan just after the fall of the Towers, that finally push my rating into the four-to-five-star range:

...a deafening booming grey-and-white world out of which figures of ash and smoke stumble vomit fall to the ground as if into a foam of rubble so light it looks as if the sharp-edged shattered objects wouldn't cut you as if all those you're looking for should come stumbling towards you at any minute like those coughing spewing screaming cloud-born bankers housewives policemen someone dragged him into a shop closed the glass door just in time before the next cloud front (blacker higher a storm-cannon loaded with bits of debris) came hurtling past and all at once it was night and he was in a cramped drugstore with 15 other people bathed in the light of fluorescent tubes like fish in an aquarium...