Alice [Paperback]

In ALICE, her most recent book available in English *), Judith Hermann takes an unusual approach to portraying her central character: through five more or less independent stories, placing Alice into the centre of each, the author explores different kinds of confrontation with death and loss. While Alice is, or was, personally connected in some way to each of the five dying men, she appears to prefer a secondary role, assisting those whose grief is more immediate and palpable. Each story captures a moment in time that brings Alice back in contact with a former lover, a family friend, an older mentor (?), even the memory of a long dead uncle. Is this a cover for her way of coping with loss and death or is she really that remote from the person dying? Do these four experiences prepare her for the loss closest to her? Can we get a sense who Alice is? Does it matter or does she stand for many who have experienced loss through death of a loved one?

Told in an unassuming and quiet and even detached voice, Hermann is very sparse in her depictions of the dying and the grieving individuals at the centre of each story. She only gives away little, brief glimpses of her relationships to the men and the other women. With each storym though, we can get a bit closer to Alice and how she approaches grieving: through keeping busy and being useful and helpful to others. Wherever the story is set - the majority in Berlin - Hermann uses the description of place to give Alice (and the reader) a tangible precise environment and a kind of grounding in mundane reality that in the face of an unexpected death may otherwise totally disappear. This juxtaposition of unpreparedness for an impending drama is especially well illustrated in the story, CONRAD, set around a villa on the shores of beautiful Lake Garda in northern Italy. Conrad, presumably a fatherly friend, had invited Alice and her friends to visit him and his wife Lotte at their Villa at the Lake. This is one story with more explicit emotional depth than we find in the others where Alice's distance, her preoccupation with practical matters hides her own sadness and grief. The story MALTE touched me particularly deeply. Alice who only knew her uncle from hear-say finally discovers who he really was when meeting an old friend of his. The last story centres on the person closest to Alice and focuses on her efforts to survive into the day-to-day. It is also the only story that touches on protagonists from the other stories and in that sense provides "closure" in more ways than one.

Not everybody will relate to this book. For some, Alice might appear too remote; it might feel unsatisfactory that she is not able to express her emotions directly or visibly. On the other hand, for other readers like me, Hermann's writing touches in many ways, mostly indirectly, on emotions and atmosphere as she explores Alice's grief and sense of loss. Alice stands for many of us.

*) I read the book in German. Apparently, the translation captures Hermann's language very well.

[Friederike Knabe]

"After [Johann] died, Alice began getting rid of his things. Putting away, giving away, throwing away, selling. Keeping. A kind of excavation project, uncovering the layers, the various colours, materials, eras; in the end there would be nothing to salvage, nothing except for the fact that [Johann] was dead. That's what it boiled down to. It wasn't the worst of jobs."

Even in translation -- a fine one by Margot Bettauer Dembo -- there is a rhythm to this, a rightness, a matter-of-fact sense of calm. No, not the worst of jobs; just take your time. Loss is best coped with in small practical ways, which bring their own memories, their own rewards. If I told you that this entire novel consists of five separate but interconnected stories, each centered around the death of a different man, you might think it depressing, but no. The cover photo of a woman swimming in a mountain lake is totally to the point: the book is cleansing, bracing, exquisitely simple. These are ordinary lives here, described with the almost neutral objectivity of a Max Frisch by way of Peter Stamm. But the more you read, the more the stories fill out into a complete life, that of the central character, a Berliner known only as Alice.

The name "Johann" above is a place-holder. One of the chief delights in the novel is the way in which Judith Hermann has the reader gradually work out who each dying person is, and what his particular relationship is to Alice. In no particular order, we have an uncle, a former lover, a husband, and two close friends, one of her own generation, the other much older. Some of the deaths are expected, some not. The settings include Berlin, a rented apartment in Zweibrücken, and the Lago di Garda. It is not even clear in which order the five stories in the book occur; Alice seems to be anything from her twenties to her sixties; only in the final story are some of the relationships made clear. But it doesn't really matter; the emphasis in each story is not on the deaths but on Alice herself, her friends, and details of her current life. She emerges as a sympathetic woman, strong but no more special than the rest of us, and totally real. Forget that Hermann hangs her stories on the occurrence of death; this is a book about life. Ordinary life, and all the more beautiful because of it.