Thirty-six-year-old Jonas, a resident of Vienna, Thomas Glavinic's everyman-type protagonist, wakes up one day and finds that everybody but himself has disappeared: gone without a trace. It's not clear whether other forms of life are also gone, but he hears no birds nor does he see any stray dogs. No flies buzz and no mosquitoes bite. He does see trees, and the electricity and the hot water (somehow) work.
This is a familiar science fiction premise, but Glavinic's treatment is pure Kafka. He doesn't attempt in any way to account for the disappearance (much as Kafka did not attempt to explain how Gregor Samsa became "a monstrous verminous bug"); instead he shows us how Jonas copes with this stupendously extraordinary event. Jonas seems to think it has something to do with his mind, and that he is missing something ghostly, and so he sets up cameras to record himself and his surroundings. Turns out that "the Sleeper" walks and does other unremembered things while sleeping. Jonas also seems to think that there is somebody (or something) else about and so he leaves his name and phone number and address everywhere. He carries around a shotgun and a knife for protection from God knows what.
To be honest I almost gave up on this most unusual novel after the first few pages, it seemed so flat; but I'm glad I didn't. Glavinic uses the reader's interest in learning more about what has happened and why, and whether Jonas will find other survivors, as a device to keep the reader wondering, while what the novel is really about unfolds. And what the novel is about is the human predicament.
Jonas is alone physically as we are all alone psychologically. His life with other people now exists only inside his head, in his memory of them. He tries to return to the comfort of his childhood by going back to the apartment he grew up in and restoring the furniture and the artifacts of his childhood. He tries to return his fiancée Marie to himself by finding her clothes and smelling them.
But ultimately Jonas is besieged by demons and the subconscious forces of self-destruction. He finds little things out of place. He hears sounds that aren't there and movements out of the corner of his eyes. He turns quickly in an attempt to catch something that is going on behind him. He becomes obsessed with the idea that something is happening when he isn't there and can't see it, and so he gets more cameras and more cameras and sets them up at intersections and other places in Vienna and elsewhere and has them run all night hoping to catch what his eyes miss. He spends hours viewing the film, looking for something out of the ordinary, something ghostly. He begins the see that "The Sleeper," has turned perverse and instead of sleeping begins to work against Jonas and his efforts. But Jonas can't catch him in the act. Jonas becomes afraid of the Sleeper and tries not to sleep at all. He drives at high speeds on the empty roads and begins taking pills to stay awake. He seems to be rapidly disintegrating.
What happens to the human alone? Can the mind really cope with the silence, the lack of movement, the absence of touch, the utter isolation? Is Jonas' experience in some way akin to being in solitary confinement, but without any hope of ever emerging? Will the last human left on earth patiently travel around the world looking for some other living being, or will he gradually go mad? Or, will he destroy himself?
And if we are all ultimately alone, what is it that allows us to hold onto sanity and to find some purpose in life?
Like Kafka and Freud (two other sometime residents of Vienna), Glavinic writes in German. (The English translation by John Brownjohn is very readable.) And like Kafka and Freud Glavinic sees the absurd in our lives, and in the individual a perverse longing for death.
This is the kind of novel that challenges the reader psychologically and philosophically. It draws the reader in and does not let go until the last page is eagerly read.
