RPF, book fair style
One minor theme of this book fair seems to be the roman a cléf. It probably doesn't make the headlines anywhere outside of Germany, but our supreme court has just confirmed that writer Maxim Biller's novel Esra is violating Billar's ex-girlfriend's rights and hence can't be distributed. Background: some years ago when the novel got published, the ex girlfriend sued, stating that there were too many details taken from her life for anyone to mistake that this character was based on her. As she never was a person of public life, her right to privacy was upheld by the initial court decision, and now the supreme court has backed it up, though with a minority vote against it which argued for freedom of artistic expression over personal rights. There is just one precedent in post war German history, i.e. only one other instant where a fictional text, a novel, wasn't allowed to be distributed. Which was a very complicated case of its own. Back in the late 30s, exiled writer Klaus Mann wrote a novel called Mephisto which was an intended as an indictement of the German artists who chose to stay and compromise/benefit with/from the Nazi state in general, but also had the main character very obviously based on his former brother-in-law, Gustaf Gründgens. Fast forward some decades, to the early 70s. Gründgens is dead, Klaus Mann is dead, Erika Mann, his sister, wants to republish Mephisto, and Gründgens' adopted son promptly sues. That was the only other instant where a court decided for the (dead) person depicted in a novel and against the (dead) writer. However, the publisher Wagenbach went ahead some years later and republished Mephisto anyway. As most people had predicted, Gründgens' adopted son didn't invoke the court decision, and Mephisto never went out of print.
However, that case involved the whole thorny issue of What Did Who Do During The Third Reich. Esra, by contrast, "just" involves Biller's ex girlfriend (and her mother, who also sued, as she, too, is depicted in the novel, but the court only decided for the ex, not the mother), and has nothing whatsoever to do with the Nazis. Which makes the whole debate about it trickier. My instinct is to go with the freedom of expression argument, especially in a fictional context, but then of course I've never been made the subject of a novel, with everyone and their dog in my acquaintance realizing it's me, so that's easy for me to say.
Meanwhile, outside of Germany nobody seems to have a problem with romans a cléf anyway. Hugely presented in both the German translation and the English original is Robert Harris' new novel Ghost, in which our narrator is hired to ghostwrite the memoirs of a certain recently retired British prime minister. I've rushed through it, and while it's solidly entertaining, my overall impression was that it wants to be Primary Colors and fails at it. Mind you, both novels have a different premise from the start, so maybe the comparison is unfair. Primary Colors is a satire and narratively framed around an election campaign; Ghost is a thriller and kickstarted by a mysterious death, with the full resolution not being presented until the last pages. Still, with the respective politicians at the center being based on Clinton and Blair respectively, it does invite contrast and compare.
I think what it comes down to is that the narrative voice in Primary Colors is eternally torn between loving and loathing its Clinton avatar, Jack Stanton, which results in a compelling portrait, as both emotions come across quite vividly. (Reading Joe Klein's non-fictional take on Clinton, The Natural, one gets pretty much the same impression, only with some more weight on the love side of the scale. The Natural pretty much could be subtitled: Bill, You Bastard, I Love You Still.) Meanwhile, Ghost is neither bitter nor enamored enough, and Adam Lang, the Blair avatar, is, indeed, ghostly pale as a result. Harris gets in the expected digs (such as the "when did Lang/Blair make a foreign policy decision that didn't benefit the US far more than it ever did Britain?"), does one set piece of Lang getting vivid when imitating other politicians and showing what a brilliant actor he is if he cares to be, and serves up some wish fulfillment for many of us when he has the ICC issuing an arrest warrant for war crimes. But ultimately, he fails to commit, and not just because the question whether Britain would actually extradite (Lang is on visit in the States when the ICC makes that decision, and the US, as the narrator tells us in another dig, along with various nasty dictatorships does not recognize the International Criminal Court) doesn't get answered. Nor do we find out what makes Lang tick, or how culpable/sincerely motivated the author wants him to be. What is answered is the whodunit part. It's not quite the most obvious explanation, but almost. Though I do wonder how seriously Harris wants us to take one particular theory there.
Something that irritated me about both "Primary Colors" and "Ghost" is something they do have in common. Both fictional politicians have steely, ambitious and brainy wives. Who at one point of the novel feel immensely let down by their respective husbands and as a consequence have a one night stand with the narrator. This does not have any consequence on the plot in either case. In both cases, the authorial voice goes out of its way to point out how cold and unerotic the woman in question is anyway, and doesn't describe the actual event, so it can't be the need for a gratitious sex scene involving the narrator. Which leaves me to conclude that it's either meant to "humanize" the female characters or on the contrary to make them come across as even more ruthless (sexually exploiting the apparantly defenseless male narrators in their husband-caused depression, tsk). Either way, it grates. And that's not even touching the problem of the entire thing being taken as RPF, which brings me back to the beginning.
However, that case involved the whole thorny issue of What Did Who Do During The Third Reich. Esra, by contrast, "just" involves Biller's ex girlfriend (and her mother, who also sued, as she, too, is depicted in the novel, but the court only decided for the ex, not the mother), and has nothing whatsoever to do with the Nazis. Which makes the whole debate about it trickier. My instinct is to go with the freedom of expression argument, especially in a fictional context, but then of course I've never been made the subject of a novel, with everyone and their dog in my acquaintance realizing it's me, so that's easy for me to say.
Meanwhile, outside of Germany nobody seems to have a problem with romans a cléf anyway. Hugely presented in both the German translation and the English original is Robert Harris' new novel Ghost, in which our narrator is hired to ghostwrite the memoirs of a certain recently retired British prime minister. I've rushed through it, and while it's solidly entertaining, my overall impression was that it wants to be Primary Colors and fails at it. Mind you, both novels have a different premise from the start, so maybe the comparison is unfair. Primary Colors is a satire and narratively framed around an election campaign; Ghost is a thriller and kickstarted by a mysterious death, with the full resolution not being presented until the last pages. Still, with the respective politicians at the center being based on Clinton and Blair respectively, it does invite contrast and compare.
I think what it comes down to is that the narrative voice in Primary Colors is eternally torn between loving and loathing its Clinton avatar, Jack Stanton, which results in a compelling portrait, as both emotions come across quite vividly. (Reading Joe Klein's non-fictional take on Clinton, The Natural, one gets pretty much the same impression, only with some more weight on the love side of the scale. The Natural pretty much could be subtitled: Bill, You Bastard, I Love You Still.) Meanwhile, Ghost is neither bitter nor enamored enough, and Adam Lang, the Blair avatar, is, indeed, ghostly pale as a result. Harris gets in the expected digs (such as the "when did Lang/Blair make a foreign policy decision that didn't benefit the US far more than it ever did Britain?"), does one set piece of Lang getting vivid when imitating other politicians and showing what a brilliant actor he is if he cares to be, and serves up some wish fulfillment for many of us when he has the ICC issuing an arrest warrant for war crimes. But ultimately, he fails to commit, and not just because the question whether Britain would actually extradite (Lang is on visit in the States when the ICC makes that decision, and the US, as the narrator tells us in another dig, along with various nasty dictatorships does not recognize the International Criminal Court) doesn't get answered. Nor do we find out what makes Lang tick, or how culpable/sincerely motivated the author wants him to be. What is answered is the whodunit part. It's not quite the most obvious explanation, but almost. Though I do wonder how seriously Harris wants us to take one particular theory there.
Something that irritated me about both "Primary Colors" and "Ghost" is something they do have in common. Both fictional politicians have steely, ambitious and brainy wives. Who at one point of the novel feel immensely let down by their respective husbands and as a consequence have a one night stand with the narrator. This does not have any consequence on the plot in either case. In both cases, the authorial voice goes out of its way to point out how cold and unerotic the woman in question is anyway, and doesn't describe the actual event, so it can't be the need for a gratitious sex scene involving the narrator. Which leaves me to conclude that it's either meant to "humanize" the female characters or on the contrary to make them come across as even more ruthless (sexually exploiting the apparantly defenseless male narrators in their husband-caused depression, tsk). Either way, it grates. And that's not even touching the problem of the entire thing being taken as RPF, which brings me back to the beginning.