TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

A rather obvious and easily accessible source—one could call it classic, were it not that it is humanly fallible and hasn’t actually been in existence all that long—gives the following information about the Swiss writer Markus Werner: born in 1944, in Eschlikon, on December 27. In 1948, he moved to the canton of Schaffhausen, where he still lives. In 1974 he took his doctorate (with a thesis on Max Frisch), and joined the teaching profession. Until 1990, he worked as a teacher, at which point he gave up to write full time. He has written seven novels to date, three before that caesura, and four after, nicely spaced out (until recently) at the rate of three per decennium: Zündels Abgang (1984), Froschnacht (1985), Die kalte Schulter (1989), Bis bald (1992), Festland (1996), Der ägyptische Heinrich (1999), and Am Hang (2004). The last of these was the first to be translated into English, in 2012, by Robert Goodwin as On the Edge. The book you are holding is indeed the first of them—not that it feels or reads at all like a first novel, so assured is it (to adopt sporting parlance) of its power and pace: so distinctive, original, and fearless.

I am sorry to say I have not met Herr Werner; nor am I privy to restricted information about him, or gifted with expert opinions either. I am, however, a passionate admirer of all his books. Sometime in the late 1990s, I attended a literary festival in my home town of Freiburg; while there, I took it into my head to ask the leading German literary critic, Helmut Böttiger, also a guest at the festival (and an old Freiburg hand), for a suggestion of what or whom to read in the current German scene. Markus Werner, he said, without the smallest hesitation. I took him up on it, and bought dtv paperbacks of all Werner’s books. They were all short, all quick, all delicious. I was by turns, and in a way that it seems only Werner knows how to produce, gripped, shaken, and rolling about with laughter. (And later, when Am Hang came out, I of course read that as well, in case you think I considered I had done enough, and called it quits. Not a bit of it: for me the world would always be improved by another Markus Werner novel, though, sadly, it seems doubtful whether any more will be forthcoming.) One November, I nominated one of them as my “Book of the Year” in the Times Literary Supplement—I have a feeling it was Die kalte Schulter. Years later, Aaron Kerner, during his all-too-brief stint as an assistant editor at Dalkey Archive, providentially remembered this, and asked me if I might be interested in translating a book of Werner’s. Reader, I bit his hand off.

It is in the literature of small countries that one learns that life is impossible. In big countries they don’t tell you such things—American writers don’t, Chinese and Indian and Brazilian writers I think don’t, even Russian writers don’t. But this criticism of life is what you get from small European countries: Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, Poland, Ireland, Bosnia, Czechoslovakia. If it were a religion, Beckett (or in other versions, Musil or Walser or Kafka) would be its Holy Ghost, and Bernhard its God the Father, and Elfriede Jelinek or Herta Müller its Son. It is what you get when you read Bohumil Hrabal or Tadeusz Konwicki or Imre Kertesz, or In the Hold, or the poems of Valzhyna Mort. It is in this cult and company that Markus Werner belongs. Without clamor or fuss, he shows how the world takes a person—say Zündel here (the word suggests a spark or fuse, or match)—and calmly, callously dinches him, extinguishes him, squeezes him out, extrudes him. In form, it is like the unpredictable counter-cyclical wandering of a roulette ball, except that, instead of winding up in a little numbered pen, it goes down the drain.

Zündel’s Exit is a remarkable splicing of farce and reflection, tragedy and humoresque. It is at once the tooth dropping out of a man’s mouth—as if it wanted a change of scene, perhaps, or is it a cry for help?—and desperate sequences of thinking that feel like oar-strokes in a concrete boat: Zündel on the military, Zündel on gender wars, Zündel on friendship and love. It is a novel of drastic movement and intricacy, of short sentences, it struck me, with long words. Werner has an alertness toward the horror of contemporary language that in German is matched only in the poems of Hans Magnus Enzensberger. He writes, as I would put it, “facing the language”—his character, Zündel, is forever upset by speech, so that a newspaper is torture to him—and yet his novels still manage to be books of action as much as contemplation, packed with real incident and real intrigue. I can’t wait for this translation to appear, so that I can sit down with friends, and—like a card game without cards—swap scenes with them: the finger in the toilet; the prostitute in Genoa; the snoozing officers; Zündel and his clerical friend Busch, our narrator, and his disdainful Vroni; Zündel and Nounou in Rapallo, both cast as products, he as noodles, she as evaporated milk. Zündel’s Exit is a short novel that is all highlights, all climactic scenes, and yet loose enough to accommodate what the Russians deprecatingly called “philosophizing.”

There is dandyishness in Zündel, as there is in all Werner’s heroes and books, but it is a kind of impersonal dandyishness. He isn’t a show-off—nor is his author—it’s that he’s complicated, and believes in the morality of complication, of sensitivity, of unpredictable and detailed responses. “Non [ . . . ] come bruti,” it says in Dante. Zündel’s is the tragic drama of the highly evolved, the uncontemporary, the thoughtful, the delicate, the unlikely, the mechanism of a Swiss watch—using the term put to me by Ursula Krechel—encountering the steamroller of our leveling age.

Michael Hofmann