Two novellas

Two short novels by German Hans-Ulrich Treichel (b. 1952) and Russian Andrei Makine (b. 1957) that both came out at the turn of the last millennium could well represent the new guard of European novelists, really no small development considering that it is an accepted fact that the literary form originated from the continent during the Renaissance, courtesy of Spain’s Don Quixote by Cervantes.

But the novel as literary form has come a long way since then, through the thick and dense narratives of the Russians Dostoevsky and Tolstoy – often required reading in college literature courses – to the wild yet coherent ramblings of the French post-symbolists like Tournier and Perec. The continent itself has always been rich in material and varied in lore, that the novelist found much room for improvisation and, in the days of the manual typewriter, enough typewriter ribbons to hang himself with.

In this respect, Treichel and Makine (who has since adopted the French language) pare down the material to the essentials, and come up however bravely with disparate chronicles of a childhood circa the Cold War and its slow and subsequently ambiguous thawing. Here their subjects are reduced to the minimal boy in an alternately tragicomic and wistful environment, dealing not so much with a lost innocence as something more profoundly intangible than that – presence in absence.

Lost has as setting post-war Germany, and at stage center is a family riven by the memory of a lost elder son given up to a refugee amid the confusion that attended the Russian invasion. The narrator is the surviving younger brother whose very existence has become nearly superfluous as his parents try to retrace the whereabouts of the lost son.

Enter the reported discovery of a foundling who might perhaps be the lost boy, Arnold, although by now he has a different name and number (Foundling 2307). This sends the guilt-ridden parents into a tizzy, and virtually turns upside down the family’s day-to-day life.

The narrator, a boy just about to enter adolescence, cannot help but feel conflicting emotions as his parents and him go through all sorts of tests to ascertain the statistical probability of their blood relation to the foundling. The process is ridiculous to the point of farce, and it is to the credit of Treichel as storyteller that any wayward sentiment does not outweigh the cool detachment of the narrative.

When the father dies because of the stress of the situation, including the family’s cold storage bin victimized by robbers, we know that things will soon come to a head, if not the sooner disintegration of this particular nuclear family. There are times in the novella when we almost suspect that the narrator could be the lost boy himself, and this suspicion is borne out by the reported uncanny resemblance between the two. And as mother insists on seeing Heinrich the foundling despite all evidence that he is not Arnold, we get to understand the narrator’s fervent wish that the lost boy be taken in so that he can gain some measure of freedom. But which boy was really lost in the end?

Point of view in the Makine novella is from an older person, but the reminiscings are mostly of childhood circa early adolescence, yet maintaining the advantage of distance.

Confessions tells of the friendship of two Russian boys growing up in a lower middle class tenement, as well the friendship of their respective fathers and mothers, and their relationship with their fellow working class neighbors. The characters are situated in that ideal age of Russian expansion, at the same time presaging the falling apart of the Iron Curtain. The narrator Alyosha constantly addresses his best friend Arkady, both of them now gone to their separate ways in the western world after a shared childhood in small town Russia. The novella’s breadth spans several years, perhaps decades, although we hardly know how Arkady is now, though we get modest servings about each family member’s history: Alyosha’s dad Pyotr was a sniper who lost his legs in the war; Arkady’s dad Yasha was self-effacing and nondescript as the benches the men sat on during their domino games in the courtyard; Alyosha’s mother seen in the hospital with the son visiting; and the terrible childhood of Arkady’s mom where she witnesses the necessity of prostitution and cannibalism in starvation time Russia.

Makine is compared to Chekhov in the book’s blurbs, not without justification – the younger writer has the same lambent prose and compassionate eye for detail, the simplicity in tone never giving way to simple-mindedness.

That Makine writes in French of his Russian past is in itself a statement, a cutting away from the old life to begin anew. Confessions though is not the author’s first novel, unlike Lost, which is Treichel’s debut. Both novellas do more than tell us something about the human condition; they occupy a place in the void of the European novel to make that space not so empty, indeed bristling with fresh possibilities and reinventions.