The Sound of Two Hands Writing Each Other

Wolf Haas's latest Escherian thriller, "Wackelkontakt"

A tessellation in the Alhambra, one of the tilings sketched by M. C. Escher in 1936. gruban, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I promised several posts ago that I would write about today’s featured book, which I finished reading on the plane home from Austria in late May, and now I am finally making good on that promise. Upcoming posts will explore authors such as H. G. Wells and Elizabeth von Arnim. I also plan to take a look at the Genesee Valley here in western NY. If you enjoy casting such a wide literary net, you can help “From My Bookshelf” grow with your likes, comments, and recommendations. And, of course, subscription! Enjoy today’s plunge into the world of Austrian crime fiction.

We read children all kinds of stories—epics, fables, fairy tales, myths, legends, Bible stories—hoping that they will find models of virtue to imitate as they grow older. In adulthood we sometimes consciously strive to imitate people we admire, to live our lives after the pattern of their stories. “A prudent man,” writes Machiavelli, “will always try to follow in the footsteps of great men and imitate those who have been truly outstanding, so that, if he is not quite as skillful as they, at least some of their ability may rub off on him.” (As is his wont, Machiavelli is being a bit ironic here, but that is matter for another occasion.) From a rather different perspective, Christians have sometimes been encouraged to ask themselves, “What would Jesus do?”

Writers and philosophers have disagreed about whether art should imitate life or whether life more often imitates art. When we try to model ourselves after some hero, we pursue the latter course.

But what if life and art were so intertwined that we could no longer even distnguish them, no longer knew which was which, where art ended and life began?

Something like that is the premise of the new criminal thriller by Wolf Haas, Wackelkontakt (a “loose connection”—think of a light flickering on and off because a wire is loose). Haas is one of Austria’s leading detective novelists, perhaps the most highly regarded at present. His work—marked by satire, a dry sense of humor, and a delight in language—is often praised for its literary qualities.

Haas is best known for his Detective Brenner novels, of which there are nine. Several of them have been translated into English (details at the end of this post). But he has also written other novels, not all of them mysteries (though I confess that I have read only some of the mysteries). Wackelkontakt is not exactly a detective story—we are not really trying to solve a crime, although elements of a mystery do appear along the way—but it is certainly a puzzle, and one of a very playful sort.

As the book opens, a man named Escher—the name is important—is waiting for an electrician to come and repair a kitchen outlet with a loose connection. While the electrician goes to work, Escher sits down in the living room to read a book—the book is also important—one of the mafia stories that are his favorite reading material. He is interrupted by the doorbell. When he goes to answer the intercom, he notices the fuse box above the door, where a fuse is out of place, the electrician having shut it off in order to make the repair. Without thinking, either out of carelessness or an obsessive instinct for order, Escher reaches up and flicks the fuse back on. At that instant, a thud sounds from the kitchen. Upon going to look, he discovers the electrician dead upon the ground.

But let’s not forget the book that Escher was reading. It tells the story of a man named Elio who works for the Italian mafia at the highest level, for the “Boss of Bosses” himself. But now he has turned state’s witness, revealing his partners’ secrets and leading to the arrest of no fewer than 27 of those bosses. In return for his testimony, the state has promised a kind of witness protection program: they will fake his death, secretly break him out of prison, ferret him out of the country, arrange for plastic surgery, and supply him with a fake identity so that he can begin a new life in Germany. As he waits in prison for the day of his liberation to arrive, he reads a book in order to practice his German…

…and in that book, a fellow named Escher is waiting for an electrician to show up.

And so it continues, as Escher reads about Elio and Elio reads about Escher, their stories intertwining by means of their two books, gradually growing closer and closer together until they finally merge into a single story as the novel nears its conclusion. Thus Elio reads about Escher’s confusion over what to do with the dead body in his kitchen, and about his efforts, after the electrician’s death has been dismissed as an accident, to appease his guilt by assisting the man’s widow. And Escher reads about how Elio establishes a new life as a mechanic in Germany, marries and has a daughter, and moves twice when his identity is in danger of being discovered.

The entire book is thus a literary version of M. C. Escher’s famous picture of two hands drawing each other (which I do not reproduce here for reasons of copyright—you can see it by following the link—but which most readers have probably seen at some time or other). Haas even signals his intention by referring to that very drawing in the book’s opening pages. Just as in the picture it is impossible to say which hand is drawing the other, because they appear to be simultaneously drawing each other in turn (the phrase “simultaneously in turn,” oxymoronic though it is, sums up the problem nicely), so too in the novel is it impossible to say which story line is “reality” and which is “the book”—both books are telling each other. I have to admit that when I initially realized what Haas was up to, I found it a little annoying, though mostly, I believe, because Elio’s story, in what first appears to be a trashy mafia novel, seemed markedly inferior and unrealistic, so that I wanted to get back out of Escher’s “book” and into the “real” story. But as the book progresses and Elio’s story starts to merge with Escher’s, it also becomes more believable. And as I read, what had at first seemed a mere gimmick began to grow on me, and I became increasingly impressed by the virtuosity with which Haas weaves the two stories together.

Wolf Haas at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2018. Heike Huslage-Koch, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

It helps that both Escher and Elio become sympathetic characters as the novel progresses, even if they don’t start out that way. Escher is a bit socially awkward and something of a loner, and his readiness to conceal his role in Elio’s apparent death, letting the whole affair appear an unfortunate accident, is cowardly, to say the least. But we also see him struggling to reestablish a relationship with a female colleague and friend, and also striving to assist Elio’s widow, toward whom he displays remarkable generosity and for whom he takes significant personal risks before the book ends. For his part, Elio begins as a mafia tough guy but grows into a sensitive, responsible, and loving husband and father.

The two are also similar in other respects. Both of them, for instance, enjoy figuring things out. Elio is a mechanical genius, who can fix just about anything and quickly establishes a reputation and successful business each time he moves. Escher’s hobby, and indeed his passion, is solving jigsaw puzzles, of which he has a large collection (including one portraying his namesake’s drawing of the two hands).

Both men also love words and care about using them rightly. Escher makes a living as a professional Trauerredner, someone who is paid to give the eulogy at funerals. (He meets Elio’s window, in fact, by arranging to give the mechanic’s own eulogy.) He therefore thinks carefully about rhetoric, about how to achive the desired effect when addressing an audience, and it bothers him when people use words incorrectly. He has also authored a decidedly unsuccessful novel about the world of professional eulogists. Elio, for his part, works hard to master German, and as he is learning the language, he creates humorous mental lists of words that somehow or other remind him of each other. When he purchases a used bicycle and repairs it, he turns the process into a vocabulary lesson, and then, setting out on his new used bike, “He rode farther every day, and everywhere he discovered new words.”

The book’s twin narratives come to a head when Elio’s daughter—wanting to know more about her family history and frustrated by her father’s reticence about his past—seeks information from an online genealogy chat group. In the process, she inadvertently blows her father’s cover and also gets herself into a world of trouble. In the meantime, Escher learns from Elio’s widow that her daughter has vanished and is now being held for ransom. He gathers all his available funds—it turns out that the advance he’d long ago received on his novel, which he invested and forgot about in his shame at the book’s utter failure, has earned quite a bit of interest in the intervening years—he sets off for Italy to pay the ransom and rescue the girl.

To reveal any more would give away the book’s ending. Suffice it to say that things come to a satisfactory conclusion all around, involving one last plot twist that the reader may see coming but will welcome nonetheless. Wackelkontakt is not a perfect book. There is one plot angle in particular that simply does not work, which, for those who are interested, I will mention only in a footnote, to avoid a spoiler.¹ But it is an enjoyable book, as well as a virtuosic display of narratorial ingenuity by Haas.

Film noir, madras91, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Is it more than that, though? Is there any broader point to the tessellated Escherian intertwining stories, the two books writing each other? Or is it finally just a gimmick—just Haas showing off?

It’s a hard question, and to a large extent I actually think it is just a neat gimmick, as if Haas were jumping up and down, shouting, “Look what I can do!” That’s not necessarily a criticism; after all, if the book is a fun read, then it’s a fun read, even if it isn’t making any larger point.

Nevertheless, the trick of having the two books tell each other’s story is—like Escher’s drawing that appears to have inspired it—so striking that the reader wishes something more were at stake than merely an illusion or the stunt of a con artist. And perhaps there is at least the hint of a broader theme, a suggestion about how Haas views the art of story-telling. At one point, Escher is attempting to learn more about Elio from his widow so that he can prepare a eulogy. The widow confesses that actually she herself had never known much about Elio’s past life and had never felt the need to inquire. Escher tells her that what he needs are impressions, not a mere collection of facts. The facts can lie, and they will not necessarily move his hearers. “The problem,” he thinks to himself, “was simply the hopelessness of the factual [die Trostlosigkeit des Faktischen].”

This prompts a reflection on his work as professional eulogist. Here is the key passage (in my translation):

Naturally, as a eulogist one couldn’t simply make things up. The challenge was to brush up against the transitional zone with one’s words. The invisible seam between the worlds of what had actually happened and what might possibly have been the case. Like a rock climber, one had to be sure not to slip off this ridge and plunge either into the heaven of pure verbal sound effects or the factual hell of lived life. The climber remained standing only by falling equally to both sides. Escher suspected that it was along this same seam that all ideas and insights were really at home. One couldn’t distance one’s self from the facts, but one also couldn’t stick to them too closely. The one and only task was to linger, without design, in their vicinity.

That paragraph reads like a possible story-teller’s manifesto, and perhaps also an explanation for the narrative form Haas has chosen in Wackelkontakt. What if we no longer knew where art ended and life began? Which was the real story line and which “only” the book?

Do we ever know this? A person’s “true” life, Haas seems to say, is never only a collection of facts. We all need to turn our lives into stories. Nor is anyone moved by hearing only a collection of facts. We are moved by stories. And even as we write the stories of our lives, and try to read the lives of others, all those stories simultaneously “write” us. Not only does art imitate life, but life also imitates art.

At present, Wackelkontakt has only appeared in the original German, so you unfortunately won’t find an English translation (though it would not surprise me if one eventually appears). If you’re interested in Wolf Haas, however, you can find several of his Detective Brenner mysteries in English translations by Annie Janusch. I can’t vouch for the translations, because the couple I’ve read were in German. But Amazon lists the following titles as available in English:

• Resurrection (German original: Auferstehung der Toten)

• The Bone Man (German original: Der Knochenmann)

• Come, Sweet Death! (German original: Komm, süßer Tod)

• Brenner and God (German original: Der Brenner und der liebe Gott)

If you enjoy a dark sense of humor and are looking to expand your international mystery repertoire, you might give one of those a try.

As always, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time for another installment From My Bookshelf.

1. What is the problematic plot element? (Read this only if you don’t mind a spoiler!) At the book’s conclusion, we learn that Elio is not really dead at all, but has in fact faked his own death. (Making this his second faked death.) We do get a clue as to how he might have done this, using a medication designed to make someone appear temporarily dead. But how he could have properly timed his “death” remains unclear to me. How could he possibly have arranged that he would “die” at precisely the moment that Escher would thoughtlessly turn a fuse back on during one of his repair jobs? Or avoid detection when Escher called the police, as one might surely have expected he would? Perhaps I’m missing some clever clue that Haas has dropped along the way—I have not re-read the book in order to find out—but this seems like a gap in the plot that can’t really be satisfactorily filled.