The Vanishing
In 1934, a writer left his wife and daughter for a trip to Shanghai -- and never returned.
MOHR
A Novel
  (Photograph By Nicolas Humbert From "Mohr") |
By Frederick Reuss
Unbridled. 312 pp. $25.95
Certain writers tower over their subjects so commandingly that anyone coming to them afterward must stand in their shadow -- Flaubert on adultery, for instance, or Hemingway on bullfighting. So it is with W.G. Sebald on the ghosts of World War II. In works such as The Emigrants and Austerlitz , he used personal histories, photographs and other documentary materials to create uniquely powerful fiction about the enduring effects of Hitler's Germany on the lives of those who came after. "Only in literature," he once wrote, "can there be an attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of facts."
Mohr , the new novel by Frederick Reuss, explicitly follows Sebald in both its theme and execution: It tells of Max Mohr, a real-life Jewish writer (and distant relative of Reuss) who left Germany for Shanghai in 1934 and died there three years later, and it makes generous use of archival materials, particularly photographs, which are reproduced in the text in a manner similar to Sebald's. (Just in case anybody missed the connection, the epigraph is taken from Sebald's poem "After Nature.") In a note at the end of his novel, Reuss explains that his grandfather had told him the outline of Mohr's life, but Reuss had been able to discover nothing more about him until Mohr's novel The Unicorn , with an afterword by Mohr's grandson, was published in Germany in 1997, 60 years after Mohr's death. "I went to Munich to meet this unknown relative," Reuss writes, "and was immediately overwhelmed by the feeling of having stepped into Mohr's life."
Reuss tries to re-create this experience of discovery for the reader, but he is not entirely successful. The novel begins with an image of the author at Mohr's house, watching the sun rise over the mountains across the valley, then sitting at his desk in the attic poring over old notes and photographs: "A shiver of cold concentrates your thoughts of what might have been. Glance up." But despite Reuss's exhortations -- and the wealth of family history on which he has built his fiction -- Mohr and Käthe, the German wife he left behind, feel more like wax effigies than fully realized characters. They may have once been real figures, but they don't come alive here.
After giving an account of Mohr's departure, the novel alternates between Shanghai, where Mohr practices medicine among the indigent (he was trained as a doctor before becoming a writer), and Wolfsgrub, the family home, where Käthe and Eva, the Mohrs' 12-year-old daughter, try to carry on in his absence. The China sections offer ample room for drama: Mohr has a love affair with a mysterious nurse, the Japanese attack the city, his downstairs neighbor turns out to be a communist rebel leader, and more. But the various episodes, constantly intercut with flashbacks to Mohr's earlier life, never build enough momentum to come together as a coherent whole. Even the war scenes are shorn of the details that could make them visible to the reader, relying on lazy abstractions ("They returned to a completely broken city") instead of concrete observations.
As for the novel's underlying premise -- did Mohr ever intend for Käthe and Eva to join him in China, and if not, why did he abandon them? -- the mystery is never fully addressed, though hints are dropped, sometimes leadenly. (At one point Mohr, concerned about some physical symptoms, thinks: "Is being in love different from being sick? Or being in exile? Cliché questions. . . . Is something wrong with his heart?") Worse, though the great love between Max and Käthe is repeatedly asserted ("When they said good-bye, it was with the feeling that they'd never loved one another more than at that moment"), the reader is unable to believe in it.
The sections that focus on Käthe are more successful, perhaps because her motivations are easier to understand: We see her going through the motions of life without her husband, trying to protect her daughter from the ultimate disappointment they both fear. But even here, the scenes from the couple's prehistory feel randomly chosen, transparently inspired by the photographs plopped into the text to illustrate them. For instance, we are shown a picture of Eva chasing a small boy through the garden, and the next page tells of a prank Eva and her friends play on a young neighbor. Such episodes seem to have been created for their relevance to the archival materials, not as agents to advance an independent plot.
The so-called "documentary novel" has become something of a trend lately, with practitioners such as William T. Vollmann, whose Europe Central features Käthe Kollwitz and Dmitri Shostakovich, and Per Olov Enquist, author of The Book About Blanche and Marie , which was inspired by biographical material about Marie Curie and her circle. Despite their sometimes overwhelming preponderance of evidence (the endnotes for Vollmann's novel run to more than 50 pages), these books suffer from the same paradox as Mohr : They are too deeply indebted to historical reality to produce a convincing fictional reality. W.G. Sebald remains unsurpassed in transmuting the "mere recital of facts" into a resonant literature. ·
Ruth Franklin is a senior editor at the New Republic.
