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Matthias Politycki
Das Schweigen am andern Ende des Rüssels
(Silence at the End of the Elephant's Trunk)
Hoffmann und Campe, August 2001.220pp. Here is a group of seventeen subtly interconnected stories, most of them concerned with travel. They cover locations from Mongolia and Uganda to Chile, Bulgaria, the Caribbean and the USA. They function on one level as straightforward travel writing, that is, as descriptions of places. But they are a great deal more than that. What the author is really investigating is the mindset of those who set off in search of adventure, what they hope for, and what they finally get. It generally transpires that whatever ideas they set out with, the opposite is what they find. Much comedy goes into the demonstration of this belief. Perhaps the best example is the story entitled 'The Golden Sphincter of the Buddha', in which a group of tourists go on a tortuous journey through all kinds of testing terrain, only to end up staring at a monastery door behind which, or so they are told, the eponymous sphincter is concealed. In another, the first-person narrator of 'Too Dumb to Fill the Tank', driving along the highways of the USA in search of the 'good ol' South', is confronted with his inability to use the petrol pump at a service station. As he becomes increasingly baffled and desperate Politycki wryly observes how he comes up with ever more complex strategies for dealing with the situation. 'On Safari with Paul', provides a cautionary tale against arrogance. The lion-obsessed Paul is contemptuous of the 'uncultured' locals. Only when he is injured and requires hospital treatment is he forced to engage with the real poverty of the country.
Not all the stories are about travel. One in particular, set within the framework of a German author's journeys around the country doing readings, is a deeply moving account of the impending death of the narrator's father. Most of them, however, throw a wry and quizzical light on Stevenson's observation: 'I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.'
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