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Angelika Klüssendorf
Alle leben so
(They All Live Like This)
S.Fischer Verlag, August 2001. 191pp. Set in and around Berlin in the years after reunification, this novel tells the story of a number of characters whose paths cross again and again. There is the bailiff who is all too often drawn into his creditors' misery; the ailing writer on a quest for love; his mother Elisabeth, an ageing beauty who falls for a conman; the bailiff's boss who confesses he is drawn to young girls. What all these characters have in common is their desperate yearning for love and companionship. Elisabeth suspects that the much younger Joseph is only after her money, but has a drastic face-lift to please him anyway. But Joseph, having successfully swindled money out of lonely older women for years, suddenly loses his touch, and when the last of his conquests before Elisabeth drowns herself and leaves him a dead dog in a suitcase as a memento, he falls in love for the first time - only to have the tables turned on him. The bailiff falls for an American alcoholic, who becomes one of his 'clients' only months later - just like the writer, who keeps meeting the wrong women. When one of them turns him from an ailing into a helpless patient and expresses her desire to serve him like a slave, she calms his apprehensions by saying: 'Somehow, this is how everyone lives'. This sense of laconic pessimism pervades the entire novel like a kind of resigned Weltschmerz. It does not, however, prevent the characters from trying to find a way out of their loneliness - with suicide all too often awaiting them at the end. Thus the old Polish woman, to whom one of the writer's girlfriends introduces him as a potential subject for a story, hangs herself when the bailiff enters her apartment. As for Elisabeth, she slits her wrists (though not fatally, as it turns out) when she realises who - or what - Joseph really is.
This novel is extremely well-written and atmospheric, and despite their pessimism the characters are convincing throughout.
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