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Dagmar Leupold
Eden Plaza
(Eden Plaza: A Novel)
C.H. Beck, August 2002. 176 pp. Two extended metaphors underpin this narrative. The first is The Thousand and One Nights, signalled by the blurb and by the prefatory quotation from Jorge Luis Borges. The female narrator adopts Scheherezade's role, keeping her lover awake and entertained by the episodes of her story of her failed marriage until broad daylight arrives and 'My king has fallen asleep'. The second is evoked by the title - a lost and temporary paradise for a lone couple, and the unremarkable hotel rooms in which they act out their scenes. The main action is set in the United Kingdom, in the city of Birmingham no less - not an obvious location for passion in British minds but all part of the author's 'dare'. The Botanical Gardens become a natural if arranged paradise, while the green island of Birmingham's university campus and its Barber Institute of Fine Art are equally the settings for passion.
Such linkings and comparisons (and there are many others throughout the book) may sound unduly heavy in the context of a plot at first sight banal: nights of passion in nondescript hotel rooms against the counterpoint of a failed marriage. But they are mostly left implicit, conveyed succinctly within a narrative which focuses on concrete details of a vividly experienced life, or added as recognition dawns on the narrator afterwards. The overall effect is of a recorder possessed of considerable intelligence, self-awareness and powers of observation coupled with strong emotions. The story of her marriage to M. (she is German, he Italian) unfolds as a comedy of jet-age manners, where the accumulated ingredients of a cosmopolitan lifestyle gradually smother any semblance of reality. Both husband and wife are proud of their sophistication, but wherever they live (whether in America, Italy, Germany or elsewhere) they end up finding fault and clinging absurdly to imprinted habits, focussing on trivia because they cannot locate what is actually wrong. As a new and sympathetic take on why a marriage fails, and cleverly open-ended, this ingenious novel says much in a short space.
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