Death In Rome
A chance reunion of four members of a German family in the crumbling beauty of postwar Rome led this re-discovered once-lost-to-obscurity 1954 German classic, Death In Rome, to its devastating climax. These characters include a murderous and non-repentant former SS officer and his son who is to be ordained to become a priest, and a government administrator who also once a Nazi officer and his son who is a composer of serial music. It is said that these four characters are the personification of the four souls of Germany – murder, bureaucracy, theology and music - while convalescing from the evil regime of the fallen Hitler.
The literary style used by the author, Wolfgang Koeppen, in this book - I don’t know what that’s called - worked very well: switching narratives between different points of view of the four main characters. This is the first time I’ve seen something like this: The last sentence in a paragraph that narrates or essays the goings-on in a particular character or milieu is purposely left unfinished or hanging, ending in either an adjective or verb. There is no ellipsis. It is continued in the next paragraph, which commences in the supposedly completion of the unfinished sentence of the last sentence of the preceding paragraph, starting with a word in lower case. However, this paragraph now is an exposition of the goings-on in another character or milieu. I suppose this technique has been used to emphasize same states of mind of the characters. It was disorienting at first but it had turned out stimulating after a short while. This technique is so effective that it made me despise one character, or empathize with the other, or weep with the other, or feel indifferent of the other, or curse the other, or want to kill the other, and so on. The writing is so sufficient and potent that I could feel the characters’ angst, disgust, remorse, false hopes, longing, indifference and fear. In the words of the translator (Michael Hoffman), the novel, believed to have completed the trilogy that earned the author generous praise from Gunter Grass (1999 Nobel Prize in Literature winner) as the “greatest living German writer,” “is a comprehensive and brilliant provocation of an entire nation.”
{March 23, 2009}
The literary style used by the author, Wolfgang Koeppen, in this book - I don’t know what that’s called - worked very well: switching narratives between different points of view of the four main characters. This is the first time I’ve seen something like this: The last sentence in a paragraph that narrates or essays the goings-on in a particular character or milieu is purposely left unfinished or hanging, ending in either an adjective or verb. There is no ellipsis. It is continued in the next paragraph, which commences in the supposedly completion of the unfinished sentence of the last sentence of the preceding paragraph, starting with a word in lower case. However, this paragraph now is an exposition of the goings-on in another character or milieu. I suppose this technique has been used to emphasize same states of mind of the characters. It was disorienting at first but it had turned out stimulating after a short while. This technique is so effective that it made me despise one character, or empathize with the other, or weep with the other, or feel indifferent of the other, or curse the other, or want to kill the other, and so on. The writing is so sufficient and potent that I could feel the characters’ angst, disgust, remorse, false hopes, longing, indifference and fear. In the words of the translator (Michael Hoffman), the novel, believed to have completed the trilogy that earned the author generous praise from Gunter Grass (1999 Nobel Prize in Literature winner) as the “greatest living German writer,” “is a comprehensive and brilliant provocation of an entire nation.”{March 23, 2009}
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