As most people will have figured out by now there is a huge gulf between living and mere existence. The ideal goal is to feel actively alive and responsive, instead of simply going through the motions of passing time, or allowing it to pass us. Human consciousness is a maze of complexity, which is why philosophers have spent centuries attempting to not only explain it but to define its meaning. Such a feat is attempted by Heinz Helle’s unhappy narrator, who for all his laconic musings may be more Everyman than he’d like to think, not that he likes much or anything about his dilemma.
Philosophical debate is a heightened intellectual pursuit in which professionals engage, alienating the rest of us who are merely concerned with the big question despatched in the opening sentence of what proves to be a rueful, cleverly observed though unoriginal debut: “You ask yourself what it’s all about, and then you remember: the preservation of the species.”
The unnamed narrator is young, engaged in some level of academic work, possibly post-doctoral, and has arrived in New York from Germany. The Atlantic Ocean appears to represent an area as vast as outer space to him. Its symbolism lies in its being a boundary and he likes boundaries, he needs them. His studies, which have brought him to the brink of something quasi-professional, are secondary to the true matter preoccupying him, the growing distance between his paralysed emotions and the dwindling relevance of his girlfriend back home.
Aimlessness quickly emerges as the theme as the observant narrator inhabits a bubble of disengagement in a small, all too human story which articulates sleepwalking as a form of survival. Helle does not waste words and the chill accuracy of his sentiments, which have been faithfully conveyed by Kari Driscoll’s nuanced translation, is unsettling if also familiar. Readers will identify with the narrator while also agreeing that the internal, self-doubting crisis novel has become a genre in its own right. It is too much of a cliche to suggest that yet again Albert Camus continues to loom large over any writer interested in questions of identity or marginalisation – but it is true.
Helle studied philosophy and has also worked as a copywriter, both of which appear to have influenced his interest in how the mind works. He illustrates the way thoughts are random; consciousness for him is a splintered prism at the mercy of sensations continually processing images. His narrator is entering a state of inertia which settles into apathy over which he is aware of having no control. It makes him drink and engage in half-hearted fantasies about women in general while disengaging from his girlfriend whose childlike affection gradually yields to her understanding of his lack of interest in everything, including her.
If there is a key to this curious little work it seems to be in an image which appears on the first page and becomes a motif, a football game. Initially it is a vivid description which appears shaped by memory: “The pitch is small, the grass dry and patchy… The corner flags are yellow…They’re coming out, they’re running up the basement steps in their blue-and-yellow jerseys, the boys, they’re eight or nine years old, and you watch them because you like it when members of a species have something that matters to them, when there is something in their lives to fight for, without weapons or violence.”
Helle’s narrator may well have once been the boy who was stuck manning the goal mouth for the very first time on the day his parents arrived to watch him play. He thinks he is a good player and reckons that he can manage and begins to think his way through the problem facing him: “and at that moment the green-and-white striker casually shoots the ball into the far corner, and the boy hurls himself after it because even though he hasn’t got the slightest hint of a chance of reaching the ball, he doesn’t want to look like he’s chicken. The match ends eight-nil.”
The rather sterile Superabundance only serves to distance the reader from a small book with modest ambitions.The German title, which roughly translated means “The Reassuring Sound of Exploding Kerosene”, brings the reader far closer to the narrator, who thinks too much and takes refuge from facts. He is a philosopher by training yet Helle could as easily have made him a biologist or a research scientist. The philosophy is only a sketchily-developed plot device. It does lead him to the major set piece, a philosophy lecture he is expected to deliver and instead stands in silence, causing irate students to walk out.
The most interesting thing about the alert, slightly pedantic narrator is not his faltering relationship. His appeal rests in the way in which he thinks: “The air resistance seems to be increasing, no doubt they are heavy with something….Then it begins, the falling. A snowflake, five, a thousand, millions, unperturbed, independently of me, they fall downward from above, while I fall horizontally through them.” His feeling of falling through the snow is consistent with his drifting.
It is a study in self-absorption and the narrative just about sustains a mood of introspection: “But I’m not feeling that, because I’m thinking of so many different things...” In a rare comic aside the narrator recalls being questioned about his health insurance. On being summoned by the staff manager at the university he is informed: “There is nothing in your contract about who pays for the cost of shipping your body to Germany.” Having argued his case with the woman he notices “her perfect white teeth”. Welcome to America. Elsewhere he muses: “…without America we would all be either Nazis, or farmers, or dead.” He also decides: “Broadway is smaller than I had imagined, smaller than the name suggests.”
As his mind struggles with chaos, doubt, desire and answers, it is not surprising that he finds refuge in the outcome of a football game, any match. Readers may well agree that Tom McCarthy’s captivating Satin Island has certainly raised the bar for this school of cerebral, perceptive, confessional literary disengagement. Helle is offering a far less sophisticated, if recognisable variation on the theme of what indeed is life and existence on whatever level through a struggling narrator who lacks the visionary panache of McCarthy’s ultra-cool U, yet may possess slightly more humanity.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent
