Shouldn’t there be a category for novels so self-assured that they invite the reader to engage without the mechanical push of plot? To journey from event to event, curious and stimulated, with no expectation of denouement, since there never was a knot to denoue? Such a genre might encompass Virginia Woolf’s project, and Beckett’s (often less enjoyable), and Kerouac’s On the Road. Not to mention endless rambling Bildungsromane.
What You Can See from Here, German author Mariana Leky’s entrancing third novel (a runaway 65-week bestseller in Germany) is told by Luisa, whom we first meet at around age ten and to whom we reluctantly wave safe journey! when she is just over 30. And yet the novel hasn’t the one-way, ego-focused feel of a conventional Bildungsroman. Luisa, apparently reminiscing from a vantage point far distant from that thirtieth year, breaks current novelistic convention with her omniscience, hovering over intimate scenes that she did not witness and could not have heard of second-hand. And instead of navel-gazing, Luisa devotes her curiosity and intense powers of observation to a close circle of idiosyncratic individuals in her tiny village in the Westerwald, focusing only intermittently on herself, the central “given.”
These winsome characters include the Optician (a kindly and crucial figure, after Luisa’s freshly psychoanalyzed father abandons her village and family to “let the wide world in” by roaming the globe); Marlies the misanthrope, barricaded in her decaying house behind five locks, who wears only a Norwegian sweater and underpants; and Antonio, owner of the ice cream café, who is Luisa’s mother’s lover and ebullient creator of such delicacies as “Flaming Temptation” and “Hot Desire.” There is Elspeth, Luisa’s aunt, a respected wellspring of superstitious remedies and advice, and Palm, the drunken, abusive father of Martin, a spaghetti-armed kid bent on a career as weightlifter, who is Luisa’s inseparable childhood soulmate.
I’ll leave other denizens (including the humongous dog, Alaska) for the reader to discover, while turning the spotlight on Selma. In Luisa’s de facto absence of parents, grandmother Selma essentially raises her, with sacrifice and gritty common sense, to become the woman whose voice we are hearing. Early in the novel, when Luisa’s world breaks apart (no spoiler here), Selma literally carries the limp, refusing child in her arms and on her back for three days and nights, until “You have to let go. It’s time.” No surprise that the good Optician is deeply, truly, forever in love with widowed Selma, penning undelivered letter after letter to her, yet afraid to destroy their everyday closeness by declaring his passion — thus keeping a secret only he believes is a secret, while the whole village is in the know. One more thing everyone knows regarding Selma: whenever she dreams of standing in a field in her nightgown beside an okapi, someone in the village will very soon die.
Death is Leky’s persistent subject. Death and grief and mourning and the loss of all that matters to a person and the what and how of anything, if anything, that comes after. In What You Can See From Here, Luisa, cautious and dutiful sometimes tongue-tied, hardly an action hero, learns gradually to carry on after one enormous loss only to face another. And a third. Her life is circumscribed by the village and, eventually, an apprenticeship to a brow-beating bookstore owner in the next town. How to rhyme such trademark gloom with enormous popularity?
Leky, born 1973 in Cologne, studied dramatic and creative writing at university, and went on to win numerous prizes for her short stories and radio plays — a major art form in Germany. Her 2010 novel, The Gentleman’s Tailor, depicts the anomie of a young woman annihilated by her lover’s rejection, followed swiftly by his death. Doubled loss, suffering, rejection of the world, and the gradual dawning of a happy ending thanks to an unlikely encounter with a customer who needs a suit. Summarizing like this, I’m reminded of Professor Daniel Kahneman’s research on memory and happiness, and his robust conclusion that people remember an often painful ordeal positively as long as it ends well, with good emotions. Leky knows this.
Moreover, though Luisa’s story seems to revolve around the year 2000, there is an aura of wholesome timelessness, as if the unnamed village were a sort of Brigadoon in Westerwald. No mention of politics, or civilization’s ills, or any strife beyond the personal, and even if those feuds nearly lead to murder, they turn out to be based on misapprehension. Happy resolutions. Technology is limited to out-of-date hunting guns and phones, especially landlines. For readers looking for a respite from, say, the current fictional flood of grim dystopias, enraged victims of sadists and racists, and myopic satires of the ever-shifting digital ground beneath our feet, What We Can See should be as refreshing as cool water sprayed on a chronic rash.
One can’t help but be pulled in by Leky’s voice, so even and restrained in today’s fiction babylon, and wonderfully carried over into English by Tess Lewis. Leky/Luisa speaks directly to us in an oral language free of writerly modifiers and prettyfiers, wry and independent, almost as pared down as the utterances of the villagers. In such simple sentences the quality of content has nowhere to hide. Here, it doesn’t need to. One can find striking, original observations almost by throwing darts at the pages:
“Elsbeth was small and round. So round that when she drove, she put a piece of carpet on her stomach so the steering wheel wouldn’t chafe her.”
“There was an entire commune of voices living inside the optician. They were the worst lodgers imaginable. They were always too loud, especially after ten o’clock in the evening … and they couldn’t be evicted.”
“It’s true that time goes faster the older you are, Selma thought, and felt this wasn’t a very good arrangement. Selma wished that her sense of time would grow old with her, that it would develop a limp, but the opposite was true. Selma’s sense of time behaved like a racehorse. ”
“And everything Frederik then did, he did with as much assurance as if he’d already studied a map of my body for years, as if that map were hanging on Frederik’s wall in Japan, as if he had stood before it and memorized all the routes.”
Ah yes. Frederik. The short story master André Dubus pére used to teach — noting he wasn’t the first to do so –– that all stories come down to either “someone leaves town” or “a stranger comes to town.” What You Can See falls squarely in the latter category. Said stranger, a very German, hiking Buddhist monk, doesn’t emerge from the forest surrounding the village until page 129. As beautifully rendered as is Luisa’s wild unfurling love for this stranger, Frederik himself doesn’t quite convince. The story felt fuller and more alive before this emissary of Zen philosophy arrived. But all is not lost: Frederik’s flop as a late-arriving plot motor perhaps predestines the tale’s final twist. The utterly surprising last page reads like an invitation to turn the page — although, alas, there are no more to turn.
For all its appeal and charm, or rather because of that, What You Can See From Here wasn’t entirely to my taste. I’m no fan of magical realism’s cloying side, which glimmers flirtatiously here, through an abundance of premonitions (not only Luisa’s, not only the silly okapi business) come true. One of the narrative devices that holds the chain of events together is repetition, in the way of the ancient oral traditions of Homer or the author of Beowulf. Or lullabies and fairy tales. Certain phrases, as well as objects (wonky floorboards outlined with red tape, the flowered nightgown, Mon Cheri chocolates, a phone answering machine with an agenda of its own) are invoked over and over again. Love is everywhere, no one is evil –– for all we know, not even dr. death. I resisted the novel’s aura of ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ despite or including the daunting task of living with death.
Truth makes writing beautiful, to paraphrase Keats. It was two luminous pages of prologue, melding observation and metaphor, distilling the presence of absence, that decided me. Despite some uncomfortable twinges of sugar-shock along the way, the view forward and back from the precipice of the last page of What You Can See from Here validated the journey.
[Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux on June 22, 2021, 336 pages, $22.99 hardcover]