Arnon Grunberg
The New Yorker,
2005-01-03
2005-01-03, The New Yorker

The Critics


This whimsical novel, written pseudonymously by a Dutch novelist, masquerades as the confessions of an Austrian philosophy student whose great accomplishment is a gloss of a gloss of Hegel's Phenomenology. Marek is an observer surrounded by actors, among them his drama-prone dead mother, notable for her string of lovers and her interest in handguns, and a professor studying the dreams of criminals, who ministers to Marek before giving up the pursuit of truth in order to sleep late. Next to them, Marek feels, understandably, insubstantial and unrealized. He decides to assert his existence by pursuing l'amour fou. Several romantic failures ensue, until he finds an older woman, an aficionado of the accordion and of vodka, who is responsible for the loss of his hair. "But what's a little baldness," Marek asks, "when one has known happiness?".