Arnon Grunberg
The Observer,
1998-01-04
1998-01-04, The Observer

The Week in Reviews


Christina Patterson

Prostitution and pork sausages feature a great deal in this month's selection, the first as a form of intimacy less threatening than a real relationship, the second as a little treat, enhanced by religious taboo. Life is tough, according to these first novelists, so eat, drink, have sex or get away from it all to worlds of surrealism and magic.

Arnon Grunberg, eponymous protagonist of Dutch wunderkind Arnon Grunberg's Blue Mondays (Secker, pounds 9.99, pp278) is told by his father on one of their trips to the fairground that: 'God didn't care about one pork sausage more or less'. 'God might not, but my mother did,' Grunberg notes dryly, but had she foreseen the more expensive treats he is later to pursue in the brothels of Amsterdam she would, presumably, have stocked up her freezer.

For Grunberg, adolescent angst is not an attitude, but a lifestyle. Too world -weary to attend school, he hangs around in cafes until he is expelled and, with his girlfriend, Rosie, signs an agreement he has little risk of breaking one 'never to become a grown-up'. At home, his mother, a concentration camp survivor, smashes china when she's feeling tense; his father disappears to the bathroom for 'entire evenings'. Occasional visitors include some 'phoney' Jewesses with faces that 'looked as if they'd been soaking in hydrochloric acid'. Grunberg fils gives them short shrift. 'It was something I couldn't fathom, why people could want to become Jewish. After all, they could always just go hang themselves if they decided things were getting too tough.'

The fictional Grunberg's savage nihilism is profoundly shocking and operates in a number of ways. Initially, you think you're in for a disaffected-Eurokid -bunks-off-school-shock-horror, but the deadpan tone, dry wit and references to Jewish history and experience add up to something very much more complex. It is deliberately left unclear whether Grunberg's emotional isolation is a response to cosy Dutch suburbia or to his mother's fanatical observance of Jewish rituals and festivals. What is clear is his conclusion, after he has constructed a lifestyle around visits to prostitutes, that 'the warmth you found among the apples and honey, the candles and the challahs . . . was all thousands of times phonier than the warmth you could get from first visit to a toothless whore'. Grunberg's cool, unflinching gaze is both brutal and disconcerting, but raises genuine questions about the boundaries between cynicism and truth. Like Meursault in Camus's L'etranger, he is extremely polite, while exhibiting an amorality that is coolly argued and highly disturbing. Unsettling, funny and idiosyncratic, Blue Mondays is an unusual and memorable debut.