Arnon Grunberg
The Indian Express,
2003-09-08
2003-09-08, The Indian Express

The Art of Losing


Phantom pain. Or life is a farce, even a series of delusions invented by people to keep themselves going so that pain becomes a distant thing, an illusion like the pain in an amputated limb. That is what almost every character in Arnon Grunberg's new novel Phantom Pain seem to be caught in. Delusions and a certain detachment from reality which delusions achieve. The novel is about a failed writer's efforts to cope with the fact that no one wants to read his books. And his failure to write the masterpiece he is promising his publisher. Its name changes from Letters to Harpo to Letters to Chimney Sweeps to Letters to the Weatherman, till it settles down to a cookbook format whichfinally brings him success and the moneyto pay off his credit card debts.

Meanwhile he says he is working on leaving his wife, a psychoanalyst who considers her husband one of the severe cases she deals with everyday at her day care centre. But Mehlman remains stubbornly rooted in the way he is. He takes pride in the fact that his wife has not been able to cure him of himself. The story of the failed writer is told within the narrative by his son Harpo who at the age of four realised that both his patents weren't quite right in the head and that he was the only normal person in the family. While Harpo grows up with a father perpetually writing letters addressed mostly to his son and always sent by registered post, he sees a mother who in fits of fury is hurling books out of windows. She is not allowed to cook and the oven is crammed with books and papers. The most extraordinary delusion is that of Mehlman's father Aron Mehlman, ''the famous tennis player''. Described by Harpo's grandmother as ''Borg of the 1930s'', Mehlman senior was actually 268th in the world, a failed player whose career is tainted with the humiliation of him having bitten his opponent on his calf after losing a game. But his wife never lets this out even once. His son, who envied other children whose parents experienced real victories or defeats, writes in his novel on his father: ''He had dedicated himself to forging what may perhaps be the most difficult thing to forge: your own past.'' The son does away with both past and future to make life into a permanent sort ofpresent, something his wife construes as lunacy. ''A soap bubble as bunker'', that is the ideal state of living for Mehlman the author. And in that bubble that is a continually expanding present tense till it blows apart, there are no pains, no hopes, no questions and no answers. Of love in the bubble, he says ''Our intimacy was futureless. We made no claims on each other's futures. I've met people who feel that anonymous futureless intimacy is loveless. What madness. What's loveless about giving someone the illusion that he's wanted and desirable?'' The only explanation is that he was a writer for whom everything including himself was a subject to examine but not to accept. For a life that is absurd, the expression has to be matching in absurdity. The book has echoes of the black humour of Grunberg's previous book Silent Extras, also a hapless tale of failure. It is funny, sad and black.