Arnon Grunberg
Village Voice,
2004-12-28
2004-12-28, Village Voice

Small Wonder


Darren Reidy

I'm glad Marek van der Jagt is a Viennese philosopher, because he has a very small penis--a "big toe," "half a pinky"--and it's "slowly disappearing." He fantasizes about taking the potato peeler to it; a plastic surgeon won't en- large it (not small enough). The trouble is those lovely girls from Luxembourg with whom he was to experience l'amour fou (Milena: "Andrea . . . Come look at this . . . " Andrea: "You have the penis of a dwarf"). That messes him up a great deal. But who is "him"? Likely not Marek van der Jagt, the Viennese philosopher who wrote The Story of My Baldness, which "Marek van der Jagt," philosopher and tutor of learning-disabled children, admits "could just as easily have been called The Story of Wasted Talent" but excuses by invoking Mom's sage words: "When you're standing in a darkened corner of the room, you can't expect to draw a map of the city." It's narrator van der Jagt who writes of the advantages of putting down the "official version" of his mother's death under the rubric of fiction, but asks how it feels "when your lie becomes the truth to the rest of the world, a truth that has even made the papers." How long it took for the gears to turn I don't know, but when the judges of a prestigious debut-novel prize discovered that van der Jagt--who'd dismissed Dutch novelist Arnon Grunberg in the papers--was really Grunberg (who won the prize a decade ago), I hope they didn't question their judgment. (They rescinded the honor.)
Baldness is filled with cracks about an industry obsessed with the next big thing--a publisher calls van der Jagt's stepmother (whose debut, How Old Women Can Get Rich, became an international bestseller) "a mouthpiece for a forgotten generation"--but the comically melodramatic story doesn't trip over motive. It's weird and moving despite itself: a light-handed perpetual piss-take.