Botho Strauss, Couples, Passersby, Trans. by
Roslyn Theobald, Northwestern University
Press, 1996.
rad it at Google Books
The six linked sections of Couples, Passersby present vignettes of frustrated connections and emotional numbness as characters search for meaning in art, in language, and in each other. A man waiting for his beloved to cross the street watches as she's struck by a car. A colorless suburban couple makes the long journey from their home to sit in a gay bar and feel exotic. A man leaves an animated intellectual lunch and goes unrecognized by his companion a few minutes later. Throughout, Strauss filters the particulars of everyday existence through his singular sensibility to creating a portrait of contemporary urban society and the artist's place within it.
Botho Strauss is a German writer and social conservative, displeased with what he sees as the cultural drift of his country and disinterested in the manner of life in the new Germany. Translated by Roslyn Theobold, this collection of Botho Strauss's short stories depicts a people losing their humanity under the pressures of history and technology. His stories describe robot-like characters with holes in their souls, who carry out the tasks of their daily lives--working, talking, sinning--amid spiritually void and intellectually desolate surroundings. By sketching the limpid lifelessness of his modern Germany, Strauss attempts to point toward a truer, more authentic mode of life and expression. That he writes in the shadow of Germany's history in this century adds an obvious edge to his work and heightens the interested reader's attention toward his aesthetic vision
The frustrated but never-ending search for meaning and emotional connection finds hyper-intellectual expression in this collection of vignettes by German writer and playwright Strauss. In six linked sections, couples both longstanding and temporary cling together only to find greater loneliness and despair. Even the section titles are lower-cased, as if to designate the ephemeral nature of even lifetime relationships. The section titled "couples" features, among others, an old married couple who travel to Iceland in order to commit suicide safely away from home, and an American army deserter who hides in his German girlfriend's apartment from 1949 until her death. Strauss's alienated individuals are more likely to collide briefly, pointlessly or violently, as in the questioning of a repeat-offender junkie by a judge nicknamed "Mother Treats" ("by ourselves"), a pedestrian's flirtation with a Citroen driver that ends in an accident ("traffic flow") or the ambiguous police shooting of a terrorist in 1978 (also in "by ourselves"). Strauss's voice is stronger in these bleak vignettes than in either his musing, surrealistic descriptive passages or his grumblings about art and society. His mini-portraits and short-takes flow from the anonymously guilty Volk of the Third Reich to the historyless individuals of the Cold War and beyond. Some of the pieces are so undilutedly alienated they read almost as parody-German intellectualism at its most grim. Yet, others are truly haunting, reminding readers that postmodernism can translate as historical and emotional homelessness. - Publishers Weekly
Botho Strauss, Living Glimmering Lying, Trans. by Roslyn Theobald, Northwestern University Press, 1999.
German dramatist and author Strauss (Couples, Passersby) aims for catharsis through language in this series of somber, tightly crafted vignettes about Berliners who are emotionally and professionally adrift. The book's bleak tone is established in the first piece, about a man waiting for a train that most likely will not come. His "profound patience" will not allow him to acknowledge any evidence (the closed-down station) that might "wear on his spirit in any way." Strauss's narrators, whether telling their stories in the first or third person, are middle-aged intellectuals and observers resigned to their fates and often undone by "rare conjunctions" and "borderline encounters." In one piece, a documentary filmmaker explains (to an unnamed interrogator) why he "never got to the big questions." He blames his estranged wife for having wrecked his career: "This woman forced her way into my sphere like the angel of death." In one of the longer sections, a married man relates how his first love, after 20 years of disastrous love affairs, gradually insinuates herself back into his life until he unravels completely. "In case you're interested," she tells him off-handedly, "we belong to each other." Despite Strauss's beautifully limpid writing, the reader craves more continuity than is provided, and latches onto the first-person segments hoping for an engagement that rarely manifests itself. In the end, these disconnected speeches spin themselves out emptily, as in the last section, a long Jamesian diatribe on the illusory nature of history and language delivered by a "philosophical pit bull." The speaker laments, "We see nothing correctly, we are blind imbeciles, bustling fools"Awhich justly characterizes Strauss's restless souls. - Publishers Weekly
Living Glimmering Lying ($26.95; Sept.;176 pp.; 0-8101-1283-3). This 1994 ``novel'' by the German postmodernist author of Couples, Passersby (1996), etc., once again assembles a series of vignettesthis time their setting is Berlin, after reunificationthat dramatize in emotionless detail their anonymous participants' ennui, purposelessness, and alienation. A traveler waits in an empty railroad station for a train that never arrives. A happily married man is deflected from fidelity by a former lover who casually plucks him out of his own life and into hers. Relationships collapse or atrophy; lifelong goals are passively abandoned; identities blur or vanishand the generic, affectless ``personalities'' of Strauss's glancingly observed ``characters'' induce in the reader answering passivity. We don't know who these people are, and we care nothing for them or about them. - Kirkus Reviews
Near the close of Botho Strauss's latest compilation of austere, elliptical sketches, ''Living Glimmering Dying,'' the brooding narrator registers a note of apprehension concerning the fall of the Berlin wall: ''This was the great break of reunification, for me it was a collapse.'' Indeed, there is little cause for celebration, let alone euphoria, in this rather lachrymose series of fictional portraits of a postunification world, translated by Roslyn Theobald. An ominous leitmotif of decay and dissolution runs throughout Strauss's prose -- relationships fall apart, hopes and dreams fizzle, desires are denied fulfillment. There is, as he puts it in one of his many fragmentary observations, ''a sense of the world breaking down . . . a mode of mourning for the collapse of all comprehension.'' The sole ''images of joy,'' if only ironically referred to as such, appear in the somber tale of a woman who has kept 60 paintings of her genitals created by her prematurely deceased lover; they stand as a graphic reminder of her once sensual life. At his best, Strauss offers redolent musings, sumptuous and refined. Yet much of the writing here is marred by its opacity and by tiresome, pretentious rambling that keeps the reader from ever gaining access to the deeper meaning Strauss's work undoubtedly aspires to convey. - Noah Isenberg
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/10/24/bib/991024.rv110638.html
Botho Strauss, The Young Man, Trans. by
Roslyn Theobald, Northwestern University
Press, 1995.
read it at Google Books
The writings of Botho Strauss examine the tension between the individual and society in the anonymity of the contemporary world. A theater director, playwright, and writer, Strauss broke with Berlin's leftist intellectual milieu in the late 1970s and turned to more personal topics; the result, and his response, inform The Young Man, a provocative work by a controversial German thinker.
The young man of the title, Leon Pracht, has left the theater to write. Contemplative, brooding, alienated from both society in general and those to whom he should be closest, Pracht moves numbly through a series of encounters, the precision of his observation of both the everyday and the fantastic underscored by his increasing detachment. His reflections, meditations, and reactions build a compelling portrait of contemporary society and of the individual struggling to.
Leon Pracht, a young German intellectual working as an apprentice theater director, is not only alienated from modern society but is also experiencing a trial separation from reality. Strauss's own background as a theater director and playwright charges the opening section of backstage drama with sharp characterizations, particularly of the resident pair of prima donnas, Pat and Maggie, who are performing in Genet's The Maids. In another expert touch, the novel's final section sees Leon visiting his old mentor, who, despite gaining national fame as a comedian, has become a Howard Hughes-like recluse. Leon's adventures as a protagonist, however, merely bookend a bulky series of fables, phantasmagoria and allegories. Some include unsettling surreal touches, such as a department store selling voices, a homunculus whose face is half-Hitler and half-Baudelaire and a seductress who imprisons her lovers in her memory's landscape. Most of these tales-within-a-tale, however, are heavier-than-air fantasies that tend to revolve around the usual postmodern problems of alienated intellectuals, cultural collisions and consumer dystopias. Ultimately, this is less a novel of ideas, or even of characters, than a series of grandiloquent speeches and freakish dream sequences. - Publishers Weekly
Botho Strauss, Three Plays, Trans. by Jeremy
Sams, Oberon Books, 2007.
These three plays, first published in German in the 1980s, show Strauss developing an enigmatic, unsettling and uniquely theatrical style. Set in Hamburg, The Park is Strauss's take on A Midsummer Night's Dream. Seven Doors brings together a jilted husband, a wedding without guests and two monks with an intimate knowledge of hell. In Time and The Room, the room contrives to be the play's main character.
Botho Strauss, Big and Little, Trans. by Anne
Cattaneo, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979.
A play about a woman's attempt at communication with a world that closing itself off.
As luck would have it, I was in Paris last week for the European premiere of the Sydney Theatre Company’s new production of Big and Small by Botho Strauss, starring Cate Blanchett. This version used a newly-commissioned English translation from by the British playwright Martin Crimp. Big and Small (the allusion is first and foremost to Alice in Wonderland) is an episodic play of a dozen scenes in which we follow Lotte Kotte (Blanchett) on a road trip, struggling to make sense of her life after separating from her husband.
Gross und Klein (as it’s called in German) was first staged in 1978 and its themes are redolent of that era: alienation, the inability to communicate, and utter disdain for bourgeois life. Scenes are full of conversations overheard and half-heard and communications devices – telephones, intercoms, and a tiny portable television set – which serve only to limit Lotte’s ability to communicate. Lotte suffers from moments of inarticulation that Blanchett pulls off with stunning eloquence as she suddenly erupts into stammering, wordless speech or spasmodic, liberating dance steps.
Strauss was the subject of an essay in A Radical Stage: Theatre in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, edited by W.G. Sebald: “Myth and Mythology in the Drama of Botho Strauss” by Irmela Schneider. Although she doesn’t discuss Gross und Klein, Schneider’s commentary on several other plays by Strauss contain references that seem equally applicable to this play, including Wim Wenders’ 1984 film Paris, Texas and the writing of Peter Handke, especially The Left-Handed Woman. “What characterises” Strauss’ plays, she writes, is “the insistence that while the search may be something meaningful in itself, it can no longer produce any meaning.”
In his own Introductory Remarks to this volume, Sebald offered a fairly cool response to Strauss’ work:
Strauss may not have remained sufficiently resistant to the temptations of beautifully organised displays of despair, which can be as insincere as they are ostentatious. On the other hand it is true to say that Strauss does attempt to reflect the process which gave rise to the discontinuity in his dramatic inventions. His plays mark a phase of societal evolution where the dynamics of social intercourse have become almost entirely opaque and where conflict – the stuff of drama – can only be represented, figuratively, in terms of battles fought and lost many times before.
A play like Big and Small is a very gutsy undertaking for someone like Blanchett, but it’s clear why Lotte is so appealing as a character (Blanchett calls her “a female Candide”). Lotte is on stage nearly every minute of the more than two hour-long play and her mercurial emotions provide an extraordinary canvas on which to work. Lotte is a physically and emotionally demanding role as she teeters precariously between optimism and despair within the space of a single sentence.
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