Toronto Star Sunday, November 10, 2003
German writer Juli Zeh’s bleak debut is an anti-love story, Run Lola Run cross-pollinated with a political thriller. The novel’s detached, alienated, coke-snorting and misogynistic protagonist Max invokes the amoral archetype now familiar to readers of urban fiction.
Yet during a recent interview held during Toronto’s International Festival of Authors, Zeh claimed to be a fan of the classics. She’s never read the sparse, brutal work of contemporaries Bret Easton Ellis and Michel Houellebecq, the guys she’s repeatedly compared with.
Zeh, who is 29, also expressed surprise at the book's success, given German publishers never used to publish anyone under 45. But after the Berlin Wall came down, Germany saw a rapid reinvigoration of its literature by young urban writers. Unlike the post-WWII literary traditionalists of Gunter Grass or W.G. Sebald, whose work articulated the country’s obsession with Holocaust guilt, this new generation romanticized urban angst and solipsism.
Their existential musings on the role of the artist, immigrant life and the elusive pursuit of happiness gained popularity during in the late 90’s - until German critics lambasted their superficiality and questionable literary merit.
When Zeh's book arrived on the scene in 2001 and critics discovered she had effectively captured the urban zeitgeist and the contemporary sociopolitical milieu, she was rewarded with such fanatical praise her book was rushed into a second printing after only 10 days in bookstores.
Her success is due, in part, to her fondness for Nabokov, which explains her ability to create a gripping story that begins as shock drama but gracefully widens in scope to peer beyond banal traumas of the everyday. Her novel isn’t just another drug addled romp - it encompasses complex ideological concerns and relevant, international political intrigue.
But don’t mistake Zeh for a benevolent humanist. Her brand of existentialism is harsh terrain. "It’s only a game, after all, everything is all there is. And memories are really just like television," says her protagonist Max, who like Zeh, is an international lawyer with a specialization in the Balkans.
Max’s singular love, Jessie, who suffers from post-traumatic stress and childlike delusions worthy of the Brothers Grimm, shoots herself in the head while talking on the phone with him. Max promptly gives up on life, quits his high-powered job and slinks around Leipzig with his only remaining friend, a newfound death fetish and Jessie’s dog Jacques Chirac.
Certain he’s going mad, Max hounds popular late-night radio host Clara, whose call-in show allows lonely, desperate and disturbed men three minutes of air time. Intrigued by his story, Clara decides to study Max for her psychology dissertation, offering him a DAT recorder into which he hesitatingly purges his life story in short, episodic bursts: "I was fighting against whatever it was in her head that I didn't really understand," says Max about his involvement with Jessie. "I had to get through the night with her to first light and not lose hope. The coke that I took from the fridge, over and over again, helped me. The coke and the hatred."
But Clara wants more from Max than his tale of love and loss, and a few devious manipulations later, his recordings shapeshift. The further he delves into Jessie's story of drug smuggling through the Balkans using prisoners of war as mules, the more connections he begins to make between the peace brokers he worked with as a lawyer and the world of organized crime.
The book isn’t pleasant bedtime reading. The characters are so cruel, blunt, opinionated and heartless that it’s impossible to feel compassion for them. Max hits Clara during his first meeting with her: "I sit up so that I can take a deep breath, and slap her in the mouth with the back of my hand. Her head is knocked to one side." He’s so detached and emotionally inert he can’t even react appropriately to his own outburst, reflecting that: "It would have looked good in slow motion, like a shampoo ad."
Whenever characters begin to show signs of empathy, Zeh reveals how their own self-interests are their only true motivation. Even Max's "love" for Jessie is shown to be faulty, possessive and more about control than genuine affection.
This attempt to repel the reader is intentional. The criminal dalliances of Zeh's repugnant characters mirror the novel's underlying analysis of Europe’s post-conflict peace building process, which Zeh, with her insider’s perspective on the machinations of the UN, suggests was brokered by self-interested parties and mired in corruption.
Eagles and Angels works as an effective criticism of our times, but it’s a disagreeable troll of a book. I would have gladly returned it to the shelf unfinished, had it not been for Zeh’s masterful use of suspense, which compels the reader to push past through one disjointed plot twist after another. Still, there’s no reader reward for those who reach the end of the maze, since Zeh is clearly more intent engineering a tidy ending than providing insight or hope. It’s disheartening to read a novel where characters stay consistently horrid throughout, instead of changing, growing or learning as we’ve come to expect.
During her IFOA interview, Zeh declared that politics in a capitalist society is about bargaining - and literature is about understanding. Zeh puts her faith in science, not fairy tales, and unfortunately, this makes for desolate, unsentimental fiction.
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