While staying with her aunt at a fashionable spa, Else receives an unexpected telegram from her mother, begging her to save her father from debtor’s jail. The only way out, it seems, is to approach an elderly acquaintance in order to borrow money from him. Through this telegram, Else is forced into the reality of a world entirely at odds with her romantic imagination – with horrific consequences.
This is the first story from 1920s Germany I read. It belongs to the Expressionist experience and I was expecting something very strange, possibly very difficult to follow and understand and written in a very unique way.
Well, it is very strange. And it is written in a very unique way (don’t look at the English translation above. I don’t have any idea why they changed the formatting completely like that). But it is also very absorbing and very relatable, and I really really liked it.
Now, I should probably have a better preparation to do justice to this remarkable novella, but I want to give you my honest, uneducated reaction to it.
The format of the story is what impressed me the most. It isn’t just first person. It’s a very long monologue that we follow from inside Else’s mind. Everything we read is filtered through her mind, her feelings, her expectations and fears. There is absolutely nothing objective in this story.
And this was what scared me at first. I thought this was going to be some kind of very convoluted stream-of-conscience and I don’t agree well with that kind of writing. Well, you could say it is some kind of stream-of-conscience since Else describes everything happening to her not as if she wanted to communicate it to us, the readers, but as if we just happened to find ourselves inside her mind and neither of us knew why and how. She just goes about her life as she has always done, she filters reality through her personality, she thinks and ponders to herself, just like everyone of us do. We reader are Else. We are her, there is no difference between her thoughts and our thoughts as we read.
And this is the trick. Because we are her, because we see reality as she sees it, we accept it as we receive it. She’s doing crazy things, but we accept it as plausible, because they are plausible to her.
I’ll admit that now and then I thought, would I really do anything such? Is that really what a person would do? But then I would think that, given the circumstance, Else had very little choice and her chosen path is probably the only one she could take.
But toward the end of the story, as Else hears other people talking, we realise that the reality we have been reading and accepting might not be all that plausible. We learn that Else has had episodes in the past, to the point that her aunt wants her to enter a clinic as soon as possible. We realise then that the mind that has accompanied us through this story might not be a straight mind. Even as we keep following Else, because we can’t do anything else at this point, the idea that something is actually very wrong enters our mind.
I see, now, how this story lives the expressionist experience. It’s full of distortions and subjectivity, and as we slowly realise it, we glimpse something of the reality we too live. We see things in the story in a very different way and we are invited to do the same with our own reality. And we become slightly upset, because we had been deceived.
But I loved it. I loved it because it deceived me.
The deception is created so to bring us from one perception to the other and it gives meaning especially to the shifting.
The way it is written is genius. It reproduces the actual way we think things out and the way our mind perceives reality. It doesn’t follow any accepted rules of fiction, because the story follows its own aspiration to be Else. Sentence follows sentence in a jumbled way, not arranged according to logic, but rather in an emotional way. Dialogues gather together as if following the sound of voices in Else’s mind rather than the actual logic of conversation and of fiction formatting. You’d think this would create confusion. It actually doesn’t and this is something that alone should makes us think.
It could have been a total mess, instead it’s a fantastic ride with a gripping plot and a lovable heroine.
I will delve into this story further soon, because I know there is a lot more to it than I can see now. But even as an independent read is just fantastic.