Brenner

May 23, 2022
Swiss writer Burger (1942–1989) makes his posthumous English-language debut with the revelatory if sputtering story of a fallen tobacco empire and its despairing heir, Hermann Arbogast Brenner. Brenner, estranged from his wife, children, and siblings and fighting a yearslong battle with depression, buys a sports car, believing his life will end within a few years. As Brenner continually hints at his soon-to-come suicide, he drives around Switzerland, visits friends, and discursively muses on his intellectual interests, all while smoking cigars. He recalls his brief stay at a children’s home where he was viciously bullied: in Brenner’s recollection, his bully made him crouch for hours, attacking him when he tried to move, but the nuns who ran the home refused to believe that their star pupil could be so ferocious. However, when Brenner revisits the home, he also remembers people showing him great kindness, and now questions the veracity of his own memories. Taken in total, and thanks to West’s lucid translation along with a series of evocative photos, the chronicle offers a cogent view of a rambling man desperate to shape his life into meaning. It’s a bit of a slog, but fans of a certain style of discursive Euro fiction will find this pleasantly diverting.

May 15, 2022
Neurasthenic tale of cigars and suicide by Swiss writer Burger. "Distinctions collapse, existence has no feeling of proportion with regard to death, when your number comes up, it's best to just slink off without disturbing anybody's sleep...." So thinks Burger's protagonist, heir to a minor cigar empire in a quiet corner of the Aargau--quiet, that is, until, having decided that there's no point to keeping a healthy savings account given the nearness of death, he buys a "rossa corsa Ferrari 328 GTS with a removable hardtop and a maximum speed of 166 mph." Not much happens in the book, though a cigar aficionado will learn a great deal about different kinds of tobacco, means of storage ("The cigar must be stored at the proper humidity, sixty to sixty-seven degrees is ideal, and sheltered from abrupt changes in temperature"), and additives that "impart the right aromas" to the tobacco. Add to that occasional disquisitions on the peculiarities of alpine weather, and Burger's encyclopedic leanings are given room to roam. Burger's smoke-filled narrative, each chapter headed by a different brand of cigar, is at its best when it's at its most Proustian, a stogie triggering a memory and with it a philosophical observation, whether a defiant defense of smoking ("a privilege of the mind and of the senses"), a takedown of psychiatry ("Analysis--and this is the perfidy of it--robs us of our myths"), or a Susan Sontag-esque meditation on depression, which Burger calls a metaphor that allows the afflicted to proclaim, "This is how miserable I am!" It adds up to a slog of a tale that makes any given D�rrenmatt work look like a light comedy. The translator is to be commended, however, for his innovative rendering of Burger's mix of Swiss German with Hochdeutsch, the former signaled by outlandish phrases in italics such as "he ken turn eh fine phrase too." Of some interest to students of postwar literature in German.

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