Maybe This Time by Alois Hotschnig (review)

Maybe This Time is an excellent English translation of the 2006 short story collection Die Kinder beruhigte das nicht by Austrian writer Alois Hotschnig, born in 1959. This collection was published by Peirene Press in London, founded in 2008, which specializes in contemporary European books in English translation. Peirine’s website states, “We only publish books of less than 200 pages that can be read in the same time it takes to watch a DVD.” Subscriptions of three such books a year are offered for twenty-five pounds. Wihle the effort to encourage serious reading as an alternative to watching movies is commendable, the emotional poignancy and disturbing effects of this particular volume are better experienced by reading one or two of the nine stories at a time, rather than all in one sitting.

In keeping with her mission to resist stodginess and promote literature as entertainment, the press’s founder, Meike Ziervogel, comments in large print on a page preceding the book’s title page, “I love Kafka and here we have a Kafkaesque sense of alienation—not to mention narrative experiments ga-lore! Outwardly normal events slip into drama before they tip into horror. These oblique tales exert a fascinating hold over the reader.” Some readers may object to Ziervogel’s light tone or apparent implication that Hotschnig may be Kafka’s equal. However, they will agree that Hotschnig creates events and moods reminiscent of this literary forebear. Moreover, this volume includes a story, “Encounter,” about ants attacking a dying beetle, that evokes Gregor, the man/insect in Kafka’s famous Metamorphosis.

The book is “translated from the Austrian German” (into British English) by Tess Lewis, who has successfully rendered a smoothly flowing English text. The language does not draw attention to itself or the characters’ European backgrounds by awkward or unfamiliar expressions but successfully captures details of their thoughts and experiences, emphasizing the relatively placeless psychological realm and descriptions of ordinary life in mostly unspecified urban or rural settings. Overall, Lewis was quite faithful to Hotschnig’s wording, ably making small changes only as needed for clarity and good English style. She broke up long German paragraphs and sentences, recast or re-ordered short passages to avoid wordiness or confusion, and substituted English idioms for German ones.

These stories, mostly in the first person, demonstrate Hotschnig’s impressive talent at creating and drawing the reader into psychological terrains that are at once familiar and strange—somehow like real life yet uncanny and haunting. They typically begin on an ordinary, realistic level, then gradually shift into abnormal obsession or a world of delusion or a fiction of the impossible. The latter is found in “Then a Door Opens and Swings Shut,” in which a man is bewitched by a strange woman with a doll collection, including a doll that looks exactly like him; and “You Don’t Know Them, They’re Strangers” in which the protagonist is accorded various names, identities, and roles by others and finds he is able to adopt and live out these shifting identities. The paranoid and delusional protagonist of “The Beginning of Something” is alone, alienated from his body to the point that he is unable to recognize himself in a mirror, but for several of the protagonists, disturbed relationships with others come to threaten not only their own identities and sense of self but also their orientation to the world and grip on reality. In “The Same Silence, the Same Noise,” a man carries ordinary curiosity about his neighbors into a consuming obsession; in “Maybe This Time, Maybe Now” all the relationships within a family are damaged by obsessive concern for an uncle who never comes to their gatherings; in “Two Ways of Leaving” a man stalks a former lover and intrudes into their former apartment to examine how it has changed. A less psychologically revealing story provides details of a man’s walk to the site of a car accident, where a doctor who had treated him briefly was killed...