Ludwig’s Room by Alois Hotschnig (review)

The translator of the novel Ludwig’s Room by Alois Hotschnig, born in 1959, is Tess Lewis. Also the translator of Hotschnig’s story collection Maybe this Time, published in 2011, Lewis has impressive credentials as an editor, writer, and translator of important French and German books. She has received an nea Translation Fellowship, a pen grant, and an English pen Award. Her insight into Hotschnig’s small but gripping body of work is apparent in her 2008 article “From the Personal to the Political and Back Again: Intimacy and Isolation in the Fiction of Alois Hotschnig” in World Literature Today (2008). There she asserts succinctly that Hotschnig is “celebrated for stylistic virtuosity and precision of observations” and refers to his “mastery in examining universal concerns through the prism of an acute focus on the local” (43).

Lewis’s excellent English version of Ludwig’s Room is both true to the original and written in natural, vivid, and idiomatic English, free of awkward or distracting expressions. Her skillful translation techniques can be appreciated by comparing selected passages from Ludwig’s Room with the German original, Ludwigs Zimmer (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2000; Taschenbuch Innsbruck-Vienna: Haymon 2011). To conform to English style, she shortened and reconstructed sentences, added contractions and active verbs, and rephrased passages that would seem too wordy or indirect if translated word for word. Precision, vividness, and variety guide her thoughtful word choices; examples are “spotted” for “gefunden,” and “It worked” for “Es gelang.” “Gestrüpp” is translated variously as “scrub,” “thickets and brambles,” and “under-growth.” The idiom “You’ll come back to the fold” is a well-chosen rendering of “Sie kommen noch auf uns zurück,” as is “My goal was always to escape” for “Das Ziel hieß davon.” The English passage, “It makes me feel like a child again” has more impact than the German expression, “immer bin ich dabei an einem Ort meiner Kindheit.” By taking such small liberties on the level of word and sentence, Lewis succeeded in conveying not just the meaning of the parts and the whole of the text, but even its tone, moods, and pace to English readers.

This translator, like the author himself, meets the particular challenge of holding the reader’s interest in a narrative that both withholds information and relates seemingly mundane events in a dreary, bittersweet milieu. To be intrigued by suspense evoked by vague allusions to sinister family secrets, represented by a secret room and hidden letters and photographs, the reader must be drawn into the thoughts and emotions of a lonely, melancholy protagonist, Kurt Weber. He moves into his aunt and uncle’s home in rural Landskron, which he has just inherited. Against the backdrop of his ambivalent childhood memories, he settles into the house, explores the area, and meets his initially unfriendly neighbors. Like many Austrian authors who rebel against idyllic portrayals of rural Austria associated with Heimatliteratur, Hotschnig describes the nearby lake, mountain, and wooded areas as mysteriously disquieting rather than beautiful or comforting. As Kurt’s experiences unfold in the real world of the author’s native Carinthia, the author skillfully combines realistic, believable detail with unexpected and unexplained twists. Lengthy dream sequences lend a fascinating nightmarish quality to the entire narrative.

Ludwig’s Room has much in common with Hotschnig’s other works. His fiction typically features a preoccupation with death, disturbed relationships, and psychological portrayals that seem familiar at first but then shift to states of obsession or delusion. His characters are often haunted by the past, especially their own guilt or that of others. New in this book is a sense of history, for the secrets found in Ludwig’s room involve events from the World War II era. Many readers will be reminded of a more recent connection to history as well: Carinthia’s far-right governor Jörg Haider caused an international outcry in the late 1990s over his xenophobia and pro-Nazi views.

The room named in the title holds the...