Sansibar oder der letzte Grund

by Alfred Andersch

Martin wanted to revisit this book when we were planning our visit to Hamburg in October 2023. It was also the reason for our walk around the Aussenalster lake on our last day there.

I downloaded the Kindle version, and read it while in holiday. It is an easy enough read (it was, after all, as an A-level set text that Martin came across it). It is also quite a short book and took me only a couple of days to read.

The entire action takes place within less than 24 hours in the coastal town of Rerik on the Baltic Sea. A town of this name does exist, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and so it is possible that the actual town was the model. After visiting northern Germany, I felt I could picture this town. I imagine it as a smaller version of Lübeck.

The protagonists are: Knudsen, a fisherman and Communist Party member; Helander, a pastor; Judith, a young Jewish girl from a privileged Hamburg family; Gregor, another Communist carrying out an a assignment for the Central Committee of the party; and a teenager known only as “the boy” who, inspired by the adventure of Huckleberry Finn, is desperate to leave the boredom of his home town and have some adventures of his own.

Each chapter is headed with the names of one or more of these characters. Each character (except perhaps the boy) is grappling with their conscience, doubts and decisions to be made about the right course of action. Though their actions might be informed by their political or religious allegiance, each of them has moved their position from the ‘straight and narrow’ and is finding his own way, prompted by his conscience.

Even Judith, whose fate is entirely dependent on the choices and actions of others, makes some decisions of her own – though these have little effect on her fate.

As well as Judith’s need to flee the country – she has been pushed into this action by the determined suicide of her mother – there are other reasons why Knudsen is pressured to take his boat across to the freedom of Sweden. Pfarrer Helander wants to rescue a wooden sculpture from the fate that awaits it at the hand of “die Anderen” – who we can understand are meant to be the Nazis. The sculpture depicts a kneeling postulant, reading a book. The assumption is that the Nazis wish to remove this from the public gaze, because independent reading and learning are anathema to them.

Gregor himself would like to flee, but recognises that his need is not as pressing as that of the girl or the statue, and he perceives that there are other options open to him. Perhaps he is the author himself, who, though imprisoned for 6 months in Dachau in 1933 for his Communist party activities, nevertheless remained in Germany after this and throughout the Second World War, until his desertion from the army and capture by the Americans in June 1944.

I enjoyed reading this book, undemanding to read and yet touching on important moral issues. I was sufficiently interested in the characters to want to know what became of each of them – especially Knudsen, who in my view was taking the biggest risk.

I also feel somewhat conflicted about Andersch’s (and others’) decision to go into “inner exile”, remaining silently in Germany through the Nazi years although opposed to the regime. W G Sebald, I read, spoke out quite vehemently against it. For contemporaries this must have been a polarising issue.

Pet Sematary

by Stephen King

This is one of King’s earlier books that I had not yet read. I have been a Stephen King fan since about 2010, and have read much of what he has published since then – books and stories – plus a few of his earlier books (Lisey’s Story, The Stand, Bag of Bones). This book came to my attention after reading The Bee Sting  on this year’s Booker prize long list, now on the shortlist, and – who knows? – maybe destined to be the winner. The young boy character in that novel refers at times to the films of King’s book, which he has evidently seen.  It’s a scary book, probably too scary a film for a child of 11 or 12. Having read King’s book, I can definitely see a connection. At the time of reading The Bee Sting, it was enough of a jog to get me reading the earlier book.

Before I get on to thinking about the story, I think a couple more contextual things deserve mention.  Maybe it is just me, but I felt there was rather a lot of vomiting in this story! I really don’t care for vomiting, fictional or real, mine or anyone else’s. In fact I think I am a bit of a ‘vomitophobe’.  Though each of these episodes may have been contextually appropriate in the narrative, it struck me that this book was probably written during the time when King was wrestling with addiction and alcoholism, and regurgitating as a result of excessive consumption of drugs or drink was probably an everyday reality for him. But I speculate … and this is really not a subject I wish to dwell on.

My next reflection relates to King’s later (much later) introduction in the paperback edition I borrowed from the library.  He writes that he considers this his scariest book.  And that because of this, he had put it in a drawer for a couple of years until he needed a book that would satisfy the terms of a publishing contract he wanted to move away from, in order to work with a different publisher. (King has worked with several publishers over the years.) Is it his scariest story? For me, the final paragraph is in some ways the scariest, as it is very certainly not the end of the story.  Dealing, as this story does, with what happens after death and people’s eternal fascination with life forms that have died and come back in some way (almost always changed for the worse) it is imaginative and, yes, nightmarish.

Stephen King’s depictions of everyday suburban family life are what I enjoy in his stories, at least as much as his plot development.  The totally believable settings of his characters allow the reader to believe even the most outlandish story of the surreal, supernatural and just plain nasty goings-on that befall the average American family.  In this story, young parents Louis and Rachel Creed move to a university town in Maine where Louis is to take on a medical role serving the campus community. Their two young children, Ellie and Gage, adapt easily to their new environment.

Death is an important ‘character’ in this story from the start.  Ellie is fascinated by the ‘pet sematary’ some local children have established near their new home.  She is afraid of her own cat dying (why is it that in American families, a pet belongs to a child or children rather than to the whole family?). Her mother doesn’t wish to speak about death – in fact the whole idea spooks her.  After a while we learn that this is because of her own childhood experience helping to care for a seriously ill sister who eventually dies with no one but 8-year-old Rachel around.

The family get to know the elderly couple living opposite, Jud and Norma Crandall. This couple also fit into a norm of American life – without children themselves, they are however friendly towards children; Norma bakes delicious cookies; Jud sits up on his porch drinking beer with Louis and telling him stories about the area and its characters. They are a benign influence in the new family’s life … until Ellie’s beloved cat, Church, is killed on the road.

The resurrection story that develops from this point is not believable, although it is, from the start, unremittingly malevolent in character. Suffice to say that there are more deaths and more resurrections.

Grief is expressed in this story in many of its possible forms.  There is the practical, quiet grief of an aged widower after sixty years of married life.  There is the howling, burning grief of parents for their young child. There is the imagined grief of a child for the possible loss of a pet animal. There is the relief, and associated guilt, that comes with the death of a person whose protracted illness has taken its toll on those around. There is anger, aggressiveness, disbelief.  And there are dreams.

King also acknowledges, through his main character Louis, that death is always just around the corner. I can’t help feeling that the author’s own struggles with addiction, at around the time he wrote this story, may have made him all the more conscious of the thin line the separates the living from the dead.