There is a lot of artistic endeavor in this novel. The protagonist is Augustus Baum, a theatre producer in his mid-fifties, who is hospitalized after a stroke. He blacked out in the theatre while rehearsing Chekhov's "The Seagull". He tries to continue working on the play from his hospital bed. His assistant, Lydia, who is also his former lover, visits him daily to report from the theatre and receive his instructions. Baum has also started a relationship with Ute, the young night nurse, who falls in love with him although she knows that he is a charmer. And then there is also his wife, a neurologist working in the same hospital, who provides him with his personal breakfast everyday, as she has done for the 29 years of their marriage.
This complicated love story mirrors the one in Chekhov's play, and there are a lot of references to it. They are explained every time, so it is easy to understand the references, although I think it might be more interesting if the reader has actual knowledge of the play.
The artistic endeavor, though, is that the novel itself is almost like a play. The whole story takes place in Baum's hospital room, and is almost exclusively told in direct speech (without inverted commas/quotation marks!). There are only a few lines by a very neutral narrator, and two long letters by an old friend of Baum, who himself is entangled in a ménage à trois with his wife and his gay lover.
Like this, the hospital room becomes a stage, and Baum wants his fellow human beings to play the roles he has assigned to them. When this doesn't work, he feels like a victim, seduced by the evil, evil women and their genitalia.
While I appreciate the idea of writing a novel that is like a play, even like a studio play set in one room with a very limited cast of characters, I fail to see the point in this. I just don't think that the world needs another novel about the sex fantasies of an aging man who feels attacked by women wearing jeans or white blouses, or even just existing. His wife tells him that he uses women like power plugs, taking their energy, and his excuse is that Goethe and Brecht did the same. The power plug is just one of many sexual references, some a bit metaphorical, some very explicit.
So what? Why should this novel even be relevant?
There are so many sexist aspects in this and when I googled it, I was surprised to find almost no negative reviews. The book was published four years before #metoo - but in the meantime, the author has published another book about yet another old man torn between two women and being helpless and despaired because they are too cruel to let him keep both of them. The poor man.
No, thanks. No more Martin Walser for me. ( )