Volume 33, Number 13 · August 14, 1986
Special Subjects
By D.J. Enright
Letter to Lord Liszt
by Martin Walser, translated by Leila Vennewitz
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 149 pp., $13.95
The Parable of the Blind
by Gert Hofmann, translated by Christopher Middleton
Fromm, 152 pp., $14.95
Across
by Peter Handke, translated by Ralph Manheim
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 138 pp., $14.95
'And my lament / Is cries countless,' goes one of Gerard Manley Hopkins's sonnets, 'cries like dead letters sent / To dearest him that lives alas! away.' This would serve as a handy description of Martin Walser's new novel, except for the word 'dearest.' Franz Horn is a middle-echelon executive, a sales manager, with Chemnitz Dentures. He has been on the skids for some time, with one attempt at suicide behind him, and Letter to Lord Liszt consists largely of an epistle with nineteen postscripts, a mixture of confession and arraignment, which he is writing to his colleague and rival, Dr. Liszt, sardonically addressed as 'Lord Liszt.' Fifteen years younger, Liszt is—or so Horn believes—beginning his own descent down the slippery slope, having been supplanted by a younger man just as earlier he had supplanted Horn.
Review, 2920 words
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