Volume 22, Number 14 · September 18, 1975
Shaken Men
By Michael Wood
The Impossible Proof
by Hans Erich Nossack, translated by Michael Lebeck
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 218 pp., $5.95
The D'Arthez Case
by Hans Erich Nossack, translated by Michael Lebeck
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 313 pp., $7.95
To the Unknown Hero
by Hans Erich Nossack, translated by Ralph Manheim
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 154 pp., $6.95
Tact is not usually thought of as a major literary virtue. In American writing, when it appears at all, it comes off as a failure of nerve or an attempt at gentility; in English writing, where it appears all the time, it is clearly a major vice, a crippling, unnecessary limitation, a form of fear. In postwar German writing, on the other hand, tact is often the ruling condition of discourse, the only passage through which words are going to find their way on to the page. To put it far too neatly, if German writers do not wish to howl, they must whisper, there is no reliable middle range for their voices. And if they howl, Hans Erich Nossack suggests, they will be taken over by all those people who like to hear animals in pain:
Review, 2173 words
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