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From Christoph Ransmayr, whose brilliant rise to preeminence among the younger generation of writers in the German language was recently crowned when he shared with Salman Rushdie Europe's most prestigious new literary award, the Aristeion Prize—a novel in which fiction and history are forged into a universe of mythic intensity.
World War II has ended, but only in the West. Central Europe is slipping back into its agricultural past.
The bomb has not yet been dropped—nor will it be for twenty years. The Allies have punished Germany for its war crimes by forcing it to revert to a preindustrial age: power stations, railways, factories, and all the machinery of technology have been destroyed or abandoned and left to decay. Moor is a small quarry town (Mauthausen in the all-too-recent past of real history). The occupying American army has installed a camp survivor, Ambras, to govern the local population. Brave, lonely, hated and feared by his former persecutors, Ambras has returned to Moor only because his Jewish wife died there. Setting up house in a derelict villa surrounded by wild hounds that earn him the nickname the Dog King, he chooses another loner, the village boy Bering, as his bodyguard. Moving away from his family and into the compound, the boy enters a new universe of power, of half-glimpsed ideas, of contact with the forbidden world outside. And he meets the only other person Ambras welcomes, a strange and beautiful orphan girl named Lily who lives and hunts in the hills, who knows where the weapons are hidden and forages in the "free world for the goods the villagers crave. But Bering's new life begins to unravel as he succumbs to a strange eye disease known as Morbus Kitahara, in which the vision gradually darkens and which tends to afflict marksmen and sharpshooters. Only Lily can find help, can offer them all a possible future.
The three make a courageous bid to escape, and the account of their flight brings the novel to its extraordinarily gripping and suspenseful climax.
Searingly powerful, with a poetic intensity that stays with the reader long after the last page, The Dog King is a modern masterpiece.
World War II has ended and the Allies have punished Germany by forcing it to revert to a preindustrial age. When three people in the village of Moor make a courageous bid to escape, their flight turns into an extraordinarily gripping feat of suspense. 416 pp. 35,000 print.
The primary setting is Moor, a lakeside village renowned for its nearby stone quarry, and notorious as the site of a former concentration camp. Immediately following the defeat of Hitler's European armies, Moor is occupied by American forces and its citizens are ordered to participate in pageant-like "parties" memorializing the sufferings of the Jews who died there. Ransmayr focuses attention on three variously affected survivors and victims of these occurrences and ceremonies: Bering, the blacksmith's son, is born during a bombing raid and traumatized for years afterward, suffering a variety of physical disabilities. Ambras ("the Brazilian") has emerged from the camps to be appointed "quarry administrator" and in effect rules—as "King of the Dogs"—over a landscape blighted by packs of roving animals and equally feral humans. And Lily, an Austrian refugee who lives alone in an abandoned water tower, turns a cache of hidden weapons she's discovered into a thriving barter business. The intricate relationships that bind these three together reach a crisis point when the quarry is exhausted and a new occupying army precipitates their exile, setting into motion the fate for which they've long been destined. This is a relentlessly dense novel characterized by highly charged language (which comes through powerfully in Woods's splendid translation) and oppressive symbolism (for example, Bering's distorted vision provokes this prognosis: "For the rest of your life. . . you'll see the world as if through blackened glass"). The blurring of historical fact and dreamlike fiction, along with the hortatory emphases, add both confusion and mystery to Ransmayr's apparent point: that neither victims nor those who "didn't know" will escape the consequences of the evil that was done.
Not the masterpiece it obviously aims to be, but a fascinating and provocative fiction nevertheless.
Anonymous
Posted December 14, 2000
I have read the three books that have been published in the US by Ransmayr. He seems to specialize in alternative universes and blurred times. In The Dog King, he presents a Germany post World War II where the victorious Allies have stripped the Country of it's industrial base and rendered it a harmless agrarian society (as was the suggestion of Winston Churchill). In doing this Ransmayr seems to be saying that the conquered now become the victim of the Allies and that new generations can never escape the past but are frozen in it. A definite good read, very thought provoking which is what reading is all about.
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Overview
From Christoph Ransmayr, whose brilliant rise to preeminence among the younger generation of writers in the German language was recently crowned when he shared with Salman Rushdie Europe's most prestigious new literary award, the Aristeion Prize—a novel in which fiction and history are forged into a universe of mythic intensity.
World War II has ...