serendip

Kleinzeit

Russell Hoban

Bloomsbury

Had done some Hoban before - The Turtle Diary and The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz; had started Riddley Walker but never gotten through with it for some reason, even though it seemed to be the most ambitious of the three, some sort of The Sound and the Fury cover. Hoban always struck me as a writer with original thinking and characteristic prose - not your creative writing workshop standard issue. So it was with a reasonably high level of expectation I started reading Kleinzeit, and no, I wasn’t disappointed.

Maybe it’s because Hoban is a very 70s kind of novelist, but there is a distinct and liberating quality to his syntax - of imagination and writing. He is not handicapped with “story arcs” and “character development” and all that - he seems to come up with a concept and then get on with it. Kleinzeit is not your typical protagonist - a middle-aged man who gets hospitalized, falls in love with Sister, runs away, comes back, runs away, comes back, is discharged, and finally moves in with her. In the process, he reads on the Peloponnesian War, follows the lead of yellow papers, has conversations with Hospital, Underground, Death, and Memory, and writes poems for cash in the subway. Not much of a plot, but the result, in Hoban’s hands, is an impressive, if “small time”, work of art.