Marrow and Bone

January 6, 2020
Kempowski (All For Nothing) offers an astute and ever-surprising comedy of the cultural divide between East and West in 1988. At 43, war orphan Jonathan Fabrizius halfheartedly pursues a life of the mind in Hamburg, where he works as a sometime journalist. After Frau Winkelvoss, a representative of the Santubara car manufacturer, offers Jonathan an opportunity to document a trip across Poland for an upcoming rally, Jonathan readily accepts out of interest in his birthplace in former East Prussia. Jonathan takes ironic pride in a painful past (“As far as suffering was concerned, this guaranteed him an unparalleled advantage over his friends”) and adopts a wry attitude toward the way he’ll be perceived as a German abroad (“When you’d started a world war, murdered Jews and taken people’s bicycles away (in Holland) the cards were stacked against you”). On the road in Poland with Winkelvoss and a famous race car driver at the wheel of the flashy V8, Jonathan plays the part of arrogant Western intellectual as their adventure turns picaresque, complete with a car jacking. As Jonathan tunes in to the wreckage of war, Kempowski’s unsparing, dagger-sharp prose leads Jonathan to face the loss of his parents and homeland. This hilarious, deeply affecting exploration of postwar dichotomies successfully channels the satire of Confederacy of Dunces and the somber reflectiveness of Austerlitz.

Starred review from February 1, 2020
A West German writer takes an assignment in Poland that exposes layers of lingering war trauma. It's 1988. Journalist Jonathan Fabrizius is living in Hamburg, in an apartment that survived World War II, but his relationship with his girlfriend, Ulla, is crumbling. While she works on an art exhibition about cruelty, he prepares for an assignment to help a luxury carmaker chart a promotional tour through Poland. That's where, in the war's waning days, his father was killed in combat and his mother "breathed her last" giving birth to him. "As far as suffering was concerned, this guaranteed him an unparalleled advantage over his friends," he thinks. He has a pretty easy life, but his outlook is morbid, his humor so biting it's usually more shocking than funny. Then, just as a reader is settling in for a long, coldhearted meditation on irony, the road trip across Poland begins, and a novel of broad historical and emotional significance unfolds. Kempowski (who died in 2007 but whose All for Nothing was released in English in 2018) captures the zeitgeist of pre-unification Germany in sharp, darkly engaging prose. One traveler marvels "that all the Poles were so friendly. To us Germans! After what we did to them. A third of the population exterminated and all the towns and cities destroyed!" and in the next breath is complaining about the hotel's scrambled eggs and sweet rolls. First published in German in 1992, this is a time capsule that feels contemporary as it looks for answers to big questions about war and suffering. Probing a part of WWII that few Americans know, Kempowski reveals how the damage goes on long after the guns fall silent.

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