Stalled communication and the vagaries of memory are the familiar themes woven through the nine spare stories in Hermann's debut collection. Her characters, mostly youngish to middle-aged Berliners, stubbornly insist on living in the past—even if it's someone else's
past. In "The Red Coral Bracelet," a young woman, trying to sort out her own relationship with an uncommunicative boyfriend, describes to her therapist her great-grandmother's life in St. Petersburg, where the great-grandmother's lover shot her husband through the heart in a duel. An artist in "Sonja" finds that his unusual relationship with a reticent, mousy chain smoker whom he claims not to desire is far more resonant than his love affair with a bombshell. The narrator of "Bali Woman" addresses an absent-lover while out on a restless all-night odyssey among Berlin's art world denizens, and in "Hunter Johnson Music" (one of the two stories in the collection not set primarily in Germany), an isolated man living in a dilapidated New York City hotel gives an unusual parting gift to a neighbor woman who's stood him up for a date. Hermann's characters are restless, their desires oblique and unfocused, their memories more real than their raucous real-life encounters. Yet in spite of some sharp observations of contemporary German manners and mores, and her generally elegant prose, Hermann's stories often don't transcend the melancholy self-absorption of her characters. (Apr.)
FYI:Nearly 200,000 copies of this Kleist Preis–winning title have been sold since its 1998 publication in Germany, and foreign rights have been sold in 12 countries.
