The Color of the Snow

Jakob, ``born with a big head and strange eyes'' in 1944 to a German war widow, is pronounced ``weak in the head'' and left to the nurturing impulses of his grandfather until the old man's death five years later, whereupon little Jakob ``tried to die like his grandfather, and when he couldn't manage to, he said with a smile, and so clearly that everyone could understand him: ``I'm Moy, that's who I am, Moy.'' In his 30s, still traumatized in some undefined way, Jakob becomes the ward, then the lover, of a distant ``aunt'' but again finds he is ``Moy''--and is institutionalized. Kremer's fable of the outcast defining and asserting his will lacks the exuberant intimacy of Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum , which it stands beside as a minor (and much shorter) variation, and escapes frequently into a dream syntax smelling strongly of pop psychology. However, it is evident throughout that Kremer is an exquisite prose lapidary, as conveyed by Mitchell's Englishing: ``. . . I drink to the point of bursting, and feel within myself the cold column of water from the top of my throat to the end of my urinary tract.'' The color and compression of the childhood sequences, particularly the not-yet-dead father's homecoming, make a promise one wishes the work as a whole had fulfilled. (Apr. )