A Kind of Lostness
Reviews
By Burke Nixon
In the early stages of reading Clemens Meyer’s While We Were Dreaming—the first fifty pages, let’s say—I couldn’t remember the title. A buddy of mine asked me what I’d been reading lately, and I told him I was reading this long German novel about a group of juvenile delinquent friends (or maybe I just said “a group of adolescent boys”) in East Germany around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Seeming mildly interested, he asked me what the title was, and I had to pause before admitting that I couldn’t remember. It was embarrassing.
During those early stages, I couldn’t distinguish the characters, either. I could name Mark and Danny and Rico and Little Walter (and Fred?), but I couldn’t have told you the difference between any of them. The characters say each other’s names a whole lot (“Why didn’t you guys visit me, Danny?” “Please, Mark, there’s no point . . .”), but that didn’t help me. In fact, if I didn’t have the book in front of me, I couldn’t even have told you which one narrated the whole thing.
But the magic of any great novel occurs over time—in the accumulation of narrative time and actual time spent reading the book—and the more time I spent with this particular novel, the greater it seemed. The characters began to distinguish themselves in my mind, just as people do over time in real life. Now I can describe them from memory: Rico is the future and former boxer who goes to juvenile detention centers or jail multiple times. Paul is the future and former collector of pornography who also gets mocked for going to church with his mom. Mark is the future and former drug addict. Stefan, also known as Pitbull, is the future and former owner of a pit bull. He’s also the future and former drug dealer who sells drugs to Mark.
I say “future and former” because the novel jumps around in time. In each chapter, Danny tells a different story about himself and his friends and their lives in one of Leipzig’s roughest neighborhoods, stories of petty crime and senseless violence, carjacking and shoplifting and heavy drinking, billiards and boxing, soccer riots and absent or alcoholic fathers, school crushes and sex clubs, days and nights spent in pubs or illegal techno clubs or juvenile detention. Meyer arranges the episodes in a non-chronological order that’s initially disorienting but which ends up creating a genuinely pulverizing emotional effect.
Imagine seeing a video of yourself and your friends at age thirteen, followed by videos of yourself and your friends at seventeen and fifteen and nineteen, the different versions of you and your pals varying detectably in innocence, in confidence, in worldliness, in hope, in your capacity to be shocked by the behavior of others and yourself. That’s essentially how it feels to follow Danny and his friends through this novel’s nearly six hundred pages, witnessing all the subtle and significant changes revealed via Meyer’s authorial time machine.
In an interview with the New Statesman, Meyer notes that he spent a bit of time in juvenile detention centers himself during his teenage years in Leipzig, for “some small stuff, stealing something or being drunk and destroying something.” While We Were Dreaming is his debut novel, originally published in Germany in 2007 and becoming a bestseller there, but only recently published in English for the first time. Katy Derbyshire’s lean, direct, crystal-clear translation features quite a bit of British slang, which makes sense since she’s originally from London and since Fitzcarraldo is a British publishing house. But this might add another disorienting effect for American readers—reading an East German novel where the characters use British slang like “bloody” and “bollocks” and “crusties.” (I had to look that last one up.)
I remember talking to my cousin once about a famous and award-winning work of contemporary fiction that she’d recently read and didn’t enjoy at all. “They tricked me into thinking it was a novel,” my cousin said, “but it was really just a collection of stories. I wanted to read an actual novel.” Usually, I side with my cousin: I know the trick of calling your “linked stories” a novel, and I don’t like it. And my cousin might make the same complaint about While We Were Dreaming. Each chapter offers its own title (“The Black Hole,” “Boy Racer,” “Injury Time,” etc.) and its own self-contained story. And yet I don’t feel scammed at all—and I’m pretty sure you won’t, either—not just because the stand-alone chapters add up to a powerful, disturbing, nonlinear coming-of-age story, but also because each individual episode is so damn compelling.
The possibility of violence hovers over most of the episodes. Occasionally, the potential violence is comical, as in the early chapter about a school military-defense drill, where the characters have to lie on their backs in the school corridors, wearing signs with phrases like GRENADE SPLINTER INJURY, SEVERE HEAD INJURY (PROBABLE LODGED BULLET), and BURIED UNDER RUBBLE. (Danny and Mark use their imaginary-victim status to peek down the shirts of the female students who take them away on stretchers.) Most of the time, though, the potential for severe injury is very much real. Danny and his friends suffer or barely escape violence from a variety of sources: skinheads, classmates, abusive fathers, cops, other inmates in juvenile detention, rival soccer fans, and occasionally each other.
The tension Meyer creates in these episodes can feel nearly unbearable. This is a novel that can make you forget to breathe. One example: a chapter called “Mongrels,” which begins with Danny on his balcony with binoculars, spying on two sunbathing teenage girls in the playground down below. Suddenly, the girls get up and run away, looking scared for a reason Danny can’t decipher. Then he sees his friends Mark and Rico running, too:
I took the binoculars away from my eyes. Rico and Mark were almost at the playground now, and there were ten or twelve guys running after them; I counted again—there were fourteen of them . . . Mark and Rico ran through the sandpit, Mark stumbled and fell down. Rico turned round, ran back to him and pulled him up again. Most of the guys were wearing bomber jackets, red, green, blue; only one was wearing snow camouflage. I knew who he was; that jacket was his trademark.
The guy wearing the snow camo calls himself the Leopard, but most people in their neighborhood call him Birdshit. Danny has seen him before at the roller rink, hanging out with the skinheads: “We’d had trouble with the skins a few months back, but we thought they’d forgotten or were too scared.” It turns out that Birdshit hasn’t forgotten and isn’t scared.
Rico and Mark climb a fence to the backyard of Danny’s building. Danny hears them talking frantically to each other: “Shit, Rico, they’re gonna get us, they’ll mess us up!” “Jesus, shut it, get inside, get up to Danny’s!” That’s when Danny remembers that he locked the back door earlier, after taking out the trash. “Shit, shit, Danny,” he hears his friends say, “open up the bloody door!” Danny wants to run down and unlock the door, bring an alarm gun and some knives, but he doesn’t. Instead, he hides: “The first of the bastards were already at the wall and now in the yard. Why hadn’t I shouted, yelled like a monster and thrown the plastic chairs and the table and the flower boxes down on the bastards?”
We watch as he watches, still hiding, as his friends are attacked and beaten by the skinheads. “I wished someone in the building would call the cops,” he tells us. “I couldn’t do it, we had rules. But I knew I was breaking all the rules of the street while I squatted up here, breaking every oath we’d sworn to each other, ‘never run off, never leave anyone in the lurch, never give up.’ ” Later, after it’s all over, Danny emerges outside, pretending to be shocked when he sees his beaten and bloody friends: “Shit, what are you doing here? What’s . . . what’s . . . what bastard did that?”
There’s something nauseating and extremely human in Danny’s moment of cowardice and deception, something that we can all probably recognize deep within ourselves—at least I know I can—even if we’ve never been in that situation. But the episode doesn’t end there, and Danny doesn’t escape unharmed. In fact, it goes on for nearly forty more pages, the tension ratcheting back up again and again, with a few twists on the way, including Danny’s strange visit to an underground punk/goth club. I won’t spoil it for you. Read it yourself.
Meyer uses a stripped-down, minimal style: dialogue and action, dialogue and action. The style matches the lives and age of the characters he describes—interiority is not a priority. (Danny’s priorities are basically friendship and drinking, though we might also throw in sex and self-protection.) Not counting the opening chapter, which serves as a kind of prologue, Danny doesn’t reflect much, perhaps because there’d be too much pain to confront, or perhaps because he’s an adolescent male, possibly the least reflective subspecies on earth. He clings to his friends and their shared wildness over everything else.
Like many of us at age thirteen or fifteen, Danny isn’t interested in the particular historical-political context he finds himself in. We get glimpses of how his life has been shaped by the constraints and difficulties of existence in East Germany—at school, many of his teachers and classmates disappear overnight, escaping to “the West”—but this is a story where history lurks in the background, a powerful but largely unspoken source of the characters’ miseries. Although the friends do attend a massive protest at one point, don’t expect a climactic episode where the Wall comes down and Danny finds a life-changing freedom beyond his home. After East Germany opens up, his life mostly stays the same, centered on his friends and the increasing trouble in which they find themselves.
The book isn’t always pretty—one could argue that there’s no more gruesome subject in all of literature than the adolescent male—but it feels very real. Ultimately, Meyer’s raw and unforgettable novel tells a story that we can recognize in almost any city in almost any age, a story of young men in harsh and often violent circumstances who choose the immediacies of friendship and trouble over any other narrow (and generally hypothetical) options they might have. In their desperate wildness and unquestioning loyalty toward each other, Danny and his friends find both genuine relief and lasting heartbreak. Looking back on everything from some kind of rehab or psychiatric facility, Danny puts it this way: “Not a night goes by when I don’t dream of all that, and every day the memories dance in my head and I torment myself asking why it all turned out the way it did. Sure, we had a whole lot of fun back then, but still there was a kind of lostness in us, in everything we did, a feeling I can’t explain.” Meyer’s novel left me with that same unexplainable feeling. And it lingers still.
Burke Nixon lives in Houston. His essays and reviews have appeared in The American Scholar, The Millions, and Popmatters, among other places.
More Reviews