The Assignment

Reading the foreword to The Assignment, I reached a passage that made me cringe:

The work is described as "a novella in twenty-four sentences." What accounts for this stylistic idiosyncrasy? In her autobiographical account Charlotte Kerr tells us that, while they were both still thinking about projects based on Bachmann's novel, the couple sat one evening over a bottle of wine, listening to Glenn Gould's performance of the first half of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier I. When the last of the twenty-four movements had ended, Durrenmatt rose, turned off the record player, replaced the LP in its case, and said, "So, now I'm going to write the story in twenty-four sentences." (The German word for a musical movement is Satz, which also means "sentence".)

The writer of the foreword goes on to expand on the relation of Durrenmatt to Bach, on music to prose, et cetera. It's not that I object to drawing inspiration from other art forms, or  the relation of a style of writing to a style of music, it's that a self-imposed limitation such as the above would seem to lead to a rambling form of stream-of-consciousness that would be tedious to process and absorb. Fortunately, this is not the case; I found The Assignment to be easier reading that the works of Jose Saramago, who often employs a similar style of pages and pages of one sentence. So while each of the twenty-four chapters here is one sentence only, many are extremely short, (the first three are only two pages each), and even the longer ones remain digestible.

This is an odd novel -- the subtitle is "On the observing of the observer by the observed." This is perhaps best illustrated by the anecdote told by our protagonist's friend, the logician D.: that his house is on a mountain, and he often catches tourists observing it with binoculars, while he in turn watches through his telescope. When they seem him observing them, they become upset and withdraw. Some return later and throw rocks. Everyone in the novel is both observing and observed, and the way this is portrayed in the climax gives that moment a bit of a comic tone. It's an unsettling and easy read.