Wrestling with the Angel

SPECULATIONS ABOUT JAKOB (240 pp.)--Uwe Johnson--Grove ($4.50).

There is often high art in knowing when to say nothing at all. and Uwe Johnson has mastered it. One of a handful of young German writers (TIME, Jan. 4) who are just now working the literary equivalent of Germany's economic miracle, Johnson, 29, has produced a provocative novel full of cryptic clues and calculated silences, inviting the reader to fill in the blank spaces with his own imagination. The result is a remarkably intimate look at life in East Germany, a finely shaded inquiry into the small tensions of a divided world.

The Jakob of the book's title is a line dispatcher in a smoggy railhead city on the Elbe in East Germany. The story opens with his death--run over by a switch engine one foggy night. Was it an accident? Suicide? Was he pushed?

Faulknerian Fragments. The reader is soon plunged into a bewildering narrative jigsaw puzzle that reconstructs Jakob's life. Snippets of dialogue between Jakob's co-workers alternate with long Faulknerian monologues by a state security officer who has been shadowing Jakob. Small, never entirely explained incidents--like the sudden flight of Jakob's mother to the West--switch abruptly to recollections of Jakob by a girl who grew up with his family and has long since escaped to West Berlin. Piecing these fragments together reveals a shadowy plot. But in the process of finding out what happens, the reader discovers that he has been half tricked, half lured by Author Johnson into immersing himself in what it is like to live in the East zone.

Jakob is hemmed in by the paraphernalia of a semipolice state--threats of jail, surveillance, party slogans. Jakob's mother and the girl are already in the West. Why doesn't Jakob join them? Jakob is not fond of the party, or of the Russians. But he takes pride in doing his job well. When a Russian troop train must be rushed through to put down the 1956 Hungarian uprising, he shunts off local traffic to let it pass. He rejects a colleague's suggestion that the switchmen should hold it up. Such a gesture is a frivolous sop to their own private feelings about the Russians, he argues. How long could the switchmen delay them? he asks. "They'd still have made it by tomorrow morning.''

Label of Relief. The Biblical Jacob who wrestled with an angel was trying to learn his name--in the belief that knowing something's name gives a man power over it. When a traditional writer tells exactly what motive a character has. he offers the reader the relief of a label that allows him to put aside his questions about the character and consider the subject--and the story--closed. By refusing to do this. Uwe Johnson makes the matter of Jakob's life a matter for continuing speculation. Jakob moves out of literature into reality--like a friend who suddenly, for no easily discernible reason, commits suicide. Why? The question lingers, humbling but provocative. In the novel's larger frame the reader is forced to feel and appreciate the equivocal human concerns and rival pulls between East and West in intimate human terms that propaganda cliches used by both sides too easily dismiss.

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