{"id":261116,"date":"2008-03-26T17:56:38","date_gmt":"2008-03-26T17:56:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2008\/03\/26\/the-have-nots\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:32:20","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:32:20","slug":"the-have-nots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2008\/03\/26\/the-have-nots\/","title":{"rendered":"The Have-Nots"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the outset, I didn\u2019t particularly care for this book. Yet, as a work of fiction, The Have-Nots<\/em> bears no great deficiencies and has, in fact, a certain charm to it. In spite of this, or, perhaps, because of it, I can\u2019t love this book. Perhaps my heart is too small to embrace the multitude of characters, or perhaps my distaste for post-9\/11 literature is too great. This is such a novel of our time. The Have-Nots<\/em> is a not a book about people who are lacking, but people who have too much\u2014too much pain, too many memories, too much angst and ambiguity. They feel too much and dwell too much in each other. What they have not is any real awareness of the poverty of their respective existences. My distaste for this book is an entirely personal reaction to a fairly good, maybe even great, novel.<\/p>\n

It is a very German work. The Holocaust plays a sort of bizarre Jiminy Cricket role in post World War II German consciousness. It\u2019s ever-present now, framing and informing German literature. In this novel, Hacker plays with a narrative clockwork that I first encountered in Sherwood Anderson\u2019s Winesburg, Ohio<\/em>. In the four\u2014really many more than that\u2014simultaneous stories, dozens of lives perform work on the others; each story acts as a cog, turning the others in a gloriously complex movement that anyone could appreciate. Like Anderson\u2019s characters, Hacker\u2019s characters are grotesque, spiritually and emotionally deformed and, for all of that, beautiful. Hacker hasn\u2019t Anderson\u2019s or Joyce\u2019s ability to define individual characters, but her grasp of this intricate form is extraordinary. Perhaps I\u2019m reaching too much into my own recent activities, but this book is like the television show Lost<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Seriously, I think it is. Bear with me.<\/p>\n

The Have-Nots<\/em> follows the interwoven stories of dozens of characters in two countries: Jakob and Isabelle, Jim and Mae, Dave and Sara, and Andras and Magda. The beauty of these stories is that each exists and continues without the reader\u2019s attention. To begin to describe the interconnectedness of it all would either be futile or take an incredibly long time. In either case, I won\u2019t. Central to the novel are Jakob and Isabelle, a German couple who move to England where Jakob is to take a position made vacant by the death of a colleague in the attack on the World Trade Center. Isabelle, his new wife, is an illustrator. These bourgeoisie are the most significant characters, yet the haziest\u2014they\u2019re constantly lost in the world around them, swallowed by a book that attempts to encapsulate so many different lives that those at the center are lost in the drama of those at the edges and their hopeless stories full of violence, crime, abuse, drugs, and just about every other misfortune these characters could quietly experience. Sound like any award-winning television show in particular? Yessir, it sounds like Lost<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The world\u2014even just the Western World\u2014has always seemed enormous, with nations separated by geography, but especially by language. Hacker collapses this too-large world and brings Germany and England and New York within painful millimeters of each other. Perhaps in literature in translation, in books like Ms. Hacker\u2019s, we all have the opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with cousins lost since Babel, with writers telling our stories in other languages. We were lost, but we\u2019re now found through the shared emotion and shared events of novels like this one. In all of its beauty and complexity, Hacker\u2019s book, which I still cannot love, has brought me to the realization that we\u2019re all closer than I thought; uncomfortably close. Just like Lost<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This is also novel about class, but also about motion and interconnectedness and simultaneity and contrast. Nothing remains in stasis. Our characters occupy very different worlds and yet they exist side-by-side, largely anonymously, but in perfect symphony. This book\u2019s triumph and its failure is in its unwavering pursuit of truth.<\/p>\n

Unlike Lost<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Have-Nots<\/a>
\nby Katharina Hacker
\nTranslated from the German by Helen Atkins
\nEuropa Editions
\n341 pages, $14.95
\n978-1-933372-41-9<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the outset, I didn\u2019t particularly care for this book. Yet, as a work of fiction, The Have-Nots bears no great deficiencies and has, in fact, a certain charm to it. In spite of this, or, perhaps, because of it, I can\u2019t love this book. Perhaps my heart is too small to embrace the multitude […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[8886,10966,6216,10956,10206,10946,6],"class_list":["post-261116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-europa-editions","tag-german","tag-germany","tag-helen-atkins","tag-jeff-waxman","tag-katharina-hacker","tag-novel"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261116"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":358806,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261116\/revisions\/358806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}