The Color of the Snow - Hardcover

Kremer, Rudiger

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811212009 ISBN 13: 9780811212007

Publisher: New Directions, 1992

Synopsis

The Color of the Snow, German writer Rüdiger Kremer’s first novel, is a most unusual and haunting work of art. Carefully constructed and elegantly written, The Color of the Snow consists of twenty-one texts which spiral around the character of Jakob, who first appears as a seemingly retarded boy born during World War II. The texts include stories, a script for a film, a radio play, a short essay––a tour de force of narrative possibilities. The twenty-one parts are interrelated and form a narrative, but their relationship to the “story” and to each other is intentionally complex: they circle Jakob, they reflect him in his shifting shapes (it begins to appear that he may well be the author of the texts we are reading), but what is at the center remains a mystery. Mysterious too is the alchemy Kremer employs to create a stunningly moving novel out of intellectual challenges.

About this title

From the Back Cover

The Color of the Snow, German writer Rudiger Kremer's first novel, is a most unusual and haunting work of art. Carefully constructed and elegantly written, The Color of the Snow consists of twenty-one texts which spiral around the character of Jakob, who first appears as a seemingly retarded boy born during World War II.

Reviews

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.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This kind of gray and humorless and relentlessly intellectual German fiction hasn't been much translated lately here--and it's almost a perverse pleasure to see one again, to be reminded of how much German Romanticism--its cult of anesthetized ruin--still holds sway over some sections of literary culture. Kremer writes of a cipher named Jacob, a consciousness forever being shocked into numbness by life's creepy oddments: the slaughter of a horse, a grotesque screenplay, the discovery of a soldier's dead body, mirrors mirroring mirrors, snow, chess (``I'll tell you what fascinates me about playing chess against myself. It's the chance to inevitably be the winner and the loser at the same time. And the snow. The snow isn't white like snow. The snow takes on any color I want''). Each of the 21 ``text''-sections here testifies to Kremer's having arrived at its controlling (and clich‚d) idea before he ended up with its actual prose. Finger exercises. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811212009
• ISBN 13: 9780811212007
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 117