#698 in our old book database. Not rated.

Ein Zürcher Kantonsrat erschießt in einem überfüllten, von Politikern, Wirtschaftskoryphäen und Künstlern besuchten Restaurant der Stadt vor aller Augen einen Germanisten, Professor an der Universität, läßt, zu zwanzig Jahren Zuchthaus verurteilt, im Gefängnis einen jungen, mittellosen Rechtsanwalt zu sich kommen und erteilt diesem den Auftrag, seinen Fall unter der Annahme neu zu untersuchen, er sei nicht der Mörder gewesen. Der junge Anwalt, der den scheinbar sinnlosen Auftrag annimmt, erkennt zu spät, in welche Falle ihn die Justiz geraten läßt, weil er sie mit der Gerechtigkeit verwechselt.

'I have to write the truth, stick to the truth, and yet: What is the truth behind the truth?'

Completed almost 30 years after it was begun, Durrenmatt's novel is typical of his classic take on the crime novel, focusing on the absurdity of the legal process whilst developing a plot-twisting novel in itself. This is a whydunnit, that then becomes a who-may-have-done-it, before reverting to something else. Not one for those with an iron-clad faith in the justice system, this is an intriguing if not wholly successful genre-busting novel. Well worth a read, even if it feels a bit dated.

(With thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for an ARC in return for an honest and unbiased review.) ( )

By the end of this book, I appreciated it. But during much of the book, I felt like I was reading a mystery as written by an OuLiPo-ian writer, and it was a little too much work to decipher it relative to the value of the payoff. ( )

A prominent Zürich businessman walks into the city's most exclusive restaurant and politely greets the professor of German, who's dining there. He then produces a revolver and shoots him dead in front of a select group of witnesses including the local police chief and the public prosecutor. Before anyone has time to react, he walks out again and carries on with his programme for the evening - the confusion is so complete that the police only catch up with him at the Tonhalle, where he's listening to a performance of Bruckner's seventh symphony (and the police have to wait for the end of the piece before moving in to arrest him...).

It's probably only Dürrenmatt who could turn so transparent an act into a murky crime story full of moral ambiguities, and even Dürrenmatt had trouble with it - he started to write the book in 1957, and came back to it several times over the next 25 years, but never really worked out how to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion until the 1980s, when his publishers asked him to prepare the fragment for publication as part of his complete works. In its final form, it became essentially a satire on the idea that there can be any certainty in the concept of "criminal justice" (a theme that comes up quite a bit in Dürrenmatt), as well as poking a bit of malicious fun at Swiss bourgeois life, where "culture" and "society" always get subordinated to "business".

The book sometimes feels a bit disjointed because of the long gestation period and the very confusing timeline (the narrator of the main part of the text is an alcoholic disgraced lawyer, Spät, who has clearly lost his grasp of the order in which things happened), but there are a lot of very telling observations and some good jokes, so it's still well worth a look, even if it isn't Dürrenmatt on top of his form. ( )