Obviously I'll have to reread this. Some parts will only make sense at the third pass. Some will never do. If there is a "beginning", a "middle" and whatever else belongs to a narrative, it is not linearly arrangeable, and I do not even mean chronology. It is a dense wad of strands, which, when thrown even at the most reasonable of readers, may produce a bout of dyslexia sublimated by commonplace expectorations and blame-it-on-the-author kind of criticism.

So, if you expect a "tale well told" and a page-turner, turn away. If, on the other hand, you want to see the ripped backside of language (German!) and succumb to a reader's PTSD, and tie a knot into your reading list, go ahead.

Johnson is one of the few truly accursed fiction writers who combines astonishing technique, inconceivable structural solutions and the bleeding truth of history, which he is able to see with a clear perspective as if he were generations away, even as it is smothering him. It is a mystery much more disturbing than the fact that one has to dig deep into the text to excavate the chronology and aetiology of events.

Johnson tells the tale of a meticulous, brilliant train dispatcher who gets hit by a train - if you get the irony and the allegorical meaning of the plot (revealing the works of the evolving GDR socialism), you will not follow the blurb's guesswork advice: is it a suicide? is it a murder? is it an accident? There is nothing solid about the case: all is speculation, ideology turns everyone into a spy, whatever you know reaches you through the grapevine, any person is a dossier, a paper trail of disparate font faces and handwriting samples (which is, thankfully, not played out in the book's typography). And a whole range of strikingly variegated personalities naturally disrupt the flow of the text, incorporate the inevitable conflict of the individual with the ideological, convert the book into a kind of chaotic explosion diagram of the time and place that expelled and eventually destroyed the writer.

While I wasn't even always sure whose words I was reading and what exactly happened in terms of the plot and why, I know now that I have never read anything as convincingly clear, truthful and personal as "Mutmaßungen über Jakob" about the ambitions and conflicts of the post-war socialism.

And yes, it is very autobiographical, and, yes, some characters even have close prototypes with similar fates. ( )

Nella Pomerania anteriore ai tempi della DDR le congetture erano così fitte, così diffuse che si potevano respirare nella nebbia di novembre. O forse ne erano la causa. ( )

German