(By the way, if you’re not already following it, the aforementioned blog is dedicated to the book . The book is due on November 9—the 20th anniversary of the falling of the Wall. As a lead-up to this, the blog has been featuring additional material that we couldn’t fit in the book, extra content from the contributors, and other related materials.)

It is a very German work. The Holocaust plays a sort of bizarre Jiminy Cricket role in post World War II German consciousness. It’s ever-present now, framing and informing German literature. In this novel, Hacker plays with a narrative clockwork that I first encountered in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. In the four—really many more than that—simultaneous 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’s characters, Hacker’s characters are grotesque, spiritually and emotionally deformed and, for all of that, beautiful. Hacker hasn’t Anderson’s or Joyce’s ability to define individual characters, but her grasp of this intricate form is extraordinary. Perhaps I’m reaching too much into my own recent activities, but this book is like the television show Lost.

Seriously, I think it is. Bear with me.

The Have-Nots 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’s 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’t. 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—they’re 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.

The world—even just the Western World—has 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’s, 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’re now found through the shared emotion and shared events of novels like this one. In all of its beauty and complexity, Hacker’s book, which I still cannot love, has brought me to the realization that we’re all closer than I thought; uncomfortably close. Just like Lost.

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’s triumph and its failure is in its unwavering pursuit of truth.

Unlike Lost.

by Katharina Hacker
Translated from the German by Helen Atkins
Europa Editions
341 pages, $14.95
978-1-933372-41-9

At the beginning of the novel, Abel Nema lives with his mother in an unnamed Balkan country. His father has abandoned them, and after a fruitless search, his mother resigns herself to the fact of his disappearance. Time passes, and as a teen Abel confesses his homosexual attraction to his best friend Ilia. He is spurned and shortly thereafter Ilia disappears in turn, which drives Abel to travel the countryside, where he resumes his mother’s search for his father.

Abel manages to find one of his father’s former paramours and is invited to stay the night, where he nearly dies of carbon monoxide poisoning. Hospitalized, he wakes up a changed man, with an incredible facility for learning languages and an attendant disability for just about everything else, including any semblance of a sense of direction or a desire to talk. When war break out in the Balkans, Abel flees and manages, utilizing his linguistic abilities, to create an academic life in Central Europe, where his bizarre, child-like manner drives everyone he meets to either fall in love with him, unaccountably, or hate him for no reason.

Habitually wandering the streets, and with little volition of his own, except for studying or drinking at an all-night sex club, where he never manages to get drunk, Abel falls in with the underbelly of refugee society, living for a time with a half-sane collector of the broken down and abandoned, Konstantin, and later living in a debauched and carnivalesque atmosphere with an even less sane woman, Kinga, and the band of musicians for whom she alternately serves as muse, lover and mother. Eventually, Abel finds some version of normalcy in the person of Mercedes, whom Abel marries to acquire legal status, and her pre-pubescent son Omar, whom he tutors in Russian, until some of Abel’s less savory secrets come to life and everything is thrown into disarray.

Terezia Mora chooses to tell the story of Abel from the perspective of everyone who comes into contact with him. That perspective changes from moment to moment throughout the story—sometimes shifting from a third person narration to a first person narration in the middle of a sentence—and doesn’t give the reader much aid in coming to understand her main character, who ends up as a cipher. He wanders from place to place aimlessly, and, because he has no apparent will of his own, much of the story moves forward through coincidence, he lives with this person, he lives with that person, he runs into trouble while he’s lost in this and such a place, or he simply disappears from certain situations with no explanation.

Perhaps Mora intended for Able Nema to serve as a stand-in for the rootlessness and desperation of existence as a Balkan refugees, or the refugee life in general, but the character she has placed at the center of the story is unable to bear that symbolic weight. His psychic absence leaves a large hole in the center of the narrative where our concern for him as a character, as a being inhabiting this created world, should be.

It isn’t until the final pages of the novel that we are allowed to peek behind Abel Nema’s curtain, and then it happens in a borderline hackneyed section where he takes psychedelic drugs and travels through a psychologically revealing dreamscape.

All in all: I have nothing to complain about. Not that I understand what it means, but most of the time I was: happy. Apart from the ruptures—I don’t know, can one say: in time?—when it suddenly became intolerable, neither life nor death but a third thing man was not made for, when a flood of repulsion, of fear overcomes you and carries you off not to pain, no, not even that, but into nothingness, nothingness, nothingness, until at a certain point, like water, it slows down and passes into an idyllic splish-splash, and I, the flotsam and jetsam, remain behind on the shore.

Brief pause to allow me to utter the following words—which in their entirety, not one by one, are for various personal reasons holy to me—with the requisite space: Sometimes, I say, I am filled to the brim with love and devotion, so much so that I practically cease to be myself. My longing to see and understand them is so great that I wish to be the air between them so they can inhale me and I sink into their every cell. Then there are timers I am so overcome with repulsion when I see them before me, their cadaver mouths eating and drinking and talking, and everything in them turns to muck and lies and I feel that if I have to see and hear them one second more I’ll give the next face I see such a drubbing that there won’t be anything left when I am through with it.

By this point in the story it’s too late. We’ve already spent more than 300 pages with a character we know very little about and for whom we have been given little reason to empathize. Day In Day Out is an ambitious novel—Michael Henry Heim’s translation is incredible, as usual—and Terezia Mora has thrown a lot of writing at it, but it falls flat in too many cases to realize its goals.

Day In Day Out
By Terézia Mora
translated by Michael Henry Heim
Ecco
$14.95, 432 pgs.