Can One Novel Capture the Expanses of Human Thought?

SCHATTENFROH: A Requiem, by Michael Lentz; translated by Max Lawton

The narrator of Michael Lentz’s towering, antagonizing novel “Schattenfroh,” a man called Nobody, sits alone in a dark room, a strange contraption strapped to his head. A deluge of images and impressions streams constantly through the mask’s eye slits. Whatever Nobody sees is automatically transcribed, and the resulting “brain-script” is the text we are reading.

A demonic maestro named Schattenfroh — subtle tormentor, shape-shifting muse, possible demigod — controls the process, compelling Nobody ever deeper into the regress of captive consciousness, a swirling vapor of memory and ecstasy, art and history, pain and fear.

Weary readers, somewhere adrift in this 1,000-page surrealist auto-exegesis, may feel inclined to accuse Lentz of adopting the bloated, paranoiac excess of postmodern fiction. They would not be entirely wrong: His attempt to render the sprawl and density of human thought into language makes liberal use of discrete literary forms. There are philosophical disquisitions, dreamlike episodes, administrative nightmares, skewed biographical turns. We get critical examinations of Renaissance art, domestic inventories, forays into the German Reformation, kabbalistic ruminations and analyses of print technology.

But the book’s fidelity to ordeal and vexation marks it above all as a quest narrative, a grand journey through profound disenchantments that may end in death just as easily as discovery. It is experimental fiction that stores its pleasures in the way-stations of form, rich deposits of beauty and terror.

The world we see is teeming, practically a Bosch painting. Its many characters appear and depart with little warning or explanation, often returning hundreds of pages later freighted with some new paradox or fresh demand. A family psychodrama lurches out of the cacophony. The narrator’s father, a German bureaucrat whose tenure coincides with the devastation of World War II, suffuses the narrative with authoritarian menace.

Some of Lentz’s preoccupations recall Kafka’s: domineering patriarchs, ecstatic tortures, the unknowable pleasures of flagellants. The father’s assistants, Mateo and Antonio, bring to mind Jeremias and Artur from “The Castle.” They ferry Nobody from scenario to scenario — to labor on an ancient wall as a “prisoner of beauty,” say, or to explicate the harrowing mechanics of crucifixion — while engaging in their own schemes. They are like pocket demons, puffed up, vicious, petty and after their own inscrutable ends.

History is no impediment to Schattenfroh’s machinations. (“We can be anywhere at any time,” one of his minions states.) The narrator, via the device on his head, travels to various epochs and realms, from Allied firebombings to folkloric legends to 17th-century construction zones. Schattenfroh himself warps and swells, taking on camouflage or shedding skin, manifesting here as a hectoring civil servant and there as the satanic Prince of Gehenna. (At one point he departs entirely into a black page — senescence or death? — which is printed faithfully in the book, à la “Tristram Shandy.”)

Nobody suffers constantly under the maestro’s domination. Utterly lacking in autonomy, he is nonetheless compelled to see, remember, dream, create. The novel’s formal pyrotechnics sometimes obscure the familiarity of its central trope: that of the artist trying to wrest control from forces that circumscribe his vision.

In Max Lawton’s ambitious translation from the German, the prose leaps across a range of styles and registers. Archaic diction, lengthy poems, lists of handwritten names, archival materials, multilingual puns and enigmatic symbols litter the text. Though the language is not in itself difficult to read, the novel’s wealth of references may eventually inspire enough companion volumes to rival those of “Ulysses.” It maintains a hostile erudition that demands the reader keep up or be cut loose. Entire sections left me baffled. Perhaps it is fair to say that such an ample and mysterious inventory of consciousness could not hope to be fully intelligible.

Suffused with unwinnable trials and inescapable punishments, “Schattenfroh” can be a gruesome novel. It has a special fascination with torture, the logistics of which Lentz spends many an agonizing page recounting. (One scene, reprising a peasant’s execution from Ivo Andric’s 1945 novel “The Bridge on the Drina,” is particularly excruciating.) You may learn more than you’d care to about the greased pole and the bone-crushing wheel, or the sounds emitted by slowly expiring bodies, “a sort of creaking and cracking like a fence that is breaking down.”

This punishing material is marshaled not for shock value, but to stretch fiction’s limits of representation. Lentz, a novelist, musician and performer based in Berlin, is interested in literary perimeters only insofar as they assure an even greater wild beyond. Again and again, he tests the novel’s — and the reader’s — essential capacities.

Despite being bullied, beaten, humiliated and imprisoned, Nobody achieves agency — at least of a sort. Sought after by numerous oppressors, he is the magnet pulling at the iron filings. The show cannot go on without him. For his part, he challenges his captors at every turn. Do his acts of futile resistance — sass, playacting, occasional refusal — merit distinction? To drag one’s heels through hell, lucidly documenting all the while: Surely, this is a kind of heroism. (One remembers Odysseus, too, identifying himself as Nobody to escape the monstrous Polyphemus.)

Whether Nobody can be said to have overthrown his jailer is less certain. Any victory signals not freedom but a mere turning over to begin anew. Ending as it began — “One calls this writing” — the novel completes a vertiginous circle, a snake eating its own tail.

What the reader is left with, beyond the glittering fragments of culture, the hallucinated gardens, the savage cruelties, the interrogations and afflictions, the sentient wooden dolls, is a sense of language as an inexhaustible resource, a fount of strange and terrifying novelty. The novel’s subtitle — “A Requiem” — could as easily have been “An Exorcism.”

There is something of the latter ritual in the novel’s blend of possession and expulsion, an embattled sanctity amid the irreverent and the profane. It is part of the exquisite paradox of reading “Schattenfroh,” one of the great, and greatly demanding, literary pleasures of the year: that its annihilating fantasy should somehow reach us as so much light streaming through darkness.

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