What Was Before
by martin mosebach
translated by kári driscoll
seagull, 248 pages, $27.50
A
woman asks a man what his life had been like before they met, and he tells her of a glittering world now gone: A group of well-to-do Germans gathers for poolside parties in the countryside near Frankfurt, vacations in the Mediterranean, and cozy sledding trips. None of them notice that a chain of small events is underway that will threaten their finances, their social positions, and their marriages—even as it brings two lovers together. This is the setup of What Was Before, Martin Mosebach’s first novel to be translated into English. Since the man’s story dwells on seemingly irrelevant details and takes in every tangent, the woman occasionally interrupts her lover to get him back on topic. Only at the end will she realize, along with the reader, that this is a story in which accident is of the essence.
Our narrator (whose name we never learn) begins the tale with his move to Frankfurt. He selects an apartment there on the strength of its being shaded by an ancient chestnut, “an undulating ocean of leaves” whose “silent movement was like the breathing of a body at rest.” Light filters into his room through its boughs, as does the song of a nightingale, a bird he has known only from literature. When the narrator returns from a weekend away, he finds that the tree has been cut down. This is the first of the novel’s many unexpected destructions, and it is a foreboding one. The tree’s stump has bright yellow edges, but a rotten core that looks like “loose tobacco.” Had it toppled, it would have torn his balcony down with it.
F
riendless in this new city, our narrator enters one of those melancholy periods in which you are “alone with your thoughts, hardly speaking.” He begins to notice things he never would have noticed before. Who is this “Baron Slavina,” whose nameplate hangs on a door down the hall? On what basis does the baron invite such disparate guests up to his flat? And why is he never himself seen in the hall? But our narrator finds more to investigate than this minor mystery. He seeks the “hidden states detectable on the surface of reality only as tiny tremors.”
