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In Which I Profess My Love for Dürrenmatt - Confession 29

2014.08.25 20:37:50
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header Friedrich Dürrenmatt is a Swiss author –primarily of crime novels– and he is one of my favourite authors, if not the favourite. There's a lot of factors in his works that fascinate me and I'll try to talk about a few of them and why I find them interesting here.

As I've mentioned a couple of times before, I am generally not a very light person and I tend more towards heavy and serious things. Dürrenmatt's stories too mirror this side in that they are not ‘nice’, for the lack of a better word. They resonate with a lot of emotions that we usually associate with negativity: fear, discomfort, suppression, helplessness, to name just a few.

Whenever it comes to feelings it is of course difficult to really describe them properly or to transmit them effectively to someone else so that they may understand the intensity and nuances of them. The only proper way to appreciate it, is to undergo the experience oneself. Let me just say that these works manage to move me to a degree that I start to sweat and feel really uneasy physically, something that does not happen lightly.

If these books do indeed provoke such strong negative emotions within me, why in the world would I like reading them, let alone so much as to praise them as some of the best books ever written? The answer is that precisely because they manage to provoke such strong emotions. That, to me, is proof of their writing quality. If a book manages to resonate with the reader in a way that it can manipulate the reader's feelings so strongly it has achieved something that the overwhelming majority of books and stories never manage to even come close to doing.

The fact that these emotions are negative makes this all the more alluring to me though. I feel that there are many more facets and aspects to unpleasant emotions than there are to pleasant ones. The addition of drama that is necessary to provoke such feelings also paints a much more interesting environment than otherwise. It allows for tension, destruction, uncertainty and gives the events a feeling of importance, there are things at stake that could be lost. On the other hand if you take an environment that is happy and positive there is very little that can be done except for tearing it down into the negatives or introduce an element of negativity in order to introduce something for the reader to care about.

Dürrenmatt's crime novels aren't traditional crime novels like Agatha Christie's or Arthur Conan Doyle's either. They deal a lot with the psychological characteristics of the people involved and not only with battles of wit between detective and criminal, but also with psychological warfare and analysis. None of the characters in his books appear too perfect, they are all very clearly flawed both physically and mentally, often very strongly so.

I'll briefly talk about ‘Suspicion’ (Der Verdacht). It is difficult to say much while trying to avoid spoiling any of it, but I will try my best. Bärlach just retired from his job as an inspector and due to a severe illness is only about a year from death. But since he cannot put his mind to rest he involves himself in another case and puts himself at huge risk by doing so. Not only does Dürrenmatt manage to bring in a danger that is incredibly shocking and fearsome to the point that death would be preferable, but he manages to describe Bärlach's fight against his last Criminal in such an excruciating manner that even recalling it in my mind makes me shudder.

Added on to the general terror there is an element to his stories that I somehow feel is kind of unique to Swiss culture. I'm not entirely sure if this is just my bias and this exists in other cultures or stories as well, but I feel like we have an appreciation for a form of frank, –how should I put it– obscene or outrageous events. I don't even know quite how to describe it. I suppose I'll take an example from ‘The Judge and His Hangman’. In one scene there is a funeral and it is really awful weather, the rain is just pouring down and it is all described as feeling really disingenuous and clumsy. The orchestra is just wailing and everything is muddy. But then, on top of all of this, as if there had to be an outrageous cherry on top, two really drunk people barge into the ceremony and bawl crude songs about. This sort of shocking and just ‘gross’ kind of occurrence is what I'm trying to refer to. For some reason I just really like seeing it and I don't recall ever quite encountering it outside of Swiss literature.

The books are of course originally written in Swiss High-German, so I'm sure a lot of the nuances and intricacies get lost in translation. I've never read the books in English, so I don't know how bad it is, but I hope even with the translation gap they'll be just as good to read. With that said, I wholeheartedly suggest you read at least ‘The Judge and His Hangman’, ‘Suspicion’ and ‘Promise’. Especially if you like novels that deal with genius mind games between detective and criminal (as for example in Agatha Christie novels) you should definitely read ‘The Judge and His Hangman’ as that does it better than any other crime novel I've read.

Written by shinmera