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Ending a novel with a wedding, wrote Tolstoy in a diary, was like telling the story of a man on a journey and stopping just when he falls into the hands of robbers. Alfred and Sally, the two main characters of Austrian writer Arno Geiger’s new novel, have been married for over thirty years; in the course of the marriage’s trials and tribulations, they settled down prematurely . Together they raised three children and bought a comfortable home in the suburbs of Vienna. They had time to live out their professions, moods and loves, and, due to some mysterious force that holds them together, keep coming back to each other; on the few occasions when they actually questioned their life together, it was done purely hypothetically.
And so, after nearly 360 pages, the book ends not with a wedding, but much like old Tolstoy in his own life had done, with a "keep it up!” In times of partners for certain phases of one’s life, there is something soothing about this.
Arno Geiger was considered one of the most important voices in new German literature for his family saga Es geht uns gut (We’re doing well), which won the first German Book Prize in 2005. Four novels later, he published a book of stories in 2007 entitled Anna nicht vergessen (Anna not Forgotten), now with his most recent book, Alles über Sally (All About Sally), he once again returns to a family saga, except this time he explores a single motif as if with a magnifying glass. Indeed, what keeps Alfred and Sally’s marriage so tightly bound? Or put differently: Why don’t they get divorced?
The answer is best compared to a spider's dense web which is woven from the fantasies, fears, delights, and dependencies of the two main characters. Sally, a teacher at a Viennese high school (Lyceum) and sharp-witted commentator about her life, at first glance, is the more unstable of the two characters. She often doubts her decisions; she asks why she married this man, whom she’d met years earlier during a business trip to Cairo, and who in his early 50s already seems so strangely aged. She, the spirited and, at first glance, the most agile of this couple, he, a curator at the Ethnographic Museum, “important and weighty, old-fashioned and comfortable as the Queen, always accompanied by his two valets: ritual and repetition."
When Alfred and Sally discover their house in Vienna has been broken into while vacationing in England, not only is their marriage put to the test upon their abrupt return home, but so is the way in which these two very different temperaments interact. The backward looking Alfred falls into a kind of shocked stupor, unable to do anything, as he sits for days over his destroyed diaries, while Sally looks ahead and deals with the chaos the gang left behind: room by room, closet by closet, as she slowly heals the wounds of all the family members.
Geiger does not draw a particularly flattering picture of the faithful, but heavily sedated husband who suffers from separation anxiety. "He has taken on an entire museum of symptoms," says Sally to her friend Nadja, "and made himself at home there. He wears the compression stocking every day, he says the stocking is comfortable. That's not normal!"
And this is how Arno Geiger describes with ethnographic precision, though never with a denunciatory glance, the small everyday scenes experienced by Alfred and Sally. There are truly strange centrifugal forces that threaten to tear the couple apart again and again. Such as when Sally begins an affair with a man from the neighborhood. Alfred could have guessed. Hoping to tear him out of his lethargy by leaving obvious traces, Sally deliberately provokes him. Alfred lets her get away with it, notices her new perfume, but doesn’t ask any further questions. Instead he complies and waits for things to take care of themselves as they always did in the past.
And the strategy works. This lover, too, will burn out in the firmament of this marriage, the secret of which Geiger is never truly able to reveal, which may not be necessary, or is even impossible.
And so we are hardly surprised when at the end of the book, the couple, Alfred and Sally, once again find their way back to each other. "You were the only person I loved, although I knew him," as Kästner put it in his Berlin novel Fabian, and which Alfred now recalls. "You’ve had a considerable influence on me," says Sally in her casual way. Of course this is banal. But perhaps that’s exactly what makes it a great truth. In “All About Sally”, Arno Geiger does not set out to reveal the truth, but to distil from it a bit of reality.
Katharina Teutsch
November 2010
[Translated by Zaia Alexander]
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