Die Unmöglichkeit des vierhändigen Spiels by Stefan Moster

Abstract

I, appears to be carved from a solid 1 piece of stone. His furniture is ultra , modern and there is nary a curved 1 line in his life, as is immediately I noticed by his girlfriend and even j tualwife, Hana. Over the course of I the novel, though, Asterios becomes, , as E. M. Foster might have said, one of the "rounder" characters to have , appeared inyears. His yearnings for 1 his essential other half, a lost twin; { his dream-life filledwith a tsunami 1 of emotion; his desire simultane i ously to participate in and observe j his own life;and his touching, com i plicated relationshipwith Hana ere , ate a fully featured character with 1 whom we identify. , We discover Asterios in medi 1 as res after his apartment has been ? destroyed by a storm. Forsaking j a linear narrative or a consistent I graphic or pictorial style, Mazzu , cchelli builds a complicated vision 1 ofAsterios and his adventures from , childhood toacademia, toNew York 1 City and beyond, even to a town I appropriately named Apogee where [ he discovers new aspects of himself. I It is in Apogee thatMazzucchelli j creates portraits of outlying and i much less stylish segments of soci , ety, including the vastly generous 1 garage owner StiffMajor, his wife i Ursula Major, a self-styledgoddess, 1 shaman, and feng shui expert, and a i radical country-punk band known [ as theRadniks. Along the way there i is also a hilarious and over-the-top , portrait of an egomaniacal theater 1 creator/producer named Willy , Ilium, theperfect parodie combina 1 tion of self-styled artist and lech i er, whose sexual double entendres ] toward Hana are cringe-inducing. I David Mazzucchelli is a gifted f artist/writer, and as a reader moves ? through the lush and varied pages j of Asterios Polyp, stylistic surprises 1 abound amid what feels like a mas ter lesson in the form and function of design. Ultimately, he delivers a truly transformative tale of love and trust as he examines the virtues and distresses of living both in the abstract and in the real. And perhaps the final,delicious absurdity is that no matter what transpires, we are inevitably tempted to believe that we exert some control over our fates. Rita D. Jacobs Mont clairStateUniversity Stefan Moster. Die Unm?glichkeit des vierh?ndigen Spiels. Hamburg. Mare, 2009.445 pages, 22. isbn978-3 86648-111-4 Die Unm?glichkeit des vierh?ndigen Spiels (The impossibility of playing four-handed piano) is an engaging novel about a mother and son who, after parting on very bad terms, unwittingly seek refugeon thesame luxury ocean liner. Stefan Moster explores the particular difficulties alluded to in the title within a social microcosm on its way around Cape Horn. The mother, Almut, is the ship's resident psychologist, a posi tion she takes on after finding her self at a professional dead end; her son, Sebastian, goes to sea as the ship's bar pianist. Moster lets the story unfold from these two per spectives. The question is, of course, When will the twomeet? They had parted when Sebastian, rebelling against his mother's stifling intima cy, refused to join her at the piano to play some Schubert. The more that is revealed about their fraught relationship, and the more we know about Almut's past, her family's obsessions, and Sebastian's particu lar difficulties, the greater the ten sion becomes. And it is not only a question of when the two figures will meet but also ofwhen the two narratives will converge. Sebastian, struggling to findhis own identity, becomes a cynical observer of the well-to-do and delivers an ironic musical underlay to the absurd goings-on in the ship's bars; Almut spends timeat thebaby grand inher consulting rooms where she attends to the passengers' pseudoprob lems. (Do luxury ocean liners actu ally have residentpsychologists and marriage therapists, one wonders?) Sebastian mixes with the service personnel, falls in love, and becomes involved in the fateof fourAfrican stowaways; Almut isplagued by the amateur pianist Gaus, who uses the skills he acquired as a Stasi func tionary to great effect inhis role as the...