I read ‘A Long Blue Monday’ by Erhard von Büren for the readalong hosted by Caroline from Beauty is a Sleeping Cat, as part of the celebrations for German Literature Month, hosted by Caroline from Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy from Lizzy’s Literary Life .
Erhard von Büren is a Swiss writer. The last Swiss writer I read was Peter Stamm, I think, and the only other Swiss writer I have read is, probably, Pascal Mercier. So I was very excited and was looking forward to reading ‘A Long Blue Monday‘.
The story told in ‘A Long Blue Monday‘ is narrated by a retired school teacher. He used to teach English at school with a focus on American literature, and after retiring he is working on a book on Sherwood Anderson. The narrator starts the story from the present time and shares conversations with his daughter and talks about his own life now. He, then, slowly takes us back to his past, and tells us about his childhood, his parents, his sisters, his family, how they struggled when they were young, how hard the narrator had to work to get out of poverty, how he enjoyed life in smalltown Switzerland. The story then pauses at around the year 1959, when the narrator is in high school, when he falls in love for the first time. Her name is Claudia. The love story progresses slowly, it is beautiful and complicated, there is a gang of friends who hang out together each of whom have distinctive personalities (my favourite was Bede – he comes across as pretentious in the beginning, but I grew to like him as the story progressed). We get to know how young people lived their lives in the Switzerland of that time, what kind of conversations they had, what kind of parties they had, what their ideals were, what dreams they had and what they worried about, the difference between the upper classes and the others, how hard it was to move across class boundaries in real life but how easy it was to fall in love with someone on the other side – these and other things are beautifully depicted in this middle, biggest part of the book. In the last part of the book, the narrator describes how he moves out of his hometown, which friends he keeps in touch with and which ones he doesn’t and which ones he meets again years later, new people he meets, new lovers he has, how all his loves are all influenced deeply by his first love, and how he ends up being an English teacher (he says this in one place – “What’s strange is that I became a teacher, and stayed a teacher, although from early on I’d always preferred to study on my own. Just me and a book, no need for a teacher“) and how he ended up in his current situation. Throughout this interesting journey, the narrator shares his love for literature and films and we read a lot about Adalbert Stifter, Thornton Wilder, William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill and many others and the film adaptations of their books. Those pages were a pleasure to read. I loved this nod to Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel, ‘Goldfinger‘ – “Once doesn’t count, twice can be a coincidence, but now Katherine was caught.”
‘A Long Blue Monday‘ is a nostalgic book. It looks back to the past and takes us on a beautiful journey. I liked it very much. I hope to read more books by Erhard von Büren. I discovered that there are atleast two more translated into English.
I will leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.
“An accidental meeting could only be made to happen with great difficulty.”
“Books and films were what showed me what true life was like. But what did true life have to do with my real life?”
“It was quite true, nearly everything my father did was wrong, and yet I was somehow fond of him. On the other hand, everything my mother did was always right, yet I never really managed to give her credit for it.”
“How easily I’d always memorised my part in plays, and how rapidly I’d also memorised what each of my opposite actors had to say. But this here was different. And I couldn’t do it.
I’d set out to do something I couldn’t do, something for which I had not the slightest talent. All the dialogues I’d ever heard or read, the dialogues I’d learned by heart, were of no use to me now. Writing a play was something different, something entirely different from learning a role and then performing on stage. That someone like myself should aspire to write a play was nothing but a bad joke.
And yet I had to do it.
If I only kept on writing and writing and then deleting and deleting, something might yet come of it. But today I hadn’t written anything for hours, and all the drafts I’d written so far needed to be deleted too.
It had to be a trilogy, a trilogy of all things! If not a work of intelligence it should at least be long, gigantic – sublimely ridiculous, for all I cared. Claudia, if anyone at all, would be the only person to read it. I had to prove something to Claudia, and to no one else. I’d got myself into this situation. I was right in the middle of it. Now I had to find a way out.
So I remained seated at my table beneath the lamp.
And then I found something to continue with.
Some sentence or other, and I typed it into the machine. Considering that I’d waited a whole afternoon and evening, that sentence would do, at a pinch.
And a single sentence wasn’t the end of it, the flow went on, and continued for one, even two whole pages. The sudden feeling of relief was immense, ridiculously so.”“If you want something for long enough you get it in the end. Spare no effort and it can be made to happen. That was the principle that guided my life. And on the same principle I hoped to win Claudia, her respect, her friendship, her confidence, whatever: all the things that were to be found in the books I read, or that were shown so strikingly in the films I saw. If Claudia was always in my thoughts, it was inconceivable that I shouldn’t also be in hers. All you had to do was hang on to your passion, and in the end your passion would be reciprocated!
I confused winning someone’s love with scrupulously doing one’s homework. I thought the strength of a sentiment guaranteed that it would be reciprocated, I thought that when it came to sentiment, too, everything was determined by merit.
Ludicrous! It might be possible to earn the odd act of kindness because a faint feeling of justice is aroused, so that what was given comes back. But twenty acts of kindness still don’t make a friendship, they can’t be exchanged for love. Love accounts don’t balance.
‘The pangs of desprized love …’ I should have known, I’d parodied Hamlet’s soliloquy often enough. And anyway, wasn’t being crossed in love the rule rather than the exception? It had been childish to imagine that an exception would be made in my case.”“Those dialogues can surely be improved. It’s not important that the sentences follow each other in an orderly pattern, question, answer, question. What matters is that I should make some discovery in the process. The sentences should lead me on to something I didn’t know beforehand, they should show me something I hadn’t seen before. That’s what they’re there for, that’s why I’m writing them down, that’s why I’m stringing them together. They don’t have to be to my liking, they don’t have to be to anyone’s liking. All I’m trying to find out by writing them down is how a simple love story could turn into such a calamity.”
Have you read ‘A Long Blue Monday’ by Erhard von Büren? What do you think about it?
What a wonderful review, Vishy. I’m very glad you joined and liked it as much as I did. There were such beautiful passages. It was nice to see how the translator translated them. I think it’s a book that will even be better the second time around because it’s so complex. I too enjoyed reading about the youth of back then.
Glad you liked it, Caroline. Thanks so much for hosting this readalong. I wouldn’t have discovered this book otherwise. I hope to read my favourite passages from this book again. I discovered a wonderful new Swiss author, thanks to you 🙂
I’m glad you joined, Vishy. The author was very pleased with your review. 🙂
So nice! I didn’t know that, Caroline! Thanks for telling me 🙂
[…] 1 Tawada Memoirs of A Polar Bear 1 Vanderbeke The Mussel Feast 1 von Büren A Long Blue Monday 1 2 Winkler Natura Morta 1 Wolf In The Flesh 1 Zweig Beware of Pity 1 Chess Story 1 2 The Collected […]
Beautiful quotations in this one, Vishy. I love the nostalgic, elegiac feel. I’ve never read anything by von Büren, but maybe this is a good time to start!
Glad you liked the quotes, Andrew. Hope you get to read this book and like it. This was my first von Büren and I discovered this only because of the readalong hosted as part of German Literature Month 🙂