[ book tip by Incentives ] Having grown up between the railway shunting yard and the rubbish tips on the edge of the city of Graz, Gerhard Roth tells the story of his childhood and youth, spent during the hardship and poverty of the post-war years, when there was little sense of the emergence of a new era, other than authoritarian restoration, denial, hatred and a propensity for violence. Roth tells us the story in longer passages, chronologically, weaving the different sections together, but also deliberately employing themes, motifs, correlations and analogies.
His sketches of people are highly impressive, above all those of his grandmother from Siebenbürgen, with whom the child begins to evolve fantastical stories. Illness and death are constantly present in the family household, since his father was a doctor. One of the most memorable passages describes wandering across the countryside with his father, who – on account of his Nazi past was banned from exercising his profession – plied his trade with the local people by bartering in kind.
Emotional isolation and recurring thoughts of suicide overwhelm the growing boy. The number of serious illnesses, injuries and accidents increase. The youthful figure of the narrator creates alternative worlds, tries his hand at sport, becomes a lonely long-distance runner. The cinema and the experience of films open up new worlds of imagination, while in reading the youth discovers a “paradise of self-forgetfulness”. His experiences with psychiatry lead him to the knowledge “that the history of human beings can never really be captured as long as our secret thoughts and dreams do not become visible.“
Writing becomes visible as a consequence and a possibility of confronting his own speechlessness. The work of remembering involved in the biography concludes with the moment of his first literary success, establishing a connection to authorship and providing testimony to its inner necessity.

(Translated by Peter Waugh)
Abridged version by Martin Kubaczek, October 2008
Original review

[ book info ] Roth, Gerhard: Das Alphabet der Zeit. (The Alphabet of Time). (original language: Deutsch) S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt, 2007 . ISBN: 978-3-10-066060-2.