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A story hard to find
The Apartment
Greg Baxter
Penguin, £12.99
Review: Liam Heylin
An American marine who has served in Iraq goes to an unspecified European city less to find than to lose himself.
That is effectively the deal with this short novel which is high on atmospheric drift and low on narrative thrust.
If someone ever decides to make a movie of it they may have to call it Lost in Translation 2 as the central character has that same sense of a character willfully floating into a new place and letting the baggage of his former life fall overboard.
Baxter, a Texan who lived in Dublin and Berlin, acknowledges the financial support of the Arts Council of Ireland for a book that is set in an old but unnamed continental European city. Not naming the city is typical of a book that operates in hints and nudges rather than outright declarations.
For such a short book it has plenty of meta-cultural ambition, taking on lots of big themes. At one stage this marine, troubled by memories of war, has a conversation with a classical musician about the Arabic origins of violin-type instruments and the civilising effect of this, above all instruments, on Western culture through the centuries.
It is one of a number of interesting digressions made by a narrator with an eye for side streets and back alleys.
Violence plays at the edges of a day where the only story is that this marine is looking for an apartment, helped by a young woman from the city who might just be a little too obviously the literary novelist’s perfect fantasy — an all-night party girl with an air of mystery who teaches herself Latin to read Virgil in the original.
The narrator pulls himself up for another digression about rich people not wanting responsibility for the poor — “But now I am going on about something I don’t want to think about.” Obsessed with uncluttering, the book is all the time looking not for an elaboration or revelation of the self but for the self to be subsumed by the city, lost in the night.
He wants to find a perfect stillness as life goes on around him. This is the book’s agenda and so we are left in the company of an anti-heroic figure who would rather tell us about his search for decent water-proof shoes to keep his feet warm in the snow.
Then he sits in a café and blankly describes an act of extreme violence against a woman he had just been admiring.
At times it is possible for the reader to fall into the mysterious depths that Baxter has in mind but too often he takes sympathy for granted and exhausts it.
It may well divide readers as Lost in Translation did viewers.