BREAKERS

by Martin Walser ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 28, 1987

Walser moves his sights to the US in this chronicle of German professor Helmut Halm's year teaching in Oakland, California. With his grown daughter and wife Sabina, Halm rents a house in Berkeley, drives a borrowed old Volvo, can't get over the climate and the light and the red wine, and quickly falls infatuated with a scrubbed-bright female student, Fran Webb. How Halm keeps himself from ever throwing himself at Fran is the rocker-arm in this version of Walser-velleity. Fran is the typical serious flirt, heedless of herself half the time and the rest of the time silently in love with her power over Halm. (Her California radiance keeps him at bay: such health is always suspect to a Walser hero.) At the other end of the social spectrum, the example of one of his colleagues in the German department, Rainer Mersjohann, a lyric poet turned embittered and philandering academic (failure turned morally gaudy), further keeps Halm from turning his life into an example-scene in someone else's theater. And behind Halm's reticence is also age: ""To Halm it seemed that every text in the world could be translated into a text spoken by someone over fifty. It is a different language."" But, withal, the book, unlike major works such as The Swan Villa and The Inner Man, seems thin--the academic-comic scaffolding too predictable, too elastic against Halm's interior thrashings-about. Only at the end, with a series of deaths that cloud the idyll, does the novel go past ridicule and into the unsparing analysis of impossibility that is Walser's signature: ""Funny how disagreeably tense life becomes when one can no longer imagine how it's supposed to continue."" Still, too much conventional campus fiction has to be plowed through before that to really satisfy; Halm seems buried under its procedures.

Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1987

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987

Categories: FICTION