THE GERMAN FRIEND SUN (347 West 39 Street, New York, NY 10018)

by Serge Gavronsky ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 31, 1984

Gavronsky's first novel has a timely focus and intellectual crispness, both admirable, in dealing with its entwined themes of terrorism and language-as-power. A French family is plunged into various orders of death by the au courant daughter's flirtation with left-terrorist ideas and actions. With another woman, ""the German friend"" of the title, she helps to briefly abduct France's President Mitterand and force out of him some humiliating admissions--after which she's caught, brutally interrogated. . . to the point of suicide. So, following this pathetic death, the young woman's bourgeois lawyer-father and her sensitive younger brother mourn variously; the brother ultimately seeks revenge by killing his sister's police interrogators; in the process, he is nearly killed himself. And finally, in coma, he in turn is treated to an inquisition: the questioning of a Lacan-school psychiatrist, gruesomely insincere and manipulative. Thus, Gavronsky's reiterated use of interrogation as an act of aggression--even of sadism--makes a sharply jaundiced indictment against current French intellectual enthusiasms for language per se, stripping down the holy ""word"" and revealing its evil properties. Unfortunately, however, this striking theme is undermined by Gavronsky's inexpert novelizing: he employs a run-on, claustrophobic style that generates a tape-recorder-like drone; the nuances and ideas, therefore, can contribute little to the narrative balance (in contrast to a writer like Heinrich Boll, who treats the same subject with less complexity--but greater drama--in The Safety Net). Thoughtful, concentrated work--yet self-conscious and quite clumsy, difficult to plough through, defeated by its own thrumming manner.

Pub Date: July 31, 1984

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1984

Categories: FICTION