THE ASSIGNMENT: On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers

by Friedrich Durrenmatt ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 21, 1988

Swiss playwright Durrenmatt, also a novelist, produced a pair of classic psychological mysteries--The Judge and His Hangman and The Quarry--nearly 40 years ago. So the arrival of this ""intellectual thriller"" is cause for high anticipation. Unfortunately, however, despite some starkly vivid images and a sporadically provocative scenario, the book itself--more novella than novel--turns out to be a portentous blend of murky existentialism, labored political themes, and mannered modernism. Psychiatrist-writer Otto von Lambert, an expert on terrorism, blames himself when his estranged wife Tina is found dead, raped and strangled, at the Al-Hakim ruin in some unnamed Arab land. (Did he alienate her with his Freudian detachment? Should he have searched for her when she ran off?.) So von Lambert hires F., a documentary-maker, to reconstruct the events leading up to Tina's death. Before leaving, however, F. consults her friend D., a logician, who delivers a strained lecture that relates all of modern life--including Tina's fate--to the subtitular theme: ""anything observed requires the presence of an observer, who, if he is observed by what he is observing, himself becomes an object of observation,"" etc. Once in the Mideast, F. enters a faintly surreal nightmare-world of identity-confusion, justifiable paranoia, and sudden violence. She witnesses the execution of Tina Lambert's supposed assassin (a Danish dwarf); the head of the local secret service, incognito, reveals his plan to exploit the Lambert case politically; rolls of film are switched, stolen, sabotaged; F. miraculously recovers the dead woman's red fur coat. Then, just after coming upon a dour gloomy quotation from Kierkegaard, F. learns that the murdered woman wasn't really Tina Lambert but a Danish journalist who had assumed Tina's identity! And finally F. is semi-kidnapped by American cameraman ""Polypheme,"" a violence-obsessed Vietnam vet--who brings F. to a secret underground ""observation center,"" where computers and satellites are coordinated to monitor (and perhaps minimize) the region's obsession with war weapons. The overlapping, densely braided motifs here--doppelgangers, photo-journalism as fiction, the global corruption of arms-merchants, observing-and-being-observed--are an overfamiliar crowd, having appeared in everything from spy-fiction to Hitchcock movies to essays by Susan Sontag. Moreover, Durrenmatt's uninspired handling of these materials--didactic yet opaque--is compounded by his style: each of the book's 24 chapters is a single, run-on sentence--an effectively unsettling device in the short opening chapters, but one that becomes increasingly lame and distracting as the narrative thickens and the chapters lengthen. In all, then: intriguing, creepily evocative at times, but without the force or lucidity that other writers (like Durrenmatt's country-man Max Frisch) have brought to fables of existential politics.

Pub Date: March 21, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1988

Categories: FICTION