The Class (Hermann Ungar)
Hermann Ungar was completely unknown to me until I read a review of this translation, I think in the Guardian book review, and added it to my list of books to read. I’m glad I did.
Ungar belongs to the generation of novelists who wrote between the wars, in German. He was a German speaking Jew from Moravia, and so, unsurprisingly, attracts comparisons with Kafka.
Ungar’s concerns in this novel seem closely related to Kafka’s in his three (all unfinished and unpublished in his lifetime). The Class was published in 1927, a year before the author’s death, and two years after the publication of The Trial. I don’t know whether Ungar was aware of Kafka’s work, although one must suppose that he was, even in its bowdlerised form as it was then published.
The Class concerns Josef Blau, a school teacher from inauspicious origins who imagines himself to be persecuted by his class of young boys. There are some striking scenes of strange beauty, such as his fainting fit on a school outing after which he hides from a pupil, although it later transpires that the pupil had known where he was.
Blau’s jealousy of his fiancee is such that he believes her to be conducting an affair with his kindly colleague Herr Leopold, even though they have barely exchanged a word and she is pregnant with Blau’s child.
There is the grotesque Uncle Bobek, a drunkard, glutton and sponger who has formed an attachment to the fiancee’s mother with whom they all live. There is the sinister and unfathomable Modlizki who was a friend of Blau’s as a child but who has not benefited from the same social elevation. He is the eminence grise of the piece.
For those who love Kafka, and who can never hope to unearth any further masterpieces of his, however unfinished, fragmentary or otherwise flawed they may be, I recommend the work of Hermann Ungar: his novel The Maimed is somewhere on my never-ending list of future reading.
Doctor Glas (Hjalmar Söderberg)
Doctor Glas is written in the form of a diary, kept by the eponymous hero. Sometimes the entries are very short and to the point, sometimes rather more conventional narratives that seem, as one reads them, more like a carefully composed novel than a diary. Which is what it is, of course.
Glas is visited by the wife of a clergyman (Gregorius) who insists on exercising his spousal ‘rights’ rather too vigorously for her tastes. She’s having an affair with another man and is repulsed by her husband’s carnality, especially as it is wrapped up in some very dubious religiosity.
Glas becomes obsessed with Mrs. Gregorius and resolves to help her. The remainder of the novel deals with his crisis of conscience over this, and the far worse deeds that he contemplates.
There are wonderful interludes as Glas muses to his diary about matters of philosophical interest; these are some of the most interesting passages in the novel.
While this is a slight novel, it has a character all its own. Although clearly related to the work of Knut Hamsun, Söderberg’s countryman and contemporary, it still has its own tone and aesthetic.
The publishing industry, suffering as it is under the weight of finding the next J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown, has unearthed a number of small masterpieces such as this in recent years. Harvill, Granta, Dedalus and the rest are to be congratulated that they can find a market for such interesting and characterful fiction among the dross. Long may they continue to unearth such gems.
