Brilliant. Four-and-a-half stars. How I subcutaneously shivered with each recognition of a Keetenheuve who was me and/or that from within me which constituted a part of Keetenheuve: solipsistic self-absorption resonating in the Key of I Minor, the ego as it's shown inside the other. No matter the strength of the story and its timeless application, the personal and collective struggles with guilt and remorse, aggression and regression, the juxtaposition of the requirements for atonement and advancement, acknowledging the past while moving forward in the present within a world in which politics, commerce, state violence all, like rust, never sleep or relax the grip of their mutual congress, its stream-of-conscious buffeting and writhing, its unconventional but lingeringly moving mnemenic wending through the uplifts and griefs of love, the scalding and asphyxiating enervation of an idealism which has burnt itself out or been smothered, nor the writing, heady but lean, lovely yet disorienting in the rhythmic melee of its movement, as if decanted from a tipped-over bottle of hundred proof despair—more than anything else it is Koeppen's ability to wring the universal from the individual, such that the individual may, in obverse contemplation, be discerned from within the whole that elevates The Hothouse to near perfection and proves anew the wisdom inherent within Lee's auspicious observation that: Really, anything translated by Michael Hofmann can be trusted - maybe also searching for his work is a good way to discover new books from Germany and Austria?I'm batting one thousand so far in following that very suggestion.I am including a lengthy stretch from roughly the midpoint of the novel because I think it is just fantastic, representative of Koeppen's style throughout, and perhaps will go a way in prodding someone debating giving Koeppen a try into deciding favorably or negatively. I don't think it contains any spoilers, but caveat lector:What was Keetenheuve after? Any roof was better than none. He ought to know that. He had known bunks in barracks and Nissen huts, put-you-ups in bomb shelters, rubble billets, emergency lodgings, he knew the slums of London and the basement holes in Rotterdam's Chinatown, and he knew that the minimum apartments that the committee was putting its weight behind were a step up. But he didn't like mollification. He couldn't see any allotment heaven. He thought he could see through the designs: he sensed poison and bacteria. How were these settlements any different from the National Socialist settlements for large families, or the SA and SS settlements, only cheaper and narrower and grimmer and shabbier? And if you looked at the blueprints, it was the Nazi idiom they were still building in, and if you looked at the names of the architects, it was the Nazi architects who were still working, and Heineweg and Bierbohn approved of the brown style and okayed the architects. The program of the National Socialist Union for Large Families was Heineweg and Bierbohn's program, it was their approach to the mollification of the population, it was their idea of social progress. So what was Keetenheuve after? Did he want the Revolution? Such a big and beautiful word, toppled in the dust! No, Keetenheuve didn't want the Revolution, he couldn't want it any more—it no longer existed. The Revolution was dead. It was withered and dead. The Revolution was an offshoot of Romanticism, a crisis of puberty. It had had its time. Its possibilities had not been investigated. And now it was a corpse, a dry leaf in the herbarium of ideas, a dead notion, an antiquated word to look up in the encyclopedia, that didn't come up in daily speech. Only a gushing youth would still enthuse about Revolution for a while longer, and after that it would be nothing but a pash or dream, an odorless bloom—the pressed blue flower of Romanticism. The time for the tender faith in liberty, equality, fraternity, it was over the morning of America the poems of Whitman strength and genius it was all onanism and the epigone lay down contentedly in the broad marital bed of law and order the night stand with the calendar that marked the fruitful and unfruitful days of his wife's cycle next to the pessary and the encyclical from Rome. Korodin had prevailed over the Revolution, and he guessed he had lost something in the process. Heineweg and Bierbohm had prevailed over the Revolution, and they felt they had betrayed something of themselves in the process. Between them, they had succeeded in emasculating religion and the Revolution. Any idea of society had gone to the Devil, and he was holding it in his claws. There might still be the occasional coup d'etat, they came in hot or cold versions, like punch, but the drink was always mixed from cheap ingredients and it left the people who tried it with sore heads. Keetenheuve was not in favor of mollification. He was in favor of looking the Gorgon in the eye. He didn't want to lower his gaze in front of horror. But he wanted an agreeable life, and he wanted to trick the devil of his due. He was in favor of happiness in despair. He was in favor of a happiness built from convenience and solitude, a happiness within reach of everyman, a lonely, convenient and despairing happiness in the technological world that had been created. There was no need to feel cold as well as miserable; or hungry as well as suicidal; one shouldn't have to wade through dirt while one's thoughts were on the void. And it was in such a spirit that Keetenheuve wanted new homes built for the working class, Corbusier machines-for-living, contemporary castles, an entire city in a single high-rise, with artificial roof gardens, artificial climate control, he saw the possibility of insulating man from excesses of heat and cold, of freeing him from dust and dirt, from housework, from domestic squabbles and noise. Keetenheuve wanted to have ten thousand under a single roof to isolate them from one another, in the way that metropolises take a man out of his neighborhood and make him alone, a lone beast of prey, a lone hunter, a lone victim, and every room in Keetenheuve's gigalith would be soundproofed against every other, and everyone should be able to set the temperature to his own liking, and he should be alone with his books, alone with his thoughts, alone with his work, alone with his idleness, alone with his love, alone with his despair, alone with his human reek.
Another masterwork from Koeppen. Where Pigeons on the Grass featured a stream-of-consciousness approach with a large cast of characters in post-war Germany, Hothouse focuses almost entirely on the activities and thoughts of Keetenheuve, a member of the German parliament, a recent widower, a man who thinks too much for his own good. The stream-of-consciousness style is similar, but the motion and specific concerns of the book are much different. The language is superb, the depiction of Germany is superb, and the echoes for contemporary U.S., though obviously not intended, are not to be denied.
What do You think about The Hothouse (2001)?
Considered a classic of German post-WWII literature, I think this is a book only for those intensely interested in Zeitgeist of the early days of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). It is an Camus-like portrait of a parliamentarian who questions his life and purpose. One highlight were descriptions of a character modeled on Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the Social Democrats, a rabid anti-Communist and nationalist whose priority was the reunification of Germany. But much of the novel meanders and reading it requires a more than casual knowledge of early 1950s German political and social history.
—Greg Brozeit
