Nobodaddy's Children

Ostensibly a trilogy after the fact, at least according to the short introduction provided in this edition, the three short novels collected in *Nobodaddy's Children* nevertheless are united by style and theme and continue a story arc extending from pre-war Nazi German to a post Cold War apocalypse. The name of the first-person narrator changes from book-to-book, but it's always unmistakably Arno Schmidt who's speaking. I have a German friend who recommended Schmidt to me as the *real* thing, as opposed to the far more popularly translated German writers, such as Grass and Boll. And, after reading *Nobodaddy's Children,* I'd have to agree that my friend was right: Schmidt is indeed the *real* thing. Schmidt is a highly distinctive, personal, and idiosyncratic writer. His style is fragmented, elliptical, poetic, and declamatory. His text is constructed like a series of photographs. Conventional narrative transitions are often excised. The result is a comparatively short, but dense text, as if all the filler of ordinary novels were discarded, and only the `good stuff' remained. There are philosophical speculations, character portraits ((and assassinations)), historical facts, nature descriptions, personal opinions....all mounted side-by-side like memories in a scrapbook. And yet, remarkably, these fragments make up a coherent whole. Schmidt reads a little like Celine...meaning, that at first, his text seems typographically alien and difficult to penetrate with its odd punctuation and italicized paragraph headings. But once you read a few pages, you find yourself swept along by the perfectly natural rhythm of Schmidt's voice and effortlessly following his grammatical notation. Also, like Celine, Schmidt is merciless in his contempt of the insanity of war, warmongers, and the `good' citizens who make it all possible by following their leaders into the slaughter. He spares no one. He is uncompromising in his disdain of the idiocy of the uncultured people who make the world the violent madhouse that it is--and he estimates their number at somewhere between 95 to 99% of the general population. Perhaps this attitude goes a long way to explaining why Schmidt isn't so well represented here in America. Why it's taken U.S. publishers so long to put out a translation of his work. In fact, he long went virtually unnoticed in Germany as well. It's not hard to see why. Schmidt isn't a warm and fuzzy writer. To be sure, he's a Romantic in the end, but Schmidt stands alone against the world and he's not afraid to tell you exactly that. `Scenes from the Life of a Faun' is the first novel in the volume. It describes the life of a modest civil servant engaged on an odd research project as Germany ominously succumbs to war-lust. It ends with a pyrotechnic description of a bombing that is both terrifying and oddly beautiful. `Brand's Heath' picks up the story after Germany's defeat. Here the narrator finds himself among a group of refugees struggling to survive in