Both of this weekend's selections were things I bought last year I hadn't gotten to in the Monday review posts. They're also wildly different books, as you'll see tomorrow.
Tiny Acts of Violence is set in East Berlin in 1968. It revolves around Sebastian Metzger, a former Stasi officer, now a schoolteacher haunted by psoriasis and nightmares. And maybe, possibly, he's haunted by something else. Something long and skeletal that lurks in shadows.
Or maybe not, because the truth is not always clear in East Berlin. Much of Tiny Acts of Violence revolves around the idea of stories, or perhaps lies, depending on what distinctions you draw between the two. Lies the states tells its citizens/subjects. Lies one person tells another. Lies one tells themselves. Early in Chapter 1, Metzger's doctor tells him of observing an attempt by a man to get his son and himself over the Wall on a zipline. The son makes it, the father is quite literally let hanging when the mechanism jams in mid-air, just shy of the wall.
Metzger's only comment initially is to muse that this is a shame, because the man was a good mechanic and Metzger's car needed a new alternator. But when he meets with a friend later and tells him the story, he alters it so father and son both make it across. Metzger's friend already knows the truth, and dismisses the deceased as a coward, for choosing not to stay and fight. But Mr. Althaus tells himself lies, perhaps about what he's accomplishing, and certainly about his wife.
The central mystery, even beyond the thing in the window, is why Metzger's not a Stasi officer anymore, and why his fall is so public that hes recognized and whispered about when invited along to a fancy party out in the woods. It seems something to do with his brother Volker, as well as Metzger's wife and children, who are always referred to in the past tense, but who Metzger rushes home speak with on the telephone when he can.
Until late in the story, the reader is left to make their own assumptions what all that means, which Stiff does a fair amount. Metzger's doctor just wants to escape, and is slowly eliminating a select circle of people on behalf of a group of people. Who are the group, why do they want these people killed? Again, kept hidden until late. There's an old coworker of Metzger's, a preening bald bully named Schneider. He plays magnanimous with Metzger, jokes that easily tip over into cruelty. A man lying to himself about how successful he feels, resentful that he felt left out of an inner circle, and grasping for the means to claim status.
Stiff sticks mostly to wide, short panels, the characters caught within these narrow confines. Most of the story takes place within the city, and whether inside buildings or outside, the panels makes everything feel closed in. A lot of small rooms without windows, whether it's a kitchen, file room, or an interrogation chamber. Even when a person is alone in a room, they look trapped. The top of the panel might barely clear their head, and the range of vision doesn't even encompass the entire room. This remains when things move into the woods, as the panels are full of trees where we can only see the bottom of the trunk, so that they look more like bars in a cell than trees.
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