Our narrator is held in complete darkness and isolation. His endless thoughts are turned into the book we are reading-Schattenfroh—directed by none other than the narrator's mysterious jailer by the same name.
Towering, antagonizing ... Weary readers, somewhere adrift in this 1,000-page surrealist auto-exegesis, may feel inclined to accuse Lentz of adopting the bloated, paranoiac excess of postmodern fiction. They would not be entirely wrong ... But the book’s fidelity to ordeal and vexation marks it above all as a quest narrative ... It is experimental fiction that stores its pleasures in the way-stations of form, rich deposits of beauty and terror ... The novel’s formal pyrotechnics sometimes obscure the familiarity of its central trope ... Entire sections left me baffled ... It is part of the exquisite paradox of reading Schattenfroh, one of the great, and greatly demanding, literary pleasures of the year: that its annihilating fantasy should somehow reach us as so much light streaming through darkness.
Bleak, confounding, and finally brilliant ... At once tragic and comic, painfully human and stupidly bureaucratic ... Might try the patience of even the most erudite reader ... All the more impressive, then, is Max Lawton’s translation, which renders Lentz’s flinty though extravagant German into English sentences that are clear, nimble, and frankly full of beans, capturing the propulsive energy of the original text without sacrificing its difficulty.
Comes with plenty of what even an advanced and adventurous reader might consider obstacles. It’s 1,000 pages long. It’s translated from its original German, brilliantly, by Max Lawton. Its title is a complex pun that can’t be translated accurately ... But Schattenfroh is not nearly as head-spinning or brow-furrowing as it all implies. Somehow, Lentz (via Lawton’s translation) renders this impossible-sounding project legible and organized ... I implore you: If you’ve lately felt too occupied with social media, if you’ve worried over the products of AI, or if you just want to deepen the mysteries of existence with an open and patient mind — pick up Schattenfroh and dedicate some time and effort to it. It couldn’t be any further from our current typical modes, but it functions as a refreshing immersion rather than escapism.
