book review: Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki

Hinrich wakes up one day to discover his wife has died of a stroke. He initially starts to think of all the things that you should do in that situation to register the death. But as he lingers, something he does quite a lot, he starts to read the papers she was working on before she died.

Her papers show notes and revisions on one of his old stories. The story was biographical but in a way that tha author never expected anyone to realise. The way that his wife changes names and adds revisions makes it quite clear that she knew about his secrets and his desires.

As he starts to come to terms with that he begins to unpick their life together finding that the version of history he liked to believe was true was in fact also a work of fiction.

As he talks and moves around the room in the apartment that now contains the corpse of his wife the man begins to find out that punishment for infidelity, even an attempt that failed, is something can take time to come to the surface.

Hinrich is left alone, unforgiven and exposed as a man of weakness. He might regret the past and start arguing his side of the story but with his wife no more it is an argument he will never win and a one-sided conversation you will sense will haunt him until the end of his life. An ending that they had promised to spend together, catching the boat across the water to the afterlife. His wife has left him alone in every dimension .

The novellas from Peirene Press are books that can be consumed in a couple of hours. But my experience so far with the couple of titles I have read is that although short to read they take a long time to digest leaving a deep impression. This is no different.

book review: Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki

"There were not many, barely three pages. Doro's final set of comments began on the the third page. He could cope with her comments now too. He put all the pages in the correct order. And then? He would be done."

Big ideas don't have to be told in big books if the writing is as skillfully delivered as here in Next World Novella.

A professor wakes to find his wife has died of a stroke in the evening and he takes in the shock of the situation reading through the last notes that she was editing. As she usually edited his reports it is his material she was found slumped over.

But the work that Schepp finds his wife Doro was concentrating on is an old story that he wrote years before and never published. The story about a drunk who hangs out in a bar lusting after a waitress mirrors the professors own fixation with a waitress in a bar he stumbled into one afternoon after eye surgery.

What becomes clear is that the wife knew about the affair, at least the dream of an affair that was harboured by her husband, and it drove a wedge between them.

One of the promises they made was to enter the next world together and to hold each other's hands as they swam across the lake of the dead to try and reach the land in the distance on the other side. That promise is ruined by the secrets Hinrich kept from his wife.

That story contains enough food for thought but the way the novella ends leaves you with the distinct impression that even near the end all it would have taken is for Hinrich to have shown a bit of notice and the love would and could have been rekindled. Failing to listen and failing to notice are the real crimes of the lutsful professor.