Wenn wir Tiere wären by Wilhelm Genazino

58 World Literature Today reviews read books is changing. The title refers to an e-reader that is pressed upon Robert Dubois, the head of a Parisian publishing house, in the name of efficiency and modernity. Dubois is a paper-and-ink guy, long devoted to typescripts, mountains of which encumber his office. As he attempts to come to terms with his new e-reader, he recognizes that his profession has skewed his own reading practice. Rarely does he read a finished piece of writing these days, spending his time instead with manuscripts in various stages of completion. Moreover, his profession itself is not what it was when he first began. It’s a significantly embattled one now; people read fewer and fewer books, and the publishing world has been invaded by money men and bean counters of all stripes. Yet Dubois realizes, too, that his profession has always been in crisis , and that such a crisis, addressed with creativity, intelligence, and tact, can be turned to the advantage of literature and the people who care about literature. One of those people is Valentine, a young intern in Dubois’s office, a real reader who is willing to imagine the new shapes that literature might assume as it adapts to changing cultural horizons. She understands that one can read in a variety of different ways, and she helps Dubois understand that, too. The same is true of this novel, I think. In a brief note at the end, Paul Fournel points out that his text is very highly constructed, following the combinatoric principles of the medieval poetic form known as the sestina, and that even the characters (and spaces) that compose it are counted precisely. One can certainly read La Liseuse as an experiment in form. Throughout the novel, however, a nostalgia for another kind of reading makes itself felt: a flatout -on-the-couch, playfully naïve kind—in a word, an amateur reading. Robert Dubois has forgotten how to read as an amateur; but perhaps he’ll have a chance to rediscover it. Warren Motte University of Colorado Wilhelm Genazino. Wenn wir Tiere wären.Munich.Hanser.2011.isbn 9783446237384 “If we were animals,” as the title of Wenn wir Tiere wären hypothesizes, life would not be so wearisomely complicated —one has to work to keep that money coming in, make all kinds of shopping decisions, deal with all kinds of other problems of everyday life, and then the women! You can’t just have sex and then fly off, like the birds the narrator has watched. Initially a freelance architect, the narrator suddenly inherits a steady job, replacing a friend who recently died. This doesn’t seem to bother him all that much, and he almost inherits the wife as well, who wants him to move in with her. But that turns out to be more of a complication, for in addition to his dalliance with her, he already has a more or less steady girlfriend , Maria, and an ex-wife he’s not completely detached from. This could all be quite entertaining if the reader’s credulity were not severely challenged by several aspects of this narrator’s everyday life. A twenty-first-century architect, around forty, he works at home at a drafting table and misses too many phone calls because he’s relying on a landline (without even an answering machine). No computer? No “Handy” (cell phone)? On top of that, his parents are long dead, his childhood memories echo the postwar years rather than the 1970s, the police file his theft report on a typewriter with carbon copies, and his “modern” reading consists of 1950s novels by Heinrich Böll, Max Frisch, and Uwe Johnson. It makes one think that Genazino has pulled out a previously unpublished manuscript that he’d written when he was around forty himself (early 1980s) and published it today on the strength of his now famous name, thirty or so years later. And who’s to care? We still get another entertaining incarnation of Genazino’s Frankfurt flâneur who observes the consumer excesses all around him with a bemused, critical eye and skewers them with scurrilous

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