In a short preface, Sachs lays out the premise. In late 1919, a mute young woman is found lost on the streets of Vienna. No one in the onetime imperial capital knows her name, her origin or what has happened to her. After her doctors reach out to the public, they receive a response from a patient at a sanatorium, an unproduced Jewish playwright who claims to be her father. Every night, writes the man, he would read his daughter Gretel a bedtime story of his own invention. And now he sends stories to those caring for her — one a day for 26 days, starting with “A” for the Architect, then “B,” the Ballet Master, and finishing with “Z,” the Zionist. At the end of this sequence, the man implies, the source of the girl’s speechlessness will be revealed.
These stories make up the rest of the novel. A fan of alliteration, repetition and the exclamation point, Sachs is well-positioned to try his hand at that classic German form, the fairy tale. His 26 inventions — in their archetypal characters and alphabetic arrangement, not to mention their being addressed to a girl named Gretel — first bring to mind the Brothers Grimm. There are choirmasters and deep, dark forests and parents quite literally split in half by the love of their children. But as the book goes on, another inspiration emerges: E.T.A. Hoffmann, the German Romantic who was so attentive to city life and professional jealousy and, especially, sex. While writers like the Grimms and Heinrich von Kleist sought to define German modernity with connection to the oral storytelling tradition and medieval history, Hoffmann found the new in the urban, and particularly in Prussian Berlin, a city full of writing, art and music.
Sachs’s Vienna is a vibrant and petty place, full of insecure authorities and overconfident revolutionaries seeking to overturn everything established. Some of the stories are straightforward parables about the perils of overconfidence or a desire for clarity. They involve a “sweet, simple man” who comes into maturity after overhearing a vulgar, racist joke; a painter who exploits his young sitters, arguing that they are already as complex as the adults around them. Others are full of cruelties exacted in the pursuit of an artistic vision, lives destroyed on the path toward triumph or revenge. Many end with a character in the sanatorium, having surrendered one hard, simplistic worldview for another.
Some are longer and more complex, revealing wider resonances through repeated use of settings and themes. In the sixth story, “F,” for Father, a physiology student who wants to strip language down to its essence becomes a priest convinced that he will one day be forced, by the head of the sanatorium, into ingesting “all of the waste of the world, for his sins.” He arrives at both the sanatorium and his beliefs via interactions with an older monk, a “skeptical, secular glint” in his eyes, who tells him a story, this one about delusion and self-absorption and, possibly, a murder. The monk’s story involves subatomic particles and the history of the X-ray, and it’s set in an old mill with whitewashed walls, a setting that frequently recurs throughout the book. Other locations to which we circle back: an old forest that serves as a game preserve, a coffeehouse where all manner of explorers hash out their plans and the City Theater with its artistic pretensions and professional cruelties.
What seems at first to be occasionally echoing but largely unconnected stories turns out to be the more coherent narrative of a society in the process of coming unglued. In story after story, parents abuse children, lie to children, put their careers and their aspirations above the life and well-being of their children. And children give as good as they get; in one of the most surprising stories, a group of boys, lured into an alley by a creepy old toymaker, beat him to death after his old-fashioned wooden playthings are not to their modern tastes.
Sachs, as shown in his previous novel, the cheekily dense and digressive “The Organs of Sense” (2019), is a clever, self-aware storyteller, and he draws creative tension from his ostensibly childlike narrative form. In idealizing the past, his characters court disaster and tragedy. No parent can exempt their child from complexity, or from history, and so it is with Gretel and her father. This storybook world is beset by problems, anarchists and aristocrats and casual cracks about Jews and Slavs and non-Austro-German ethnics of all kinds. In the characters of the Duke and Duchess and their daughter, Sachs dramatizes the decline of the Habsburgs and the outbreak of the Great War. Where the earlier stories feature explorers and kindergarten teachers, those that come later star revolutionaries, veterans and Zionists. Where once mothers gave birth to sons and fathers protected their daughters, now men find themselves pregnant with nation-states, and they stuff toys with explosives.
“The Organs of Sense” was a dense book, full of incident, yet always cohesive; at times, “Gretel” struggles to maintain a similar feeling, following unnecessary paths that can weaken individual stories. Learning that a kindergarten teacher and a ballet dancer are sisters does little to enrich the stories in which they appear. And unlike the compact classics Sachs is aping, his interweaving sprawl forces his tales into a sometimes awkward interdependency.
But perhaps this is the point. Where his previous novel expanded our sense of history, “Gretel” collapses it. A national story, Sachs concludes, can be much like a fairy tale: too neat, deluded, fit largely for children.
Robert Rubsam is a writer and critic whose work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, the Baffler and the Nation.
FSG Originals. 213 pp. $18, paperback
