Calm, controlled . . . and ultimately indifferent?

F ICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews AliceBy Judith Hermann, translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo Clerkenwell Press, 154pp. £8.99

A WOMAN IS ADRIFT surrounded by various deaths. We follow her through these encounters and it is clear that the setting is Germany, aside from one set in a holiday home in Italy, but it really doesn’t matter – it could be anywhere. Borders don’t appear to interest Judith Hermann all that much; she is drawn to the psychological moment of discovery. It is often emotionally charged, but it can also be so overpowering as to render the character numb, somewhere beyond grief. A woman named Alice is present in each of the five stories, which are described as interlinking. They are not really linked; there is a thematic cohesion, but it is not quite correct to assume that Alice is a unifying presence, because Alice never emerges as a character. The fact that several cross references connect the stories is merely a device.

This is a book that initially engages but then leaves the reader shrugging and curious about why the writer did not so much underwrite the book as appear to walk away from it.

Hermann at her best is a cool, disciplined writer capable of defining the near impossible: “The house where Richard lived was on the right-hand side of the street. The right-hand side was in the shade.

“Alice looked up at Richard’s closed windows and thought: in a room in that apartment in this house on this street a man I know is dying.

“Everyone else is doing something else.”

The dream-like unreality that shrouds the ultimate reality of death is well conveyed as various characters, including Alice, or the various Alice figures that may be one woman or five separate women, wait and watch; they keep vigil at bedsides.

The first two stories are very good; the other three are far less convincing and seem oddly undeveloped, even cryptic. It is a book concerned with death and, more importantly, waiting, but it is also about writing – and for this reason it is worth reading, but that does not make it good art. The German publication of Hermann's debut collection The Summer House, Later, in 1998, caused an exciting critical response. It marked the emergence of a new strain of German fiction, and Hermann was well balanced by the wonderful, if very different, Ingo Schulze, whose first book, 33 Moments of Happiness, had been published three years earlier.

The Summer House, Latercame out in English translation in 2001 to excellent reviews. Aside from the nine stories being uniformly superb, they were candid, intimate and international, and equal to the finest work of US writers. Hermann expressed the huge moments in life when nothing and everything happen. Misha, the first of the stories in this new book, enters the world of the soon-to-be bereaved. Alice has come to see Misha before he dies. Both had moved apart; he has a wife and child, and Alice is the former lover. The dynamic between the two women is alluded to; they are wary but prepared to unite in their grief. Maja has rented a holiday apartment in order to be near her dying husband. She is attending to the day-to-day practicalities. The characters moved in the shadowy nonworld of hospital rooms. There is no hope left; the doctors have conceded defeat; now it is left to death. The women take turns to visit him. While Alice waits at the bed of a person she once knew so well, an elderly nun enters and asks Alice "what sort of man he had been". Alice is not sure of the question. But the old nun clarifies this: "Well, how did he spend his life?" It is so well executed; Hermann provides details and also withholds them. It leaves one wondering. It also is an exciting insight into Hermann's maturing vision.

The same could be said of Conrad, the second story. In it Alice, in the company of two friends, travels to visit Conrad, an older man who lives with Lotte in a beautiful lakeside home in Italy. The journey there, the petty tensions in the car, the various stops along the way, are closer in style to the stories in her first book. On arrival there Conrad is not well, so the plan is for the guests to settle. The holiday will begin later, after Conrad is rested. But instead Lotte brings him to the hospital, as a mere precaution. Alice has a brief conversation with him.

Later, she speaks with him in the hospital. Again, this is a strong narrative; the use of detail, the nuance, is as measured as a piece of music. Alice’s memories flicker in the background as she looks at the older Conrad. Later she reimagines a sequence of events and places what she has learned against the information she has been given.

To set out to write about waiting is dauntingly ambitious and difficult.

But then little about this book is easy. Even the translation jars, which is unexpected, as Margot Bettauer Dembo also translated The Summer House, Laterand Nothing But Ghosts. Ducks are referred to as "dishevelled" – that seems an odd choice of word for a bird. Even more peculiar is "nice windscreen wipers"; windscreen wipers either work or don't – where does "nice" fit in and why? Elsewhere, Alice becomes aware of a "nimbus" of mothers – a cloud of mothers?

Perhaps the ultimate difficulty with this book, which certainly begins very well but then falters into indifference, is that the coolness of the calm, controlled prose quickly settles into an aridity that bypasses emotion and results in a narrative disengagement conveyed by the writer and shared by the reader.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times