Appearing only now in English translation, Clemens Meyer’s debut novel – first published in German in 2007 – features a belated scene in which two teenagers doing community service meet their former teacher. Hard-boiled before German reunification, he now offers them cigarettes in a case with the former emblem of the GDR and a motto: “Comradeship is combat”. The young protagonist refuses the cigarette. But the motto could be his.
Daniel Lenz grew up in ruined East Leipzig in the 1980s and 1990s. From late-Soviet decline to post-Soviet collapse, While we were dreaming follows Danny and his friends Mark, Rico, Paul, Little Walter and Pitbull, who take advantage of a power vacuum to do whatever they want. The socialist security apparatus has disappeared and their parents are violent, absent or drunk. So they fight other boys, drag cigarette machines off walls with stolen cars, or rob old women who ask them to do odd jobs. At the gang’s zenith, they run an illegal techno club in an abandoned factory near the city limits.
The chapters are organized chronologically. The German author used a similar approach to storytelling in his other novel to be translated into English, bricks and mortar, which was written seven years later, but first appeared in the UK. Each episode here has a standalone form, with distinct phases of humor, shock, and pathos. The narrative jumps back and forth between the group in their early teens and when they go in and out of prison and rehab, or worse. What some of them looked like as children is cleverly saved for much later, once we know who they became.
Meyer deftly punctures the boys’ and men’s attempts to appear tough. Children cook shoplifted pizza in a new microwave oven, pretending it’s good. Failed acts of disobedience: “Rico had found a big nail and wanted to break through [a police officer’s] tires, but he couldn’t get the nail in the rubber. Danny gets a prison tattoo artist to ink him, so people might think he spent time inside. “I’m scared my arm will fall off because it’s really swollen like I have huge muscles, which I have.” The tattoo artist returns to prison before finishing, leaving Danny “a skull without eyes”.
Like the book’s treatment of the political landscape, which is subtly shaded, there is no direct narrative commentary on Danny’s behavior. No sign of the explicit self-reflection one would expect from contemporary equivalents, such as that of Gabriel Krauze who they were or that of Graeme Armstrong The young team, which are also inspired by the violent youth of their authors. (Meyer, like Danny, spent time at an institute for young offenders in the Leipzig area.)
While we were dreaming, which was nominated for the International Booker Prize, has the strengths of a good first novel: a keen sense of place and detail; an accent on the voice, wonderfully rendered in the translation by Katy Derbyshire. But it also exhibits the clichés of an exuberant beginning. Minor characters may be brought to life, their stutters represented phonetically, or the story behind their nicknames worked out, and then never appear again. Conversations, scenes, and entire chapters add more color than consequence.
In real life, social groups are made up of similar people doing similar things. But this poses problems for writers of realistic fiction. It’s hard work to differentiate between characters who share a strong collective identity, and then manage them.
Meyer has to do this for a core of six, some of whom seem interchangeable for long periods of time, plus an extended social group and members of other crews. “I almost forgot it,” says one central character of another. It was 200 pages, and I knew the feeling. I wondered why Meyer hadn’t cut or merged certain characters, before understanding his sad structural dilemma: it would leave too few to collectively remember those who die.
While we were dreaming by Clemens Meyer, translated by Katy Derbyshire, Fitzcarraldo Publishing £16.99, 528 pages
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