En tyst minut

It's a tragedy: Stella Petersen, a young woman, an English teacher at a high school in northern Germany, has died. The school holds a memorial service, and one by one they step up to give their eulogies: the principal, other teachers, a representative of the students.

In the audience sits Christian, one of the students. He was asked to say a few words, but while the others speak for all but one minute, he's quiet. He sits there remembering the summer, their summer, in the small seaside town with beach parties (this is the late 50s, after all), regattas, and clandestine meetings. It's a short service, so it's a short novel; in just over 100 pages, and in quick flashbacks, we get to follow Christian's and Stella's hesitant, very inappropriate, and ultimately (as we know) doomed relationship.

So, yet another novel by an aging writer reminiscing about first discovering the physical act of love, eh? Well sure, if you want to get technical, but it's a lot more than that. Though on the one hand, this is really that simple: a story about falling in love for the first time, back when everything is still life and death, everything or nothing, when you still think love is all that matters and your feelings are automatically returned. Lenz's style is wonderfully and deceptively light, letting Christian the narrator set the whole thing in such simple tones (teenagers love hard, but they're not always noted for their empathy) that we almost, but only almost, don't notice the obvious: that Stella is an adult, with a couple more years on him, and a complicated life full of issues and relationships that Christian has no part of. Christian certainly doesn't notice; he's too busy making plans of a little lighthousekeeper's house for two.

That difference in storylines, that confusion of subject and object run throughout the novel. Christian, in love with (the idea of being in love with) a person who's supposed to be an authority figure, dreaming of being her Man, struggles to be consistent in how he addresses and thinks of her; shifting between du and Sie when talking to her and between you and she when describing her to himself. It's as if he's trying to deliver a eulogy to her, yet ends up telling himself their story instead, fixing it in his memory as he wants to remember it, encasing her in amber. And throughout the novel, rock by rock, a breakwater is built outside the little town to keep the big waves from ruining the nostalgic calm.

There's a tone in A Minute's Silence that reminds me of the paintings of the Skagen painters; the wide open sky, the false nostalgia of easy life in a place where most people have to work hard for everything, the hazy North Sea light. At other times it reminds me of Isherwood's A Single Man; not just the way it's set in a single day but dealing in memories and their role in how we see (or fail to see) ourselves and relate to others, or coping with the death of a loved one, or even the way the discussion of a different book (Orwell's Animal Farm; Christian misses the point of it entirely) plays an important part in the narrative. But also the way the author manages to charge every word of his simple story and featherlight prose with meaning. If you wanted to, you could pick every paragraph apart hunting for symbolism and find it - yet that's never necessary. That's just all the little shades of blue that make up the whole picture, give it depth. Mostly, though, A Minute's Silence is just itself: a simple but haunting story about a young man, a slightly older woman, and how we become... well, slightly older. A eulogy for getting it both right and wrong.