Mit Haut und Haaren by Arnon GrunbergMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Arnon Grunberg is the best living Dutch author. Period. The English translation of this novel is "Tooth and Nail," but I'm afraid Grunberg is too European for an American audience (by the way, I happened to read this novel in German and not in the original Dutch, not only because German books are easier to obtain from Japan than Dutch books, but also because I like to read German). This novel is so soaked in black humor that it literally drips off the pages and the protagonist is not an all-conquering American-type hero, but an abject failure. Roland Oberstein is an economics lecturer and researcher (typically not yet professor) who studies economic bubbles. He also regards love as an economic market and has as much empathy for other people as for the products on the shelves of a supermarket. Despite his repeated statements that he is only interested in his studies, he spends a lot of time playing around with women and we gradually realize he is not at all the great economics researcher he gives himself out to be.
He has an ex-wife Sylvie, a dentist, who lives in Amsterdam with their young son, a Nintendo freak. He has a girlfriend, Violet, also living in Amsterdam, who is a designer of ladies' handbags (Roland started this relation to make clear to his ex-wife that all was over between them). At a conference Roland meets the New Yorker Lea, biographer of a Nazi camp commander, and their shared interest in the academic study of genocide forms the basis for an intense friendship. Roland works in Fairfax, but his ex-wife convinces him to return a semester per year to the Netherlands where he can teach in Leiden (the negative description of the academic environment in the Netherlands is one of the highlights of the novel). He soon finds a new girlfriend, Gwendolyne, one of his students and a fanatic horseback rider, and this relation will become fatal for both of them when it reaches the front page of Holland's largest newspaper (Gwendolyne has carefully documented their contacts on her Facebook account).
We do not only read about Roland and his relations, but also about the relations of his relations, like an expanding universe. Violet starts something with Wytze, a salesman of satellite telephones, but is driven to despair when Roland remains indifferent to her unfaithfulness. She therefore buys a whip so that Roland can punish her. The husband of Lea, Jason, a local politician in Brooklyn, discovers his great love for a UPS delivery man from Guatamala, who is illegal in the U.S. so he can be blackmailed. Lea herself starts a relation with a taxi driver from Pakistan, after also having slept with one of Roland's colleagues - one the rare events which makes Roland angry because he regards the colleague professionally as a nitwit. And so on and so forth. What becomes clear is that the market of love has nothing to do with love, but that its only currency is power and manipulation (as can already be seen in Choderlos De Laclos' Dangerous Liaisons of 1782).
If this is the level of humanity, there is indeed not much hope left. But the novel is not negative, on the contrary, it is somehow uplifting thanks to Grunberg's strong sense of humor.
Author's website: https://www.arnongrunberg.com/
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