Tanja Arnheim and Jerome Aimler are Millennials in a long-distance relationship. Tanja is a Berlin-based novelist and Jerome a Frankfurt-based web designer. They text regularly and occasionally visit one another. There are lots of drugs, lots of parties, and lots of sex. One day Tanja, for no particular reason, breaks up with Jerome. They revert to other, short-term relationships, Tanja with the tattooed Janis and Jerome with his schoolfriend Marlene. At a friend’s wedding they decide to get back together, but it is not, alas, “official”, and despite a series of emails (faithfully reproduced here) the relationship once again peters out. Tanja’s eventual decision to rekindle the flame comes too late, because Jerome, having impregnated Marlene, is no longer available. That is the end of the affair.
Leif Randt’s Allegro Pastel (2020), newly translated from the German, is intended as a “serious” novel – it was longlisted for the German Book Prize and shortlisted for the EU Prize for Literature – but it amounts to very little. For one thing we never really care about the relationship between Tanja and Jerome. They split up for no definable reason, and there are so many alternatives on whom each of them can fall back that there is never any sense of crisis. Nothing is at stake. Nothing will change whether they are together or apart. Everything is dependent on their whims. Chunks of the book consist of their texts and emails – very difficult to read – but even the moments of physical intimacy are unmoving and repetitious. If there were an index of terms at the end of this book, it would consist largely of instances of the phrase “good sex”, which crops up again and again in endless scenarios. Here is a typical passage: “The sex they had in the incredibly humid room was not particularly good, but there was a sense that it might become good. It was promising, Jerome felt, so maybe it was good sex after all.”
Characters’ obsessions with scribing the experience of each moment onto social media, and catalogic details of Samsung Galaxy S7s, iPhone 8s, N64s, PlayStations, are probably intended by Randt to show the encroachment of technology into every facet of modern life – but it is overdone, and serves only to emphasise the shallowness of the rest of the book. Sex parties, night-clubs, and drugs in toilets account for the bulk of the characters’ enthusiasms; otherwise, their thoughts centre on Airbnbs in the Cayman Islands or burger places in Los Angeles. They are shallow, capricious, and self-obsessed. Occasionally their micro-analysing, hyper-selfconscious thought processes give insight: the mention of “pre-emptive wistfulness” as “a general sadness regarding the passage of time, mixed with a warm euphoria, spread[ing] from his stomach to his chest” expresses a familiar sensation in pithy terms. But nothing can change the fact that these characters are empty. They are not human beings. They are like the screen-driven ghosts in D.H. Lawrence’s poem “When I went to the film”, inhabiting
a white atmosphere
Upon which shadows of people, pure personalities
Are cast in black and white, and move
In flat ecstasy, supremely unfelt…
The overall feeling is of pastel-coloured shallowness. Small, ubiquitous scenes stick in the mind like photographs – a U-Bahn ride followed by Szechuan chicken, a Christmas party in a Frankfurt apartment, a friend’s wedding in the German countryside, a flight to a literary festival in Vienna – but there is no emotion behind them. Politics or religion occasionally intrude, but only for cameos. Randt’s narration is too detached and unfeeling; it is never clear what he wants to say, whether he is criticising the lifestyle he depicts or commenting on it at all. His terse style might be called Hemingwayan; only, it is too awkward and lacks Hemingway’s bursts of life or his power of visual description. At its best it is crisp and evocative but never outstanding:
They held hands on their way to the U4. It was a rare thing for Jerome to navigate a crowd of people while holding a girlfriend’s hand. But with Tanja he didn’t even think about what they looked like. There was a line in front of a stand selling freshly pressed fruit juice, and a few people were still buying glossy magazines from the giant newsagent’s next to the Burger King.
As a record of nightlife and cosmopolitanism in contemporary Germany, Allegro Pastel is entertaining. As a record of blandness it also succeeds – whether consciously or not.
Allegro Pastel by Leif Randt, translated by Peter Kuras, is published on 8 May. Granta Magazine Editions ISBN: 9781738536221
