Kleinzeit

By Russell Hoban

On a day like any other, Kleinzeit gets fired. Hours later he finds himself in hospital with a pair of adventurous pyjamas and a recurring geometrical pain. Here he falls instantly in love with a beautiful night nurse called Sister. And together they are pitched headlong into a wild and flickering world of mystery ... Kleinzeit. In German that means 'hero'. Or 'smalltime'. It depends on whom you ask. 'Russell Hoban is our Ur-novelist, a maverick voice that is like no other' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jun 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781408835753

Russell Hoban

Russell Hoban (1925-2011) was the author of many extraordinary novels including Turtle Diary, Angelica Lost and Found and his masterpiece, Riddley Walker. He also wrote some classic books for children including The Mouse and his Child and the Frances books. Born in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, USA, he lived in London from 1969 until his death.

Reviews for Kleinzeit

[myopicbookworm · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What can one say about such a bizarre yet engaging book? It is with some hesitency (sic: prick up your ears, hapless readers of Finnegans Wake; prick up your bottoms, hopeless worshippers of Ulysses) that I make the attempt. Yes, that was me (greetings, Esta) who commented that it was like T. S. Eliot got drunk and decided to write a short comic novel in the style of James Joyce. Let us go then you and I...Kleinzeit, the central character of the book (he once tells someone jokingly that his name means "hero"), goes to the doctor with a pain in the hypotenuse and is given a hospital appointment. (We overhear the hospital bed calling to him. There is something about a glockenspiel.) He finds a piece of yellow paper (A4) on the ground, takes it to his office, writes on it, and is fired from his job. He finds himself in a ward (A4) full of faintly weird men, and falls in love with the night sister. He is haunted by emotion-wracked pieces of yellow paper. He escapes periodically from the hospital to busk in the Underground with a glockenspiel (Orpheus with his lute), where he meets another man haunted by pieces of paper. He lends him a room, and finds it transformed into what a writer of words on yellow paper needs: a bare room with a deal table. He realizes that he has sprung fully-formed from (somewhere) and has to make an effort to recall (construct?) a past for himself. His medical condition fluctuates, expanding to encompass his diapason, and even his asymptotes (Hoban raids the dictionary for amusing mock-medical terms).The narrative is fractured, humorous, abounding in wordplay and allusions, partly stream-of-(un)consciousness though narrated in the third person, punctuated by imaginary dialogues with inanimate or personified objects, of which the most important are Hospital and a simian figure of Death. I have had to start reading it again: I don't think it makes sense on one straight reading, as although the plot is (apparently) linear, the writing is circular, and the first-time reader inevitably misses early allusions which hark forward to later chapters (did I mention the glockenspiel?). There are some great one-liners and comic moments.So what is Kleinzeit? Small-time? Possibly. Like Joyce's Ulysses, it is a short time (though longer than a day), made up of partly articulated moments. Sometimes it is enjoyable to be slightly bemused by a book. I liked it.MB 16-iv-2012, rev. 19-iv-2012

[esta1923 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

(I have reread this so many times that I almost know it by heart.) "Kleinziet" is a perfect book in that, if you accept its narrator, you will have a wondrous trip.

[meditationesmartini · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is like Salvia: The book of the movie. It's like OH SHIT WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME and THE HOSPITAL IS DREAMING OF US. And sex and mystery and psychedelic freakouts just everywhere you could want them. It's better than The Invisibles because it doesn't limit weird truth and freaky freaky beauty to de facto superheroes, but lets old sickies have a look in too. Ad then it fades and you're accepting but a little bit sad, and then it acts up again, comes back morbid because come on, every novel gets pathological, every story goes septic except the oldest and cleanest ones from an unpolluted, primary world. But you don't care about Death and his hairy fingers - you're just happy to be on the ride again, screaming toward brainsad or at least ullage and a skewed hypotenuse, but having an adventure. And this book demonstrates what Riddley Walker, and I'm not gonna find you the quote, only affirms - that that adevnture is always outside your door.