As the great British actor Donald Wolfit breathed his last, he is supposed to have remarked to those gathered at his bedside, "Dying is easy; comedy is hard."
Difficult as it may be on the stage, a genuine literary comedy is even harder to pull off. It's easy enough to do a comedy of manners set, say, in publishing or literary academia. The trick there is an observant eye, a nose for cant and, as with any comedy, timing. A true "comedy of letters" in which literature and the making of literature are the subjects is something else entirely.
That's what makes Michael Kruger's elegant little novel, "The Executor: A Comedy of Letters," a fine and thought-provoking entertainment for anyone who ever has taken their reading seriously or idolized an author -- however privately. This is a book that not only lives up to its subtitle but also reminds us that between the dramatic poles of slapstick and black comedy is a broad, gray area where the absurd holds unsettling sway.
Kruger, now 65, is one of Germany's foremost men of letters. Since the early 1970s, he has been a widely admired poet, as well as the head of the prestigious Hanser Verlag publishing house and editor of the influential journal Akzente. He also is a translator, critic and essayist. Two years ago, his first novel, "The Cello Player," won critical success in the United States as an intellectual entertainment. In that book, Gyorgy, a Hungarian immigrant composer in contemporary Munich, supports himself writing nonsensical television advertising jingles while working on an opera about the doomed Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. It's an erudite meditation on the sources of creativity and on how the artist's political relationship to society both feeds and subverts them. Fans of "The Cello Player" will recognize certain similarities in "The Executor" -- not least the author's choice of an epigraph from Mandelstam's equally tragic contemporary, Marina Tsvetaeva, who hanged herself:
When I leave a city, it seems to me
It comes to an end and ceases to exist.
It's a significant choice on a couple of levels because "The Executor" is not set in Germany but in Turin, "the city of suicides." (In the German original, the book was titled "Die Turiner Komodie.") As in his earlier novel, Kruger manages the neat trick of wearing his formidable -- and formidably allusive -- erudition lightly by structuring his story in that most beguiling of forms, the mystery. It is, in fact, a mystery so deftly laid out that, when a reader reaches its resolution on the last pages, they're likely to gasp in pleased recollection of the subtle clues they missed along the way. Its process is abetted by John Hargraves' keen and lucid translation.
