A wailing child lost in the neon aisles of a department store finally finds his Mama. Upset, the mother reacts poorly, slapping the child; he begins to vomit on her. Onlookers stand back, thinking, we imagine, that this terrible Mama is getting just what she deserves—but Zündel, our hero, steps forward, holding out his plastic bag to help her catch “the violet spew.” “Yes, I acted, true,” thinks Zündel, but it’s “the wrong thing and too late.” So begins Zündel’s Exit, and so it continues: humor and horror, action and (over)contemplation, bodily function and regret, isolation among the masses. The awful inscrutability of the “right thing” is what finally drives Zündel to the edge. The novel’s crisis is the one beneath all crises: the fact of having to exist at all.
Zündel’s Exit, the first novel by Swiss writer Markus Werner, written in 1984, just now translated into English by Michael Hofmann, is a highlight reel of the last legless month in the life of thirty-three-year-old high-school history teacher Konrad Zündel. Our narrator is Zündel’s smart, sympathetic friend, pastor Viktor Busch, who reconstructs the story through various sources. For such a short, quick-moving novel (126 pages), it is remarkably full: action, hearsay, philosophizing, diary entries, imagined dialogue, advice. The speed and force and assurance with which the novel moves is arresting: it convinces us of the drama in the drama, and the drama in the everyday. There is a kind of brutality in having to read, day in and day out, that little warning sticker on one’s toilet.
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