Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

And when he wasn’t reading, he sometimes started to laugh.

When he was younger he’d enjoyed Jules Verne, Jack London, Friedrich Gerstäcker’s novels set in exotic countries, had read Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer again and again. He loved stories of adventure, Stevenson’s Treasure Island , Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe , stories of spies, musketeers and agents. When he had started at the senior high school, however, Meno had given him a book that impressed Christian in a way he couldn’t explain; it was The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, a book that told about an age that had long since disappeared, the Belle Époque in the Vienna of the turn of the century. It was teeming with names, allusions, quotations that Christian recognized from having heard them from Meno himself or from Niklas, an effect that delighted him. Not only that, there was a casual remark by Zweig he couldn’t get out of his mind: that in Europe before the First World War you didn’t need a passport to travel wherever you liked; that you could attend university in Paris or Florence, if you wanted (and, of course, assuming you had the money). In that book he found wide horizons he had not yet come across, even with the Tower-dwellers. In the ‘Camp for Work and Relaxation’ he had read Goethe’s Elective Affinities more in an attempt to impress Verena than out of interest; now this book by Zweig gave him a sense of what the concept of ‘world literature’ meant. World literature — they’d talked about that at school as well (Goethe, Faust I : but at the time Christian had preferred to play battleships or handball); he had only had a vague idea of what it meant: it was the grey-linen rows of dignified books behind the glass of the bookcase in the living room of Caravel that seemed to stare at Christian with an expression that said: You’re too young, too stupid for us. Out of a sense of disdain that already had a touch of curiosity, he had occasionally taken a book out of the row, leafed through a few pages here, read a paragraph there (dialogues between lovers, that too), then carefully weighed the book in his hand and replaced it. He had to read, he had to learn more. He told himself that his models had been much farther on at fourteen, fifteen, than he was now, at seventeen; he told himself that, if some day he really was to become one of the great figures of science, he would have to at least double the daily quota he’d set himself. Every day in Waldbrunn he longed for the end of lessons so that he could finally get down to his own work. He studied like one possessed, eight to ten hours a day, both coursework and his own, but only as much coursework as he needed to get an A grade in class and oral tests. His own work consisted of fifty words each of English, French and Latin vocabulary a day together with further topics in chemistry, physics and biology. Christian swotted day in, day out, to the point of bitter despair that arrived by midnight at the latest because by that time he usually started confusing all the vocabulary, had forgotten the word for the biochemical cancer cycle (a complex of thistly formulae intended for second-year medical students), which was almost unpronounceable and ended in — ate or — asis, and no longer knew what the difference between an enzyme, a vitamin and a hormone was. He was dog-tired but he hadn’t done enough yet. He now forced his brain, which was already generating delusions, to read at least one chapter of world literature. Woe to anyone who dared to disturb his daily routine; Christian had already once driven off Frau Stesny, the middle-aged head of the pupils’ hostel, with a fit of rage; astonishingly she hadn’t complained to Engelmann, the principal. The other pupils in the hostel looked askance at him because he shut himself off from everything. Svetlana Lehmann tapped her forehead, Verena shrugged her shoulders, Jens mocked. Only Siegbert said nothing, Siegbert, with his little desk full of matchstick ships and sailing manuals, who knew all the ranks in the People’s Navy (and also of the Nazi navy, but no one was to know that), the types of ships, classes of cruisers and tonnages, Siegbert Füger, who wanted to go to sea and liked stories of the sea, especially Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese comic books; Christian had given him a few, ones of which Lange, the ship’s doctor, had spare copies. He even read the Odyssey , Apollonius of Rhodes’s saga of the Argonauts, the reports of Pharaoh Necho’s captain, of Herodotus.

When Frau Stesny, not knowing what to do next, locked the door of the classroom where Christian studied in the evenings (he disturbed the quiet of the building, and not only when, at two in the morning, his overwrought brain had the idea of relieving the strain by playing his cello or the school piano) — well, if Frau Stesny locked the rooms, Christian would just go on working in the toilet. He didn’t get much sleep, just four or five hours, and went with glassy, red-rimmed eyes to classes where he only realized the teacher had asked him a question from the gleeful giggles of the rest of the class. The books were beginning to become attached to him, as he called it, for the others they were something like his emblem. He seldom went anywhere without having a book with him. He read during break, while the others ate their rolls, or, during the lunch hour, went out into the yard, where the girls swapped cassettes and the boys played cards, argued about rock bands or discussed the latest football results. He even arranged his books into different categories: reading for the bus he took to Dresden, reading for the lessons he found boring (English with Frau Kosinke, geography with Herr Plink, who kept waving his pointer at the maps hanging on the walls), reading for his free time (his daily chapter) and reading for the break. Soon he was no longer satisfied with reading one chapter of world literature a day and set himself 100 pages. His day extended well into the early hours of the next. During the autumn break, when he naturally continued his study, he increased his quota to 400 pages a day, with the result that he sometimes read for fourteen, fifteen hours on end and then got up off the couch eyes rolling, pale and wan as a potato sprout. Sometimes he read two or three books in a day and afterwards all he knew about Tagore, for example, was that during the previous week he had got through five books by him. He ploughed his way through the Waldbrunn library, returned the complete editions of Max Planck, Rutherford, Albert Schweitzer after three weeks, in order to take out the next enticing pile for the next week, and the longer the book, the better! Christian loved long books. A novel wasn’t a real novel unless it was at least 500 pages long. At 500 pages the ocean began, anything less than that was paddling in a brook. It was in vain that Meno shook his head and pointed out that there could be more of the world in a short story by Chekhov, more of life and art than in many a fat, blubbery tome. But Christian went for the blue whales, as he called the epic novels of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil and Heimito von Doderer, he loved Thomas Wolfe, from the pages of his books came the sound of ships’ sirens, music from the steamers in the Southern states, the whistles of the American transcontinental trains. He read that Eugene Gant (that is Wolfe himself, he thought) had read 20,000 books in ten years (which seemed absolutely unimaginable to Christian), a real logodipsomaniac, then.

‘Now Christian’s really flipped his lid,’ Verena said.

On free days it had to be 500 pages, so for that he didn’t bother with physics and chemistry. Now the following happened: Robert had got really hooked on some Balzac novel and, out of the blue, worked his way through 555 pages in a single day. That mustn’t be allowed to happen; as far as reading and studying were concerned, Christian was the boss, Robert’s record had to be broken. One day Christian got up at four in the morning, washed, had not too full a breakfast and started to read. He wasn’t going to study that day, it was to be entirely devoted to breaking the new record. He read uninterruptedly from 4.30 a.m. until 12 p.m., though with two very irritating breaks for lunch and supper that Anne forced him to take. On the stroke of midnight he’d read 716 pages — and forgotten them, but what did that matter, he’d broken the record.