'The Sweetness of Life' by Paulus Hochgatterer

Thus begins Paulus Hochgatterer’s The Sweetness of Life, a spare and finely observed portrait of a small Austrian town living through a winter of vague fear. Winner of the European Union Literature Prize for Austria in 2009, this short novel is finally available in the U.S. in a most readable translation from the German by Jamie Bulloch.

A hyperintelligent maze

Less a whodunit than hyperintelligent maze of psychological studies, Hochgatterer’s story does, nonetheless, involve a detective, Ludwig Kovacs, who has very little to go on. The little girl’s dog may have seen the killer briefly, and so may have the girl, but that isn’t entirely clear, and in any event, the child isn’t even speaking. It falls to Raffael Horn, a local child psychiatrist, to deal with the dumbstruck girl, and her case is only one of many sticky problems he has to handle.

Both Kovacs and Horn are somewhat strange characters. The former takes to drinking beer outdoors at an immigrant’s restaurant in subzero temperatures, where he admires the owner’s unattainable wife; the latter — not an old man by any means — becomes aware of the fact that he has begun to mutter aloud to himself, mostly somewhat embarrassing but astute observations like “the problem with detaching things from yourself is that they always come in through the back door.” Moreover, he’s having trouble forming or retrieving notions that arise at the edge of his consciousness. Kovacs, on the other hand, while thinking less intricately about behavior perhaps, isn’t having any memory problems, and when needed, can be more on target in analysis of certain behavior.

Eventually, a few suspects in the killing surface, the first and most promising a man who brutally breaks his disobedient daughter’s lower legs by swinging her bodily against an iron post, the second — well, is it actually a child, or is it his older, apparently sociopathic brother? Or since the town has other strange thought patterns walking and running about, maybe it’s none of those three. More than halfway through the book, however, no one who seems a potential killer seems to have any palpable connection to the dead man.

Frosty echoes of winter darkness

In tone and effect, Hochgatterer’s story calls to mind some of the disturbing poems of Robert Frost, perhaps first “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” which begins, “All out of doors looked darkly in at him / Through the thin frost....” It also suggests “The Hill Wife”: “She had no saying dark enough / For the dark pine that kept / Forever trying the window-latch / Of the room where they slept.”

What was it with Frost and windows at night and in winter?

Windows do not figure prominently in The Sweetness of Life, but like Frost, Hochgatterer has a fine feel for that dread that arises from winter darkness, certain crime stories in your newspaper, or in a small town visited by the worst possible of human impulses.