A tiler's afternoon

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A Tiler's Afternoon is a novel by the Swedish writer Lars Gustafsson . The original Swedish edition was published in 1991 under the title En kakelsättares eftermiddag ; Verena Reichel's German translation was published in the same year . The work ties in with Gustafsson's cycle of novels, Cracks in the Wall, from the 1970s, which he initially concluded in 1978 with the death of a beekeeper .

action

In the first lines of A Tiler's Afternoon , the main character and the place and time of the plot are defined: The story begins on a “gray November morning ” in Uppsala in 1982 , the protagonist is a 65-year-old tiler named Torsten Bergman. The lonely Torsten, who retired early for health reasons, occasionally carries out illegal work . That morning he received an offer by telephone to tile the bathroom and washroom of an old villa that was being renovated. The tilers who are actually entrusted with it have disappeared. Although the plumber who gives Torsten the job cannot even say who the house owners are and who will pay Torsten, he goes into it, because "a nice little job that didn't take many days would come in handy" . Torsten Bergman finds the construction site abandoned. The renovation work, which is already well advanced on the ground floor, is breaking off in the stairwell on the way to the upper floor. A cardboard sign on the upstairs door is labeled Sofie K. There is no response to Torsten's bell. Since no one is still there, Torsten starts work on his own. In the bathroom he notices that part of it is already tiled - initially good, but then worse and worse, “in a highly grotesque and confused mess”. Torsten Bergman feels anxious at this sight, especially since the tiler or tilers had apparently not noticed "how much their own work had changed and had failed", and it occurred to him that some life also looked like this . He begins by knocking off the botched tiling from the wall.

While Torsten is working on the incorrectly tiled wall with a hammer, he fantasizes about the invisible inhabitant of the upper floor. Once he imagines her as an attractive redhead, then as a white-haired Aunt Sofie . The latter idea lets his thoughts wander back to the time of his childhood and youth. Over time, feelings of hunger appear; Torsten also remarks that he will soon run out of work if no one shows up - unless he gets glue and grout himself. There are enough tiles , however. When he noticed the high-quality faucets that had already been installed, he decided to unscrew them and sell them in a hardware store in order to raise money for the material.

After he has put this project into practice, Torsten runs into his cousin Stig Clason, known as Stickan, who offers him his help. The two buy schnapps, sausage and bread and drive back to the construction site together. Stickan can borrow a wheelbarrow and shovels from a neighbor to remove the rubble, and on this occasion learns that nobody has been in the house since early summer. The owner lives in Stockholm and ran away after bankruptcy. Since it is not to be expected that “Sofie K.” or anyone else will be on the upper floor, Stickan sets out to explore it. In the kitchen he comes across a locked safe. Torsten and Stickan speculate about its contents and push it around, but finally leave the closet and leave the room again. While they continue working in the bathroom, Stickan tells Torsten about his life. He particularly hated the haulage contractor Bromsten, who kicked him out decades ago as a partner in his business and who also incited Bromsten's daughter, who Stickan was in love with, against him by portraying Stickan as a drinker. Stickan then went to America, stopped drinking and preached at the Pentecostal movement . The memory of the “bad person” Bromsten makes Stickan reflect on the bad in people in general. Torsten, who does not believe in Stickan's Bromsten and suspects that this is just a scapegoat that the embittered Stickan made up, has no idea whether he ever received any wages for his work “in this haunted house” will, and also wonders if the result of the work will be valued - but he states that at least he has accomplished something.

A persistent ringing on the door interrupts Torsten's thoughts. A woman with two small children stands in front of the door and wants to make a phone call. Although Torsten explains that there is no telephone in the house, the woman insists on her request and does not allow herself to be dismissed. Her husband locked her and the children out and she had to talk to him. It doesn't help to knock on the door. Stickan, who had explored the upper floor again, joins the discussion. When the woman - her name is Seija - is preparing to leave the house with her children after all, Torsten sends Stickan after her because he is worried about her. Stickan accompanies them to their house. The husband lets Stickan in with Seija and her children, but initially only sits next to his goldfish aquarium, reading. When Stickan speaks to his conscience, the man begins to cry. Stickan suddenly notices that he knows him: It's Alfred, one of Stickan's cousins.

Meanwhile, Torsten Bergman continues to work. He thinks back to his youth and ponders his relationship to alcohol. As a youth he was a teetotaler and has remained so in his heart, although he has “gotten into drinking hard” since his military service. Torsten himself can hardly work without drinking alcohol, but at the same time he hates to see his colleagues drink at work. Torsten comes to terms with this contradiction; he feels that "the world must be contradicting itself for it to work". When he discovered the piece of paper on which he had noted the address of the house, he discovered that he had mistaken Malma Skogsväg for Skogstibblevägen - he was working in the wrong house the whole time. Alfred and Stickan have meanwhile started a conversation with each other. Alfred says that he got out of prison a few months ago and since then has preferred to stay at home and have some peace. He worked as a talented art forger , but was jailed not because of that, but because he drove around one of his clients who wanted a car he had paid for after the fraud was discovered.

Torsten Bergman sits there "like Job on a heap of ashes and rubble" when Stickan comes back. They talk about the events of the day, with Stickan not telling Torsten what he learned about Alfred, and Torsten, for his part, has no interest in revealing that they have worked senselessly on a wrong address. The book ends at eight thirty in the evening - with a loud knock on the door.

reception

Gustafsson has created "a new kind of clarity and a new kind of mystery," said Jay Boggis in Harvard Review . The details of his world are perfectly clear; only when you look at it all together do you notice how mysterious the world is. In a review in World Literature Today , Rochelle Wright wrote that Gustafsson showed again in the afternoon to a tiler that the will to make the best of things can make sense of existence even under unfavorable circumstances. In Spiegel magazine , the novel was described as a virtuoso parable about the question of meaning , in which Gustafsson “also takes stock of his own writing work, persistently and thoughtfully as the tiler”.

expenditure

Swedish first edition:

German translation:

Further translations of the novel have appeared in at least the following languages: Bosnian, Danish, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Rochelle Wright: Lars Gustafsson, En kakelsättares eftermiddag . In: World Literatury Today . vol. 67, no. 1 , 1993, p. 199 , JSTOR : 40148974 .
  2. ^ Lars Gustafsson: A tiler's afternoon . Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1991, ISBN 3-446-16306-9 , pp. 7 .
  3. ^ Lars Gustafsson: A tiler's afternoon . Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1991, ISBN 3-446-16306-9 , pp. 15 .
  4. ^ A b Lars Gustafsson: A tiler's afternoon . Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1991, ISBN 3-446-16306-9 , pp. 34 .
  5. ^ Lars Gustafsson: A tiler's afternoon . Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1991, ISBN 3-446-16306-9 , pp. 93 .
  6. ^ Lars Gustafsson: A tiler's afternoon . Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1991, ISBN 3-446-16306-9 , pp. 122 .
  7. ^ Lars Gustafsson: A tiler's afternoon . Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1991, ISBN 3-446-16306-9 , pp. 123 .
  8. ^ Lars Gustafsson: A tiler's afternoon . Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1991, ISBN 3-446-16306-9 , pp. 138 .
  9. ↑ a b Jay Boggis: A Tiler's Afternoon by Lars Gustafsson . In: Harvard Review . No. 4 , 1993, p. 200-201 , JSTOR : 27559834 ("a new kind of clarity and a new kind of mystery").
  10. ↑ Happy Sisyphus . In: Der Spiegel . No. 8 , February 17, 1992, p. 202 ( online ).
  11. ^ According to the catalog of the Swedish National Library .