The Snowman by
Jörg Fauser
pbk out September 04
(Bitter Lemon Press)
at £8.99
Blum's out-of-date porn mags ("classics, my dear fellow. Denmark 1968...) are not
selling well. A dip into his 'emergency' funds may well be necessary. The Maltese
police suggest he tries Italy. Instead, on his way with the magazines to meet Rossi, a
new Italian client, he is waylaid and they are stolen. Rossi disappears, his hotel room
devastated, but Blum finds a left luggage ticket, valid at the Central Station, Munich,
concealed inside a wig left by Rossi in his room. Decamping immediately to Munich,
Blum is at first disappointed to reclaim a carton of unusually heavy Old Spice shaving
foam. But the cans prove to contain pure Peruvian cocaine. Dreaming of the modest
business that might support him in his old age, he sets out with the coke to sell it...
Thus begins a bitterly funny odyssey through the European coke-using classes
of the early 1980s: rock stars, punks, balding hippies or those with contacts amongst
the captains of industry, admen and politicians ('cocaine is a status
symbol').Transactions take place in (West) Germany, Holland and Belgium, at
parties, in clip-joints and toilets; contacts are made at restaurants with 'artistic
performances'.
It's a wonderfully down-at-heel picture of Europe at a particular point in time
("in ten years snorting coke will probably become big business, but for now we're
still an exclusive circle", says one customer), curiously short of ready cash a source of
continual frustration for Blum and with several other parallels with the modern state
(asylum seekers, street crime). Through it all trudges the strangely admirable
protagonist, one of life's survivors ("Do you write?, asks one party hostess. "Only
figures," replies Blum), clinging grimly to his grimy independence, convinced that he
is being tailed, pinning his hopes on the 'shop-soiled and run-down' Cora and basing
his future on a well-thumbed 1978 guide to business opportunities in the Bahamas.
Fauser (for many years himself an addict) has a wryly observant eye for life on
the margins (note the jukebox cockroaches copulating to the tune of 'Don't Go
Breaking My Heart'), for the smart bars and their customers living their lives in
empty desperation. His stripped-down prose and honest observation hints at the later
Camus, his characters bring both Ambler and Greene to mind.
This novel, Fauser's first, was published in Germany in 1981. Six years later,
after two more books, he was dead, mown down by a heavy goods vehicle on a
motorway. Clearly a great loss. The best of Bitter Lemon's roster so far. Don't miss.
The Snowman by
Jörg Fauser
