The Narrator
The narrator/protagonist of the story is given to philosophical contemplation throughout. This sort of prose lends itself particularly well to the incorporation of metaphorical language. Direct metaphors and similes thus populate the novel extensively and are often self-directed in order to provide insight into the narrative consciousness:
“Ever since I had left my parents’ home I had been without a center. I was a vagabond, one for whom the world was not wide enough, a vagabond in language.”
Translators
The protagonist, Sacha, comes to recognize the underappreciated value of translators in a world complicated by too many different languages. His contemplation becomes almost poetic:
“Without translators the world would fall apart in many places. They make many seams invisible. Only those who are too close to the seams feel the pain, the itching and burning where the stitching runs.”
Language
The novel, through Sacha’s narration, is obsessed with language. His contemplation is far from limited to translators as he takes as the subject of his interests almost the whole of communication. And he arrives a singularly simple philosophical conclusion:
“Language is an attempt to escape time.”
Being German
The novel is also a meditation on the prickly subject of being German in the modern world. After initiating two world wars and multiple atrocity exhibitions, being in the 20th century was quite different from being German before. Sacha sums up the whole complicated recent history of his fatherland in perhaps the book’s defining metaphor:
“I am the grandson of perpetrators and victims.”
Nietzsche-like Epigrams
As stated earlier, the book is robust with metaphorical imagery. Much of this imagery is epigrammatic--with some so tightly constructed as to call to mind the genius of Nietzsche:
“Memory is the only wound in a person that never fully closes.”
