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Schwab exploits the remarkable capacity of the German language to make abstract concepts seem like solid objects. This is what drove Nietzsche up the wall, but Schwab revels in it, making extraordinary black comedy out of the plastic qualities of German. It sounds academic, but it's not. A character in one play says that her husband might "get a nervous spasm down his marriage". In another play, while a person is being beaten up, a character muses that "human society beats up human society too much." The remarkable thing about this book is that Mitchell manages to make this extremely weird and singular idiom fresh and funny.
Schwab's sense of construction is no less weird. If a character gets killed in Scene 1, chances are he or she will be back be Scene 3 as if nothing had happened. Schwab's vision is as dark as Thomas Bernhard's, but it's as if Bernhard's consciousness of despair and loss has been determinedly blurred in an ocean of cheap beer. There's a "version" here of Schnitzler's La Ronde which reads like it was rewritten by the collective mind of the Sex Pistols. It's good to see this amazing writer being served so well by a translator. I doubt that American producers are going to leap at the chance of putting Schwab on Broadway, but that's the public's loss. He is a vigorous kick up the fundament of the all-too-slack and showbizzy English-speaking theatre.
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