Seven Lies

Book Review

James Lasdun

Seven Lies, by James Lasdun, tells the story of Stefan Vogel, a young man who grew up in East Germany, but is now living in the United States.

When the novel opens, Stefan is at a party in New York.  A woman says to him, " Excuse me, are you Stefan Vogel?"  When he confirms his identity, the woman throws a glass of wine in his face.  Stefan is stunned and confused.  Who is this woman?  Why did she throw her wine in his face?  As Stefan ponders these questions, he looks back on his life in the GDR and on the events that brought him to America.

Stefan grew up in East Berlin in a privileged family.  His father was in the diplomatic service, negotiating the Friendship Treaties between the GDR and other Eastern Bloc countries.  His work took him to New York frequently, and he often brought back exotic foreign presents for his family - Slinkies, diving watches, perfumes, bottles of Schaad-Neumann aquavit,  Stefan's mother had an ostentatious pretension about her, and made it known to anyone who would listen that at any moment, her family will be posted to New York City.

When this plan falls through due to the father's ineptitude, she hurriedly recasts the family as intellectuals, desperate to assert the family's superiority over others.  She gathers artists, writers, and actors into the family's bosom, and begins to host salons.  At one of these events, Stefan's mother begins to introduce him as their "literary man" and the family's "poet-intellectual."  Stefan doesn't question the lie; indeed, he supports it, bribing their building superintendent with a bottle of aquavit to let him into the family's basement storage locker, where he copies out a poem from a volume of World Poetry in Translation.  At the next salon, he presents this forgery as his own work:

I celebrate myself, myself I sing

And my beliefs are yours, as

    everything

I have is yours, each atom.  So

    we laze -

My soul and I  - passing the

    summer days

Observing spears of grass...

This establishes Stefan as a liar, and he observes:

"It seems to me that at the age of thirteen, I had already developed the cynicism of a seventy-year-old dictator."

Stefan continues his pattern of lying one day when he arrives home from school to find his mother accusing his brother Otto of stealing on of the bottles of aquavit that Stefan has been using to bribe the building superintendent.  Instead of rightfully taking the blame, Stefan lets Otto take the fall, and in the process, assists in the breakdown of the relationship between Otto and his mother.

Stefan falls out of favor with his classmates, who tease him mercilessly and call him "sloth."  He becomes depressed and lethargic, and turns inward, describing himself in this way:

"During this period I formed the idea that every phenomenon that comes into being represents a victory in a struggle against a force willing it not to come into being.  I pictured this opposing force as a kind of Chinese Dragon, a Dragon of Stability, jealously guarding the status quo. It patrolled the borders between occupied and unoccupied space, and it lay curled and scowling at the threshold of every possible action.  In order to open a window one must first slay the dragon posted to ensure that the closed window remain forever closed.  The fire these dragons breathed took the form of waves of paralyzing inertia, a breath of which was enough to overcome you unless you had extraordinary vitality as well as unshakable belief in the importance of what you wanted to do.  More and more I found myself defeated before I could even move.  Was it worth the almighty struggle, the expenditure of limited energy, to open that window, when after all nothing material would be changed by doing so, and when, even if I succeeded, another dragon would immediately be posted to ensure the now-open window would now remain forever open?  Increasingly, it seemed not."

After attending Humboldt University, Stefan goes to work for a government organization, where his job is to create propaganda that promotes "Peace, Friendship and Anti-Imperialist Solidarity."  He discovers that he is surprisingly good at this.

One evening, Stefan attends a performance of an avant-garde play in the Prenzlauer Berg, a region of East Berlin resembling the East Village.  The play is called Macbrecht, and is a farcical rendition of Shakespeare's Macbeth.  Walter and Clara, friends of Stefan's mother with whom he attends the play, pronounce it banal, and leave early.  Stefan, however, is captivated by the actress Inge, and returns to see the play alone a few nights later.  Stefan describes that Inge's "allure for me had something to do with the suggestion of a violently destructive power at her disposal."  While Stefan is observing Inge, men in dark clothes rush the stage and march off some of the actors, who Stefan belatedly notices are wearing anti-government badges of a swords-to-plowshares insignia.

The crowd disperses, and as he is leaving, Stefan is randomly invited to a party at somewhere called Menzer's place by Margarete, a stranger and Menzer's sister.  The party is located in a bohemian squat, and is filled with political rebels and various artists.  The group is rowdy and vocal, criticizing art and the government in equal measures.  Menzer even has his own Stasi member tailing him, and is on such good terms with him that he invites him up to the party.

Stefan meets Inge at the party, and after this first encounter, he goes back repeatedly, attempting to win her love, although she has a fiance.  Again, he misrepresents himself, asserting to Menzer's crowd that he is a poet, and stretching the truth even further, that his poems will be published by the literary magazine Sinn und Form.  He ends up trying to pull strings with his Uncle Heinrich to support this lie.

Eventually, after Inge's fiance supposedly rejects her, Stefan declares his love for her and tempts her into being with him in exchange for the promise of exit visas to America for the pair of them.

Their fantasy materializes.  Stefan's Uncle Heinrich assists with the exit visas.  They fly to New York City, and live in the East Village, in an apartment above a homeless shelter, where they work in exchange for their lodging.  Stefan, through a connection of his father's, makes a useful contact and begins to work at her magazine.  Inge finds acting work.  They move to upstate New York and acquire a dog.  Their carefully contrived life seems to be idyllic and perfect, until that moment at the party where a woman throws her wine in Stefan's face.  The fastidiously constructed lies seem to come tumbling down around him.

This is an elegant and well-constructed novel.  Lasdun has an ear for language, and his descriptions have a precise detail that one might expect from a published poet"

"The lobby was floored with polished slabs made of a pink and white agglomerate, like slices of vitrified mortadella."

Though Stefan is not particularly likeable - how can one really trust a compulsive liar as a narrator? - Lasdun's writing enables the reader to ignore that fact and continue reading.  The author does an impeccable job of showing what life must have been like in the world of the GDR, where everyone informs on everyone else, and where you never know if your best friend or acquaintance is actually working for the Stasi.  These details make the novel compelling, and it is easy to see why it was optioned for a movie before it was even published.  It is a very worthy novel for the Booker longlist!

"I have been familiar with this face since my teens in the German Democratic Republic, where it formed one of a half dozen human images into which the abstraction 'America' would resolve itself in my mind.  It was always gentle and frail and tired-looking, giving the impression of a sad god working overtime to help the human race, and now it is even gentler and frailer and more tired-looking than ever.  The crest of sugar-white hair rising from his forehead looks almost ethereal in its silkenness; a veritable halo"

"Unpopularity, as any schoolchild knows, is a highly specific spiritual sickness which can strike almost anybody at any given moment.  It is as irrefutably real as the measles, and in its own way almost as contagious.  Once a person has been diagnosed with it there is nothing he can do except wait patiently for it to run its course.  Attempts to deny it or overcome it by ingratiating oneself with the uncontaminated will only result in ever crueler forms of rejection."