Books

From Rome to Hiddensee: a novel way round writer’s block

Lutz Seiler, winner of the German Book Prize for Kruso, on the hard road to its creation

Lutz Seiler, winner of the German Book Price 2014 for Kruso. Photograph: Ulrich Baumgarten via Getty Images

Lutz Seiler
Mon Feb 4 2019 - 05:41

At the start of 2011, we moved to live in the Villa Massimo, which hosts German writers in Rome, for just under a year. All I wanted to do was write. At last there would be time enough for that, a long, undisturbed period, without any duties or need to travel. On the very evening of our arrival I was already sitting down in my studio with its 30- or 36ft-high ceiling, this enormous echo chamber with endless windows and light, in order to finally begin my novel. A novel under the Roman sun with a view of sad cypresses and pines. However, the reading light on my table would have been enough, “my lamp and my white paper,” as Gaston Bachelard so accurately describes it: “The true place for solitary work is the circle of lamplight in a small room.”

My raw materials: 14 packing cases full of books, folders, copies, drafts and research material, which I had assembled in the previous year, as well as plot sketches, chapter designs, character files – with this cargo I had driven south over the Alps. I wanted a novel, and I didn’t want to fail.

Just a little later everything lay in ruins. The novel absolutely refused to happen. There were at the same time villa engagements and on top of that the artists’ minder had lots of ideas: some Caravaggio sightseeing, a concert in Villino, a trip to Olevano etc. – all quite wonderful, but not for someone who is unable to write. The person who cannot write doesn’t want any events or trips and above all doesn’t want to see any artists.

In the morning my eyes were already tired as I stared at my blank sheets, anxiety spreading. I would pull this or that folder out of the drawer and leaf wildly though my notes – the early hours were vital because from 10am the villa’s two gardeners began their deafening work in the grounds. The electric shears and a tractor-like lawnmower were particularly hateful.

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Rome, Roma, a romantic novel – didn’t that somehow sound like a natural progression of things? Instead I had palpitations, fevers, sweating and sleeplessness, stomach cramps and raised blood pressure – the rapid development of the complete spectrum of my hypochondria, just as exaggerated as comparing the collapse of my novel to that of the Coliseum, which signified to superstitious Romans the fall of Rome and the end of days, the end of the world – no comparison, of course not. But a novelist who doesn’t write is worthless, especially to him or herself.

So I went to see a doctor. On a list of doctors registered with the German embassy I found Dr W. On the way to see him I saw Rome for the first time since our arrival with tired eyes and fluttering nerves. I came upon St Peter’s Square, where preparations were being made for a sermon by Pope John Paul II – the sun shone in an azure sky, a glance at St Peter’s, its dome shimmering.

W’s practice consisted of a lot of small rooms filled with oil paintings. Dr W also looked exhausted. First my medical record: my hospital stays, broken bones, children, marriage. “What do you write?” A difficult moment, unbeknownst to Dr W. W wrote down: poetry and essays. No mention of the novel. I also wondered, how could this information be useful in a patient’s notes? W said: “I always admire writers who can make a living from their work.” “Me too,” I replied, not cheekily, simply a spontaneous reaction born out of tiredness, without reflection. W looked up, irritated. “I am relatively expensive,” he now explained, “I mean, compared to my Italian colleagues, but I will give you a discount.”

Why the pain? The idea of giving it all up hung in the air and disturbed me. I saw Rome as the place where I might abandon writing. I left the island of Massimo to explore the city. "Explore" is a bit of an exaggeration but I was active, I was outside. What I liked doing best was to accompany Viktor, our son, to his football matches or training. After a successful battle with Italian bureaucracy, my wife had managed to get Viktor signed up with an Italian club. I remember an away game in the Via Norma very early on a Sunday morning. The pitch of this club called Savio lay on a hill, surrounded by a wire fence, downhill from a slightly rundown district full of nooks and crannies, and tiny houses that resembled bungalows. We walked down the street, past angels on doorposts. There was no one about. Everything seemed still asleep, until we came across a little old lady, all in black. She looked at us and asked: "Oggi é domenica?" Is today Sunday? She had only one solitary large tooth in her mouth, bottom left – so my notebook informs me today.

Meanwhile it had become warm in Rome. My next appointment with Dr W loomed. After his first observation about writing, this time the embassy doctor upped the ante, saying: “I’m astonished that authors still exist!” He didn’t examine me but took €90 for his 15 minutes, no mention this time of a discount. But I was at last feeling a lot better, he suggested, and so we parted almost cheerfully. I had also finally given up on the novel in the meantime, or rather, the novel form. I had returned now to the safe harbour of poetry.

“Is this your father? Is this his car? Does he write things?” On the way home to the Villa Massimo from the Olympic Village we usually had Viktor’s Italian football friends in our car. When I think of Rome today, the first thing I see is the five of us in the Volvo, in the nightly traffic jam on the Foro Italico, Nicolo und Nicola, Viktor und his mother, two Swedes, who have involved in daily Roman life a German man, whose only wish was to write for an entire year. Sometime or other over dinner the question arose as to whether I mightn’t like at least to write a short tale, 10 pages “about that Hiddensee story” which I as a writer of things, as Nicolo described it, had really liked, which was supposed to have been a brief flashback chapter in the failed novel.

Those 10 pages became 500. While I ran my daily laps of the Villa Torlonia in Benito Mussolini Park, an enthusiasm for the text grew in me. Lap after lap, I discovered how strongly I related to this island material, as it came towards me at a trot, so to speak. But now I had to be careful – don’t make any plans! Only notes, sentences, just wait and listen, blink and listen at the source of the novel. Soon I saw my two protagonists Kruso and Ed standing at the window of Klausner’s, that pub on the cliff of Hiddensee, which stands at the centre of the novel, looking out over all the castaways, trying to live their own, self-determinded lives on the island.

Then, on one of my circuits of Torlonia, for the first time the image of a Soviet general appeared before my eyes, a Russian general on the edge of the Baltic Sea, Kruso’s father witnessing his son’s repatriation.

His powerful appearance – a big man in an open overcoat and battleships in the background – pleased me extraordinarily, familiar and at the same time crazy enough, to usher in the end of an era, spring 1989. Familiar, because he corresponded to both my army experiences in East Germany as well as the iconography of brothers in arms, united in unbreakable friendship, as it was called then at every opportunity. But I was still anxious and barely wrote anything down. I was waiting. What the picture was missing, I saw a week later: suddenly his trouser legs were wet – a little, limp Baltic Sea wave had wet his trouser legs. And there he stood now, at the height of his power, which now was broken in every way. An image, which contained the entire story in an instant, which I could absolutely trust, a portal, through which I could enter into this period in history.

Kruso by Lutz Seiler, the 120,000-copy-bestselling German Book Prize winner translated by Tess Lewis, is out now in paperback. Based on Robinson Crusoe, it tells the real-life-inspired story of a group of misfits on the Baltic island of Hiddensee who help East Germans to live outside of their oppressive society. Scribe is publishing it to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 300th anniversary of the first publication of Robinson Crusoe.