Gazing into One’s Own Head

Josh Billings reviews German author Michael Lentz’s novel “Schattenfroh,” newly translated by Max Lawton.

By Josh BillingsSeptember 9, 2025

• Fiction

A QUARTER CENTURY OF steady competence has made it easy for us to forget that the history of the novel is a history of monsters: Don Quixote. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Watt. No sooner does the reading public get comfortable (and bored) with a particular set of expectations than the surface of the genre trembles, threatening to belch up a kaiju whose bug-eyed weirdness will make us grab our children and run screaming toward the parking lot.

And yet, the beautiful thing about the novel is that, frequently, these extinction-level events turn out to be rejuvenating, reminding us of the exploratory ambition that lies at the heart of this most batshit of literary forms. The novel, after all, is not just a 200-page study of failed marriages or spiraling drug addictions. It is these things, of course, vitally and inarguably. But it is also, inconveniently, Marquis de Sade writing a catalog of sexual positions and James Joyce culminating his career with a barely readable bar joke. Monstrosities, in other words. And yet, and yet (the novel’s favorite words), without such sorties past the horizon of legibility, how would we know that the novel was keeping faith with our deepest, most heretical desire—which is not just that it reveal reality but also that it somehow contain it, like a Mary Poppins valise we can enter into and zip up conveniently behind us?

It is hard to read German author Michael Lentz’s 2018 novel Schattenfroh (newly translated into English by Max Lawton) without thinking of its genre’s monstrous pedigree. This, after all, is a book whose traditional generic markers—characters, setting, plot—all shift constantly, disorienting us so reliably that we begin to suspect one of its main projects is to make us question what “reading a novel” actually means. So, in the book’s opening, we get exactly the kind of interrogation scene that might begin a cerebral James Bond movie—with the important difference that, rather than resolving into some deft escape, the narrator’s confinement grows more mysterious and self-contradictory the longer we read:

One calls this writing. I have no paper, no pen, no typewriter, no computer. I am writing into my brainfluid. I must write that I am here voluntarily. And so I write: I am here voluntarily. And, as I am here voluntarily, I have voluntarily subjected myself to the confines of this society. I write: As I am here voluntarily, I have voluntarily subjected myself to the confines of this society. Society demands amusement. My mission is to write everything down from the beginning. I said it can’t be done.

The peristaltic, one-step-forward/two-steps-back rhythm of Lentz’s writing here reminds us of the straight-faced myopia that Samuel Beckett perfected in his Trilogy (1951–53), the influence of which dominates the first (and weakest) third of Schattenfroh. This is the Beckett that sprouted from Sartre’s pebble-sucking Nausea (1938)—not to mention from Proust, about whose work the Irish author said, “The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent.” In his own novels, Beckett managed this “contraction” by dilating sentences until they glowed like keyholes, creating a minimalism of complaints, confusion, and body odors that has often felt like a kind of endpoint for the novel-as-exploration. But Lentz’s book (which is three times as long as the entire Trilogy) starts in many ways where Beckett left off, which, as we read, we realize was not in a physical cell so much as in the conceptual—and, therefore, much less escapable—prison of writing itself.

How does a writer write his way outside of writing? The question sounds like one of those Cretan-liar riddles that eats its own tail. For Nobody, the scheherazadian narrator of Schattenfroh, the escape involves a constant return to the temporality and physical circumstances of the act of writing itself. This is how the narrative works: stuck in his cell (which is somewhere, we don’t know where), tormented by antagonistic forces (we never find out definitively who), Nobody weaves what feel like endless fantasies to “explain” his circumstances, or at least to unpack them into a cosmology that makes sense. Sometimes these fantasies are elaborate and engrossing—there is a long section in which his confinement is transferred to a medieval-sounding city, complete with jailers who bicker back and forth at one another like a pair of Shakespearean clowns. Sometimes they are oddly hilarious—for example, another extended section revolves around a pair of chairs arguing over a doll. Most of the time, however, the various dramas of Nobody’s imagination conclude quickly, before they have a chance to usurp writing itself as the focus of the action. The storytelling buckles, shifting attention away from whatever plane of believable reality it has created in a way that can feel shocking to the practiced reader, like being on an airplane whose engine has suddenly cut out. What happened to the talking chairs, or the arguing executioners we’ve spent the past 40 pages listening to? Accustomed to a certain consistency of surface, Lentz’s dream-flux dares us—perversely, it often seems—to read it as “wrong,” or at least as a poor fit for the novel form.

We are tempted to do so—for, like so many genre-pushers before it, Schattenfroh tests the boundaries of our readerly masochism with a predatory relentlessness, creating a reading experience that, for long stretches, can feel purely theoretical. At the same time, once we’ve gotten over our initial frustration with Lentz’s narrative, the sensation of wandering through its crumbling architecture begins to make a certain amount of sense. We start to notice, for example, that although the particulars of the characters change constantly, the general shape of their dramas tends to recur, falling into patterns that, with time, we can recognize, if not totally unpack. There is always the Father, for example, and Mother, and the helpers (usually there are two of these). Similarly, there is often a crucifixion, sometimes literally, and often (although not always) of Nobody himself. The simplicity of the shape is powerful and effective, since it joins Nobody’s agony to perhaps the most resonant symbolic story of suffering in Western culture, but it is also helpful, since it makes us feel as if, no matter how stuttering and frankly random Lentz’s prose may seem, it is in fact moving toward some coherence—a meaning or maybe experience that will justify all the disorientation we have had to put up with in order to follow it through the woods.

And yet. One of the strange and wonderful things about Schattenfroh is the way that it occasionally seems to move us even beyond our usual novel-reader’s need for consistency, whether narrative or symbolic, and into a mode of reading that feels more granular and expansive—as if we had stopped caring whether we made it out of the forest and instead began marveling at the animal tracks and cool-looking stones scattered all around us. Freed from the usual forward thrust of novelistic meaning, our attention drifts, seeping out into aspects of the reading process that we usually ignore. Sometimes this can take on an almost physiological dimension. For example, I often found myself abandoning my preferred semiprone reading position, taking off my glasses and putting my face up close to the page, as if I were an explorer parachuting into an abandoned city. (Nobody enacts a version of this fantasy himself at one point, when he “describes” a sentence he has written as if each letter in it were a room.) Was I actually “understanding” the text any better? Maybe not, in a traditional sense. But I felt closer to it, even surrounded by it, in a way that felt both legitimate and in keeping with the claustrophobic but also weirdly compelling project of the book itself.

Exacting as Lentz’s literalism can be, it is also fresh and suggestive. After all, there are plenty of novels that embrace writerly self-consciousness—there are even several that do so by showing a prisoner trying to talk his way out of a prison (Claudio Magris’s 2006 novel Blindly and Elias Khoury’s Yalo, from 2004, are two recent examples that feel like spiritual cousins to Schattenfroh). In each of these books, the unreliability of the narrator’s monologizing can feel unsettling, but it ultimately serves to reinforce a larger settledness about the world outside the book. It suggests that there is a difference between such hyper-articulate (and, in Magris and Khoury’s cases, traumatized) narrators and us, the readers, who have somehow, despite being creatures of language ourselves, managed to hover above its dangers like Romans in a gladiatorial arena. They, the characters, are trapped by language. We, on the other hand, know where the world ends and writing begins—which means that, at the end of the day, we are safe, or at least certain enough about the potential pitfalls of language to stay away from them.

Compare that kind of voyeuristic hygiene to this:

A ways back, I walked heedlessly past Father’s hearing aid, I now wish to look for it and pick it up. What does “a ways back” mean? Back a ways. Back away. It is both a curse and blessing of reading that there is no more time left. I listened to the book with great pleasure and could listen to it for hours more. Does reading not mean listening, sleeping, dreaming? Father was never all that happy with his hearing aid. It beeps, he’d often say, then he’d turn it off, but leave it in his ear, which gave his interlocutor the impression that he could follow the conversation.

Lentz’s language—as brilliantly reimagined by Lawton, whose amazing work here feels like a continuation of the Pentecostal reinvention that the late John E. Woods performed in his translation of Arno Schmidt’s Bottom’s Dream (1970)—is more than just a tissue of contradictions: it’s a block of them, a veritable Borg cube of shifting walls and disappearing rooms where, as soon as we look back at it, the staircase we have just climbed has turned into a swimming pool. On the one hand, it is oblique, suggesting mysteries with one sentence that it abandons with the next. On the other hand, it is pithy to the point of aphorism, with a pungency that seems to be rising out of a tangible (or at least vividly hallucinated) reality. The two vectors of prose—toward definition and away from it—rub up against one another constantly, creating an electricity that is both heady and vaguely uncomfortable, like an accumulating static charge. We want to ground it in something, some paraphrase or solution that will leave us standing where we are used to standing—that is, on the outside of the confusion. But the more we scramble for our bearings, the more the text shifts, transforming in a way that seems random (or, again, wrong, meaningless) but which at the same time feels like it’s operating from some hidden but very real coherence.

But what is cohering? This is the riddle of Schattenfroh, one that has already prompted somewhat flailing paraphrases from Amazon reviewers and publishers alike. (Here is Deep Vellum’s marketing director James Webster: “Telling the story of Nobody, a man who is held captive and forced to write the very book that you are reading now, Lentz draws on centuries of art, history, theology, music and painting to create a ‘psychogeography of the self.’”) The interesting thing, however, is that the further we read in the book, the more it begins to seem that figuring out its plot—or, for that matter, the constellation of characters surrounding Nobody, from the Kafkaesque Father to the menacing Frightbearing Society—isn’t really the point. This isn’t Pale Fire (1962), with its synapse-flooding clicks; it isn’t even Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), in which the whole point of getting us hooked on a plot is to remind us that plots are everywhere and endless. On the contrary, after 400 pages of Schattenfroh (this is how long it took me, at least), even the pessimistic suspicion of storytelling begins to feel less like a revelation and more like a given: a place from which to set out. Because even after we’ve admitted that we are our own jailers (spoiler alert; although, as Schattenfroh itself prompts us to ask, what exactly is being spoiled?), we still have other questions to deal with—like, for example, why? Why do we work so incessantly on these fortifications when what we want (or say we want) is to get past language to a something-beyond-ourselves? (My kingdom for a Germanic portmanteau!) What, if we ever managed to get over ourselves, would we expect to find?

It is in its articulation of these questions, and its go-for-broke exploration of the writing mind itself as it grapples with them, that Schattenfroh shines—or maybe glows, like a mushroom in a basement. For isn’t it really the urge to write itself that is, or at least has become at this point in the human story, monstrous? Stories solve a problem—they convince children why they should eat their vegetables, say, or people why they should give 10 percent of their harvest to the king. But the tricky thing is that, having solved their problems, stories stick around, lingering in a way that can be maladaptive to a degree that we, their tellers, don’t even see—until, that is, something wanders out of the forest and makes us wonder if we’re doing it wrong. This, as much as anything, is why we need monsters: to show us how, in our sheer allegiance to habit, ­we ourselves have become monstrous. “Here, somebody has spent so long without gazing behind the curtains that the curtains have become that which is hidden,” Nobody remarks, echoing, characteristically, both Borges and Saint Paul. Interestingly for someone writing in the 21st century, his restlessness seems closer to the latter—and maybe this is what makes Schattenfroh stand out from its neighbors on the shelf of antinovels: not its awareness that all of our truths are stories (which should be old/fake news by now) but its insistence that there really is, still, something worth seeing behind all the drapery:

For me, my essence is an unattainable hereafter, it flees from me with each attempt to grasp it. In observing an image, consciousness cannot return to the reality of the image, in which I see only phantoms, but in which consciousness scents its own essence—itself. Here, the photo grabs hold of only the gaze, the observer himself does not appear in the image, he is the blind spot. I harbor such deep thoughts when my gaze passes through the device. So deep are the thoughts that I dub the device that triggers them “Hegel.” It is a device with which I can gaze into my own head. The problem of the future shall be having to decide whether to gaze out into the world or into one’s own head.

“Consciousness,” “Essence,” “Hegel”: these are airy containers, but as usual, what impresses us when we actually settle down and read Lentz’s prose is the way it manages to texture its concepts just enough to make Nobody’s fantasies trackable. Again, Lawton deserves a huge amount of credit for this—especially given the English language’s mistrust of abstract nouns (as opposed to the original German’s farmer-and-sheepdog comfort with them). Like all great translators, he picks his spots: the word “scents,” for example, is Latinate enough to not call attention to itself among the overall transparency, while at the same time adding a certain infantile tang—not to mention its own interesting toggle since, as it is used here, consciousness could be both picking up a scent (that is, smelling something like a dog hunting a fox) or leaving a scent, like the fox being hunted. The doubleness is critical since it repeats on a smaller level the same chasing-its-own-tail argument of the larger passage—not to mention the book itself, which seems to be always trying (and failing) to say for sure if the words it has written are its own or the whiffs of some other, finally substantial Presence.

Spoiler alert, again: It does not say this for sure. So what does Schattenfroh do? Intrigue, frustrate, hypnotize, even—yes—entertain, after a certain point. What novels are supposed to do, in other words—which, we begin to realize, is not actually to create Presence but to carve around it. Novels suggest, by their constant failure to articulate a more convincing Absence, that there really is something missing from our books and lives, which we have felt up to this point, with our usual neurosis, were both perfectly worked out and (shhh!) missing their most important pieces.

Because something is missing, as we all know in our bones and yet spend most of our day trying not to remember. Something has been left out of even our most comprehensive stories—not on purpose but because of the nature of what writing is: a trace, meaning an afterthought or maybe a reexperiencing of an event, never the event itself. It was the happiest day of my life—that is, it is by definition no longer the happiest day of my life, and though this might feel like a tragedy at first (and is), it is also a critical part of being human. Unlike its beach-read cousins, Schattenfroh does not ignore this fact. But unlike its fellow postmodern masterpieces, it does not sigh wearily about it, nor does it resign itself in self-aggrandizing complacency. On the contrary, it moves relentlessly forward, telling and retelling with such uncompromising vitality that it leaves us feeling not necessarily terrified, but uncomfortable with our solutions, which we now cannot help but see are not really solutions at all but only stopgaps, scaffolding, sketches for some other work in progress. And yet, and yet …