“I am standing at a crossing. On the street, people are moving in machines designed for transportation in various shapes and colours.” The unnamed narrator of Heinz Helle’s debut describes his life in New York with remorseless logic. A philosophy graduate from Germany, he is plagued by two things: an overactive mind with a tendency to overthink things, and a habit of lusting after every woman he sees, despite his loving partner at home. In robotic, fragmentary prose, he recaps their relationship from its gentle beginnings to its frazzled climax, but the story is secondary to the march of that voice, ably rendered in English by Kári Driscoll. At times penetrating (“We are what everyone we know calls happy”) and even funny (of after-work drinks: “We’re all in the same job, which is why it’s OK for us to be imbibing nerve toxins together”), it winds up gruelling, which is perhaps the point. The lack of character or plot development, though, gives this the feel of an extended short story, while it is missing the mercilessly anatomised sex scene it longs for.
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