FICTION

BROTHER OF SLEEP by Robert Schneider, translated by Shaun Whiteside. (The Overlook Press, Woodstock, N.Y.: $21.95; 208 pp.) This novel, translated from deepest, darkest German, might well be set in a Hieronymous Bosch painting, rather than the remote Alpine Village of Eschberg in the beginning of the 19th Century. Like a Bosch painting, it is peopled by misshapen peasant gnomes, religious zealots, murderers, careless parents and otherwise upstanding citizens, a village in which having the misfortune to be born good-looking or talented means certain death by slow abuse followed by burning at the stake.

In the midst of this Pentecostal small-mindedness the greatest musician of all time is born, Johannes Elias. When he is 5 years old, he hears the sound of the universe, a terrible experience that leaves him with yellow eyes and painfully acute hearing. In the midst of the roaring whistling vibrating cacophony he hears the heartbeat of his unborn beloved, his neighbor Elsbeth, also the child of cretins, and born with the curse of loveliness. Elias learns to speak in the frequencies of animals; he can imitate any voice, any sound, any piece of music. He teaches himself to play the organ, sneaking into the church at night, but does not learn to write or read music. Surrounded by meanness, baseness and cruelty, the metal of his tenderness and sensitivity is tested repeatedly, not least when he relinquishes the love of his life to marriage with another villager whose finest quality is that he is kind to animals. Elias decides that his fatal sin was loving Elsbeth only halfway, a “lukewarm” love and to make up for it he will stop sleeping so as to love her 24 hours a day. You know where that gets him.

The narrator of this strange, rich story is the storyteller/historian, a voice that sounds as though it might belong to the one intelligent peasant in the village canny enough not to be run out of town, the outside insider. It is a story suffused with the poignancy of genius that is not allowed to flourish, with the loss to history of one crushed spirit. The writing draws much of its power from the strangeness of the setting, as in this description of Elias’ music: “The fog freezing in the forests, drawing icy threads from the branches and coating the barks of the pine trees with rime. When sun and moon faced each other--the moon a broken host, the sun a mother’s cheek. The light of the Great Fire was made music. . . .”