From one point of view the novel is a postmodernist whodunnit which, true to form, refuses to disclose what it’s all about. Most of the characters are dead before the action starts. They include two seventeenth-century ghostly ancestors from Poland, a posthumously murderous brother and the uncle (or possibly father) of the book’s narrator, Nathan Hollander. Nathan is stranded by snow with his presumed niece Nina in a mountain hunting lodge in — wait for it — the eastern Netherlands. If this makes us think of Cees Nooteboom’s In The Dutch Mountains, it is probably deliberate. Pastiche is another aspect of postmodernism and a variety of authors seem to have contributed to this encyclopaedic and labyrinthine work besides the thirteen acknowledged at the end.


Folk tales and family annals had already played a dominant part in Möring’s The Great Longing. Making Nathan Hollander a professional writer of fairy tales and biographer of his dead uncle Herman allows the author to sprinkle his new text liberally with parables, Jewish folk tales, (pseudo-)historical anecdotes and items of family history. Where his earlier novel is aimed at the young, this nostalgic and allusive book is, in complete contrast, for old men. To while away the time of their incarceration (the allusion here is to the Decameron) the uncle regales his niece with excerpts from the biography and other stories. In between their lives are threatened, not just by the cold but by a number of booby traps that may or may not be the work of his dead brother Zeno.


The book is so packed with uncertainty that one is never sure whether the clues littering it are not so many red herrings. As in Catch 22, for instance, many incidents are related twice. Double-cross and self-cancelling logic may be all that this points to. Alternatively it may indicate that the whole family are reincarnations of a Hassidic false messiah and his entourage reliving their former frailties. In Babylon is entertainingly written, with all Möring’s poetic skill and a good leaven of slapstick humour as well. If multiple readings of it are needed, you won’t be bored.

‘Listen,’ I said to my father, my bottle of Budweiser half raised. ‘There seems to be some sort of misunderstanding. I thought I just heard you say that I’d sung a song for Gene Kelly and that Herman had taught me that song.’

Manny looked at me in amazement. ‘That’s what I said. Didn’t I?’

‘You mean it’s true?’

He picked up his bottle and drank. ‘Yep,’ he said¼

A mother who had danced in Ziegfeld Follies, a father who invented the drill that wasn’t a drill, an uncle who was a world-famous sociologist and analysed a Gene Kelly movie in apocalyptic terms and¼Suddenly I remembered the story the story of how Manny had run into Enrico Fermi at Columbia University and Fermi had recognized him because he and my father used to sing Finuculi, Finucula together. Banality, I thought, is the backbone of history¼

I grabbed my sandwich and started eating. Outside the traffic moved through the streets, men in shirtsleeves and women in light blouses glided along the sidewalk. In the distance, at the intersection, the traffic lights showed a slow succession of red and green flecks. My name is Nathan, I thought, I’m a Hollander in New York. My mind began to wander. Banality is the backbone of history. Or perhaps not banality. The insignificant, that which we forget, the inconsequential. What’s visible, and what we regard as History, are the stories of kings and generals and archdukes and terrorists. But what supports those stories, the foundation, is the awkward side of life, someone who invents something to do with mattresses, a child stealing a guilder from his mother’s wallet, the new boy at school, the failed marriage¼.There’s a visible world, which we see in the papers and hear on the radio, which dominates film and TV, and a hidden world, the world that sees the visible world and thinks: that’s where real life is. (p. 134-5, tr. Stacey Knecht)