The Story Of My Baldness

Rating:
Summary: "If life is a joke, I wanted to resign."
Review: Marek van der Jagt is a pen name for iconoclastic Dutch novelist Arnon Grunberg, whose novel Blue Mondays won the Netherlands' 1994 Anton Wachter Prize for a Debut Novel. After publishing additional successful novels, Grunberg created a literary controversy when he invented "Marek van der Jagt," an author who was supposedly a Viennese philosopher, and with whom Grunberg engaged in a bitter "rivalry," heavily covered in the European press. When The Story of My Baldness, "van der Jagt's" first novel, unexpectedly won the 2000 prize for Best First Novel, a prize Grunberg had already won, the true identity of "van der Jagt" was discovered and the prize withdrawn.

Young, irreverent, and gifted with the ability to see real life as the joke it sometimes is, Marek van der Jagt/Arnon Grunberg writes earthy, beautifully observed prose, breathing life into every aspect of this hilarious and ribald coming-of-age story. The "author" is a fourteen-year-old philosophy student as the novel opens, deciding he will devote his life to "l'amour fou," or mad, passionate love. The son of a Viennese insurance salesman and a woman for whom unrestrained "l'amour fou" is life's primary occupation, Marek has little family guidance about the facts of life, but he eventually finds two tourists, Milena and Andrea, to teach him.

Marek's farcical reactions to "l'amour fou," his inappropriate comments, his clumsy approaches, and his undisguised fascination with his older brother's prowess make Marek's first attempt at seduction one of the least romantic (and most amusing) seductions ever recorded. For Marek, however, this is an ironically life-changing experience: Milena's pointed comments about his naked body cause him to seriously question whether he might really be a dwarf, one who is a little taller than usual. The remainder of the novel deals with Marek's attempts to cope with his feelings of inferiority as he becomes an adult.

Throughout his farcical search for l'amour fou, Marek makes grand pronouncements and "profound" comments about life and love, often relating his experiences to those of philosophers and creating satiric epigrams ("If you drink enough vodka, you understand everything."). When he is making love, he thinks of Camus, ponders the French Surrealists, fantasizes about being "the Rimbaud of Vienna," and dreams of being a successful poet with a volume entitled The Dwarf and Other Poems. His comic observations about the human foibles of his larger-than-life family and friends show them to be ludicrous, while his own naïve, Don Quixote-like search for "l'amour fou" is both touching and laugh-out-loud funny. Ironic, satiric, and ultimately thoughtful, the novel teaches that one "should not live as if a masterpiece is on its way." Mary Whipple