The Game for Real
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Compared to Kafka and a member of the Surrealists, Richard Weiner is one of European literature’s best-kept secrets. The Game for Real marks the long overdue arrival of his dreamlike, anxiety-ridden fiction into English.The book opens with The Game of Quartering, where an unnamed hero discovers his double. Surely, he reasons, if he has a double, then his double must also have a double too, and so on . . . What follows is a grotesquely hilarious, snowballing spree through Paris, where real-life landmarks disintegrate into theaters, puppet shows, and, ultimately, a funeral.Following this, The Game for the Honor of Payback neatly inverts things: instead of a branching, expanding adventure, a man known as “Shame” embarks on a quest that collapses inward. Slapped by someone he despises, he launches a doomed crusade to return the insult. As the stakes grow ever higher, it seems that Shame will stop at nothing — even if he discovers he’s chasing his own tail.Blending metaphysical questions with farcical humor, bizarre twists, and acute psychology, The Game for Real is a riveting exploration of who we are — and why we can’t be so sure we know.
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THE GAME FOR REAL
THE GAME FOR THE HONOR OF PAYBACK
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What is just now transpiring, and what is soon to come, is a sort of one-off script.
Having described the “auditorium,” I will depict the general situation on the stage. Each of us was, roughly speaking, as if fixed in the position he was occupying when the curtain went up. I don’t know the cause for the relative motionlessness of my fellow actors, but I well know the cause of my own lethargy, which is to say that as soon as I had arrived at my place at the table (I’ve said that I had retired there as if at the instruction of an invisible director), it was clear to me beyond all doubt that I hadn’t so much wound up somewhere as frozen into something. (And I apologize for that frightful, but unavoidable, turn of phrase, which is the only one that fits.) I knew that I was with the other three in a closed system—as if we had grown into a transparent cube, cut off from the ordinary, phenomenal world. The slightest individual attempt at a turn, a step, a movement was in communication with the entire construct, which would then swing (for it was suspended). In other words: we had not been completely deprived of the ability to move, but whatever any of us undertook, his position relative to the others remained unchanged and was as it had been initially, that is, when “I took up my role.” This is just to explain why, for example, I had no luck in seeing Fuld and Mutig other than in profile, and it follows from this finding that these two were invariably face-to-face. – Giggles is no exception: not for a moment did she cease to be that puppet I’d spotted when I came in, a puppet incapable of expressing whether she was suffering or rejoicing, an awfully timid puppet, yet counting on the power of her queen, Puppenfee. All I want is for the reader to picture it like she was constantly, if almost unnoticeably, swaying, like she was charmingly floating, like she was in the grip of some music that no one else but she could hear, though she might not be able to say who was playing it for her, whether it be the words, the atmosphere, or my own unconscious desire. I would want the reader to picture Giggles a bit like a leaf that submits to the will of waves just a hair before it has circled down upon them, perhaps in the naïve hope that they would have mercy upon it for its having “obliged” them.
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