Well well, it looks like I am finally starting to have some god damned luck with short stories.
I think I got this as a recommendation of off reddit, having asked for some fiction that focuses on court cases. The fact that the author was German, and I have read preciously little from Germany, was also a large part of the appeal to read this. Being a short story collection, I was a bit apprehensive about it. But I found it on the Kobo store for relatively cheap. It was also the first Kobo purchase I made, and I think it rotted on my device for a good two years before I finally got around to it.
It isn’t Crime and Guilt, it’s actually Crime, and Guilt, but the two stories might as well have been one. I frankly didn’t really notice any kind of difference between the first collection and the second. But this might just be the kind of distinction I make in reading that no one else does. The stories seemed to me to be a lot more about the Crime than the Guilt. Each story follows a Crime, and how it ultimately gets resolved in the courts. Ferdinand von Schirach seems to be a stand in character, in the form of a public defender, who helps out in many of these cases.
At least I think he is a public defender. I have no idea, and it isn’t actually ever specified. I have memories of my aunt, who not only doesn’t speak English, but tends to prefer speaking Venetian to Italian, sat in front of her TV watching Law and Order, with me wondering how she navigates the differences between the US judicial system and the Italian one. I supposed I would have had that problem here, but it as well was not the case. A lot of the subtleties are probably lost, but it never effected my reading. At the end of the day, the stories do focus on the Crime, and not the Justice.
What was important is the extent to which I found each story to be very gripping. I would sit down with them and managed to focus only on that for the duration of the story.
I don’t know why this collection worked. Or at least how it worked for me. The writing was somewhat spartan for my taste, but I think that worked for the nature of these stories. They all had a journalistic, ‘just the facts’ kind of tone. I guess that is to be expected. I didn’t find myself rooting not so much for individual characters, but for a sense of justice in the world. Which doesn’t mean the characters are poorly writen or characterized. If nothing else, this collection really felt like a masterclass in economical writing – something my own writing can certainly do a lot more of.
Ferdinand von Schirach is going right back into the TBR list with some other of his work.
Failures in Polymathy 