Mohr: A Novel
by Frederick Reuss
Unbridled Books

It's hard to say who should claim the crowning influence in Frederick Reuss' remarkable new novel, "Mohr"; is it the author's great uncle, who lends the book its title, subject, and illustrative photographs, or is it the late author W.G. Sebald, who left as his legacy a genre of uncertainty best verbalized in his admission that "the more images I gathered from the past ... the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way."

"Mohr" carries the boilerplate disclaimer that it is a work of fiction in which resemblances to actual persons and places are coincidental. In fact, it is the story of Max Mohr, an actual, if obscure, German author and doctor, a Jew who abandoned his beloved family in the early years of the Third Reich and died in Shanghai in 1937. It is an imagined story, one that tells of a past that did not actually happen in this or that way, but one in which resemblances to reality are not only not coincidental — they are physical evidence, displayed on the pages in sepia toned photographs from the effects of the author's vanished relative. From these photographs Reuss extracts his own portrait of a marriage sundered but enduring.

The love story is told from the alternating perspectives of Mohr in his self-imposed Shanghai exile and his wife Käthe, left behind to tend their Bavarian farm and young daughter with dwindling hopes of a reunion. Not since Dr. Zhivago has the physical distances of place served a better metaphor for the rift between two humans' needs. Wolfsgrub is a bucolic idyll threatened by dark domestic clouds; Shanghai is a stimulating escapade reduced to rubble by foreign aggression. If Käthe's tragedy is her preservation instincts, her husband is a victim of his own defiance. Like the antithetical venues of their correspondence, Käthe and Mohr are partners in devotion and courage but strangers to each others' fates.

Reuss writes with mesmerizing grace, sacrificing neither leisure nor romance to what is, essentially, a thriller. Mohr is a daredevil, a sensualist, and a man on the run, but he will remind readers more of Walter Benjamin than Yuri Zhivago. Countering the handful of photographs of a playful man in happier times (hurdling kitchen chairs, playing the accordian, setting out on cross-country skis with his daughter in one hand, a cigarette in the other), Reuss creates a character whose every move is just a step ahead of crippling indecision. His Mohr is flawed to perfection —a complex yet immediately sympathetic man who broods without sorrow and regrets without apology. Most remarkable is the author's ability to make his hero at once inscrutable and familiar. Without the former, the story would lose its tension; without the latter it would lose its heart.

And without the photographs, "Mohr" would be a different book altogether. Reuss may be in large company as an author whose work is inspired by an old family portrait, but he enters a smaller confederacy when he ponders the essence of photography and its transcendent reality: "What moves you in looking at these old snapshots of people who were long gone before you entered the world isn't nostalgia, but a thrilling sense of connection," he writes. He asks, "Can feelings be preserved in photography, the way love letters can be written on a typewriter?" His answer is ambiguous, for while "Mohr" is a testament to the endurance of emotion on photo-paper, it is also an exercise in invention. The feelings telegraphed by these pictures are strong indeed, but they are enforced by an imagined urgency and an embellished plot.

No recent author has plumbed the depths of photo-fiction as evocatively as W.G. Sebald and readers of "The Emigrants" and "Austerlitz" will recognize in the elusive photographs of Wolfsgrub a distinctly Sebaldian landscape. They convey the same implicated innocence and human loss. Particularly suggestive are the photos Eva, Mohr and Käthe's young daughter, who would be only slightly older than Sebald himself. It's tempting to see in these images a proxy snapshot of the childhood that Sebald characterized as completely cut off from the realities of life beyond his alpine threshold. Indeed, in Reuss' story, young Eva is blissfully ignorant of the dangers that await her as a half-Jew. For those less compelled to seek parallels between the two authors, Reuss gives an overt tribute in an epigraph quoting Sebald on "the nervature of past life in one image ... [that] has something to do with truth."

The author of three other novels including "Horace Afoot" and "The Wasties," Reuss moves boldly into a difficult but seductive genre with this new addition to the small library of "documentary fiction." He brings to it a provocative discussion of voice as well, by interrupting his narrative with interludes in the second person. "Open the front door, step outside into the morning air," he instructs the reader on the opening page, and then clarifies "I say you, but I also mean me. In novels, personal pronouns can be misleading."

So too can pictures. So too can a thousand words.

— Elizabeth Kiem (eckiem@yahoo.com)