Expatica Germany's reviewer Ruth Zein takes a leisurely stroll through Wilhelm Genazino's prize-winning novel and discovers a work full of humour and hope.

When I read New Directions’ description of "The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt," I wanted to put the book back on the shelf and walk away. Here is why:

Recalling books with famous flaneurs, I imagined a "Ulysses" requiring an allusion dictionary next to me or a T. S. Eliot poem, heavily footnoted, evoking fear of eating peaches. Instead, Wilhelm Genazino has written a novel that is funny and full of hope.

In this novel translated by Philip Boehm and published in English in 2006, the Shoe Tester strolls the streets of Frankfurt during the 1980s, trying out new models for a luxury shoe company. His walks do not map city sights and there are few references to place names. Perhaps it is not irrelevant that the author moved to Frankfurt after the book - which won the top German literary prize in 2004 - was published.

The pace of the story feels like a series of leisurely walks filled with the intimate conversations of a man who talks with a long time friend as they walk off lunch. What emerges is a person like us – looking for a career or at least the means to make a living, hoping to find a successful relationship, trying to throw out the baggage from his childhood and searching for "authorization" or purpose to his life. His dominant thought is that he is in the world without knowing if he wants to be here: "Namely that I’m here in this world without my inner authorization. Strictly speaking, I’m still waiting for someone to ask me whether I really want to be here."

It seems implausible that he runs into so many ex-girl friends in a city the size of Frankfurt, but who cares? Each encounter brings out a poignant or funny story. An amusing sexual fetish runs through his encounters – his fascination with women’s breasts. Shoe Tester frequently reminisces about Susanne’s breasts, the first woman’s breasts he touched: "I know her bosom . . . from childhood but haven’t seen it or touched it for many years, so perhaps I can no longer claim I really know it. What a strange idea, anyway—wanting to ‘know’ a woman’s bosom!"

Susanne comes and goes in his life. She occupies his thoughts more than his latest ex-girl friend, Lisa, who left him her pension fund out of guilt for leaving him. When Lisa was there, he "could stop being so suspicious of my life the minute I entered my apartment." She answered the phone and dealt with his clients at the shoe factory.

After Lisa moved out two months ago, he filled her room with leaves, a way of saving the leaves and his sanity. He drifts into sex with his hairdresser and meets other ex-girl friends on the street: "I still want a woman but at 46, I feel I’m too old or too used up to play the lover one more time."

After seven years of testing shoes, he has settled into a comfortable, robotic routine. He can assess the walking quality of a pair of shoes in half a day instead of the required four days. His relationship with his employer is always the same: take the number 7 train to the Weisshuhn Shoe Factory in Hollenstein, receive his new assignments of three or four pairs of new shoes, hand in his test reports and chat with the manager about model trains from the 1950s for an hour. For every evaluation, he receives 200 German marks.

One memorable day, he explains why a pair of hand-stitched wingtip brogues, not his personal favorite but becoming popular, is the best of the latest batch and why the remaining shoes are poorly cut. Handebank, the manager, does not offer the usual cup of coffee. Instead, he reveals that the company’s share of the market is under attack from powerful competitors. The Shoe Tester’s evaluation fee will be reduced to 50 German marks but he will be allowed to keep the shoes: "This is the kind of situation that has given rise to my sense of living without inner authorization."

At this point, many flaneur novels would have continued drifting aimlessly but Genazino slowly and realistically leads his character through a series of risky situations that bring him out of his robotic existence into increasingly successful encounters. He started selling his recently tested shoes at the flea market. A sexual encounter with Susanne reveals that she was not "essentially too beautiful for me" and didn’t prefer her sex chic.

One sunny November Sunday in Paris, I walked along the Seine on a sidewalk thick with leaves. Behind me I heard the scuffling crinkling of leaves. I turned to find a 30ish man gleefully scrunching the leaves as he shuffled through them. He laughed a carefree, infectious laugh. On his last romp through the leaves in Lisa’s room, the Shoe Tester too experiences that irrefutable joy, "that irreplaceable and unparalleled feeling that every human being is always one and the same person with a single chronicle of memory that is slowly but surely growing richer and richer."

Ruth Zein

25 January 2008

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