The Pigeon by Patrick Süskind
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What Passes For Success

“He was not a man of action. He was a man of resignation.” And consequently, he was also a man of strict routine, of rigid habit, of acute sensitivity to any deviation from the expected. Suskind’s anti-protagonist is also emotional; he suffers anger and fear, and resentments.

But these emotions are provoked only by events, mostly trivial except to him, not by memory or positive desire of any sort. He wants nothing other than what he has, especially when the little he has is threatened.

Until the moment of self-recognition, the moment when his whole life is explained in an instant as one trapped in childhood trauma: “... you’re a child, you only dreamed that you had grown up to be a disgusting old guard in Paris, but you’re a child and you’re sitting in the cellar of your parents’ house, and outside is war, and you’re trapped, buried, forgotten. Why don’t they come? Why don’t they rescue me? Why is it so deathly still? Where are the other people? My God, where are the other people? I simply cannot live without other people!”

Learning how to survive without other people had become not just a necessary tactic but an end in itself. The Dutch build more polders, perhaps simply because they can; South Americans have revolutions because they know how; Americans arm teachers with guns because... well just because. To what degree do all of us find ourselves similarly trapped by the successful tactics of youth?

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