David Schmahmann

Ah, the unreliable narrator! It drives some people to distraction but it's a literary device I love.

In some cases it's subtle, as if the person speaking isn't that different from you or me. We each perceive things differently. Telling a story from our individual perspective is not a lie, nor is it delusional. It's point of view. Only when imagination veers wildly from reality does the unreliable narrator show his or her detachment from reality. It's kind of like when my kids tell me "everyone else has _____!" Fill in the blank with something expensive, like a laptop. Or a car. Or hair extensions.

So, how can we tell when a narrator is grossly misrepresenting the facts? A good writer shows us, that's how. He (in this case) describes the reactions of those around the narrator, which, in the case of the unreliable narrator, screams out, "This dude is nuts!"

Yes, the correct literary terminology includes the word "dude." If you hold a degree in English
literature, as do I, you'll know. If not, you must go on trust.

Main character Alfred Buber is a well-to-do everyman. A middle-aged and paunchy attorney, he realizes despite all his success he's very lonely. He wonders if any woman could ever find him attractive, at this point in his life, and if he has any hope at all of finding love. For all his money all he has to show is a showcase of a home, empty save for himself and his help.

Because he is so rich and unattached, Buber can afford to travel anywhere he'd like. So he takes a trip to Thailand, where he meets a heart-achingly young prostitute named Nok. She's beautiful, frail and doesn't deserve to spend her life in a brothel. The minute he sees her he's smitten, deciding then and there his purpose in life is to use his fortune to rescue Nok from her own life.

Nok, on the other hand, sees her life as inevitable. The daughter of a destitute farm family living in rural nowhere, it is her duty to come to the city and make money using all she has - her body - sending money back to her family to help support them. She's doing what poor young girls do, not feeling herself degraded by her life so much as useful to her family.

Eventually, after more trips back and forth, he decides he must marry Nok and bring her home to live in his empty mansion in Boston. But he also knows if he does everyone will think he's resorted to a mail-order bride, a young Asian woman who barely speaks English, is tiny and beautiful as a doll, and lives with him out of gratitude he's saved her and appreciation for his money. He's not so deluded he doesn't see reality, yet he's tortured. And Nok? She's extremely confused.

And life is about to get more convoluted for Buber. Much more.

Of course, Nok is Lolita, and Buber Humbert Humbert. She is child-like and waifish, he middle-aged and wealthy. It's a theme that's been done over and over. Still, Schmahmann manages to bring a fresh perspective to it, some quality it's hard to name, but one that appeals though I've read several Lolita-esque books of varying quality.

Buber is a laughable character, in a very dark way. I'm not one for seeing humor in situations in which a sad person humiliates himself, though many other reader/reviewers are, or at least express they are. To me that sort of thing isn't funny. I feel for Buber, wish him well and hope he find his heart's desire. Yes, he's a bit of a kook. He's unrealistic, but his heart is good. He's done what so many others have, put aside everything in life for his career. And now he's alone, realizing what he's missed.

This is a book that likely won't receive the recognition it deserves, getting lost in the shuffle with the big publishers, but I recommend it very highly. If you can get your hands on it it's one terrific read that's stuck with me for months.… (more)

This is reflective first-person narrative from an unrepentantly unreliable narrator, the titular Alfred Buber. In it, he tells his reader the story of his real and secret lives, both of which are isolated and insular. Buber is a Jewish man who grew up in Rhodesia and immigrated to the U.S. as a young man. He is a lawyer who has managed to almost accidentally become the senior partner in his firm. He made sacrifices to build the perfect home, but shares it with no one. And he makes trips to an unnamed Asian country where he has met a sex worker named Nok that he becomes as obsessed about as all the other details of his lonely life.

Buber is a liar. He lies when it is important that no one find out the truth about his secret life, and he lies when it is of no importance at all. He lies to himself, and he lies quite a bit to his reader (who is us, obviously, but also someone quite specific in Buber's life). Many reviews have called The Double Life of Alfred Buber Nabakovian, and the combination of self-delusion, self-awareness, and isolation definitely owe a debt to Humbert Humbert. But where Humbert's obsession has a strength and power to it, Buber's seems to result in half-hearted actions, eternal doubt, and more inconsequential lies. Schmahmann brings it all together in a well-earned exhale of an ending that is satisfying for its utter Buberness. This slim character study is worth reading if you like you unreliable narrators mixed with a little humor and a lot of discomfort.

[full review here: http://spacebeer.blogspot.com/2011/09/double-life-of-alfred-buber-by-david.html ]… (more)

The Double Life of Alfred Buber by David Schmahmann

KUMAR(to Goldstein)Well, if you have the yellow fever tonight, there's a rocking Asian party over at Princeton tonight.

GOLDSTEIN Man, I have the yellow plague. There's nothing sexier than a hot Asian chick...or dude for that matter...

Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle (Danny Leiner, 2004), script by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867) by Karl Marx

A Woman of Property

David Schmahmann is another lawyer-author who joins the ranks of the Permanent Press. His second novel, "The Double Life of Alfred Buber", can be seen as a Judeo-Anglo-Rhodesian-Thai riff on Vladimir Nabokov’s iconic novel "Lolita" (1955). Schmahmann, like Buber, is a product of international personality. The author is a native South African who practices law in Brookline, Massachusetts. Alfred Buber is the son of Jewish Communists living in Rhodesia, pariah people living in a pariah state as it were. (Rhodesia withdrew from the British Commonwealth in 1965 to establish a white-ruled sovereign state. Unrecognized and justifiably shunned by the world community, it lasted until 1979, when it became Zimbabwe in 1980.)

Alfred Buber grew up in Rhodesia but eventually settled in the United States to work at a prestigious law firm of Henshaw & Potter in Boston. After many years hard labor at the firm, Buber moves from a small boardinghouse to a white mansion, a veritable marble sarcophagus. Dissatisfied with wealth and in a rut at work, he decides to take a trip to Thailand. In a bar called The Star of Love, Buber meets Nok. With this fateful meeting, this overweight nearly hairless Westerner finds pleasure, relief, and the seeds of his own destruction.

Already one can see the contours of Lolita in the narrative. Schmahmann elevates the novel from a mere facsimile of Nabokov’s best-known work and makes it his own. In the same manner, Stevie Ray Vaughn covered the uncoverable “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” by Jimi Hendrix. The unexpected delight arises from Schmahmann’s deft handling of Buber. He begins as an overdetermined caricature and gradually transforms into a fully formed human being. Buber’s “yellow plague” becomes less a desire for the flesh than a desperate need for companionship with another person. His finely calibrated professional persona, the fortress-like mansion, and the complex dissembling finally begin to crack.

Tongue Thai’ed

Western fascination with Asian cultures is nothing new. As the quote from the pan-ethnic stoner comedy "Harold and Kumar" explicitly states, human desires know no ethnic boundaries. Unfortunately, Alfred Buber comes from an older generation and raised in the racially rigid society of Rhodesia, and sees his desires for an Asian woman as something hateful that must be concealed at all costs. The worst part is not that Nok is Asian as much as she works as a prostitute.

Buber’s descriptions of Thailand are impressionistic and possess the vagueness of fable. But this should be expected, since he is not a native and everything seems new and odd. One can compare Buber’s impressions with the razor-sharp descriptions of Sonchai Jitpleecheep, the hero of John Burdett’s crime novel "Bangkok 8" (2003). Buber is a foreigner, a farang. Bangkok 8 plays like a great companion piece to "Alfred Buber", since both are told in first person and Burdett’s crime novel goes into amazing depth about the Bangkok prostitution industry, as multilayered and economically vital as any other sector.

Alfred Buber’s love for Nok develops to the point where he wants her to be his bride. The economics of prostitution and marriage collide and commingle in a series of scenes with Buber interacting with the Nok’s family and villagers. Buber, ever the public traditionalist, negotiates with Nok’s father for her bride-price. (It is ironic how “traditional marriage” advocates fail to mention how the earliest traditional marriages were both arranged and saw woman as property. Then again, who can rationally discuss anything with someone possessed by Gay Panic?) In both cases, prostitution and marriage, women are commodified. Buber, the son of Communists, teases out the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” of the situation.

Nabokov Blues

From the plot to the quality of the writing, comparing Schmahmann to Nabokov is inevitable. In this case, it is entirely justified. Anthony Burgess wrote about Nabokov in his book-length review of literature, "The Novel Now" (1967). (Burgess also shares with Nabokov, at least with American readers, the notoriety of being known for only one book, despite being prolific.) Burgess writes that Nabokov is both “pedantic and cosmopolitan” who writes in “the involved, dense, witty, learned, allusive English that disappointed the smut-hound readers of Lolita.”
Buber shares the trait many Nabokovian characters share, finding “the only alternative to perversity, with its magical and terrible privileges, is banality.” One can see this in Alfred Buber, his near-reverential desires for Nok contrasted with the artifice of propriety and decency. (Side question: Why do we yearn for our financial betters to be so utterly boring? And why do we feign outrage when they aren’t? The hypocrisy cuts both ways.)

An example of Buber at his most tender is in order. Here Buber describes Nok with a tenderness and joy one usually doesn’t associate with clients of prostitutes:

"Buber holds her narrow brown foot in the air as she lies on the bed under a single sheet, traces the curve of her calf with his finger. What is it, what, I obsess, about this slender curve, this smooth brown muscle, that holds me so entranced? It cannot be lust alone. I have had her, recently, cannot penetrate her again and grab any pleasure further pleasure in it, and yet this curve, this calf, holds me still, dominates me, entrances me beyond description. Or the hardness of the back of her thigh, the very fine, almost impenetrable follicles that give texture to her skin. I run a finger there and I want it too, endlessly, for myself. I have her, for a pittance, for today, for tomorrow, for a week or a month if I choose, and yet that is not enough."

It goes on like this, alternating between an almost detached and clinical sexuality and a lush, overheated sensuality of a Baudelairean prose poem. The passage convinced this reviewer that the novel was no simple copy of "Lolita", but a worthy book in its own right.

While Nabokov is most famous for his book about the pedophile and Burgess is most famous for his book about gangs that speak strange, both writers produced a large multifaceted oeuvre. Only reading those two books by these titans of literature does a disservice to the reader. The same goes for David Schmahmann. While he only has two novels to his name right now, one can only hope he, like Burgess and Nabokov, is capable of so much more. Nabokov wrote a novel-length poem with academic commentary (Pale Fire), satires of totalitarianism (Invitation to a Beheading), and alternate history erotica (Ada, or Ardor), among many, many other volumes. And that’s just his fiction. This reviewer hopes David Schmahmann can be as prolific and imaginative as Nabokov, but hopefully get beyond the great author’s shadow. It is still early in his career and this reviewer anticipates much from this gifted South African born lawyer.

http://driftlessareareview.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/the-double-life-of-alfred-bu...… (more)

Poor Alfie Buber, the protagonist of The Double Life of Alfred Buber by David Schmahmann, remember him? He is the fat little kid in the corner of the playground who never was a part of the crowd. Alfie has always been in the corner of his playground and, though successful professionally, he never learned to be anywhere but in a corner. He graduated from law school, though he didn’t seem to care he did. Social interactions are limited to an uncle, as he has little or no interaction with his parents in Rhodesia and a few women. The relationship with the uncle is an older/wiser to younger/dumber person. Relationships with women are distant, never involving anything more than “we were both delusional.” He grows in stature professionally and politically but never personally, always being the rotund unattractive fellow. Over time he seems to develop an alter ego, travels to the Far East and finds a beautiful young girl in a bar, Nok. He develops a relationship with her, but Nok’s feelings, other than leaving where and who she is, are unclear. He becomes obsessed with the girl, travels to her village, meets her father, and ultimately promises to bring her to Boston, where a mansion of his own design sits empty waiting for him and her. He lives a Walter Mitty life and continues misinterpreting what and how people are communicating with him. This leads to his complete downfall. Nok, the beautiful girl from the bar, disappears and is only found by him through devious means, ending with Alfie in jail and confrontation with his mother. His job collapses under the accusation of impropriety with a contractor. The uncle dies, leaving him alone. An event saves him when a daughter he has never known, appears at the mansion. The woman’s mother and Alfie were involved in a single event during law school. Alfies’ later conclusion of that relationship was both he and the mother were delusional. At the end Alfie seems to be satisfied, though doomed to loneliness, because he has never willingly tried to overcome it; but happy he has a daughter- someplace. Nok has traded one kind of poverty for another, now trapped in a place unknown, yet known to her.
This book is funny; the rotund Buber never seems to quite understand himself, never mind others. Life to him is good or bad. Outwardly he is the consummate professional. But he travels the world trying to find what is in him. Buber is the adolescent, never grown up. This book is sad too; Buber can’t seem to understand others. Nok is beautiful and intelligent and mired in poverty. She leaves that life only to end in a different abusive poverty. I enjoyed The Double Life of Alfred Buber because, it pointed to the loneliness and struggle we all have to live and love others. I give this book three and one-half stars.… (more)