"Masante" by Wolfgang Hildesheimer

Names matter, and places. 2 men are hunting a man. But most important is competitive conversation - who can control the veracity level of it. The incidentals contain some of the most enjoyable passages. Here are some -

• Fog rises from the graves. Weather of the dead. Under the drizzle, under the haze from fritters oozing out from under the awnings of roadside stalls, greasing the damp air, making it stick to raincoats, this is when the drops of the blood of Christ are carried through the town behind a brass band, in front of a phalanx of clerics in black with dirty white lace; a golden vessel of Byzantine filigree on a chain, closely guarded by the bayonets of a Royal Walloon battalion so that no one steals these drops and sells them to even more deeply religious townships: because quite a few underhand offers have been made.
• his diocese could use the proceeds: the organs and the glockenspiels, this ghastly pride of Flanders under which so many church towers even deep in the south suffer, are in need of repair, the G-sharp is missing from the Halleluia and replaced by a pause of emotion;
• five army men – or police? – who are always changing so that the share of contraband doesn’t always go to the same privileged ones
• Memories accumulate, form layers, change form and meaning, and everything gradually becomes fainter and blurs into elements of a previous life shared by all. It’s the same here: relics, rags, remains.
• I mostly saw him in a small restaurant where he sat at the Professors’ table below Piero della Francesca’s portrait of Montefeltro, who of course also only had one eye and had the upper nasal bone removed in order to be able to look past it sideways.
• Everything seemed to have outgrown him, his clothes, his rooms, he moved in them like someone who couldn’t find the lady he had asked for a last waltz

Other reviews

• Power, desire, performance - Narrative exchanges in Wolfgang Hildesheimer's Masante (J.J. Long)