davidwright's review against another edition
5.0
I really loved this metaphysical spy novel, which feels like the sort of thing that might have been written by someone who was locked in a cell with a paperback thriller for a space of years: the elements of espionage are there, the menace, the surveillance, the ill-defined mission that changes shape over time, the weaponry, the Middle East. Yet you know right away that something is different, first in the format: the novel consists of 24 ‘chapters,’ each of which is a single sentence, some stretching for several pages (it would be really interesting to try to diagram one of these babies), that read aloud (yeh, I sometimes read aloud) like a digressive ramble, and read silently in an irresistible rush and tumble of words. Then there is the opening image, as the Psychologist Otto von Lambert has the brutalized corpse of his wife flown home for burial in a coffin suspended from the bottom of the aircraft where it sails along over the ocean and the Alps, the first of many weird, surreal images that catch the reader by surprise throughout the story. F, a filmmaker interested in documenting the whole wide world, takes on the job of investigating the death, and consults with D, a logician who shares his own spin on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle – or is it the observer effect - derived through viewing through a telescope how others respond to realizing they are being viewed. (eg. they throw rocks at him) F then proceeds in her strange, unsettling journey that I won’t attempt to summarize, but that leads her to a desert bunker where she encounters the illusory nature of freedom – the biggest trap of all - and the idea of God not as the unmoved mover, but as the unwatched watcher, pure observation. If all this seems insufferably theoretical to you, the author’s method really keeps the tension alive even as the author teases out existential riddles and curious features of human (self) awareness in an age of spy satellites and watchful unease. While a lot of other philosophical mysteries play around the edges of ideas, this book charges right into the heart of Mystery, with enjoyable results.
michelle_beringer's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
3.0
lpz's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.75
emmi_lee's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Police brutality and Violence
Moderate: Sexual violence, Gun violence, Confinement, Stalking, Rape, War, Murder, Fire/Fire injury, Death, and Alcoholism
Minor: Racial slurs and Injury/Injury detail
nike_'s review against another edition
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
blackoxford's review against another edition
3.0
The Mystery of Representation
Look at any word long enough and it becomes absurd. Such a recognition isn’t illusion but appreciation. Words are absurd. When we consider them as what they really are, it is clear that they are merely arbitrary sounds or signs on paper, often ugly and grotesque in their presumptuous arrogance of an independent existence.
And if for words, why not the users of words, the speakers and writers who treat others, or even themselves, as if they were the words used about them? Are not they absurd as well?
It is so easy to become the words used about us when they are used again and again, and with relentlessly refined precision. As F, the investigator and documentary film-maker hired to determine the reason for a murder, recognises. The professional notes keep on the murder-victim by her psychiatrist husband “weren’t observations at all but literally an abstracting of her humanity.” The victim is portrayed inhumanely by her closest relation. Those described thus become ugly and offensive regardless of the intentions of the describer. The words extract the existence from their target, which is literally observed to death.
This is the theme - if there is one, who can be certain of anything with this story? - of Durrenmatt’s Assignment: How we destroy existence with words. Not just the personal existence of other people, but the existence of whole cultures. Words, no matter how precisely they are employed, inevitably create a stereotype, a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing, a part that masquerades as a whole.
This is the formal definition of heresy. Heresy easily becomes prejudice, especially when we are unacquainted with the person or thing in question (but even sometimes when we know them intimately). Our responses are to words not to other human beings. It is from this absurd connection between words and things that Durrenmatt creates his ‘mystery’, not a who-dunnit but a what-happened, or more accurately is-anything-in-this-story-to-be-taken-at-face-value.
“The meaning of existence is existence, which insight, once accepted and affirmed, makes existence unbearable.” A psychological insight like this one can create a psychological illness. In Tina’s, the apparent victim’s, case the result is severe depression, brought about by her husband’s observation of not only her behaviour but her own words written in her private journal and intruded upon by him. This is the ultimate iatrogenic risk for a psychiatrist’s wife. And the ultimate crime for a psychiatrist, even if there is nothing to prosecute.
But the situation is actually more complicated. Observers provoke observation of themselves. The wife notices her husband’s ‘objective’ attention and responds in kind. Through observation of his various quirks and idiosyncrasies, she grows to hate him. So too, F muses, might the Gaia of the planet observe its objectification and respond to its human inhabitants. Observers too, therefore, are turned into words, numbers, signs.
So what ethics should apply? Unobserved men and women do not exist. Nor can they. There is no such animal as a human being without his fellow, who watches, anticipates, measures, values and responds to him, most frequently using words. Even a person who is totally alone reflects on himself. A quandary therefore. Is the psychiatrist (or his wife) guilty of bad observational technique or of simply being human? The mystery looms larger still.
And it’s not just words which are problematic. Art, particularly visual art, has all the same issues as language. It claims to represent. What exactly? The ‘object’ of art is as illusive as the denotation of a word. A painting can be as pejorative as a rumour. Even more so since the artist can claim interpretive license. Tina had an artist listed in her journal. Did he have something to contribute to her death?
Arriving in North Africa, the scene of Tina’s death, F finds her own camera crew being filmed while filming. Yet another problematic mutual observation that affects both parties. The site where Tina’s body was found, an ancient Shi’ite monument, is guarded by dead, rotting, silent ‘saints’ who had protested the place’s excavation and expired in situ. Among these corpses Tina’s body had been discovered, half consumed by the local wildlife. The monument itself is perhaps the ultimate cipher, a huge black cube of polished stone, mostly buried in the sand.
The presence of the observing camera crew of course provokes the local police into a transvestite investigation of their own in which various suspects, or rather their testimony, are presented. One is shot. He was, after all, nothing more than his confession, coerced or not. Unfortunately all the documentary footage mysteriously disappears. But would its recording of the statements of prisoners have made any difference? To whom? The story is that Tina’s murder was revenge by someone’s security service for her husband’s soft stand on terrorism. Why not, it’s a good story.
F persists. She finds a clue, a coat that looks like Tina’s. Is a found clue more authentic than a word, or a portrait, or a confession? She is drawn into a conspiracy with some of the locals, in which she is replaced by a ‘double’. She becomes in other words her own representation. She is unaccountably mistaken for Tina because she wears her coat. She becomes yet another representation.
Her co-conspirator provides ‘testimony’ that the murder victim wasn’t Tina after all. She is alive and with her husband according to the gossip magazines. More symbolic representations of ‘reality’. But yet another corpse is certainly real, the cameraman who mistook F for the dead woman - either Tina or her surrogate is unclear. Yet another cameraman is assigned to F by her conspiring friend. Named Polypheme - literally: abounding in tales and legends - he is nothing but a representation of things not himself.
Polypheme leads her to a sophisticated, underground desert hideout. The place is a virtual warehouse of film and photographs. Stills cover the walls, rolls of film are strewn about the floors. Polypheme, true to his name, tells F a long complicated tale of his background and reasons for his trajectory from the Bronx to North Africa. This tale may have meaning, but it has nothing to do with the history or identity of Polypheme.
The desert hideout, F learns from Polypheme, is in fact an observational bunker to monitor nuclear armament developments globally, using mainly satellites to observe the world, and other satellites to observe the observing satellites. Abandoned now except for Polypheme, the bunker is now the possible target of nuclear weapons. Explosions can be heard intermittently somewhere outside.
Their bunker-chat becomes theological: “If God we’re a pure observer, could he remain unsullied in the observation of his creation?” And if not God, then what about a lowly human cameraman? The discussion turns, appropriately for a Swiss author, Barthian: “... a god who was observed is no longer a god, God was not subject to observation, God’s freedom consisted in being a concealed, hidden god, while man’s bondage consisted of being observed... “ This bondage has become more oppressive as it is not people but now machines, computers, that do the observing. These computers were “gods watching each other.”
Polypheme it turns out has film of the murder because he arranged it using his insane ex-Vietnam American pilot-friend as the instrument. The victim wasn’t Tina but a Danish journalist who used her passport. She resembles F, not just in appearance but also in her obsessive but fruitless search for truth. Trying to get past representations is a dangerous business. Indeed Polypheme has the same motiveless intention for F as he did for his previous victim. But at the last moment she is saved by a police-chief-ex-machina. Polypheme and numerous others get it on film.
Reversing my opening remark: Perhaps if one looks long enough at the absurd, it develops coherent meaning. This is, after all, the fundamental principle of Kabbalah (See for example: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/693646771). I can only hope that such meaning emerges for me at some point from this rather chaotic ride through semiotics. Durrematt makes Umberto Eco look like a slouch when it comes to opaque complexity. The Assignment is not for the weak or faint-hearted.
Look at any word long enough and it becomes absurd. Such a recognition isn’t illusion but appreciation. Words are absurd. When we consider them as what they really are, it is clear that they are merely arbitrary sounds or signs on paper, often ugly and grotesque in their presumptuous arrogance of an independent existence.
And if for words, why not the users of words, the speakers and writers who treat others, or even themselves, as if they were the words used about them? Are not they absurd as well?
It is so easy to become the words used about us when they are used again and again, and with relentlessly refined precision. As F, the investigator and documentary film-maker hired to determine the reason for a murder, recognises. The professional notes keep on the murder-victim by her psychiatrist husband “weren’t observations at all but literally an abstracting of her humanity.” The victim is portrayed inhumanely by her closest relation. Those described thus become ugly and offensive regardless of the intentions of the describer. The words extract the existence from their target, which is literally observed to death.
This is the theme - if there is one, who can be certain of anything with this story? - of Durrenmatt’s Assignment: How we destroy existence with words. Not just the personal existence of other people, but the existence of whole cultures. Words, no matter how precisely they are employed, inevitably create a stereotype, a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing, a part that masquerades as a whole.
This is the formal definition of heresy. Heresy easily becomes prejudice, especially when we are unacquainted with the person or thing in question (but even sometimes when we know them intimately). Our responses are to words not to other human beings. It is from this absurd connection between words and things that Durrenmatt creates his ‘mystery’, not a who-dunnit but a what-happened, or more accurately is-anything-in-this-story-to-be-taken-at-face-value.
“The meaning of existence is existence, which insight, once accepted and affirmed, makes existence unbearable.” A psychological insight like this one can create a psychological illness. In Tina’s, the apparent victim’s, case the result is severe depression, brought about by her husband’s observation of not only her behaviour but her own words written in her private journal and intruded upon by him. This is the ultimate iatrogenic risk for a psychiatrist’s wife. And the ultimate crime for a psychiatrist, even if there is nothing to prosecute.
But the situation is actually more complicated. Observers provoke observation of themselves. The wife notices her husband’s ‘objective’ attention and responds in kind. Through observation of his various quirks and idiosyncrasies, she grows to hate him. So too, F muses, might the Gaia of the planet observe its objectification and respond to its human inhabitants. Observers too, therefore, are turned into words, numbers, signs.
So what ethics should apply? Unobserved men and women do not exist. Nor can they. There is no such animal as a human being without his fellow, who watches, anticipates, measures, values and responds to him, most frequently using words. Even a person who is totally alone reflects on himself. A quandary therefore. Is the psychiatrist (or his wife) guilty of bad observational technique or of simply being human? The mystery looms larger still.
And it’s not just words which are problematic. Art, particularly visual art, has all the same issues as language. It claims to represent. What exactly? The ‘object’ of art is as illusive as the denotation of a word. A painting can be as pejorative as a rumour. Even more so since the artist can claim interpretive license. Tina had an artist listed in her journal. Did he have something to contribute to her death?
Arriving in North Africa, the scene of Tina’s death, F finds her own camera crew being filmed while filming. Yet another problematic mutual observation that affects both parties. The site where Tina’s body was found, an ancient Shi’ite monument, is guarded by dead, rotting, silent ‘saints’ who had protested the place’s excavation and expired in situ. Among these corpses Tina’s body had been discovered, half consumed by the local wildlife. The monument itself is perhaps the ultimate cipher, a huge black cube of polished stone, mostly buried in the sand.
The presence of the observing camera crew of course provokes the local police into a transvestite investigation of their own in which various suspects, or rather their testimony, are presented. One is shot. He was, after all, nothing more than his confession, coerced or not. Unfortunately all the documentary footage mysteriously disappears. But would its recording of the statements of prisoners have made any difference? To whom? The story is that Tina’s murder was revenge by someone’s security service for her husband’s soft stand on terrorism. Why not, it’s a good story.
F persists. She finds a clue, a coat that looks like Tina’s. Is a found clue more authentic than a word, or a portrait, or a confession? She is drawn into a conspiracy with some of the locals, in which she is replaced by a ‘double’. She becomes in other words her own representation. She is unaccountably mistaken for Tina because she wears her coat. She becomes yet another representation.
Her co-conspirator provides ‘testimony’ that the murder victim wasn’t Tina after all. She is alive and with her husband according to the gossip magazines. More symbolic representations of ‘reality’. But yet another corpse is certainly real, the cameraman who mistook F for the dead woman - either Tina or her surrogate is unclear. Yet another cameraman is assigned to F by her conspiring friend. Named Polypheme - literally: abounding in tales and legends - he is nothing but a representation of things not himself.
Polypheme leads her to a sophisticated, underground desert hideout. The place is a virtual warehouse of film and photographs. Stills cover the walls, rolls of film are strewn about the floors. Polypheme, true to his name, tells F a long complicated tale of his background and reasons for his trajectory from the Bronx to North Africa. This tale may have meaning, but it has nothing to do with the history or identity of Polypheme.
The desert hideout, F learns from Polypheme, is in fact an observational bunker to monitor nuclear armament developments globally, using mainly satellites to observe the world, and other satellites to observe the observing satellites. Abandoned now except for Polypheme, the bunker is now the possible target of nuclear weapons. Explosions can be heard intermittently somewhere outside.
Their bunker-chat becomes theological: “If God we’re a pure observer, could he remain unsullied in the observation of his creation?” And if not God, then what about a lowly human cameraman? The discussion turns, appropriately for a Swiss author, Barthian: “... a god who was observed is no longer a god, God was not subject to observation, God’s freedom consisted in being a concealed, hidden god, while man’s bondage consisted of being observed... “ This bondage has become more oppressive as it is not people but now machines, computers, that do the observing. These computers were “gods watching each other.”
Polypheme it turns out has film of the murder because he arranged it using his insane ex-Vietnam American pilot-friend as the instrument. The victim wasn’t Tina but a Danish journalist who used her passport. She resembles F, not just in appearance but also in her obsessive but fruitless search for truth. Trying to get past representations is a dangerous business. Indeed Polypheme has the same motiveless intention for F as he did for his previous victim. But at the last moment she is saved by a police-chief-ex-machina. Polypheme and numerous others get it on film.
Reversing my opening remark: Perhaps if one looks long enough at the absurd, it develops coherent meaning. This is, after all, the fundamental principle of Kabbalah (See for example: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/693646771). I can only hope that such meaning emerges for me at some point from this rather chaotic ride through semiotics. Durrematt makes Umberto Eco look like a slouch when it comes to opaque complexity. The Assignment is not for the weak or faint-hearted.
guojing's review against another edition
3.0
Not a bad story and no dearth of interesting ideas, but terribly annoying writing. All these dead white guys who thought it would be cool to write as though periods, paragraphs, sentences, were below them, they definitely did not have the skill they thought they had to pull it off, the result being a disorderly mess that's not too unlike a drunk slobbering all over the cop he's trying to convince he's sober after being pulled over driving in three lanes at double the speed limit.
piccoline's review against another edition
5.0
A disturbing headlong rush of a book, 24 chapters, each chapter a single long sentence. But that doesn't mean this is just some formal experiment or just a philosophical rumination. Everything is connected, and everything means something, and Durrenmatt deftly conjures the various darknesses of the 20th century.
Highly recommended.
Highly recommended.
emilysquest's review against another edition
"When Otto von Lambert was informed by the police that his wife Tina had been found dead and violated at the foot of the Al-Hakim ruin, and that the crime was as yet unsolved, the psychiatrist, well known for his book on terrorism, had the corpse transported by helicopter across the Mediterranean, suspended in its coffin by ropes from the bottom of the plane, so that it trailed after it slightly, over vast stretches of sunlit land, through shreds of clouds, across the Alps in a snowstorm, and later through rain showers, until it was gently reeled down into an open grave surrounded by a mourning party, and covered with earth, whereupon von Lambert, who had noticed that F., too, had filmed the event, briefly scrutinized her and, closing his umbrella despite the rain, demanded that she and her team visit him that same evening, since he had an assignment for her that could not be delayed."
So goes the first sentence, which is also the entire first chapter, of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Assignment (or, on the observing of the observer of the observers). In fact, every chapter consists of a single long sentence, a technique which leads, at its best, to evocative, noir-ish snapshots of the action, and at its worst to confusing, breathless run-ons with no clear referent. I actually think both best- and worst-case scenarios have their place in creating Dürrenmatt's chosen atmosphere: as the titular "assignment" spirals out of F.'s control, the chapter-sentences get longer and more labyrinthine, mirroring her own descent from unease to panic. It's cleverly and effectively done, and also allows Dürrenmatt to condense a standard-length novel into a scant 129 pages. Into this brief first chapter, for example, is packed a remarkable amount of information, relevant to both the plot (von Lambert is a psychiatrist; he is "well known for his book on terrorism"; his wife has been brutally raped and murdered; her body was found at the foot of a desert monument) and the enigmatic atmosphere ("over vast stretches of sunlit land, through shreds of clouds, across the Alps in a snowstorm"; "closing his umbrella despite the rain"). Indeed, especially in these first few chapter-sentences, I was spellbound by Dürrenmatt's extreme economy of language. It's right next door to a political thriller told in verse, so compressed and evocative is the prose.
Although I generally preferred the shorter chapters, one of the most memorable is much longer: in it, F. drops into a cafe to talk with her logician friend D. about the case, and D. proceeds to develop the novella's obsessive preoccupation with observation and aggression. Dürrenmatt's overarching fear, in this book, seems to be the dual dependence on and incapability of constant observation: just as Tina von Lambert and her husband were constantly observing (and therefore objectifying) one another, so countries and individuals are constantly locked in a (to Dürrenmatt) unhealthy relationship of obsessive observation:
[The case reminded him of:] a logical problem loosely involving a mirror telescope he had installed in his house in the mountains, an unwieldy thing that he occasionally pointed at a cliff from which he was being observed by people with field glasses, with the effect that, as soon as the people observing him through their field glasses realized that he was observing them through his telescope, they would retreat in a hurry...for the people observing him and discovering that we was observing them through a mirror telescope felt caught in the act, and since being caught in the act produces embarrassment and embarrassment frequently leads to aggression, more than one of these people, after retreating in haste, had come back to throw rocks at his house as soon as he had dismantled the telescope...
...but, he added, after suddenly bursting into laughter and becoming serious again, what he was constructing here was of course only one of two possibilities, the other one being the precise opposite of what he had described...: if, in his house in the mountains, he was being observed less and less, so rarely that, when he pointed his mirror telescope at people who he presumed were observing him from the cliff, they turned out to be observing not him but something else through their field glasses, chamois or mountain climbers or whatnot, this state of not being observed would begin to torment him after a while, much more than the knowledge of being observed had bothered him earlier, so that he would virtually yearn for those rocks to be thrown at his house, because not being watched would make him feel not worth noticing, not being worth noticing would make him feel disrespected, being disrespected would make him feel insignificant, being insignificant would make him feel meaningless, the end result might be a hopeless depression...man was staggering along in the mad hope of somehow finding someone to be observed by somewhere...
As sophomoric as the character D. (for Dürrenmatt?) can sometimes be, this ongoing trap of observation is at the heart of The Assignment, and manifests in personal relationships as well as international relations. Being under constant observation, argues Dürrenmatt, makes people antsy and suspicious, desperate to escape into some modicum of privacy and aggressive towards the ones observing them. Yet without the presence of an observer, one who provides some kind of feedback, modern people lose their sense of self. Toward the end of the novel, he even argues that in certain circumstances the inability to observe directly - the modern dependence on intermediary tools and measures, which abstracts peoples' experiences of concrete reality - can have disastrous and violent consequences. These are all thought-provoking claims, especially in the era of Twitter, GPS, and iPhone apps that broadcast to one's friend network whether one is walking, shopping, or sitting on the john. I'm not sure I agree with all of them (it might actually be logically impossible to agree with all claims made in the book), but it definitely got me thinking, in a very stylish way.
There were two things that mitigated my pleasure in The Assignment, the first of which is somewhat unreasonable: I was expecting a work of modern absurdism, a kind of thriller version of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, whereas Dürrenmatt's work turns out, in the end, to be full of rational explanations for all the weird and atmospheric stuff that goes on in its early pages. There's more weird stuff that goes on in its latter pages as well, but, sadly for me, this is all explained too, and kind of lamely at that. I know that it is a convention, in the mystery/thriller genre, that the crime is tied up neatly in the end and explained to the reader, and I like that okay when I'm in the mood. But I dearly love a well-executed absurdist novel, and they're much harder to come by than a well done standard murder mystery. Having psyched myself up for the former, it was disappointing to be left with the latter.
My second issue is, I think, more widely applicable. Throughout the whole novella, I was mentally commending Dürrenmatt for writing a thriller with a female protagonist who is independent and gutsy, without making an issue out of her femaleness. F. engages in almost exclusively un-gendered, yet noirish, activities: she shoots reels of film (which are then swapped for others by her mysterious antagonists), meets a friend in a shady café, descends into the lair of the chief of police, decides whether or not to accept the advice of mysterious drunken strangers, and so on. Even her single-letter "name" is gender-free. Aside from a casual reference to her "changing into a denim dress" partway through, F. could just as easily be a man. This is, to me, very refreshing, especially in a genre where female roles are usually limited to helpless victim or femme fatale, and where, on the few occasions when detectives are female, they are usually presented with a dashing love interest who rescues them right on schedule. I was just reveling in the welcome change when BAM!: F. is threatened with a grisly rape. (Orbis Terrarum people: I do actually read books that don't involve rape, I promise.) To me, this rape threat is totally unnecessary to furthering the plot or developing any of Dürrenmatt's points about observation and violence. It seems to me that the author uses rape, irresponsibly, as short-hand for "extreme violence," and the way the scene is handled undermines the entire prior development of F.'s character: in the final analysis, she is reduced to just another person whose victimhood is synonymous with her womanhood. This, coming in tandem with the (to me) unwelcome explanations of all that went before, soured me a bit on the book as a whole.
But! For those thoughtful readers who like a little weird but still prefer their loose ends tied up, and who don't mind the predictable victimization of the female lead (and you can't mind that too much if you like thrillers), I would still recommend The Assignment. As an experiment in style, an atmospheric political portrait, and a parable of observation and violence, it was quite memorably effective.
bridgetrose's review
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.25
i hate this book
Content Warnings
Graphic: Rape, Sexual violence, Violence, Police brutality, and Gun violence
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