The Masochist by Katja Perat
/The Masochist
By Katja Perat
Translated from Slovenian by Michael Biggins
Istros Books, 2020
Every parent has embarrassing qualities. Luckily for paranoid young people everywhere, it’s only in rare cases that a parent is a figure of genuine notoriety. The narrator of Katja Perat’s debut novel, The Masochist, has more claim to that paranoia than most: Nada’s father is Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the 19th century Austrian writer of Venus in Furs whose sexual proclivities inspired the term “masochist.”
But when a middle-aged Nada looks back on her life, it’s not Leopold’s sexual preferences or his descent into syphilitic madness that seem shameful—it’s that he was a consummate hypocrite. He espoused feminist ideals in front of company, only to demean his wives behind closed doors. He nobly took up the cause of “the little people,” never realizing that they viewed him in turn as “an unctuous aristocrat who could afford the luxury of a perverse imagination.” He fled his beloved Austria for years to avoid serving a four-day prison sentence, exiling himself to Germany, where he believed the local populace was “short on intellect.” He was a humanist with a cynical view of humanity, an admirer of the Austrian Empire’s diversity who nevertheless subscribed to “pan-Slavist fairy tales,” and a pan-Slavist who would’ve gladly excluded Poles from the future utopian Slavic homeland. At one point an acquaintance approvingly tells Nada that her father “understood how ridiculous it is to be proud of something as insubstantial as a nation.” To which she thinks: “Aside from the fact that he idealized the Ukrainians.” Even tender moments don’t escape this trailing hypocrisy; when burying his favorite cat, “Leopold the atheist” fashions a small cross for her grave, saying it’s “so that the other animals know.”
It’s not just Leopold’s character that Nada coolly eviscerates, but also their distant relationship. Leopold found her in the woods as a baby, and in the true spirit of Genesis he had two preferred versions of her origin story that he dusted off according to his mood and audience. She was his “wild child,” a sprite who had been so obligingly literal about springing from the roots of their shared homeland, and as such Leopold insisted she was destined for great things. “Like other mythological creatures, I’d been created to presage something more significant than myself,” she notes. “But the child refuses to presage anything. The child wants to be significant in its own right.” It’s this blend of irony and sincerity that gives Perat’s writing such energy.
Lonely, resentful, and stifled by her provincial town, a teenage Nada convinces herself that she’s in love with a young noble named Maximilian, and the newlyweds move to fin de siècle Vienna. It’s the first time Nada’s day-to-day life isn’t subjected to her father’s whims, but everywhere she goes she’s known as Sacher-Masoch’s daughter, especially since he earned his own entry in the famous volume Psychopathia Sexualis. Far from a refuge, Nada finds Viennese society steeped in “arrogance and complacency”—a social scene that rarely offers respect without some accompanying condescension, and that exudes superiority while always remaining “one proverbial step behind the Parisians.” Here she meets the likes of Gustav Klimt, Theodor Herzl, Gustav Mahler, Sigmund Freud, and (later) Rainer Maria Rilke, but each is viewed through the lens of how Nada personally interacts with him. She meets Herzl only once, and references Mahler and Klimt in passing; one of Klimt’s models, Emilie Flöge, requires more narrative attention than the painter himself. An individual’s encounters with fame will always be more delightfully randomized than a history student’s.
Freud and Rilke earn the dubious honor of specialized attention, and Perat gets in some seriously good jabs. On Rilke: “He was the kind of person who in the course of a single sentence was capable of apologizing at least five times, without giving the slightest impression he was sorry for anything.” As a long-term patient on Freud’s couch, Nada laments the “vulgarity that he paraded as clinical expertise.” But it’s almost too easy for contemporary writers to belittle Freud, and Perat seems to sense this, rounding out her portrait of him with the kind of affection and ambiguity that an astute woman like Nada would have felt about his techniques. More significant than any one personality is the dynamics engendered: she’s surrounded by men who are lauded for their insight, but like with Leopold’s child of the forest story, the tales they’ve imbibed about women hinder the full development of such insight. At times the reader almost feels sorry for these men—that their worldview prepared them so poorly to expect penetration from a woman.
But other people’s foibles are low-hanging fruit for such a witty protagonist, and what elevates The Masochist beyond cleverness is Nada’s dawning recognition of her own hypocrisies. She looks back on the now deceased Leopold with such painful clarity, but it takes more effort and humility to confront all the qualities she’s inherited from him. In her own way, she connects love and vulnerability with humiliation. She strives for an “insightful, detached and rational” narrative persona, isolating and examining emotion from a distance. And for all her perceptiveness, she often views others through the prism of her snobbery and egocentrism.
Most incriminating of all is that, despite her mockery of her origin story, she’s absorbed the most essential element of it: the idea that she’s special. It’s maybe the most dangerous message a person can absorb if their goal is detached realism. And because of the magnetism of Nada’s voice, the reader is complicit in the fiction, realizing alongside her that her struggles could be considered banal. Childhood pain, marital loneliness, loss, self-doubt—how can all these ordinary things have happened to her? And even more affronting, how could they have affected her so deeply?
But the reader’s neutrality allows for a further question: How can banality itself be worthy of the name, if this is what it feels like? “The hardest part [about grief] was forsaking the image of your own life that you’d begun confusing with life itself,” a weary Nada learns. In a novel already filled with humor and longing, her final emotional awakening is a quiet triumph.
—Jennifer Helinek is a book reviewer and EFL teacher working in New York.