Alias, or Real Life

I mentioned yesterday that I'd managed to read several things over the past week.  And believe it or not, not all of them were by Gotthelf!  On Saturday I decided I should give myself a break and read something else for a change, so that morning I decided to finish off a book I'd been in the middle of for a while, Alias, oder Das wahre leben (Alias, or Real Life), by Felix Philipp Ingold.  Ingold is a Swiss author, editor, translator, and journalist; there isn't much about him in English, and I don't think any of his books have been translated, but you can read a one-paragraph summary of him here.

It was an interesting book, partly because of the premise.  It purports to tell the life story of one Kirill Beregow, alias Carl Berger, a Volga Russian of German descent.  The hook is that Beregow/Berger is a real person, an acquaintance of Ingold's, and the book is supposedly based upon conversations with him and papers that he left behind, fictionalized into a novel by Ingold.  But this is very cleverly done--at first I took it for granted that Berger was a real person, then at one point I began to doubt that this was the case, then I did some more googling and decided that, as far as I can tell, he was indeed a real person.  As its title suggests, the book is very much about who we really are and where the line is in our own identities between fact and fiction.

As the story begins, Berger--a committed communist--is on the Russian front in World War II and has to kill a captured German soldier.  He moves along with the Russian army and takes part in the occupation of Vienna; he returns to the Soviet Union and becomes a celebrated, albeit minor, Soviet author; in the typical twists and turns of Stalinist Russia, he falls out of favor and is made an example of by being sent to the Gulag; eventually he is released and rehabilitated; after another misstep (and final disillusionment with the communist system) he emigrates during the era of perestroika; through an error he is first sent to Israel with a group of Russian Jews, though he is not himself Jewish, and while there (under documents that have incorrectly assigned him yet another name) he is beaten to within an inch of his life by a group of anti-Semitic thugs; finally he makes his way back to Germany, where he has one last love affair and dies while traveling with his young girlfriend to Vienna, where they revisit the concentration camp he had helped to free.

It was a clever novel that did indeed leave one wondering who the real Kirill Beregow or Carl Berger was, and how one would ever know it.  My only other acquaintance with Ingold is through an occasional newspaper column, but I was favorably impressed by this book.