Aris Fioretos

The Truth about Sascha Knisch

Novel
Translated by the author
London: Jonathan Cape, 2006, 306 pages
ISBN: 0-224-07685-X
New York: Rookery Press, 2008, 306 pages
ISBN: 978-1-58567-957-7
Cover: Photograph from the Uwe Sheid Collection

‘My name is Knisch, Sascha Knisch, and six days ago my life was in perfect order.’ So begins Aris Fioretos’s elegant, hilarious novel, set in Berlin in the sweltering summer of 1928. Knisch, who works as a projectionist at the Apollo movie theatre, is a person with special sexual habits. One night, he sees the enigmatic Dora Wilms again. A week later, she is dead and Knisch is charged with murder. As he tries to clear his name, he discovers a scientific conspiracy and is drawn into the rich tangle of a story, in which nothing is as it seems. How can he prove what didn’t happen? What goes on at the Foundation for Sexual Research? And why is it important to have testicles?
A biological thriller set in the steamy underworlds of Weimar Berlin, The Truth about Sascha Knisch deals with the so-called ‘sexual question’, its lures and seductiveness, dangers and temptations, but also with the shrewd love between two young people in a Germany at the brink of disaster. Above all, the novel is a declaration of love to imagination — clever, droll and stylish, couched in the form of a riddle and written with effortless elan by one of Europe’s most exciting and entertaining new writers.

‘Like a cunning diplomat who gets the Foreign Secretary of another country drunk at a dinner party with an eye to obtaining territorial concessions, the Swedish novelist, Aris Fioretos, in this noir-ish novel of 1928 Berlin, serves up an intoxicating brew distilled of equal parts murder mystery, sexological rumination, and historical farce. Having downed this admixture, the giddy reader is likely to redraw the borders of those warring, loving neighbors, the masculine and feminine.’ – Jeffrey Eugenides, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex

‘This incredible novel about a young man’s odyssey through the sexual underground of Weimar Germany is either a comic tragedy or a tragic comedy, and it is Aris Fioretos’ great achievement to keep you guessing past the last page. The Truth about Sascha Knisch is worldly, audacious, haunting in its candor and unremittingly disturbing in its prescience. Fioretos is without a doubt one of Europe’s most gifted writers.’ – Jane Kramer, European Correspondent of The New Yorker