Tübingen und Basel: A. Francke, 2011. 2nd rev. ed. Pb. 358pp. € 19.90. ISBN 978-3-8252-2580.Christoph Bode's The Novel, which is a translation of Der Roman, is a great introduction to the study of the novel. It is comprehensive, well-written, lucid, and to the point. Given its advanced level of sophistication, I would recommend it to graduate students of literature as well as experts in the field.Bode illustrates that the beginning of a novel is always a positing that involves some kind of interruption of 'normality.' He also points out that narration, i.e., the linking together of two events, is "the endowment of sense against the possibility of the absurd" (5). In addition to that, Bode highlights the central role of generic conventions or "rules of the game" that might transcend our real-world experience (as in the case of fairy tales).For Bode, the novel is a protean genre that involves a plenitude of species and subgenres. He begins his overview with Don Quixote, which still contains remnants of the chivalric romance. Bode also discusses realist novels, modernist prose texts, and postmodern manifestations (such as the self-referential nouveau roman). It seems to me, and this is no small feat, that Bode gets the balance right between realism and antirealism. For him all novels "relate to our perception of reality, whether by way of confirming or undermining it" (61).Moreover, Bode points out that the story is a construct insofar as it is never "immediately available, but must first be abstracted from the discourse" (67), which is always at hand. He then moves on to a discussion of story time (erzählte Zeit) and discourse time (Erzählzeit), and the question of how they can be related to one another. Bode mentions Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, where time moves backwards at the level of the story, but I would like to highlight that there are further important experiments with time that could be mentioned. As Brian Richardson (Narrative Dynamics, 2002, 48-52) has shown, unnatural narratives frequently confront us with temporalities that are circular, contradictory, differential, conflated, or dual.In his discussion of character, Bode uses the terms "character conception" and "character portrayal" as analogues to "story" and "discourse" (98-9). This distinction is very useful. Bode also discriminates between flat (or monodimensional) characters
