Paul Sahre. cover, Couplings, for Farrer Strauss & Giroux, 1996
Peter Schneider. Couplings. translated by Philip Boehm. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1996
Originally published in German as Paarungen, 1992.
I think I bought this book for its cover; amazingly the designer of the cover appears to have read the book– a discursion on divided Berlin written a couple of years after unification. Nominally about affairs of the heart and the heart's inconstancy, it is also a Bildungsroman, the narrative the metaphor for Berlin's partition, separate development and clumsy re-acquaintance.
Twins: one brother all black leather and jeans, believes in western science (nature), the other in socialist society (nurture). Everyone in the city is as internally conflicted and divided as the city itself. The east has all the privacy of a refuge, the west is racked with profligate self-exposure. Relationships founder on convention; are deflected by desire. Yes, it's all about love, circumstantial and determined, love in a city and how Berlin maps relationships that crash into walls both physical and emotional.
If all the characters in the book were merely ciphers for East and West Germany it couldn't sustain itself the way it does, with side conversations about buildings, the city, the compromises made by the aging '68 generation, the omnipresence of surveillance with the Stazi and a kind of inadvertant stazi of the mind.
Paul Sahre did the cover — a NY graphic designer who is often brilliant. None of the sentimentality of Schneider: a different generation – Schneider born in 1940, Sahre probably in the late 60s. Where Schneider can be bathetic, Sahre is funny.
I liked this book when I read it, I kept it for the cover.