In Zurich, Lev cannot work out how to buy a tram ticket.
He has written directions. What defeats him is the machine: its buttons, the fares, the place to put the money. Kato comes to his rescue and buys him a weekly pass. Later, at the guesthouse, his hand passes over the wooden counter. Maple, he thinks.
Those two moments, from the authorized selections published by Litrix, offer an excellent way into Iris Wolff's Clearing. Here is someone baffled by an ordinary transaction who immediately notices something most of us would overlook. Being unable to buy a ticket tells us about his difficulty in Zurich. It does not tell us everything about him.
The scene occurs in chapter eight, early in the book but not at its beginning. We have met Lev without yet knowing him well. Already, there is a reason to keep our judgment provisional.
The person who went away
Lev and Kato grew up in a village in northern Romania, in the Maramureș region. Their childhood belongs to the years of Ceaușescu's dictatorship; the upheavals around 1989 alter the possibilities of movement, work and ordinary life. Opening a border, however, does not give everyone the same destination.
Kato goes to Western Europe and makes a living as a pavement artist. Lev remains more closely attached to home, to the forest and to working with wood. They keep in touch, but their days become increasingly unlike one another.
A quick account could make this a contrast between courage and fear. One person embraces freedom; another cannot let go. That would be an efficient way to describe a relationship, and a poor way to become curious about it.
Departure has a ready vocabulary: opportunity, adventure, escape. Staying often has to defend itself against the suspicion of failure. Before placing Lev and Kato on that scale, it is worth asking what each person is attached to, and what each would lose by changing their life.
Then a postcard from Kato invites Lev to Zurich. By the time they meet, they have not seen each other for five years.
Letters can preserve a connection across that interval. They cannot quite prepare you for standing beside someone again. A familiar voice comes from a body that has continued living elsewhere. Old ease and new awkwardness may arrive together.
Wolff does not require us to settle the relationship's name before attending to it. Lev and Kato have mattered to one another for a long time. How friendship and love share that history is part of the attraction of continuing.
Nine, eight, seven
The novel counts its chapters backward, from nine to one. We approach the adult Lev first and move toward his youth and childhood.
A conventional coming-of-age story invites us to wonder who a child will become. This arrangement turns the question around. Having seen a man hesitate, remain silent or make a journey, we begin to wonder what it took for him to reach that moment.
In her interview with Laura Möndel, Wolff connects the backward movement to the way people actually get to know one another. We encounter the person in front of us; their past emerges as the acquaintance continues.
It is a simple observation with considerable consequences for a reader. Most people do not arrive with an account of their upbringing attached. A quiet colleague might remain a quiet colleague for years before telling us something that changes the meaning of that quietness. Nothing about the original encounter was false. It was incomplete.
A novel can spare us that uncertainty by explaining everyone at once. Wolff asks us to spend some time without the explanation.
This need not turn the past into a box containing the correct answer. There would be little gain in reversing chronology if every childhood scene merely proved that the adult had always been destined to behave as he does. The more interesting possibility is that earlier moments revise our understanding without closing it.
The German original is only a little over 250 pages long, yet it crosses decades. Selection does much of the work that a longer novel might give to continuous narration. Some periods become vivid; others are separated by gaps. Those intervals ask for patience, but they also resemble how another person's life reaches us.
What a place teaches you to notice
Readers unfamiliar with Romanian history need not complete a course before beginning. A useful first orientation is that these characters have lived through restrictions on movement and then through a time when leaving becomes possible for many people.
That change is more than a personality test. Wanting to leave and being able to leave are different experiences. So are remaining by choice and discovering that the people around you are disappearing.
In her Litrix review, Kristina Maidt-Zinke describes Wolff's treatment of historical change through scenes, landscapes and encounters, rather than a systematic sequence of political events. She also draws attention to the movement between sensory impressions and reflection.
This is useful guidance for approaching the book. History gives weight to a departure or a return without turning the characters into guides stationed beside the major dates.
The forest deserves similar attention. It is tempting to turn woodland immediately into a symbol of roots or belonging. But the counter in Zurich suggests something more ordinary and more specific: Lev knows wood. His working life has trained his hand and his attention.
A place enters a person through such habits. The things you can recognize, repair or find your way through may not be the things that make you look capable somewhere else. In Zurich, the ticket machine and the maple counter belong to the same visit.
The title offers a helpful expectation for the reading itself. A clearing lets you see part of a landscape. Trees still surround it. You have gained a view, not possession of the whole forest.
How much do we need explained?
There are reasons a reader might resist this approach. In her review for Literaturzeitschrift.de, Eva Luber admires the writing about mountains, seasons and the natural world, while finding some chapter epigraphs difficult to interpret and some questions insufficiently resolved.
That reservation should not be waved away as an inability to appreciate ambiguity. Gaps can be suggestive; they can also leave someone unsatisfied. Wanting an explanation is not a literary failing.
Wolff, in the Möndel interview, is willing to leave the boundary between friendship and love open. She also acknowledges that she does not possess all her characters' secrets. The invitation is to get closer to them, without assuming that closeness must eventually produce a complete account.
Readers who enjoy small gestures, restrained prose and the strangeness that survives a long acquaintance may find that invitation compelling. Those looking primarily for a rapidly advancing plot or an unmistakable romance will want to adjust their expectations.
For English readers, the published edition is *Clearing*, translated by Ruth Martin. The Litrix selection linked above, translated by Alexandra Roesch under the earlier sample title Glimmer of Light, is a different text and covers several selected passages.
What stays with me as a point of entry is the man at the tram stop. He has made it a long way from home. We can see that buying a ticket is difficult for him. We do not yet know how difficult it was to decide to come.
As the pages move forward, time moves backward. The pleasure on offer is the possibility of returning, in thought, to that first encounter and seeing a little more.