Too Much Information

When David Schmahmann, the final author of the JCC’s November Book Month series, spoke in the evening of Nov. 30 he took note of his audience, mostly women. In an apologetic manner, he explained the topic of his fourth and latest novel, The Double Life of Alfred Buber.

The story is “about being a man misreading … situations regarding women, and the shame that follows.” More specifically, the story centers on a “Boston lawyer who falls in love with a sex worker” in Bangkok, Thailand.

Bangkok is “a colorful place” where a person is “accosted and offered sexual favors everywhere … at the airport, at the hotel, waiting for a taxi.”

For inspiration Schmahmann drew on the story of M. Butterfly—the French diplomat who carried on a love affair for 20 years without knowing his paramour was actually a man.

Schmahmann added that although the book is a “novel not a diary … I’m quite Buberish in my own way … I’m stuffy, an atheist and a closet libertine.”

Schmahmann is also no stranger to relationships rooted in an imbalance of power—he was born and grew up in the South Africa of apartheid and the Botha regime. This meant racial oppression and identity cards, as well as anti-Semitism, a society based, as Schmahmann pointed out, on Nazi values. Of his generation, Schmahmann said, “we all knew we had to leave.”

Schmahmann came to the United States in 1970 to attend Dartmouth College, landing in Boston “and feeling right away that I was home.” He stayed, received a law degree from Cornell, and spent the next 20 years or more practicing law in a large Boston firm.

This is Schmahmann’s fourth novel. The first,  Empire Settings, captured the John Gardner Book Award for outstanding fiction published by a small press for a first novel. That and his other two are set, at least in part, in South Africa. Through these novels, he is still “trying to process the experience … I can’t get away from South Africa and I can’t get away from race.”

Like the main character in The Secret Life of Alfred Buber, Schmahmann has always been an outsider—a Jew in anti-Semitic South Africa, a South African in the US.

He also “knows what it’s like to live a double life.” Even as he worked as a lawyer for his entire adult life until 2001 when his first novel was published, “every day I thought I was an imposter [because] I was really a writer.”

And Schmahmann has spent extensive time in South East Asia, over a time frame of decades.

The main character says of the young sex worker, whom we only see from Buber’s eyes, “There is in her face every dream I have ever known.”

Schmahmann started out “ashamed of Buber” and “worried people would think it was me, that I was him.”

Now, he says, “I just don’t care anymore what people think.”

He adds, there is “something about Alfred Buber, desperate, that is in everyone.”

Let’s hope it’s only a tiny bit. Otherwise, we’re all in big trouble, as what passes for love to those in power is often perceived as something vastly different by those on the receiving end with little control over their lives.