I read The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt while relaxing in a snow-bound hotel in Northern France. We had gone for a short walking holiday, but unexpectedly woke on the first morning to find six inches of snow, limiting our time there to strolls around the surrounding small towns, and sitting in warm bars and cafés and the lounge of our hotel. This book seemed to match my mood perfectly, for the unnamed narrator, the shoe-tester, spends his days in similar style, wandering around and spending rather too much time in slightly aimless reflection.
I like books that create previously unheard of occupations for their main characters (Anne Tyler is also adept at this) and the concept of a shoe-tester is up there with the best – being paid to walk all day around the city of Frankfurt testing up-market shoes and writing reports for the manufacturers. Of course, the job is a pretext for a meandering dissertation on life and its unliveability – for the narrator is a true existentialist, living at the sharp-end where nothing is a given, and the everyday is seen in its remarkability as though through eyes just born to this planet (“through the open door I once again hear the little noises the birds make as their tiny feathered bodies take off with a dense and compact flutter”).
The narrator’s main concern is that his life is lived without “inner authorisation”. Nobody ever asked his consent to be alive, and this affront perplexes him from the start of the book. He is “disgruntled” at this. He enters a department store and says that this is “precisely the kind of place where I would appreciate being asked whether I really want to be in this world”. We all know the feeling! Yet with such puzzlement upon him, even the purchase of a pair of socks defeats him, and he has to return another day. Even the simple act of getting on a tram can defeat the shoe-tester, but he finds later in the book that his existential opposition to life is dissovling and he hope that he is “getting closer to the day when he will be able to live with inner authorisation.
The shoe-tester is not alone all his days, despite his tendency to isolation. He has relationships with several women, all of whom find him perplexing, but evidently appealing in one way or another. At a dinner party he becomes positively voluble and claims that he is an authority on “Comparative Guilt Studies”, and digresses on “the guilt that accumulates without being seen when we think we are living guiltlessly – we all live in systems that are not of our making . . . and the ordinary guilt of these systems migrates inside us”. Before he realises what he has done, he has invented the fictional “Institute for Memory Arts and is making private therapeutic appointments with dinner party guests.
The book is humorous and despite its philosophical under-currents it is an easy read, almost “light” in fact. It is immensely beguiling and the reader finds himself drawn into the strange inner-world of the shoe tester, and reflecting on his strange way of seeing things. It is one of the few books I really found too short (only 132 pages) but its impact was that of a much longer novel, one which I will definitely read again (something unusual for me).
Recent Comments