The Truth About Sascha Knisch

The kinky sex business in pre-Hitler Germany spawns a suspicious death in a murky novel by Swedish author Knisch that often reads more like a treatise than a thriller. It's the summer of 1928 in an unnamed city that is evidently Berlin. The narrator, 29-year-old Sascha Knisch, moved there a few years earlier from his hometown, Vienna; he's a part-time projectionist at a movie theater. Sascha is also a transvestite who makes regular visits to Dora Wilms, who's a softer version of a dominatrix. Their current session is interrupted by the doorbell. Sascha, dressed as a schoolgirl, hides in the closet. He later emerges to find the visitor gone and Dora dead. That's the setup, but don't expect a suspenseful narrative. For most of the novel Dora is alive, in flashbacks; we don't learn until almost the end whether she died of natural causes. What's front and center is the sexual question, by which Fioretos means the obscure drives that shape sexual identities. For Sascha the key moment came in a high-school art class, when Sascha was the model and his fellow students, prompted by their teacher, drew him as a woman. Dora's past involved exhibitionism, sex with her brother, a teenage pregnancy and a baby given up for adoption. Their interests take them to the Foundation for Sexual Research, where they learn about the grey sex and the wondrous properties of semen and testicles. Periodically Fioretos returns to the investigation, while adding complications. Is some missing film the key to Dora's death? Is Sascha's best friend Anton, a porn filmmaker, playing a double game? What is the significance of the Brotherhood, a band of vigilantes? A final difficulty: Fioretos wrote his novel in his native Swedish. His own translation leads to some awkward locutions (e.g., my heart inched up a few notches. )A dismal farrago that illuminates neither character nor sexuality. (Kirkus Reviews)