Illusions by Ruth Rehmann

Published by Faber in August 2026 in a translation by Rob Madole – more details here

Ive read this book relatively slowly over about a week and a half, dipping into it at moments when attention permitted.

While reading this book, it has wrapped around the entirety of my birthday “treat read”, Kate Folk’s Sky Daddy and also around the majority of William H Gass’ The World Within The Word blog post to come).

I put Illusions by Ruth Rehmann down and picked it up over those ten days for a very simple reason: it has really really really big paragraphs.

This is not a book to slip into while doing childcare or while making a journey that involves four different trains. No.

This is something to sit with and sit on; it’s a beautiful, poignant, serious, novel about the build-up of regret and the vacuity and pointlessness of almost all life.

It’s a great and timely read for me, reading this great text about the false promise of the weekend just as I settle, begrudgingly, into full time work for the first time since my toddler was a newborn¹.

Is this a brand new novel about work-life balance and its failures and its promises? Is this a fresh text looking at the way that weekday tedium slips and slides and expands its reach into the psychological time that is meant to be ones own, and how one can either resent that and yearn for the moments of freedom, doing the personal equivalent of blogging on the country’s cheapest laptop while travelling on a really stinky commuter train, or one can lean into worker-as-identity and become someone who no longer lives for the weekend, but rather a person who doesn’t live at all?

But no, no it’s not a new novel that’s about all of those things.

It’s a newly translated novel, yes, but this is a German novel from the 1950s, published in English for the first time in several decades.

I was lucky enough to snag a proof from Faber of this one, which does mean that – as per the cover image you can see above – I’m not able to quote anything from the volume, but I can describe it. Yes, yes, I can.

Illusions is a novel set over a single weekend about a group of people who work together in an office, with each chapter focusing on each of them in turn and the narrator being a very tight, Dallowayesque, third person that shifts and slides into memory and fantasy as well as reality.

The key figures we see the world through and around are as follows:

Frau Schramm, an older woman who has dedicated her life to the firm and has essentially nothing else; she has one friend, who she doesn’t really like, and who judges her harshly for her own misdeeds, of which she feels insufficient shame. She has been told on Friday afternoon that she is going to involuntarily retire, and absolutely refuses to accept it. Because she has nothing else. Her friend has gone mad, or has maybe gone mad, but she does nothing that may help this friend, just as she’s done nothing that will help anyone other than her employer for decades;

There is Carmen Viol, a formerly beautiful woman reaching middle age who has had great love affairs and still believes one may happen again, but is beginning to believe it is unlikely and that her best days are behind her; she is terrified of ending up the same as Frau Schramm, whose job she is going to take after the more senior woman’s retirement;

There is Paul Westermann, a translator at the firm who isn’t very good at foreign languages, who has an infant child and a wife, neither of whom he cares about, who yearns for adventure and excitement yet doesn’t event have the nous to chase advancement in the office he works at, and is on the cusp of being conned by an old schoolfriend when the conman’s life partner warns him off, though this could just be the limit of their con; a free cab ride and a dinner on someone else; maybe the promises of riches weren’t fodder for something greater, but fodder for something small…

And then there is Therese, the young, beautiful, woman who is powerless in her own life, dating a man who bores her to death (because he is boring), recently divorced from another boring man and having had a fun and exciting romance in-between (well, overlapping with her marriage, gence why it crumbled) that she could maybe go back to, but the idea of the bounder-cad excites her but she doesn’t feel able to enjoy or relax into that kind of excitement. She is excited by romance, but bored by it too… She, like some of the others, has friends who she doesn’t really like…

Those, yes, do seem to be the options in the novel and also, so familiarly to me, too, yes; you get either no friends or friends you don’t really like…

I wish I had friends… more friends, bigger friends, more proximate friends, I don’t quite know what I mean; all my friends feel like acquaintances, really, sometimes, now I no longer scream and hyperventilate in front of them. It all feels… ah… flat. Yes. Flat. Yes.

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Illusions is written, then, in a winding and lyrical stream of consciousness, shifting from youth to age, from male to female, from fantasist dripping in nostalgia through to denialist living in regret…

It takes us from present to past to possibly fictional past to present to dream future to feared future… from bar to house party to cafe to psychiatric ward to grimy flats and slightly less grimy flats to, briefly, the glamorous house of one of the company’s executives, to bored suburban parks and to the office at times when one really shouldn’t be at the office…

It’s about the ways in which compromise fails us, the ways in which freedom to do and be who one wants to be is very often a con or a lie or something that isn’t, really, isn’t really ever possible at all in the world in which we live…

It’s over 70 years since this book was written and nothing has changed, really, has it, for those of us with unfulfilling and/or meaningless work.

Work that doesn’t sit right is something that clings to the mind and body like a cloak of shame; it clings to the money you spend in the hope that the shame and discomfort will be forgotten or slip away. The working life, something merely a means to an end for the vast majority of us, infects the time around it like a disease, a virus, a putrid smell.

When there is rot in the centre of all of your week days, there is a rot in your life that you cannot ignore without strenuous psychiatric tightrope walking or – the other option and one I’m hoping to avoid this time – sufficient quantities of pharmacological psychiatric intervention to make ones sense of self something of so little personal importance that all else fades away…

I’ve often found that the levels of medication required for economic stability essentially rob life of any purpose, any feeling of being a person more than just a tool, a cog in someone else’s machine.

Yes, the medication makes the dry dull repetition of meaninglessness slide along a little more smoothly (though still not totally smoothly), but the last time I was highly medicated just in order to get by, I made what I consider to be the biggest mistake of my life, and I’ve made some other, massive, mistakes, though the other ones were committed with genuine foolishness, bumpkin ignorance and naïveté… Taught nothing of any value or use as a child/teenager, I was ripe for a life of constant errors until I bothered learning how to think and not feel unable to feel in my mid-twenties, and all the other really big mistakes I made happened prior to being 22/23 at the latest really… there were consequences of those mistakes, yes, that would hold me underwater until I was basically dead for many many (still) years yet, but all of them were mistakes ultimately committed by someone with so little self-knowledge and no real responsible or wise person of care to offer reflection, advice, assistance, anything, really, anything, that to judge and blame and hold in contempt the child-youth I was at that point would be pointless.

The massive mistake I made in 2022, however, was one I made full in the knowledge that it was an act of destructive self-harm that I shouldn’t under any circumstances have done. All of the shit times since then, really, are mere afterburns of that same mistake. Could the wounds of that big mistake ever be fixed? Yes, possibly, but with more forthright self-knowledge, self-belief and willingness to take risks than I’ve ever exhibited in my life to date.

So, yes, I firmly believe that me having had a string of bad jobs is a result of my own personal failures and clear evidence of my own societal lack of import, however in reading a novel about other people with dead-end jobs and dead-end lives, I don’t judge them in the same way that I do judge myself.

I empathise with those characters, yes, I feel for them. But I don’t sneer at them in the way I sneer in the mirror. No. No I don’t.

–///–

Illusions is a very well-constructed book, which moves with an increasing rapidity as it goes on, and although the psychological flow and the stream of consciousness is tight and direct and personal throughout, it doesn’t stultify as it goes on. And maybe that, too, is part of the loser (like me)’s approach to the weekend…

At the end of the working week, time feels open and eternal, full of opportunity and optimism. Time to slow down, pull back, relax, sit and view and consider and appraise. 

The prose is formally vigourous, able to hold the plodding yet paranoid thoughts of the elderly, the skittish and unfocused thoughts of the young, the self-involved and meditative reflection of those in middle age whose self of sense is flapping, lost, ragged, dead, behind them…

Who are any of us, really, when the vast majority of our waking lives are wasted in the production and the act of what is ultimately nothing?

A wake up call to the clear notion that the ways in which most of us live is absolutely fucking shit, and people have known that it’s absolutely fucking shit for fucking lifetimes. 

A great read; meaningful, articulate, serious, and a thoroughly justifiable use of its stream-of-consciousness form.

The weekend is a desperate time. It shouldn’t be. But it is.

More details on the book here, and options to order direct from Faber innit.

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1. There is definitely a part of me (the good part, the part I wouldn’t hack out with a spoon given the option) that continues to add complaints about working into the opening paragraphs of this blog in case my employers bother to Google me and can fire me or whatever due to a lack of enthusiasm. “Take it out of my hands!,” I suppose, that would be great. I really want to commit to the idea that this will be my final job that feels wrong to do, ethically, but I honestly don’t quite know how I’ll actually ever, practically, be able to find a job that doesn’t feel like an ethical dereliction, certainly not here (in London). And maybe not anywhere, tbh. Alas, stuck I am, for a bit. ↩︎