German

Drvenkar, Zoran. (2011/2009). Sorry. Trans. from German by Shaun Whiteside. London, UK: Blue Door (Berlin, Germany: Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH). Note: Drvenkar is Croatian by birth.

I really should be letting you figure out the characters, but, in this novel, the relationships are complicated  by inconsistent POV shifts. Don't worry; I plan to clarify who's who.

Let's start with the main killer, who goes by the name of Lars Meybach (p. 65; see pp. 293, 296). His actual identity - Jonas Kronauer[1] - is revealed toward the end of the narrative (p. 304); it's easy, though, to guess that he's also Sundance. However, I think it would've been more interesting had Drvenkar left Jonas's gender unknown, especially with his assignation of the second person POV which is sometimes confused with the omniscient narrator's own thoughts. At other times, Jonas appears in the third person, sometimes when interacting with other characters (pp. 166-171, 304-306, 319) and always when talking about himself in the context of Butch and Sundance (pp. 110-113, 125-134, 194-201, 205-209, 293-297).

With regard to the friends - brothers Kris and Wolf Marrer (pp. 12, 33), Tamara Benger (p. 17), and Frauke Lewin (p. 42) - they share the third person POV, which is fine. Tamara, though, has a second identity in the first person; once it's clear that the I can only be one of the friends (p. 179), Kris is the first to mind because of his previous violence (p. 91). You should know it's Tamara after reading pp. 317-318; but she's still I in the last After (pp. 324-325), which doesn't make sense unless Drvenkar simply assumed that all readers would make this connection.

So let me get that out of the way, too. The Before and After sections were confusing! Until I started writing this response, I didn't get it. Here's what's happening: The After (Tamara in first person) is present time, Before (and one In Between) the events leading to Tamara's abduction of The Man Who Wasn't There (pp. 317-318), aka Samuel (p. 317). In other words, what Drvenkar did was fill in the gaps of what is essentially Tamara's story; but the reader, knowing more than Tamara, is left to decide the ending which is unresolved, though her desire to kill Samuel is clear on pp. 312-313. More simply put, Sorry is basically one big vignette/slice of life.

What I want to know is: Why do readers get to find out Karl's last name - Fichtner (p. 204) - but only Franziska "Fanni" (p. 112) and Samuel? Also, since they're pedophiles who turn Jonas's Butch into pedophile Lars (see pp. 294-295), why are readers supposed to be angry with Jonas for killing them? Because this is Drvenkar's moralization as omnicient narrator: "You can't conjure up ghosts and then turn away when they're suddenly standing in front of you. That's just not how it works" (p. 282). This seems to be the reason Samuel is in the narrative; it explains his near anonymity, while giving the pedophilia angle a more sinister twist. Also, Jonas would've gotten away with everything if not for Samuel (pp. 282-283).

Ironically, the whole premise of the friends' agency Sorry is actually realized in this situation, as Jonas ultimately wants forgiveness from himself. However, it's difficult to track by page numbers what's happening when since the narrative is constantly shifting back and forth in time and memory; on p. 212, though, Jonas can finally face himself in the mirror because "the guilt is gone," which gives added significance to p. 305 when he first uses the word "'pedophile'" and p. 298 when he first names Lars Lars and not Butch - because Butch is the one traumatized by ongoing sexual abuse in childhood, while Lars is the same as Fanni, Karl and Samuel: monster makers who intentionally warp children into becoming child sexual predators as adults (pp. 291-296; see pp. 141-143, 255, 266-268, 309-311)).

It also makes sense that Tamara abducts Samuel. What's annoying, however, is that Tamara and Kris remain ethically dead but alive, while the most and lesser ethical of the friends - Frauke and Wolf - die (see pp. 174-175, 270, 272, 281, 309-310; only Frauke's death is confirmed (p. 180)). Kris, though, is the worst! Not only does Kris assault his brother (see pp. 91-92, 94-95), he also kills the wrong man (Jonas) for Wolf's murder (p. 319).

So, overall, Sorry just wasn't as satisfying as it could've been. What Drvenkar needs to do is master POV shifts involving multiple characters.

[1] Just a minor note on one of Drvenkar's mistakes. When Tamara finds Jonas in the basement, she thinks back to the day she proved she wasn't Frauke's friend (p. 137), then decides Jonas is: "One of the two policemen; the one she asked to sit down [because] she finds it hard to take policemen seriously when they're younger than she is" (p. 304, italics added). In fact, "the younger of the two asks her to sit down" - twice, though she refuses to (p. 135, italics added). What, though, is the significance of Tamara's repetition of Jonas: "Who was so young I couldn't take him seriously" (p. 304)?