Phantom Pain by Arnon Grunberg

Translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett

• Openbare Bibliotheek Eindhoven,
  The Netherlands
• Gemeentebibliotheek Utrecht,
  The Netherlands
• Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Gemeentebibliotheek Rotterdam,
  The Netherlands
  

Once a literary novelist of some respectability, now brought low by the double insult of obscurity and crippling debt, Robert G. Mehlman is a man in need of money and recognition, fast. It is, of course, to cookery writing that he turns. A practised decadent, a habitual spendthrift and a serial womaniser, he has, ostensibly, all the right qualities. But the path to fame is never a smooth one.
Phantom Pain is the bitterly funny but unpublished manuscript of Mehlman's autobiography. In it, he tells the parallel stories of his decaying marriage and his puzzling affair with a woman he meets by chance and who accompanies him on the road. Their journey takes them on a chaffeur-driven, midnight run from New York to Atlantic City where they gamble away most of Mehlman's remaining funds and then north, to Albany, where his unlikely salvation, and the inspiration for his book Polish-Jewish Cuisine in 69 Recipes, lie.
Framed by a son's account of his famous father, this novel-within-a-novel is a hilariously black account of a writer's fall and his subsequent rise.

Arnon Grunberg was born in 1971 in Amsterdam. He began writing plays and monologues when very young and ran his own publishing company at the age of twenty-one. His first novel, Blue Mondays, became a bestseller in Europe, won the Anton Wachter Prize, and has been translated into twelve languages. Phantom Pain won the AKO Prize in Holland. Arnon Grunberg lives in New York City.

Grunberg has taken a handful of dysfunctional characters and produced an extremely funny 'black comedy', but beneath the cloak of humour there is a sense of disillusionment and despair. Mehlman sees his serial affairs as 'intimacy without consequences' which in his own words is 'a deceitful form of intimacy' and 'his speciality'.

Phantom Pain is an absorbing read and Grunberg's anti-hero Mehlman, bears a strong resemblance to Bellow's Herzog.

It is my choice for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

A member of Raheny Reading Group, Dublin, Ireland