Thomas Pletzinger: writing the world

"Speaking from the point of view of a 'German writer'," Thomas Pletzinger waves his arms in the air to make the scare quotes, "referring to 'German literature', I have to admit that there's as much reference to German literature as there is to American independent rock, or Finnish film." He shrugs, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. "The frame of reference for this book is international, and that's the way I perceive myself and my writing. The title," he adds, brightening, "is a good example. It came to me in English, so I translated it into German and it worked."

It comes as a disappointment to learn that the most exciting German-language novel published in English this spring is so lightly rooted in the particularities of the German intellectual landscape, but Funeral for a Dog is strong enough to banish such regrets. Published in Germany in 2008 as Bestattung eines Hundes, this prizewinning debut tells the story of a reluctant journalist sent to interview Dirk Svensson, the reclusive author of a bestselling children's fable. Through a collage of postcards, notes, an unpublished Svensson manuscript and the occasional picture, Pletzinger explores the repercussions of his fictional author's unconventional love-life and the tensions in his reporter's professional and personal relations, while steadily building towards a death forged from high drama and the harsh banality of everyday life.

Funeral for a Dog doesn't feel like a German book, Pletzinger claims – though he struggles to define what a "German" book might be. German literature has opened up to voices from around the world over recent years, but this international novel isn't part of that tendency. It isn't "language-centred", playing with the German-ness of the words (Pletzinger and his translator, Ross Benjamin, simply moved the German puns around and made English ones); nor is it focused on particularly German topics. The problems that confront the characters could easily be transferred "to England, to America. Hierarchical questions, relations between the sexes, the work environment … that's everywhere in the western hemisphere."

The novel took shape over seven years during which this former literature student left behind publishing jobs in New York and Hamburg and dared to think he might become a writer. Born in Leipzig in 1975, he returned to the city of his birth in 2004 to study on what was at that time Germany's only creative writing course. The story shifts back and forth through time, flitting from Hamburg to a ruined house on the shores of Lake Lugano, from New York City to a Brazilian favela with a restlessness that mirrors his own travels while he was writing. For all his wanderlust, he found he kept returning to the same set of characters, who appeared in a handful of earlier short stories about a love triangle. After a while he thought he had "the material for a novel, but it didn't work on the textual level. It was a collection of stories – they were connected to each other, but there were parts missing and they weren't the right parts."

It was while he was sitting on the banks of the Odra in Wrocław that he realised the book needed a journalist – someone who deals with other people's stories – to provide a frame for these fictions, now presented as an autobiographical novel written by one of the corners of his love triangle. Enter Daniel Mandelkern, who records his attempts to interview the author, Svensson, in a series of short notes, recorded in the same Semikolon notebook Pletzinger carries in his rucksack today. This bite-sized style – all subject headings and wry, bracketed asides – is intended not only to provide a contrast with the expansive prose of the short stories, but also as a way of capturing Mandelkern's attempts to "bring things to order".

Funeral for a Dog's formal sophistication is there, Pletzinger explains, to serve "a very straightforward story." But once the experimental toolkit has been opened, putting the lid back on is no easy matter. "I find it very difficult to tell a story from the beginning to the end, in a seemingly old-fashioned way," he says. He's trying to keep the novel he's writing at the moment, a biography of an old man's left foot, along more conventional lines, but finds it very difficult just to begin at the beginning. "I'm trying to tell it straightforwardly, and I think I'm failing badly. I'm in his mind all the time, and he jumps around."

The shifts of geography, period and perspective which animate Funeral for a Dog are matched by Pletzinger's deft variations in tone. He's constantly on the move between comedy, irony and tragedy as his characters discover the limits of their control over their own lives – an amalgam which the author says is intended to avoid the cheesiness of the doggedly tragic. "Obviously there are great books that are purely tragic, but I can't do that – I just can't," he says. "I'm not able to pull that off, and I don't want to, because I would be depressed while doing it. But at the same time, I can't write comedy, because I like it when there's something meaningful and tragic to the story. This intertwining of comedy and tragedy – that feels real."

Despite the constructed quality of his fiction, Pletzinger insists it's the novelist's job to write solid characters, and suggests that the reality of his characters is why he "wrote this book and told their stories". The images in the book – a title page, a receipt, a line drawing – are a further attempt to bolster the reality of his fictional universe, and Pletzinger's determination to ground his fiction extends to his choices of location, which are all drawn from his own experience. The problems his characters confront, and the places in which they confront them are all "of our time, of our generation", he says. "The book comes from my world, without being my story."

The personal experience which lends his settings such vibrancy is never more important than in a sequence that unfolds in New York in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. While he defends the right of any writer to tackle America's tragedy, Pletzinger admits that he "worried" about including it. "I could easily have told a similar story – a love triangle in New York – in 2000, not 2001," he says. But his experience that day was so striking, and offered such a powerful way of examining his characters' central dilemma, that he couldn't leave it out.

"At the centre of my 9/11 experience, which was pretty much as it is in the book, was that I thought I knew how the world functioned, and then I realised I didn't," he says. "When 9/11 happened I was simply shit scared. What was in the media sounded the same as always, but I had a totally different feeling about it, because it happened right next door." That disconnect between the pictures on the television and the feeling in his own gut – the realisation that what's on the screen is "nothing" compared to what you "see and feel and smell and think" – was not only a striking moment in his own life, he explains, but also a way of exploring his characters' illusions of control. The gradual realisation his thirtysomethings undergo is a subject which Pletzinger feels he will return to again and again.

"I know that at the core, it's always the same stuff," he says. "That's my feeling. It's always the same story, that people are terribly afraid of loss, and it bloody happens anyway."