Thomas Pletzinger’s Funeral for a Dog , a riveting story of search and loss, combines its protagonists’ physical and mental restlessness with something of an old-European lingering. A marathon across continents and between past and present, the book nevertheless thrives on its characters’ condition of “just being”—they’re not exactly idle but not productive either. Disorientation prevails as the author ponders life’s two grandest mysteries: love and death. Pletzinger’s debut novel propelled him to the front row of new German fiction and will be published in English this spring.

When BOMB approached Pletzinger for an interview, he wished to speak with musician Sufjan Stevens who, indirectly, shaped his book—namely by inducing a certain state of mind with his songs. (Pletzinger continually listened to Stevens’s albums while writing Funeral for a Dog .) There are obvious affinities between the two artists’ works: an interest in the symphonic, in empathy, and a “courage for pathos”—a resolution that Pletzinger’s main character, a writer, arrives at in the end of the book.

Pletzinger and Stevens met for the first time via Skype while they were both on the road. Their conversation drifted from missing limbs to hip-hop and will no doubt continue in some form.

—Sabine Russ

Thomas Pletzinger Hello, Hong Kong? This is somewhere near Cologne.

Sufjan Stevens Hello?

TP Good. I’m very excited to talk with you.

SS Ah, it is beautiful, this technology that we have access to now.

TP Did you have a chance to read my book?

SS I haven’t quite finished. I’m reading a whole bunch of things at once.

TP What else are you reading?

SS I just finished Patti Smith’s memoir about her and Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids .

TP Did you like it?

SS I love Patti Smith. She’s so sublime. As a performer, she is a real social-energy force for transcendence. Whenever I see her I’m inspired. Reading her book I loved the anecdotes, the history, and all the nuanced information in it. She and Robert had a beautiful and symbiotic relationship—companionship. The book is worth reading, even just as a voyeur if you have interest in that ’70s scene in New York. It was the tail end of the Andy Warhol thing.

TP I translated a collection of poetry by the American poet Gerald Stern into German. Have you heard of him?

SS Yeah.

TP He is 85-years-old now. Last year I invited him on a trip to Germany and we did a series of readings, one of them in Cologne, at the literary festival lit.Cologne . When Gerald Stern and I checked into the hotel, Patti Smith was there. She had this whole entourage with her and she was the star of the festival. I found her very charismatic. And Gerald Stern approached her and patted her on the back. They were chitchatting for a bit and she seemed really, really nice. Stern and Patti Smith talked about Warhol, actually. Stern grew up in Pittsburgh and knew Warhol back then. When Warhol moved out from home, Stern was the one who drove him to the train station.

SS Oh my lord.

TP Warhol was going to be a commercial artist for a shoe company or something in New York. So Stern gave him a lift to the train station. Warhol had all these bags and he had this painting with him. He gave that painting to Stern for driving him.

SS No …

TP So Stern went home and gave it to his mother and she said, “Really, that Warhol, that pimply Polack, can paint?” And then she threw that very early Warhol away. (laughter) Stern always says it’s the story of his first lost million.

SS Wow, that is tragic. Well, you know, money wouldn’t have done him any good anyway. Poets are meant to be poor.

TP Yeah, yeah. But he is not really poor. (laughter) You live in Brooklyn, right? Have you gotten to the New York chapters of my book yet?

SS I have, actually. I was excited about the number of times you referenced the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the BQE.

TP Well, my protagonist Svensson and his dog walk to Williamsburg and through Greenpoint on the BQE. I myself was living on Lorimer and Skillman, right next to the BQE, across the street from a bar called Union Pool. Do you know that one?

SS Yeah, Union Pool is right on the expressway.

TP So, in my imagination, my characters live on this street corner. Right above a corner store. In reality, there is no store. I simply put one there for the book.

SS Were you writing the book while you were in the city or was this something you wrote afterward?

TP I was living in New York from 1999 to 2001, but I didn’t write the book then. I wasn’t even writing, really, at that time. I wrote it several years later, mostly in 2007. By the way, I was listening to your BQE album yesterday. Last night, actually. I put it on at dinner for my sister and her kids. They didn’t quite get it.

SS The BQE is not good for digestion, I suppose.

TP You’re probably right. The two little kids wanted song and we wanted to listen to Wagner in traffic on the ugly highway. They wanted sugar and storytelling and we kept telling them to listen carefully. It was hard for my sister to hear anything, let alone references to architecture and urban planning and development and weirdness and Robert Moses—all translated into music. (laughter)

I was actually wondering if you thought the New York parts in my book were okay? You know, they were first written with a German audience in mind.

SS I really appreciated a lot of the references. There’s a kind of linguistic cacophony. The characters in the prose are very distracted, which is evocative of the physical New York landscape. Especially that area in Brooklyn, near the expressway, where you have all these bisecting lines of streets. Your narrative has that same kind of shape to it, narratives upon narratives. There are three different time sequences going on in the same story.

TP Yeah, for the characters it is a very distracting time, because it is September 11. I didn’t want to tell a story where people are able to make up their minds. Everyone at that time was making resolutions and deciding to do this or that—to change their lives, to move somewhere else, to hate Arabs, and so on. People were making up their minds and going in one direction. My characters don’t do that. I felt that this was more a sign of the times than anything else—they had to go back and forth, they had to talk a lot, about both nonsensical and very interesting things. And they have to get drunk because they can’t make up their minds, really.

SS It’s interesting that you position this kind of major catastrophe with this collection of people. They are so ambivalent. There is a kind of emotional anarchy in these characters; they never seem to come to grip with the event itself, you know, with this major event. Instead, there is this nearsightedness; they only see what is in front of them and they are just barely getting by from space to space and from moment to moment. It becomes almost surreal, in a way. And at some point you have the dog talking as well.

TP Yeah.

SS Because the prose is kind of surreal in itself—everyone is drunk, doing drugs, or wandering around—it seems very natural that the dog starts talking.(laughter)

TP Yeah, the dog is what you would call, in team sports, the glue. (laughter) He is the one that holds it all together. The dog offers his opinion or his reflections, usually when everyone is drunk. It’s then that he seems to be able to talk. Later in the book he actually really speaks and articulates his wisdom and all the pain he experienced. He is a real character in the book, he is not only a dog.

SS The dog is the prophet in some ways, he’s the spiritual advisor.

TP Absolutely. Have you gotten to the point where his leg is amputated?

SS I’ve gotten to the part where Tuuli cleans the fish for dinner and she insinuates that she had amputated the dog’s leg. But I haven’t gotten to that scene yet. I’m so behind. I need to finish it and call you back. (laughter)

TP No, don’t worry at all. It’s nice to talk about a half-book. It happens very often, but people always—more or less successfully—pretend otherwise. Let’s talk about unfinished things.

SS The story of my life is the story of half-finished projects and half-read books.

TP Is it?

SS Yeah, I never really finish anything.

TP Sometimes I finish something, but in comparison to how much I start, it’s pretty shameful. (laughter) But that is how things work, don’t you think? You start more than you finish.

SS How do you know when you are finished?

TP With this book? Actually, I’m supposed to be finished with it, but I’m not. And probably will not be finished for a long time. For the next novel, I’m using the same characters again.

SS Oh.

TP I didn’t want them to go away and abandon me. Tuuli, who is a medical student in Funeral for a Dog , will be an older doctor, a surgeon, in the next novel. And she will be amputating my protagonist’s leg, again.

SS Oh my lord.

TP But my next protagonist is 85-years-old and Tuuli gets to work on his leg as a surgeon. It sounds terrible, but she is a good doctor.

SS So what’s your fascination with amputated limbs?

TP You know, in Germany, every young man has to do mandatory military service or a substitute public service. You can work in a hospital instead, or care for children, or the elderly. Everyone has to do something, right? I didn’t want to go to the army, so first I worked with kids and then I worked with an elderly woman. I went to see her every day, helped her with whatever she needed, like cutting her toenails, or going shopping, feeding her parakeet—all these things. Apart from high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes, she had this infected toe. All these conditions that don’t kill you fast but add up to real misery. Because she had diabetes and her leg was gangrenous, the infected toe was amputated first. Then half her foot had to be amputated, then the entire foot, then the leg below the knee. She remained strong somehow or at least she pretended to keep her spirits up, although she physically disappeared, really. And I found this terrible, of course, but fascinating at the same time. I thought one day I’d want to use that experience in my writing.

So eventually I used it on the dog in Funeral for a Dog . I also wanted this dog to have a name with three letters and his name was Lula before, when he was a police dog in Brazil. Then one of his legs is shot off and he becomes Lua, the three-legged, talking, beer-loving dog.

SS So you lose a letter and you lose a leg.

TP Yeah, they shoot off his letter.

SS I’ve seen three-legged dogs and cats. They seem to get on as if nothing is missing. A three-legged dog doesn’t appear tragic.

TP They can run really fast with three legs. When their entire body gets up to speed, you don’t even notice the missing leg anymore.

SS A person is much more affected, whereas an animal is still proficient in spite of the disability. You mention in the book that the dog doesn’t experience phantom-limb sensation.

TP Exactly. Dogs don’t know nostalgia and melancholy either, do they? Humans are sad and nostalgic, so my next book is a sad story of a missing leg. I will talk about a human amputee. Even before his leg is removed, he thinks about everything he once was able to do with his leg and everything he will be missing. The biography of a leg.

SS It seems like the human characters in Funeral for a Dog are all experiencing phantom-limb syndrome. Even though they are not missing limbs, there is this anxiety about something missing and an anguish about the past.

TP Yeah, that is what they deal with, right? They live in ruins, basically. And Svensson literally lives in a ruin—a rundown house with holes in the roof, surrounded by garbage. Everyone else deals with their own ruins and broken-down situations, broken homes, in some way. This is what the book is about. The different parts—the New York, Brazil, Finland, and Italy parts—all come together at one point and it becomes clear that the characters are all dealing with ruins.

SS In spite of all the movement … And there is so much geographical movement, change of landscapes and countries and continents. It’s that restlessness versus the kind of static deconstruction of the ruins, the lightness of movement versus the heaviness of the ruin. How did you manage all this motion in the book?

TP Well, the characters are moving around, trying to find a place they can call home. And then there is this Svensson guy who decides that all this traveling is probably not a good idea, so he tries to pin himself down. He settles in this one traumatic place where his best friend, the mysterious Felix, has died. He stays in a boathouse on the lake and doesn’t move—to see what that’s like. Technically, it’s montage. You jump from chapter to chapter, switch places on a page, or from paragraph to paragraph. I think it can be confusing, but I wanted it to be a kind of a voyage for the reader too.

Is that a kid crying in the back?

SS Yeah, that’s my nephew, my sister’s two-year-old. I’m surrounded by stuffed animals right now.

TP I’m actually surrounded by a collection of old Donald Duck comics. (laughter) I’m at my sister’s house too and my little nephew just woke up and came in here. He’s three and a half. Do you have kids?

SS No, no kids.

TP I’ll be a father in six weeks.

SS Wow! Congratulations.

TP Thanks. I’m excited to see what that’s like.

SS Will this be your first?

TP Of course. I mean, not of course, but it is. (laughter) What’s your favorite name? We are still hunting for a name for the baby.

SS I always liked Maximilian. It sounds like a dictator.

TP It is.

SS Or like a robotic space leader. I think that one is from Walt Disney’s The Black Hole .

TP It’s a holy Roman emperor’s name. Where does your name come from?

SS Well, Sufjan is probably Persian.

TP Is it your real name or an artist name?

SS No, it is my given name.

TP Does everyone in your family have Persian names?

SS Four of us do. We are six kids. There is Djamilah, Djohariah, Marzuki, and Sufjan. My parents changed their names to Rasjid and Hadidjah, which are very Middle-Eastern names.

TP But they are originally from America?

SS Yeah, they were born in the US. My parents were members of a spiritual group called Subud. The leader of the group, Bapak, would sometimes rename group members or, if you wanted that, name the children. He was Indonesian and Muslim, so he chose a lot of Middle-Eastern names.