A Sabbatical in Leipzig by Adrian Duncan | Review
In wrestling, the success of a performer often relies on the originality and authenticity of their gimmick, the character trait that defines their persona and sets them apart. While reading A Sabbatical in Leipzig by Adrian Duncan, I began to think of writers as having gimmicks too.
What’s clear from having also read his debut novel, Notes from a German Building Site, is that Duncan’s background in engineering serves as an engaging prism through which he projects his stories. Similarly, Sabbatical takes this gimmick further, resulting in one of the most bizarre, bewildering, and beautiful novels I’ve come across for quite some time.
It tells the story of Michael, a retired architect who spent his career building bridges all around the world. Having grown up on the boglands of Longford during the electrification era, Michael witnesses his nation’s first clumsy steps towards modernisation. Perhaps this is what leads him to dedicate his life to building bridges, connecting landscapes both remote and civilised.
Midway through his career, he falls for Catherine, a museum curator who helps him recover from a workplace trauma and continue his work from the relative calm of Stasi-era Leipzig, and later Bilbao.
When Catherine passes, however, Michael withdraws from life as an active pursuit, retreating into the spatial comforts of light and structure and an obsession with Richard Serra’s labyrinthine sculptures exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum.
“The joy of this novel lies in spending time with someone who experiences architecture with the same depth of emotion that an ordinary person might experience music. ”
The joy of this novel lies in spending time with someone who experiences architecture with the same depth of emotion that an ordinary person might experience music. As in most great novels, very little happens. Instead, we are swept along on a wave of loss, loneliness, and slow dissociation. Works of such ambition or obliqueness are usually difficult to read, yet A Sabbatical in Leipzig flows like a page-turner.
Which brings me back to my original point. It is often said that the greatest gimmicks in wrestling aren’t gimmicks at all but are built around the wrestler’s own personality. Duncan is intimately familiar with a world most writers know nothing about, and, as such, his work takes on a rare quality in contemporary literature: originality.
About Adrian Duncan
Adrian Duncan’s debut novel, Love Notes from a German Building Site, won the 2019 John McGahern Book Prize. His second novel, A Sabbatical in Leipzig, was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award 2020. His collection of short stories, Midfield Dynamo, was published in March 2021 and was longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize, while his third novel, The Geometer Lobachevsky, published in April 2022, was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. His latest novel, The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth, was published to critical acclaim in January of 2025.
