The King of the Forest

The King of the Forest is the short novel by Benno von Archimboldi that unexpectedly brings Lotte Haas face to face with her brother’s public literary identity. Its family resembles her own so closely that she recognizes her childhood in its pages; carrying the book to Santa Teresa, she reads from it to Klaus Haas and then contacts the publisher, turning a chance purchase into the beginning of a deliberate search for Archimboldi.

The Book and Its Accidental Reader

Lotte buys the book in 2001 while waiting at Frankfurt airport for a flight to Los Angeles. The purchase is unlike her usual choices: she is not a strong reader, and the books she sometimes buys tend to be celebrity memoirs, biographies, or volumes by television personalities that promise stories but, in her judgment, contain none. This time she has bought The King of the Forest by mistake, or in the hurry of not missing her flight. The slender volume is no more than 150 pages, but its brevity does not make its effect on her slight.

As the plane crosses the Atlantic, Lotte discovers that she is reading about a recognizable family: a one-legged father, a one-eyed mother, a boy who likes to swim, and a girl who follows her brother to the cliffs. The resemblance is not an abstract likeness to a familiar kind of household. It is a return to her own childhood, felt with astonishment as she reads. The book gives her a way to encounter family history from outside herself, through a novel whose author she has not yet identified as her brother.

Form, Memory, and Recognition

Lotte finds the style strange. The writing is clear, sometimes transparent, yet the stories follow one another without leading to a settled destination. People, animals, neighbors, and the children’s surroundings remain in view, while nature gradually dissolves, like something vanishing in a boiling cauldron. The book’s movement away from a conventional, directed sequence matters to Lotte because recognition comes through its particular scenes and remembered details, not through an explanatory account of who the family is.

While the other passengers sleep, she reads the novel again, skipping the sections that do not concern her family, house, neighbors, or garden. Having finished, she is certain that the author, Benno von Archimboldi, is her brother. She briefly considers another possibility—that Archimboldi spoke with him—but rejects it: some things in the novel, she believes, are matters her brother would never have told anyone. The inference contains an irony she does not pause to consider. By writing those things into a book, her brother has already told them to the world; the novel has made private memory public while leaving the author’s identity concealed from its reader.

A Public Name and a Private Connection

The book offers Lotte clues beyond the family resemblance. Its cover has no author photograph, but it gives Archimboldi’s birth year as 1920, the year her brother was born, and lists numerous titles published by the same house. It also describes an author translated into a dozen languages and mentioned for several years as a possible Nobel recipient. These details place the author in a public literary world that Lotte has not previously connected to her family. They reinforce her recognition without giving her a photograph or a direct confirmation.

At the Los Angeles airport, while waiting for her connection to Tucson, Lotte looks for more Archimboldi books in the airport bookstores but finds only books about aliens, abductions, encounters with extraterrestrial beings, and flying-saucer sightings. The failed search leaves The King of the Forest as the one concrete piece of evidence she can carry onward. In Tucson, the lawyer meets her, and they drive to Santa Teresa discussing the murdered-women case. The lawyer says the case has long been deadlocked and considers that good news; Lotte cannot understand why a deadlock would be good, and lets the conversation drop as she turns to the landscape. The book’s discovery thus travels alongside a case whose stalled progress remains difficult for her to interpret.

Reading to Klaus and Contacting the Publisher

When Lotte visits Klaus in prison, she finds him much as she remembers him: distant and cold, a little thinner, still strong, with the nearly imperceptible air of disdain he has carried since he was seventeen. Their conversation is mostly about ordinary matters—Germany, her trip, and the condition of the shop. Klaus seems uninterested in Germany. Only after the lawyer leaves to speak with a prison official does Lotte tell him about Archimboldi’s book.

Klaus initially appears uninterested. His expression changes when Lotte takes the novel from her bag and reads him the passages she has underlined. She offers to lend it to him, but when he reaches for it, she keeps hold of the book long enough to note the publisher’s contact information in her notebook. Only then does she hand it over. The small exchange makes the book serve two purposes at once: it is something Klaus can read, and it is the practical link Lotte needs in order to pursue the identity she has recognized.

That night at her hotel, drinking orange juice, eating biscuits, and watching late-night Mexican television, Lotte telephones the Bubis offices in Hamburg. The secretary tells her that the publisher, Mrs. Bubis, has not arrived and asks her to call again later. Lotte agrees, then adds that the caller is Lotte Haas, Benno von Archimboldi’s sister. In naming herself that way, she turns her reading into an explicit claim of kinship and begins an attempt to reach the publishing world behind the book. The novel’s decisive role is therefore not only to mirror a childhood: it gives Lotte a name to follow, an address to record, and a route toward her brother’s otherwise distant public identity.