The Town of the Fat is one stop in the chain of settlements that Hans Reiter explores on foot as a boy. Its butcher shops and animals set it apart from the nearby villages, while Hans’s imagined account of their inhabitants gives the place an ominous reputation as a world of killing from which he remains a visitor.

Setting and Approach

Hans walks east from town along a dirt road through the forest. He reaches the Village of Red Men, where peat is sold, then the Village of Blue Women, situated in a lake that dries up in summer. Farther on lies the Town of the Fat. The sequence makes the town part of a wider childhood geography of distinct, almost self-contained settlements, rather than an isolated destination.

The surrounding villages appear deserted to Hans, as if inhabited by the dead. The Town of the Fat, by contrast, is populated and active: it contains many animals and several butcher shops. The narrative sets these settlements beside one another but leaves their relationship to Hans’s home and to any larger civic order undefined.

Reputation and Hans’s View

Hans associates the town with a heavy smell, unlike the thin smell he assigns to his own town. Its butcher shops and animals feed his speculation that the people of the Town of the Fat may have killed the inhabitants of the Village of Blue Women and the Village of Red Men. This is Hans’s conjecture, not an established account of events; the people he imagines as dangerous never trouble him.

On the way home, Hans sometimes watches residents of the Town of the Fat walking through the neighboring villages. He thinks of them as relentless practitioners of killing, yet explains his own safety by imagining that, as a diver, he belongs to another world. In this private logic, he visits the town as an explorer, not as one of its inhabitants. The distinction both frames the place as a source of threat and reveals how Hans uses the diver identity to make sense of his distance from it.

Place in Hans’s Childhood

Hans’s walks through the settlements are part of a recurring pattern of observation and concealment. On routes east and west, he moves like a diver through places he regards as strange, watching their inhabitants while remaining apart. When he returns home, his mother asks where he has been, and he gives her an answer that is not the truth. The Town of the Fat thus belongs to a geography Hans explores privately, one he does not straightforwardly disclose to his family.

The town also precedes a practical change in Hans’s life. In 1933, after he leaves school, his parents and relatives place him in a succession of jobs, including peat gathering, work at a tool shop in the Town of the Fat, farm labor, and work on a fishing boat. The book does not describe what he does at the tool shop or connect the job explicitly to the earlier walks. It does, however, move the town from the imaginative map of a boy’s explorations into the sequence of short-lived employments that follows his departure from school.