Überman

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Tommy Jaud (2010)

Überman is a novel by the German writer Tommy Jaud from 2012 . The book is the continuation of the novels Vollidiot (2004) and Millionär (2007) and thus the third part of the Simon Peters series. The main motives of the plot are Simon's attempts to regain his lost fortune, as well as the widespread fears surrounding the end of the Mayan calendar and the predicted end of the world on December 21, 2012. The novel reached number 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list.

action

Most of the action takes place in the days leading up to December 21, 2012, the alleged doomsday day at the end of the Mayan calendar . Simon Peters is broke because, on the advice of his financial advisor Sarantakos, he invested all of his fortune, which he earned with a friend by selling their website whatsyourproblem.de , in curious forms of investment that made no profit. He also has to pay considerable tax debts to the tax office by December 21st. He decides that he must be wealthy again by the deadline and that neither his girlfriend Annabelle nor his friends should see anything of the whole misery.

Over the next few days, Simon forges various plans to get some money back. For example, with the help of his lawyer Ditters, he wants to sue Jamie Oliver , since his “30-minute menus” cannot be cooked in half an hour; He also wants to revolutionize the ordering process at McDonald’s . As time is getting scarcer, Simon goes to the doctor to get a “pick-me-up” prescription. He learns about Modafinil , but the doctor does not want to prescribe it for him; Instead, Simon should use the “Überman Sleeping Schedule”, a polyphasic sleep pattern . However, since he prefers to use the drug, he tries to get it through his buddy Phil, who is in the hospital. Through a TV report, Simon learns that there are companies that earn money from people's fear of the alleged end of the world, for example by renting out sleeping berths in bunkers.

In his attempts to get money back, Simon gets from one bizarre situation to the next. In doing so, he gradually loses it with all of his friends. Finally Annabelle moves back to her old flat share. The attempt to rent the alternative seat in North Rhine-Westphalia and sell the bunker spaces failed. Due to the increasing time pressure and the alleged Modafinil, which Phil is concerned about, which is actually a cocktail of various, powerful drugs, Simon himself is getting more and more into the madness of the end of the world. Inevitably, he begins to switch his sleep rhythm to the Überman program.

He decides to prove to his friends that he's not an asshole by protecting them from the end of the world. To do this, he wants to lure them into the Cologne wine cellar , because it is like a bunker deep underground. Using utensils that he stole from his friends Flik and Daniela, Simon secretly converts the cellar into an emergency shelter. He manages to invite his friends Phil, Paula, Manni, Flik and Daniela to a supposed wine tasting on the evening of December 20th. His lawyer Ditters and his cleaning lady are also present, and by chance also his financial advisor and his girlfriend. Only Annabelle does not appear. When it becomes clear that the wine tasting serves to lock the friends in the basement in order to protect them from the apocalypse, the situation escalates and can only be resolved hours later by the fire brigade and police alarmed by Annabelle.

By agreement, Simon escapes ads from friends and the cellar. A few months later he got his money back after successfully suing Jamie Oliver, and his order idea was implemented by McDonald's, which earned him a share of the turnover. He was able to reconcile himself with Annabelle and his friends.

main characters

Simon Peters is the first-person narrator of the story. He lost his fortune, which he earned in the novel Millionaire , through insecure investments, plus six-figure tax debts.

Annabelle is Simon's girlfriend. She quit her job in the waxing studio to start studying international wine economics at the Geisenheim University . Simon has promised her financial support for the tuition fees.

Kosmás Nikifóros Sarantakos is Simon's Greek financial advisor. He advised him to invest his fortune in investment models such as Romanian forest funds and discount certificates on lean pigs.

Lala is Simon's cleaning lady. She is a fanatical follower of all conspiracy theories and also believes in the end of the world on December 21, 2012.

Phil Konrad is a friend of Simon's and the owner of a successful TV production company. Phil has been in the hospital since an accident he had after drinking with Simon.

Paula is Simon's former best friend. She maintains an office community with him and Manni. In recent years she has become a staunch vegan and radical eco-activist.

Manni is Simon's friend and a web designer. He maintains an office community with him and Paula. Manni is applying as a candidate for the ProSieben game show Schlag den Raab .

Flik is Simon's friend. Together with Daniela, with whom he has a child, he built his own home in the Cologne area, where he is hoarding supplies and equipment such as emergency power generators and water purifiers in case of an emergency.

Daniela is a friend of Simon's and Flik's partner. She is expecting Flik's second child. After they were broken into, she took a course in Krav Maga .

Lars Ditters is Simon's lawyer. Together with Simon, he tries to realize his ideas to regain his fortune, but is constantly bullied by Simon because he does not stand by his homosexuality.

In addition, the former IKEA salesman, who sold Simon the single chair in the novel Vollidiot and who works in the novel Millionaire in the Alnatura organic supermarket, appears as a salesman and sommelier in the Cologne wine cellar. Simon's business partner Shahin, with whom he sold the complaint website whatsyourproblem.de for 4 million euros in the previous novel , now lives with his wife and children in San Diego, California and is still rich, as he reports to Simon when asked .

Real background

The "treasure chamber" in the Cologne wine cellar, in which the wine tasting takes place in the novel

Überman mainly plays in Cologne . Several places of the action are real objects, such as the former nuclear bunker " Alternative seat North Rhine-Westphalia " in Kall -Urft, the Eifelhöhen Clinic in Marmagen and the Pullman Hotel in Cologne . The Cologne wine cellar and the “treasure chamber” in which the wine tasting takes place in the book really exists.

One of the hooks of the story, namely the fear of the end of the world on December 21, 2012, is based on the hysteria that was widespread around the world at that time that the Mayan calendar would end on this day and thus seal the end of the world. The drug Modafinil , which is described in the novel as a brain booster, is a real drug used to treat narcolepsy . As described in the book, there are applications of the active ingredient in soldiers in the US military before particularly long or stressful missions. The eponymous "Uberman Sleeping Schedule" is a model of polycyclic sleep published since the early 2000s , which divides the day into 6 waking phases and 6 intermediate phases, each 20 minutes long.

The magnetic sense in cows, which Simon uses in his novel for his formula for calculating fear and which states that cattle often graze in a north-south axis, goes back to a research paper published in 2008. The Scottish highland cattle Lotta and Trulli, which appear in the book, were real animals with these same names in 2012 in the Lindenthal zoo in Cologne's city forest .

The " Allesverloren " winery , whose story Simon uses in the wine cellar as an introduction to his doomsday scenario, is one of the oldest South African wineries and is internationally known primarily for its red wines. “Allesverloren” already played a role in Jaud's novel Hummeldumm .

reception

Überman is generally assigned to the genre "men's novel". According to Spiegel culture editor Wolfgang Höbel, this genre was only revived by Jaud himself and his previous novels. In addition to Jaud, authors such as Moritz Netenjakob , Oliver Uschmann and Michael Eichhammer are assigned to the men's novel .

Überman received mixed reviews from critics. Volker Isfort writes in the evening newspaper that the book would begin "with a comedic promise", but Tommy Jaud would "quickly get off the track" and in the end "the joke fireworks over the author" won. In the Rheinische Post , Sabine Schmidt praises the witty design of the novel and emphasizes that Jaud "makes his readers and listeners laugh, or at least smile, with his hero who runs amok over and over again". She draws the conclusion: “It's not great literature, of course, but Tommy Jaud doesn't have that claim either. He just wants to be fun, entertain and provoke a bit. He's now able to do that with Überman ”. Florian Hagemann criticizes in the Hessische / Niedersächsische Allgemeine that the plot of the book is "flat and meaningless" and "rarely very funny" and states that "others like Moritz Netenjakob have long overtaken Tommy Jaud [as a comedy writer]". The inventor of the fictional character Simon Peters is with Überman "on the best way [..] to become the Thomas Gottschalk among the German book authors".

In the review of a reading by Jaud for the publication of the novel, Michael Völkel writes in the Braunschweiger Zeitung that the novel comes “without clichéd plot or hackneyed formulations” and that it has “unusual metaphors”. However, he complains that the characters lack "something amiable". Völkel also finds the “changeable quality of the punch lines and digressions” annoying, some passages in the novel seem to him “extremely fluffy or constructed”.

In comparison with the two previous novels , Überman is rated by several critics as the weakest part of the Simon Peters series in terms of quality and content. Florian Hagemann believes that Überman is in danger of Tommy Jaud becoming “the Thomas Gottschalk among German book authors”: “There is always hope that things will get better, that fireworks of punch lines will follow - as before. But for more than a few Schmunzler it is not enough anymore. "Christoph Schröder referred to the time the audience Jauds as" Lachflash community ". His followers would long for every new work by the author with an almost religious ardor, sometimes without delving deeper into it, and would deny those reviewers who are not consistently positive about the books the ability to objectively criticize. The style of the novel describes Schroeder as a "permanently Pointe and effect hochgejazzte Suada a smart Meier ends narrator who sees through his fellow men in their wretchedness believes he has and his sad realism with a duration exaggeration disguises". Jaud himself is one of the representatives of “so-called light humor”, which according to his statement “has it a bit difficult in our time clock-tie country”.

In the reviews of the audiobook, which the author reads himself, the lack of continuity in the Simon Peters series was noted, as the two previous novels were recorded by Christoph Maria Herbst and thus the character of Simon is associated with his voice. Jaud's reading got positive reviews anyway. Christian Bärmann from the Bücher -Magazin certified him with “skilful dialects and parodies” and sums up: “ Überman is not a millionaire , but still offers a lot to smile about. Which is also due to Tommy Jaud, despite the missing autumn. "

The first edition of the novel was placed in the Spiegel bestseller list for a total of 38 weeks , in the 50/2012 edition it was ranked 1. On the 2012 annual bestseller list, Überman was ranked 13th in the fiction category . The new edition of the novel in 2014 and the audio book also achieved placements in the Spiegel bestseller list for several weeks.

Others

According to the S. Fischer Verlag , Überman is the last part of Tommy Jaud's Simon Peters series.

The audio book contains the cobblestone song as a hidden track after the epilogue , which Phil wrote in the novel during his hospital stay.

expenditure

Print output

E-book

Audio book

literature

  • Anna Katharina Knaup: The man's novel - a new genre of contemporary German literature . transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2015, ISBN 978-3-8376-3309-2 ( limited preview in the Google book search).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Global fear of the end of the world on December 21st. Welt, December 12, 2012, accessed April 20, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Susan Donaldson James: Super Soldiers? Military Drug is Rage Among Students, Young Professionals. abc News, July 24, 2007, accessed April 20, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Kai Stoppel: How to get by with two hours of sleep. n-tv Wissen, May 20, 2016, accessed on April 20, 2018 .
  4. Jump up ↑ Sabine Begall , Jaroslav Červený, Julia Neef, Oldřich Vojtčch, Hynek Burda: Magnetic alignment in grazing and resting cattle and deer. In: PNAS. Volume 105, No. 36, pp. 13451-13455, 2008, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.0803650105 .
    Researchers discover magnetic field phenomena in cows. On: idw-online.de from August 26, 2008.
  5. ↑ Julia Schaaf: It's just funny. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 14, 2012, accessed on April 11, 2018 .
  6. ↑ Wine Country South Africa: Terroirists from the Swartland. Falstaff Magazin 02/2012, April 15, 2012, accessed on April 24, 2018 .
  7. ↑ Alice Werner: Laughter desired. buchjournal, December 4, 2012, accessed on July 17, 2018 .
  8. ↑ Knaup: The man's novel. P. 9 ff.
  9. ↑ Volker Isfort: Tommy Jauds wine blissful end of the world. Evening newspaper, November 12, 2012, accessed on April 11, 2018 .
  10. ↑ Sabine Schmidt: The secret of Tommy Jaud. Rheinische Post, January 1, 2013, accessed on April 11, 2018 .
  11. ^ A b Florian Hagemann: The fall of the idiot: Tommy Jaud's bestseller "Überman". Hessische / Niedersächsische Allgemeine, November 27, 2012, accessed on April 11, 2018 .
  12. ↑ Michael Völkel: From the idiot to the Überman - Tommy Jaud read at Graff. Braunschweiger Zeitung, November 17, 2012. ( Vom Vollidioten, zum Überman - Tommy Jaud read at Graff ( Memento from February 11, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) in the internet archive), accessed on June 5, 2018.
  13. ↑ Christoph Schröder: The Lachflash community. Die Zeit, November 23, 2012, accessed June 5, 2018 .
  14. ↑ Knaup: The man's novel. P. 287 f.
  15. ^ Christian Bärmann: Überman. Books, accessed April 13, 2018 .
  16. ↑ Überman (2012). book report, accessed on April 11, 2018 .
  17. ^ Annual bestseller 2012. In: Der Spiegel, issue 1/2013, p. 121 ( PDF; 61 KB ).
  18. ↑ Überman (2014). book report, accessed on April 11, 2018 .
  19. ↑ Überman (audio book). book report, accessed on April 11, 2018 .
  20. ↑ About Tommy Jaud - Vita. S. Fischer Verlag, accessed on June 5, 2018 .
  21. ↑ Lutz Birkner, Tommy Jaud: Cobblestone Song. S. Fischer Verlag, accessed on April 20, 2018 (MP3 audio).