Apostoloff

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Apostoloff is a novel by Sibylle Lewitscharoff that was published in Frankfurt am Main in 2009.

The Sofia driver Rumen Apostoloff drives two Swabian women across Bulgaria in his modest Daihatsu . In the younger of the two sisters middle age - this is the constantly gibbing narrator - recognizes Volker Hage in his review of 16 March 2009 in the mirror , the alter ego of the author.

content

A look at the table of contents of the work reveals from some chapter names - Shumen , Varna , Nessebar and Sofia - the writing of the travel experiences of a Bulgaria tourist. This assumption only applies to the first of the at least three narrative levels of the novel. Levels two and three contain the prehistory of the little tour of Bulgaria - a mourning journey - as well as a review of events in Degerloch , Wurmlingerstraße 14, around the 1960s and 1970s. From a depth psychological perspective, the latter is the meaningful level of the present work: the suicide of the father of the traveling ladies is dealt with by the first-person narrator. The father, a Nietzsche admirer, had been a gynecologist.

While questions seem to keep the reader engaged, the answers ultimately turn out to be incorrect. Questions are not expressed directly, but rather come up step by step in the reader's brain as they read and solidify in a secret way. Right at the beginning of the novel, the reader is amazed: What are the hateful tirades of the first-person narrator about her own father Kristo and his home country Bulgaria? Answer: The sisters were still school girls when the 43 year old father hanged himself. The two sisters are still enmity with the father at the time of the narration. One of the intertwined chains of associations - the one that winds around the father's suicide - is listed. During her tour of Bulgaria, the first-person narrator reads Martin Amis ´ “ Koba the Terrible. The twenty million and the laughter ”. The Bulgarians also suspect that Hitler had their King Boris III. poisoned in the summer of 1943. The first-person narrator doesn't want to believe the illogical stuff and turns angrily to reading Koba's laughter. Sibylle Lewitscharoff returns to her association a few pages later in the plot. The first-person narrator said that the Sofia relatives could not be dissuaded, the father was either promoted to the afterlife by the Bulgarian secret service or by his Swabian wife. The latter can no longer defend itself against the suspicion. The sisters no longer have parents.

Why is the novel titled with the family name of a minor character? That’s one of the next questions. The answer is not given immediately. The reader has been weaned from wondering in this regard, but at least a partial answer comes in the ninth of the 23 chapters. The suicide is from Sofia. His and Apostoloff's family were neighbors there when Rumen Apostoloff was children. When she was nine years old, the first-person narrator had visited her grandparents in Sofia together with her father. Now, on the three-day round trip through beautiful Bulgaria, the first-person narrator is holding a gift of many pages in her hands. They are closely written manuscript pages from the pen of Rumen - translations of the voluminous notes of the Sofia grandfather of the traveling sisters into German. The relativization follows immediately. The scriptures were of no interest to anyone; at most its author. By the way, Rumen and the sister of the first-person narrator fall in love in the last third of the novel. The tenor of the narrator's comment: it was about time.

The answer to a question regarding narrative level two, i.e. the above-mentioned mourning journey, is tricky. The first-person narrator recounts this journey once in a motley sequence during her trip to Bulgaria. What actually drives the agile Alexander Iwailo Tabakoff to Sofia? There has been a community of Bulgarian emigrants in Stuttgart since around 1944. Their heads were all buried in Stuttgart cemeteries after their death. Tabakoff, a very rich American, formerly a member of that Swabian exile community, who lived in Sillenbuch at the time , has survived, ends up in Germany and is carrying out an ambitious project there. The remains called nineteen Bulgarians were exhumed shortly before the Roman period (level one), in a motorcade moved from thirteen Nobel limousines to the Balkans, where in Sofia native soil in the Central Cemetery - previously cryotechnically mummified - was laid to rest. The enterprising sister of the first-person narrator, who was two years older than her, had given Tabakoff the sisters' approval for the transfer for a fee of € 70,000. Tabakoff had avoided Belgrade on the parade and, because of his phanariotic descent, took it via Zurich and Milan because of the detour via Greece . Shortly before leaving Stuttgart, the Zankoff twins - Messrs Marco and Wolfi - had crowded into the sisters' spacious limousine. We have known each other since school days and have lost sight of each other in between. The first-person narrator sells a conversation with Wolfi in which she learns news. The conversation took place on the Adriatic ferry and affected the fathers. The Stuttgart brothel owner Zankoff had sat with the doctor in a Sofia prison in 1946 - after the Red Army marched in. The narrator's father had visited his relatives and had been arrested on suspicion of espionage. After all, he had lived in Tübingen , i.e. in the German Reich , since 1943 . Zankoff, the prisoner with the better "connections", had obtained the release of the two. However, both had to commit themselves in writing to work in the Bulgarian secret service. The otherwise talkative first-person narrator is silent on these facts in the remaining three chapters of the book. Significantly, the last one bears the laconic title “Everything else remains secret”. In it she takes the floor for the dead father and puts “You can cross me” in his mouth. Strange: both the brothel owner and the doctor die a violent death in their mid-forties in Germany . Zankoff had an accident in his Karmann Ghia .

Tabakoff's motives for the lavish funeral procession to Sofia can only be guessed at. Either he is a Bulgarian patriot or he has established himself in the Sofia funeral industry or both are true.

shape

The novel has two weaknesses in form: firstly, the first-person narrator demonizes her father and his fatherland with a bitter tirade and in the second half she forgives him everything in a conciliatory suada as sometimes an embarrassing family memory. Small relapses in the tone struck at the beginning of the novel, such as “alcoholized smoke channels” for the birth mother, cannot hide this towards the end of the novel. Second, the narrator's incessant leaps and bounds between the three levels mentioned above make it difficult to read fluently. Sometimes the reader has to pause and ask himself: Where were we? Are we now on the tour of Bulgaria, on the corpse parade to Bulgaria or in the spaetzle grandmother's kitchen in Stuttgart ?

For the entertainment of the dear reader, Sibylle Lewitscharoff ignites a firework of exhilarating expressions. The Bulgarians were once " Soviet creeps". Previously, during the Nazi era , the Germans had upgraded the allied Bulgarians among the Slavs as “ Aryan displaced hybrid people”. The reader is saddened by the fact that such blockbusters will soon disappear. Most of the rest seems like forced fun. The tone always remains amused. The father had made two attempts in the bathroom before the successful suicide. As a result of the "blood mess" held there, the sisters had a bad cleaning syndrome and kept it. Both of them, living in two large German cities that are far apart, had - independently of one another - each had a capable Polish cleaning lady under contract. The Polish women didn't know each other at all. Both ended up independently by suicide. To cut a long story short - as soon as the very hard-working Polish women were finally out of the bathroom during their lifetime, the siblings had to thoroughly scrub the place every time. The first-person narrator comes back to this tick of her story in telling. In the hotel bathroom in Sofia, she was the first to establish “military order”.

With all the Charivari, the reader gets his money's worth all in all. Some of the confessions of the first-person narrator range from stunning to completely honest (“Most men avoid me” or “my radical disinterest in children”). As a teenager, she tried LSD .

reception

Awards

literature

First edition

  • Sibylle Lewitscharoff: Apostoloff. Novel . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-518-42061-4 (edition used)

Remarks

  1. ↑ The Tsar ensitz Veliko Tarnovo , the convent at Arbanassi (Engl. Arbanasi ), the village of Madara (bulg. Madara ) and Plovdiv are also identified and partially described.
  2. ↑ The sister of the first-person narrator, "this amiable book man" (edition used, p. 192, 6th issue), had a conversation with a Persian - that is "a Sky Dumont pulled through salad oil " (edition used, p. 190, 1 . Zvu) - two children.
  3. ↑ The narrator thinks that Tabakoff was inspired by the funeral procession of Philip II to the Escorial or Goering from Sweden to Carinhall .
  4. ↑ The Spätzle grandmother, called “Sorgobesen” (edition used, p. 118, 5th Zvu), is the Swabian grandmother of the first-person narrator on her mother's side. This good cook had only good personality traits and died shortly after her son-in-law. The Bulgarian grandparents are called Nadja and Lubomir. They were 95 and 98 years old, respectively. They were more heterogeneous characters than the Sorgo broom. Incidentally, Lubomir, from Pazardzhik , had been one of the godparents of the title-giving Rumen Apostoloff.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Edition used, p. 246, 4th Zvu
  2. ↑ Edition used, p. 187, 5. Zvo
  3. ↑ Edition used, p. 14, 6th Zvu
  4. ↑ Edition used, p. 27, 4th Zvu
  5. ↑ Edition used, p. 102 below to p. 103
  6. ↑ Edition used, p. 114, 20. Zvu
  7. ↑ Edition used, p. 191, 7th Zvu