Beck's Last Summer (novel)

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Beck's last summer is a novel by the German writer Benedict Wells , which was published in 2008 by Diogenes Verlag . It is about a middle-aged teacher who has grown tired of his work. He sees the management of a talented student as an opportunity to live his long-forgotten dream of a music career. A summer road trip with an eccentric friend takes the two across Eastern Europe. Wells' debut was largely positively received in the feature pages. A film adaptation of the novel was released in 2015 .

content

The German and music teacher Robert Beck is heading for a midlife crisis in his late 30s . Since he was forced out of a rising amateur band, he has buried his lifelong dream of becoming a musician. But he finds as little fulfillment in his work at a Munich high school as in fleeting relationships with women. His only friend is his former bandmate Charlie, a huge black man who drifts aimlessly through life and invents new diseases every day in his hypochondria that he thinks he is dying of. When Beck met the waitress Lara, who had applied to a fashion school in Rome, he knew from day one that their affair would be finite. For her of all people, who is not his type at all, he develops unexpectedly deep feelings. He tries in vain to prevent her from planning to leave.

It is a 17-year-old student who seems to be turning Beck's life around. Rauli Kantas comes from Lithuania and has the charisma of a little boy. A cranky loner who skates in his spare time and allegedly owns a gun. But when he played on Beck's Fender Stratocaster one day , he turned out to be a natural musical talent. Beck takes care of the boy, writes songs for him and organizes a release party to which he invites his old contacts from the music scene. After the boy's initial stage fright, however, it is not Beck's songs with which he inspires the specialist audience, but Rauli's own compositions, which he scribbled on small yellow pieces of paper with a light hand in free moments. His masterpiece is the song Finding Anna , written for his classmate Anna Lind, who rejects the young Lithuanian talent.

Beck's former bandmate Holger Gersch, of all people, offers Rauli a contract with Sony BMG , and just as he pushed Beck out of the band many years ago, he is now calling for him to withdraw from Rauli's management. But before that happens, Beck, Charlie and Rauli set off on a road trip to Istanbul , where Charlie wants to visit his mother. On the drive through Hungary and Romania, it turns out that there is another reason for the trip: Charlie was persuaded to smuggle drugs, which cost him his little finger in an argument in Bucharest. Rauli, however, admits that behind Beck's back he has long since accepted the Sony BMG offer. Deceived by his two companions, Beck developed a close relationship with them on the turbulent journey. Its future, however, is uncertain. As an artist, Rauli is a genius, he is just average. Should he still give up his security and return to music, even though failure is likely? When Beck finally tries a designer drug, Robert Zimmerman, alias Bob Dylan , appears to him , who encourages him to live his dreams.

Rauli left Beck immediately after returning together and from then on lived in England, where he was working on his music career, but without ever being able to use his full talent. Charlie gains new courage in life in Istanbul, but on the return flight he, who has finally overcome his fear of flying, is killed in a plane crash. Beck quits his position as a teacher and moves to Italy to make music. Eight years later, he is still living alone, waiting for musical inspiration and again working part-time as a tutor. What is wrong with Lara remains unclear, but apparently they are not together. One evening Rauli Kantas visits him, marked by disappointments and drugs. Beck learns that the boy was previously beaten by his father, and also that he never got over the rejection of his childhood sweetheart Anna. When Rauli left, he took the only living thing that means anything to Beck with him: his nameless cat. But he left his former teacher a farewell gift with a song that could boost his musical ambitions: his still unpublished masterpiece Finding Anna .

background

Beck's last summer is Benedict Wells' first published novel. However, it was created after his first work Spinner , which only appeared afterwards. When Wells started writing the novel at the age of 21, he still had no clear plot in mind. After two years, the work was over 1500 pages, which Wells radically cut down for publication. After his manuscripts had only received rejections from publishers for four years, Daniel Keel became interested in Beck's last summer in 2007 and published the novel in Diogenes Verlag , which at that time only accepted a new author into the publishing program every three years.

The idea for Becks last summer arose in Wells through the acquaintance of a teacher who reported on his dilemma between secure civil service and unfulfilled self-fulfillment. Wells wondered, “What happens if I grab this guy and put him in the craziest adventure possible.” The road trip in the novel takes up an experience of the author himself, who traveled to Istanbul in a car across Eastern Europe at the age of 16. In contrast to his protagonist Beck, Wells is a great admirer of Bob Dylan, to whom the novel repeatedly refers.

shape

The structure of the novel is already determined by the central theme of music: As in a long-playing record, there is an intro , an A and B side and an outro. Each page consists of four chapters, called tracks , that are titled Bob Dylan songs. The novel takes place mainly between February and August 1999 and is told by its protagonist Beck in a flashback from 2007. However, the perspective is repeatedly broken by Beck and I titled insertions in which the author himself appears in the story as the writer Ben and researches the life of his former teacher Beck. According to Florian Illies, this "dangerous construction that could look like laborious metapoietological fretwork" is intended to increase the illusion of a real story, according to Wells.

reception

Beck's last summer was mostly positively discussed in the German-language feature pages. The age of the author, who was only 24 years old when his novel was published, and thus the youngest author in the ranks of Diogenes Verlag, caused quite a stir when the book was presented. Regula Freuler is also amazed at the fact that the young author does not present a narrow prose volume, but an expansive 450-page novel in which he has the courage to “start telling it off”. For Florian Illies it is the “most interesting debut” of a “new, completely independent exponent” with “that characteristic, lively and uncompromised Diogenes tone”. Jan Söfjer drops the phrase “ child prodigy ” in order to put into perspective that the author is no such thing, but rather feeds his novel from his own experiences. Martin Wittmann finds the novel "thrilling, but anything but a reinvention of the genre."

Patrick van Odijk describes Beck's last summer as an ostensibly "light, fast-paced story", which, however, takes up many serious topics: "Difficult father-son relationships, friendship and betrayal, drug addiction, death and love affliction." Regula Freuler discovers a "literary game" between "social criticism, soul study, road movie , love story, male friendship novel, development novel." For her, the author belongs to a "post-pop cultural youth who do not hide the fear of seriousness behind irony, but dare to just be serious." the “sound” of the novel on the B-side becomes “softer and the tones long and warm”, according to Jan Söfjer. For Martin Wittmann, the novel subsides here: it is “just a B-side”. Regula Freuler, however, sees it as a "self-affirmation of the young man as a romantic".

Gertrude Siefke compares the difference between the A and B sides with the two sides of life: "Stagnation and dynamism, cheerfulness and melancholy, superficiality and depth". Jan Söfjer sees Becks last summer as an artist novel that revolves around “self-realization, becoming an artist”, without, however , culminating in a clichéd happy ending : “Life, so the message, catches up with you again and again.” Florian Illies goes it is "mainly about ideals, utopias and why you have to constantly betray them." This is told "with unpretentious, apparently casual language" and changes in tempo, reminiscent of Rauli's furious guitar playing. Patrick van Odijk only criticizes touches of "youthful talkativeness", and Regula Freuler passages of self-interpretation: "This CD didn't need a booklet, the pure music would be more than enough."

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Benedict Wells in a portrait at booksection.de.
  2. ↑ Jan Söfjer: "I was considered a failure" . In: Der Spiegel from March 15, 2013.
  3. ↑ a b c d Patrick van Odijk: Self-realization of a teacher . In: Deutschlandfunk of October 27, 2008.
  4. ↑ a b c Jan Söfjer: Of road trips and crises of meaning . In: Frankfurter Rundschau of December 4, 2008.
  5. ↑ a b c d e f Regula Freuler: Simply count on it . In: NZZ am Sonntag of January 25, 2009, supplement books on Sunday , p. 8 ( pdf ).
  6. ↑ Zita Bereuter: Becks last summer . In: FM4 of October 22, 2008.
  7. ↑ a b c Martin Wittmann: Jelly as a main course . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from December 31, 2009.
  8. ↑ a b c d Florian Illies : The most interesting debut . In: Die Zeit of November 27, 2008.
  9. ↑ Review notes on Beck's last summer (novel) at perlentaucher.de
  10. ↑ Gertrude Siefke: A novel like an LP . In: Badische Zeitung of March 26, 2009.