Pictures of your great love
Pictures of your great love (subtitle: An unfinished novel) is a posthumously published fragment of a novel, written by Wolfgang Herrndorf . It was published in 2014, edited by Marcus Gärtner and Kathrin Passig , by Rowohlt Verlag and is a continuation of the novel Tschick from the perspective of the protagonist Isa Schmidt in the form of a road novel on foot.
action
The 14-year-old first-person narrator Isa breaks out of an institution. In a village she hitchhiked and walked to, she stole food from a supermarket, cutting herself. After an overnight stay in the cornfield and a not undiscovered shower in the sprinkler of a football field, a remote house inspires Isa to think of a novel with her as the main character, who is waiting for her husband returning from the war.
She then gains unauthorized access to a barge. After the skipper originally refused to allow her, he ties her feet and tells her his life story, namely of a bank robbery long ago. Before the skipper can call the police at a lock after a promised nightcap, Isa manages to escape, on which she finds a bag belonging to a man who had killed himself.
Later, a deaf and mute boy follows her, as she takes from a sign, but with whom she still talks because he does not want to let go of her anymore. She tells him the story of a dog abandoned on holiday in Spain that ran back to Germany to see its owner. She then describes several short scenes with a passer-by who gives her a sandwich, the observation of two homeless people and the encounter with a construction worker who recognizes her first love in her.
Finally she watches a man mowing the lawn in his garden and offers to do it; the writer pays her and offers her clothes to his daughter. Isa steals the satchel along with the clothes and discovers an emaciated woman in one of the rooms, her head only covered with fuzz, which she apparently cannot distinguish from her daughter Angela. She leaves the house unnoticed through a skylight. Her further path leads her into a forest, where she unsuccessfully asks hikers for food and then finds a dead roebuck and a dead man, whose gun and 50 euros she steals. She spends the following night in a run-down hotel.
Next, she describes how she is hitchhiked by the driver of an animal truck. During a stop, the driver exposes his genitals, but this does not prevent them from supplying the transported pigs with water. The path she continued on foot leads her to a rubbish dump. There she finds a box for a pistol and diary and meets two teenagers whom she helps at a nearby gas station to draw gas from a car, which they then take with them. At the end, a scene in the mountains is described where, standing close to the abyss, she shoots the pistol in the air and the bullet falls back into the barrel with millimeter precision.
epilogue
In the afterword, the editors Marcus Gärtner and Kathrin Passig describe the development of the manuscript, with quotations from Herrndorf's blog Work and Structure as an initially rejected idea of a continuation of the novel Tschick . When he took it up again, he was no longer able to finish it himself because of the advanced disease. After none of his friends wanted to comply with the author's request for co-authorship, shortly before his death he finally consented to the publication with an explanatory afterword. He determined the title himself. In the following, the editors describe their work, chosen from various alternative passages, executed two written down in the sense, determined the order, inserted transitions and merged two truck drivers into one.
Reviews
"..., in such a radical way out of the literary usual habits that one would like to start with the greatest Germanist crap-like comparisons and place the novel fragment in the league of world-famous outsider novels: Isa is as crazy as Büchner's Lenz , as lost as Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten , as sensitive and cold as Camus ' stranger . "
“And as with his masterpiece, the desert novel ' Sand ', when reading the almost 130 pages you get the impression that this book is unparalleled in contemporary German-language literature, yes, that it is unique - so broken, sick and on the one hand out of place , especially regarding the dialogues. So full of poetry, beauty, obsession with dreams, sadness, charisma and also comedy on the other hand. "
expenditure
- Wolfgang Herrndorf: Pictures of your great love: An unfinished novel. Edited by Marcus Gärtner and Kathrin Passig. Rowohlt, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-87134-791-7 ; Rowohlt Taschenbuch, Reinbek 2015, ISBN 978-3-499-26909-7 .
Web links
- Book Description at rowohlt.de
- Summary of reviews at perlentaucher.de
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