The life of desires

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The Life of Desires is a novel by Thomas Glavinic . It was published by Carl Hanser Verlag in 2009 .

The novel tells the story of Jonas, a 35-year-old advertising copywriter, married and father of two sons, who receives an offer from a stranger that he has three wishes. Between marriage, family and love adventures, desires are increasingly proving to be powerful, sometimes as exhilarating, sometimes as destructive. Glavinic develops the old fairy tale motif mainly psychologically: Jonas discovers hidden aspects of himself with the effect of his wishes, some of which become effective in violence and destruction, and in some cases healing and erotic.

The novel was on the longlist for the German Book Prize 2009.

content

The novel begins with a classic fairy tale motif: On a bench by a fountain, Jonas, the novel's protagonist, encounters a stranger who seems to know the most secret details of Jonas' life. The stranger promises Jonas to grant him three wishes . Unlike in the fairy tale, Jonas is not facing a beautiful fairy, but a dubious Mephistopheles figure, a poorly shaven man dressed in white with a gold chain, sunglasses and a beer flag. Jonas finally formulates:

“I want all of my wishes to come true.” (P. 14) And forego any further wishes.

Before that, however, he addressed a number of wishes, rather facultative and vague, that prove to be powerful in the course of the novel. Some of the wishes revolve around the question of the meaning of life and death. But Jonas also wants to find out what it is like to narrowly avoid a disaster, wants to be more active, wants to know and understand, wants to be richer, wants to destroy an enemy he doesn't think he has. When walking away, the stranger Jonas points out a difference: It is not about what he wants selectively, but rather about wishes (p. 15), i.e. about a deeper level of wanting and desire.

“What happens when suddenly all dreams come true? Then the unconscious - and uncontrollable - desires still remain. "

"What one should want, the mind can regulate, but the world of limitless desire is ungovernable, you can call it" instinct "or" unconscious "."

Furthermore, the reader experiences Jonas with his family with his wife Helen, who dreams of giving up her office job and running a fair trade boutique, and their sons Chris (stunted growth) and Tom. Usually Jonas is absent and only half involved in family life because his thoughts revolve around his lover Marie. Marie, an airline employee, is also married to Apok and has a son. Both do not have the courage to break out of their families, meet secretly and keep in touch via SMS.

At first it doesn't seem to work with the wishes, one lot turns out to be a failure and world peace is missing. (P. 26 f.) Jonas initially remains the small copywriter in the agency “Drei Schwestern”. But Jonas shares are starting to rise, the publicly traded ones as well as the internet ratings of his erotic attractiveness. Suddenly Jonas observed a series of strange accidents. His wife Helen dies and his lover's husband also disappears as a war volunteer in the direction of Ossetia. A plane that Jonas had booked and not boarded at the last moment crashes, nobody on board survives. The dream machine starts to work. Jonas son Chris surprisingly overcomes his stunted growth, Anne, Jonas ex-girlfriend, is cured of incurable liver cancer.

At the end of the novel, Jonas and Marie set out to find paradise by the sea.

Motifs

3 wishes

The motif of the three wishes runs through fairy tales and literature up to and including modern everyday culture. The motif of Glavinics has seldom been carried out, that the person making the wish wishes that in the future all his wishes may be realized. Usually there are explicit or implicit limits to the wishes. But as in fairy tales, wishing has its dark sides: false or ill-considered wishes become a threat to those who wish, for example King Midas , who wished that everything he touched should be turned into gold. Another threat to the person making the request assumes that the person making the request does not set any limits and is punished for it. Paradigmatic for this is the fairy tale of the fisherman and his wife, the Brothers Grimm . Jonas' desires turn more destructive in the spirit of Freud , who saw secret desires becoming real as a characteristic of the uncanny. It is unconscious aggression and fears of the night that make the wishes in the novel increasingly threatening.

Electronic communication

One of the motifs of the novel is the means of communication used in 2009: The contact between Jonas and his lover is largely via SMS, so it is shortened, mutilated, scarce. (cf. about p. 19 ff.) Jonas has his erotic attractiveness assessed on the fictitious internet portal "amisexy.com" (p. 42) . The colleague Sondheimer in the advertising agency hangs around "as a bisexual twenty year old in chat rooms" (p. 34) and plays internet card games.

Jonas figure

The protagonist bears the same name as the hero of Glavinic's novel “ Die Arbeit der Nacht ” from 2006 and his lover is also called Marie. At that time the hero suddenly found himself alone in the world, went in search of the disappeared others and their traces and yet only found his alter ego , a dark side that awoke in the night and planned without the knowledge of the conscious self, dreamed and acted.

“Even then he was trying to overcome the tenacity of time, even then he discovered that part of himself led a mysterious life of its own when the other was asleep. And back then, too, was the only one who could save him, at least for a blissful moment, from himself, Marie. "

The character of the biblical prophet Jonah was also the godfather of the main character of the dream novel.

"Jonas, not by chance a namesake of the prophet who defied God's commission and was swallowed by a large fish on his flight across the sea, is chosen and damned at the same time: 'He had the feeling of being a stranger on earth, someone who did not belong to the people around him. '"

reception

In her review, Felicitas von Lovenberg praised the novel's “own, illuminating tone”, “sober and, despite everything bitterly serious, also nonchalant, a tone that understands the bizarre not only as real, but also as normal”. In Jonas she sees an extreme existentialist , a seeker of meaning and a skeptic, who fears that we are living in a kind of computer simulation and who at the same time hopes that God wears a human face.

“What did Jonas want at the beginning? “I would have liked to have known more about death before I die.” And: “Perhaps I would have liked to have known what it is like to just get away with it.” Finally: “To look into the future or the past.” When all these were as human as fulfill presumptuous desires, it is too late to take them back. And without having to say it, one understands: The only way to stop the fatal development lies in desirelessness. It is up to the reader to decide which conclusions he wants to draw from this. Glavinic isn't about morals. His concern is the loss of all securities - and what comes afterwards. He found it out in "The Life of Desires". "

Wolfgang Tischer praises “the wonderfully dark new book” because of its “sober and descriptive language”, which ties in with the novel “Die Arbeit der Nacht”. Tischer emphasizes the close connection between the two novels and emphasizes the uncanny that the texts reveal: “... because at some point in the story the dark shadows open and they drag the reader down into the abysses that the main character will reach. "

Uwe Wittstock assesses the novel more critically in the world : "... its experimental arrangement is not entirely convincing." Wittstock sees the novel as a literary experiment that essentially plays through one question: "What happens when all the wishes of a novel hero suddenly come true?" Wittstock sees the downside of this attempt above all in the fact that the reader understood long before the main character "how the hare runs".

“Glavinic is a capable narrator, and with all sorts of enigmatic hints and surprising twists and turns, he manages to create suspense even after one has long since figured out the narrative principle. Nevertheless, Jonas seems a little bland and narrow-gauge. As in "The Night's Work", he is haunted by late adolescent fantasies in which he plays the role of a chosen one, a man who barely escapes any blows of fate or is the only one who survives terrible accidents. "

Wittstock sees in Jonas the worldview of "the narcissistic character" who does not really perceive his fellow men. "The reader doesn't have much to laugh about with all this."

Gerrit Bartels sees “The Life of Wishes” as more successful than its predecessor “The Work of the Night”. Through the open wishes he sees every little "incident in Jonas' life .. charged with meaning"

“Jonas doesn't want to restore the old one anymore, but rather shed it. He tries to escape the strangeness of his life, to develop something of his own. He just doesn't know if he's in control of his life. Or is someone controlling him? He doesn't know how free he really is in his thoughts, desires and decisions, what kind of obsessions lie dormant in him. And how certain the supposed certainties of his life are. "

Bartels praises the clear, straightforward language and the arc of suspense. He criticizes the last, catastrophic chapter, however, as "a little too boastful", here he sees the construct of a connection between paradise and apocalypse constructed for "too lax".

Gustav Seibt, unlike the other reviewers, sees linguistic weaknesses, "dialogues that should be strangely stilted, especially between the main character and his lover". On the other hand, in view of the mathematical-theological construct, he praises the “considerable ingenuity” and “atmospheric power” of the implementation.

text

Thomas Glavinic : The life of desires. (Roman), Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-446-23390-4, hardcover, 320 pages

Literature and Reviews

  • Gerrit Bartels: That's not me, ZEIT literature from September 1, 2009
  • Felicitas von Lovenberg: There is no escape from this panic room. FAZ from August 15, 2009
  • Gustav Seibt: The tempter wears white. Thomas Glavinics horror novel "The Life of Desires". SZ of September 8, 2009
  • Wolfgang Tischer: Thomas Glavinic: The Life of Desires - An irrepressible joy to surprise yourself and your audience with something new, introduction for the reading and review copies, quoted from: Das Literatur-Café [1]
  • Uwe Wittstock: What if you had three wishes? "Die Welt" from August 24, 2009 [2]
  • The wish in a fairy tale. Home and foreign in fairy tales. Edited by B. Gobrecht, H. Lox and Thomas Bücksteeg. Hugendubel (2003), Research Reports of the European Fairy Tale Society , Vol. 88

Web links

Sources and individual references

  1. ↑ Uwe Wittstock: What if you had three wishes? Die Welt from August 24, 2009
  2. ↑ a b c Gustav Seibt: The tempter wears white. Thomas Glavinics horror novel "The Life of Desires". SZ of September 8, 2009
  3. ↑ Perhaps the name equality with Anton Chekhov's drama Three Sisters is not entirely coincidental, because there, too, it is about the possibility of another life.
  4. ↑ An exception is Shel Silversteins , Where the Sidewalk Ends, ISBN 0-06-025667-2 , German: "Where the walkway ends."
  5. ↑ a b c d e Felicitas von Lovenberg: There is no escape from this panic room. FAZ from August 15, 2009
  6. ↑ a b Wolfgang Tischer: Thomas Glavinic: The Life of Desires - An irrepressible joy to surprise yourself and your audience with something new, introduction for the reading and review copies, quoted from: Das Literatur-Café
  7. ↑ a b c Uwe Wittstock: What if you had three wishes? "Die Welt" from August 24, 2009
  8. ↑ a b c Gerrit Bartels: That's not me, ZEIT literature from September 1, 2009