The Room (Roman)

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Das Zimmer is a novel by Andreas Maier that was published by Suhrkamp in September 2010 . In it, the close-to-author narrator describes the life of his uncle J., who is handicapped, sketching a panorama of life in the Wetterau and Frankfurt am Main in the 1960s and 1970s. The focus is on the phenomenon of bypassing , which has driven life out of the inner cities. The novel is the prelude to an eleven-volume family saga, which was continued in December 2011 with the novel Das Haus .

content

A VW Variant that Uncle J. was allowed to drive. On the book cover, however, the car is olive green and is referred to as “Nazi brown” in the novel.

The title of the novel Das Zimmer refers to the room of Uncle J., who, in the narrator's memory, was the “archetype of horror” (p. 11), because it smelled silage and could not be taken seriously as a mentally handicapped person . The apartment, which is located on Uhlandstrasse in Bad Nauheim , and this room now belong to the narrator who is close to the car. The uncle's former room serves both as a place of memory of the uncle and for writing down the novel.

The novel consists of nine chapters and for the moment describes a possible daily routine for Uncle J., as it might have happened in the beginning of autumn 1969. The narrator was only two years old at the time, so the literary program is: "I imagine ..." The uncle takes the train to work at the post office at Frankfurt Central Station and does various transport services for his family on his return in the afternoon before leaving to the forester's lodge Winterstein. Starting from this basic framework, the text repeatedly digresses into details, which it circles around in repetitive structures, the style of which is trained on the work of Thomas Bernhard .

In addition to Bad Nauheim, most of the passages take place in neighboring Friedberg , where the narrator's father's stonemason was located, the "large Karl Boll Steinwerke company in Friedberg in der Wetterau, Mühlweg 12" (p. 146). A central passage in the book is the vision of a necessary detour. As part of the hypothetical daily routine that was played through, Uncle J. is supposed to take his mother to the Friedberg city center by car for cleaning. When they get to Kaiserstraße, there is an accumulation of traffic of ten cars: “And so for the first time the word bypass appears in everyone's mind on that day . "(P. 176)

The most important historical reference point in the book is the moon landing . In addition to Luis Trenker films, other cultural and historical points of reference are also the stays of Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary (Sissi), Nicholas II and Elvis Presley in Bad Nauheim. In addition, the Friedberg poet Fritz Usinger has a short appearance, the "cosmological poet", who was temporarily vice-president of the German Academy for Language and Poetry (see p. 173).

Uncle J. has a driver's license despite his disability. His family got him a VW Variant in order to integrate him productively into family life through driving services.

The uncle as inspiration for writing

In one of his most recent columns for the literary magazine Volltext , Andreas Maier remembers the last time he saw his uncle in 2001, during a carnival parade in Friedberg:

“[I] stood on the side of the road and didn't know that I would learn to write again a few years later with my uncle, for which I am still grateful to him, the poorest pig in our family, only that I can no longer tell him and probably wouldn't say either. Nobody needs to know his name. But that he lived and was. "

criticism

The critics discussed the novel in detail and received it mostly positively. Christian Thomas describes Das Zimmer in his review for the Frankfurter Rundschau as a “grandiose novel”. Maier is "a constant home-hating, as can only be found among people who are forever in love with their home."

Ina Hartwig complains in the literature supplement of the time that "the literary role models, especially Thomas Bernhard and Arnold Stadler , are occasionally a little too clearly audible". But that's the only objection in their consistently laudatory review. However, in view of the remaining parts of the planned family saga, it is too early for an overall judgment.

In her review for Deutschlandradio Kultur , Verena Auffermann finds that Maier becomes "literarily more relaxed" with increasing age. His new novel is “not a backward-looking, lamenting book, but a comical and clever book. Funny because the author's observations are staggeringly accurate, clever because the dissolution of social relationships is depicted on a small scale, which troubles us all over the world. "

In a critical interview with the weekly newspaper Der Freitag, Frank Fischer particularly emphasizes the design of Uncle J.: “[Maier] turns this personally experienced and suffered uncle into a type. Uncle J. is suddenly a close relative of the great eccentrics of literature next to Oskar Matzerath , next to Steinbeck's Lennie Small , next to Simplicissimus and the good-for-nothing . "

In his review for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Friedmar Apel describes the book as “a masterpiece of keen observation and small perception”.

Dierk Wolters is a little more critical in the Frankfurter Neue Presse : Maier, in his “great attempt at remembrance”, is a skilful “unmasker”. In contrast to his homeland glosses, which have already been published, the punch lines are lost in the novel.

In his review for the literary magazine Volltext, Christoph Schröder comes to the conclusion that the quality of the novel lies, among other things, in the fact that Maier in his portrait undermines the reader's expectation of exposing the figure to ridicule, because the novel speaks primarily of “sympathy and Mercy to the innocent; a persistent, exact working through and working through the narrator figure compared to the uncle figure ”. Maier's works are not permeated by nostalgia, because whoever reads them “carefully will notice that only the framework conditions change, but that as a constant the person remains and that always remains the same”.

Awards

The novel was on the longlist for the German Book Prize 2010 , but was not selected among the six books for the shortlist.

On 1 October 2010 it was announced that Maier for the room to Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize 2010 will receive. This prize, endowed with 30,000 euros, honors “a narrative work written in German (...) that marks a special place in the development of the prize winner”.

expenditure

  • Andreas Maier: The room . Novel. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-518-42174-1 .
    • in Danish: Andreas Maier: Værelset . Rosenkilde & Bahnhof Verlag, 2011 (Original title: Das Zimmer . Translated by Paul Klitnæs).
    • in Czech: Andreas Maier: Pokoj . Archa Verlag, 2013 (Original title: Das Zimmer . Translated by Milan Tvrdík).

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ a b Cf. Christian Thomas: Piercing in the home until it just splatters . In: Frankfurter Rundschau. September 9, 2010
  2. ↑ "the room in which I am writing this", p. 138.
  3. ↑ Andreas Maier: Recently. In: VOLLTEXT. Literature newspaper. No. 3, June 2010, p. 14.
  4. ^ Ina Hartwig: Home Machine Wetterau . In: TIME LITERATURE. No. 40, September 30, 2010, pp. 53-55
  5. ↑ Verena Auffermann: World experience in a confined space . In: Deutschlandradio Kultur. September 27, 2010
  6. ^ Frank Fischer, Dorothea Dieckmann , Michael Angele, Magdalene Geisler: Literary Quartet . In: Friday. No. 39, September 30, 2010, literature supplement, pp. I – III
  7. ↑ Friedmar Apel: This vintage car drives with a sat nav . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. October 2, 2010, literature supplement, p. L 3.
  8. ↑ Dierk Wolters: Uncle J. stinks very badly ( Memento from October 4, 2010 in the Internet Archive ). In: Frankfurter Neue Presse. September 27, 2010
  9. ↑ Christoph Schröder: Areas of longing for a forceps delivery ( Memento from June 6, 2012 in the Internet Archive ). In: VOLLTEXT. Literature newspaper. No. 5/2010
  10. ^ Wilhelm Raabe Prize to Andreas Maier. Braunschweig pays tribute to “masters of literary close-up”. In: derStandard.at . October 1, 2010. (online)
  11. ↑ Andreas Maier receives the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize 2010. In: boersenblatt.net . October 4th 2010. (online)