The bird is a raven

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The bird is a raven is the second novel by Benjamin Lebert .

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On the night train from Munich to Berlin , two young men who have never met before share a sleeping car compartment: the first-person narrator of the framework story, Paul (20), a student of ethnology , and the 18-year-old student Henry. Throughout the night, Henry Paul tells his story, which, as an internal narrative, represents the main content of the novel.

Henry formed a group of friends with Jens (23) and the 28-year-old Christine in Munich who spent a lot of time together. The two young men are outsiders in their age group. They long for love, sex, and physical closeness to girls, but are unable to achieve such; they have the typical problems of " people without relationship experience ". Small and skinny Henry is noticeably suffering from some form of social phobia . At social events, especially where there are girls and other young people flirting, he regularly gets diarrhea and nosebleeds and runs away quickly. The two meter tall and very fat Jens, who is constantly holding something edible in his hand, attributes it to his obesity that he does not appeal to women and is far from having a girlfriend. The life situation of the pretty and attractive Christine is different : Although she suffers from anorexia , she is sexually quite active with changing male acquaintances. Jens and Christine met and became friends in an eating disorder clinic . Henry is distantly related to Christine, she found temporary shelter with Henry's grandmother in Munich after her stay at the clinic.

Henry and Jens are both madly in love with Christine. Jens refrains from confessing his love to her for fear of rejection. This fear is also justified, because Christine once told Henry that she found Jens completely uninteresting as a man, that it was a purely platonic friendship. Jens makes painful sacrifices for his unattainable love: Whenever Christine has a date with a man, he lets her shower and dress up in his apartment, and he even drives her to her date in his car. Christine takes advantage of this good-naturedness, however, as Henry suspects: “I suspect that she even went to his apartment to fuck. But when he wasn't there. ”Christine keeps telling the two frustrated boys about the exciting sexual practices she has carried out with her lovers. Henry at least manages to write Christine the words "I love you" on a napkin over a pizza for two. She kindly rejects his declaration of love on the grounds that he is too young.

When the three of the trio spent the night in the same room on an excursion, Henry crawled into bed with Christine, and - while Jens lay snoring next to them - spontaneous intercourse began . Exactly at the moment when Henry experiences his orgasm , they are caught by the terrified Jens. He breaks off contact with both of them without a discussion. A few days later, Christine explains to Henry that she is sorry for the sexual encounter with him, that it was her fault and that something like this should not and will not happen again. Henry, who apparently had hoped for a further development of the relationship, is offended by these words. Jens, on the other hand, freaks out after days of radio silence: after beating Christine green and blue, he lures Henry into his car and wants to take him and as many other people as possible to their deaths. Henry manages to escape during a breakneck drive through Munich, where he gets diarrhea and runs to Christine's apartment in panic with dirty pants. In front of her door he again confesses his love for her, but she does not let him in and sends him away. He hears the voice of a man he does not know - presumably her current boyfriend - in her apartment. Henry goes home first; fearing that Jens might lie in wait for him and kill him, he flees to Berlin by night train.

On the last pages of the book, the reader - but not Henry - learns that Paul, who has so far hardly spoken about his private life, has an even bigger problem with him: A wealthy acquaintance bought him a visit to a posh brothel where he was Had great sex with the beautiful prostitute Mandy and spontaneously fell in love with her. When he confesses his love for her and asks her to quit her job and come with him, she laughs at him and tells him that she likes her job and that she likes prominent men with money and not poor students anyway like him. A few days later, Paul visits Mandy in the brothel and strangles her.

Finally the train arrives at the Zoo station in Berlin. On the platform, Paul is arrested by two detectives in front of the astonished Henry.

background

After the overwhelming success of his first work Crazy (1999), Benjamin Lebert's second novel was announced by the publishing house Kiepenheuer & Witsch for autumn 2003 with great media coverage. When the Spiegel published a sensational interview with Lebert on August 4, 2003, the publisher decided to bring forward delivery to August with a remarkably high first edition of 100,000 copies. On September 5, 2003 Lebert appeared on the talk show 3 to 9 and on September 29, 2003 also on the Beckmann talk show and spoke primarily about his new novel. From October 2 to November 15, 2003, the author read from his novel on a reading tour in 38 German cities. In 2007, Lebert named Der Vogel ist ein Rabe of his four books so far (three novels and a picture book written together with his grandmother Ursula Lebert ) as his “favorite book”. The bird is a raven has been translated into six languages ​​so far.

Reviews

  • stern.de , August 4, 2003: "As with 'Crazy', Lebert lets his heroes live through fears and psychoses and scrambles along philosophical kitsch more than once with precocious aphorisms."
  • Die Welt , August 9, 2003: “Again Lebert succeeds in telling a lot with beautiful pictures of the despair that grips you when you need tremendous strength for what seems to be an easy game to others. And once again the gallows humor flashes comfortably from behind the veil of melancholy. All in all, a bit of Weltschmerz for such a small train compartment. Every saying a metaphor, every passenger a philosopher on the train of life. "
  • taz , August 9, 2003: “It's brave, bold and cheeky to fill a book for the mass market with dirty sentences about shitting, throwing up, bleeding and jerking off. Forcing all the 'Crazy' German teachers and Ms. Elke Heidenreich , Pope of Literature, to read such sentences is great and damn cool. A nice slap on the shoulders for that. "
  • Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung , August 10, 2003: “What the young man, who recently obtained his secondary school leaving certificate in Freiburg, seems to be far too moving. But what does wise mean? What is moving? He can! Can do the shallow, the entertaining - see 'Crazy'; but can also represent real life, with all its hardness - see novel number two. Lebert's art: Even the depth is always relaxed and easy to read with him. [...] Benjamin Lebert sets extraordinary accents in his thin work (128 pages). He conveys emotions, writes lines that (can) move. "
  • Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , August 22, 2003: “Like 'Crazy', 'The bird is a raven' is also a narrow band of sadness and longing, as there is, unfortunately, too much commonplace talk here too. [...] In the pseudo-senselessness of the conversation, there are gossips [...] There are also inserts that compensate for a lot; Thought fragments, half-sentences, exclamations that come across as light as a feather and create an atmosphere and closeness without any effort. "
  • Frankfurter Rundschau , October 22, 2003: “It is a full-blown cultural criticism including morals that Benjamin Lebert puts into his protagonists' mouths, formulated a thousand times, as simple as its syntax and presented without any self-irony. She is there, and that is the almost denunciation quality of this book, extremely believable - probably they really are like that, these sad boys. "
  • literaturkritik.de No. 12, December 2003: “One thing is clear: if the author wasn't the young, celebrated Benjamin Lebert, then one would not lose many words about this book. […] The completely unbelievable ending takes all the tension out of the book, you almost want to laugh. "

expenditure

  • Benjamin Lebert: The bird is a raven . 2nd Edition. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2003, 2003, ISBN 3-462-03336-0
  • Benjamin Lebert: The bird is a raven . Paperback edition. Goldmann, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-442-54160-3

Audio book

  • Benjamin Lebert reads “The bird is a raven” . Complete reading. Der Hörverlag, Munich 2003, 2 audio CD, ISBN 3-89940-203-0

Translations

  • Benjamin Lebert: Fuglen er en ravn . Borgen, Copenhagen 2003, ISBN 87-21-02224-0 (Danish)
  • Benjamin Lebert: L'ultimo treno della notte . Tropea, Milano 2004, ISBN 88-438-0479-0 (Italian)
  • Benjamin Lebert: Sis paukstis yra varnas . Vaga, Vilnius 2004, ISBN 5-415-01711-9 (Lithuanian)
  • Benjamin Lebert: The Bird Is A Raven . Knopf, New York 2005, ISBN 1-4000-4284-4 (English)
  • Benjamin Lebert: Nebelaja vorona . RedFish, St. Petersburg 2005, ISBN 5-483-00041-2 (Russian)
  • Benjamin Lebert: Ptic je vran . Cankarjeva Zalozba, Ljubljana 2005, ISBN 961-231-498-5 (Slovenian)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paperback edition 2005, p. 39.
  2. ↑ Mathias Schreiber, Claudia Voigt: "Love is a kind of illness." Benjamin Lebert on madness, beautiful girls and his new novel "The bird is a raven" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 32 , 2003, p. 139 f . ( online ).
  3. ↑ literaturkritik.de accessed February 7, 2007
  4. ↑ The bird is a raven in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  5. ↑ fairpress.de ( Memento of the original from October 8, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved February 5, 2007. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.fairpress.de
  6. ↑ morgenweb.de  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Mannheimer Morgen , January 11, 2007; Retrieved February 5, 2007.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.morgenweb.de  
  7. ↑ stern.de ( Memento of the original from December 16, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved February 5, 2007.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.stern.de
  8. ↑ The heart thinks for itself - portrait . In: Die Welt , August 9, 2003.
  9. ↑ taz.de
  10. ↑ lyrikwelt.de ( Memento of the original from September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved February 5, 2007. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.lyrikwelt.de
  11. ↑ faz.net, accessed February 5, 2007
  12. ↑ lyrikwelt.de ( Memento of the original from September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved February 5, 2007. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.lyrikwelt.de
  13. ↑ literaturkritik.de accessed February 5, 2007