The work of the night

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The novel Die Arbeit der Nacht by Thomas Glavinic was published in August 2006 and tells the story of a man who wakes up one morning and realizes that he is apparently the last living being in the world.

action

Jonas, a 35-year-old interior design consultant who lives with his girlfriend Marie in an apartment in Brigittenauer Lände in Vienna, is confronted one morning on the way to work with the incredible fact that he suddenly seems to be alone in the world. Vienna is extinct, neither by telephone nor via the internet or radio is it possible to receive signals from other people or explanations. On almost 400 pages, the author describes the following two months, which Jonas lived through without any contact and without any explanations of the unheard-of situation in a predominantly personal narrative form. The protagonist's first reactions consist of a dogged search for answers - he tries relentlessly to dial phone numbers, he drives across the city by car, later as far as Germany and Hungary, hoping to meet millions of evacuated Austrians there Schönbrunn Zoo, only to find that the animals have also disappeared. His search is connected with the attempt to send out auxiliary signals - he leaves his cell phone number in innumerable places, provides famous Viennese sights with SOS messages, etc. Furthermore, Jonas is already busy in this phase (as well as up to the end of the novel) with traces to leave behind. He regularly writes his name and the date on the menu boards in restaurants and cafés that his search tour takes him to. Soon, in addition to these initial reactions to the incomprehensible situation, Jonas also begins to fill the days with actions that are not primarily aimed at explaining and trying to solve his situation. This includes, for example, his decision to "take possession of" the apartment on Hollandgasse, where he lived with his parents as a child. He also goes back to earlier times when he tried to repeat a trip with the moped from Vienna to Mondsee in Upper Austria, which he undertook as an 18-year-old, as precisely as possible. The most important activity for the novel is, however, that Jonas begins to experiment with cameras: Out of the desire to be able to observe different places at the same time, he sets up several cameras in different places in Vienna and then spends a lot of time looking at them Watching tapes (on which, of course, nothing happens) at home. Then he starts filming himself asleep. In the passages that describe the video recordings of his sleep, Jonas is referred to as "the sleeper" as if someone were talking about it. And indeed, the sleeper increasingly develops a life of their own, gets up at night and does things that Jonas cannot remember when he wakes up - at first the sleeper just stares at the camera with a frightening stare, later he walks around at night, so that Jonas wakes up more and more often in unknown places, fiddles with a knife and pulls an infected tooth. Towards the end of the novel, the sleeper increasingly becomes a threat and enemy of the protagonist Jonas, whom he finally tries to fight with sleep-inhibiting means. In addition to the eerie double life that Jonas leads through the existence of the sleeper, the course of the plot is consistently interspersed with inexplicable things, few of which are later explained logically (the ringing of the phone in Jonas' apartment is due to the fact that he unintentionally on his cell phone activated dialing his own number), but most of them remain unexplained (and inexplicable) (a series of ropes in a station concourse with coats dangling from them, the fact that on his second visit to someone else's house there was one more picture on the wall depends than on his first visit, etc.)

After about six weeks, Jonas sets out for England to look for traces of his friend Marie (who was last visiting her sister there). After an adventurous crossing of the Channel Tunnel by moped and on foot and a desperate fight against the sleeper, who repeatedly takes him from his destination, the town of Smalltown on the Scottish border, at night, he actually finds Marie's suitcase, which he takes back to Austria takes. During the return trip to Vienna, Jonas' fear of the unexpected appearance of the wolf cattle, which kept recurring in his mind, had already subsided; he seemed much calmer and more resigned than on all of his trips up to then. When he arrived in Vienna, he made one last foray through the city, which ended in St. Stephen's Cathedral. With Marie's suitcase, which contains all the material things that connect him to her, he climbs up the tower to throw himself down. While falling, Jonas reflects on life, happiness and love; the desire to die thinking of love, he had expressed in the course of the novel.

Language and style

The author brings this unusual scenario to the reader in the shortest possible sentences. Above all, the change of place and time should arouse tension. Through the combination of neutral, hardly emotionalized language and the description of gruesome scenarios and images (e.g. the sleeper staring at the camera with the hangman's mask pulled over his head, the gallows in the station hall, the apparent awakening in a coffin, etc.) give the reader a mood of creepy trepidation.

The fact, which is remarkable for the novel concept, that there is not a single contact of human nature on 400 pages does not mean that passages in direct speech are completely left out. Nevertheless, the reader is never given the feeling that the protagonist is talking to himself. What is striking about the use of language by the Austrian author is the almost complete avoidance of any features that are attributed to the language variant Austrian German - he consistently uses expressions such as the pillow, the stairs, the SMS instead of the upholstery variants common in Austria , the stairs, the SMS . Only for the roll and the ATM does he choose the Austrian variants. Inconsistencies are also apparent in the morphological area; For example, the High German ( has sat ) and Austrian forms ( has sat ) are used side by side.

reception

The criticism reacted largely positively to Glavinics novel. The Austrian daily newspapers Der Standard and Die Presse praise the work as "far more than an intelligent mind game" or as "a bold, grandiose design". The Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann describes Die Arbeit der Nacht in the German news magazine Der Spiegel as "a wonderfully large book, a novel about self and others, about fear and courage [...]". There are repeated references to similarities to Great Solo for Anton by Herbert Rosendorfer from 1972 and to Marlen Haushofer's Die Wand (1962). Not to be forgotten is the New Zealand film Quiet Earth from 1985, which is also about the last survivor of a global extinction of human life.

In the "meta-novel" That's me , the narrator "Thomas Glavinic" reacts during a radio broadcast on Ö1 to a listener's tip that he has taken up foreign models in his novel Die Arbeit der Nacht (especially the works by Rosendorfer and Haushofer mentioned above ) and am accused of being a plagiarist , with the unspoken thought only revealed to the reader: "Informer bitch!". The narrator then informed the radio listeners that Rosendorfer had written him a letter in which he addressed the similarity of the works, and in no way claimed that Glavinic was a plagiarist.

That's me as a meta-novel

The main theme of the novel That's Me by Thomas Glavinic, published in 2007, is the process of marketing The Night Work . In the newer novel Glavinic describes the literary business , in particular the hope of his "alter ego" called "Thomas Glavinic" that the novel will be placed on the longlist of the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels 2006 for the German Book Prize , which (as in reality) not happening.

Secondary literature

  • Marta Famula: Parables of epistemological failure. Thomas Glavinic's novel Die Arbeit der Nacht in the tradition of labyrinthine storytelling by Franz Kafka and Friedrich Dürrenmatt . In: Andrea Bartl (ed.): Transitträume. Contributions to contemporary German literature. Interviews with Raoul Schrott et al. With the collaboration of Hanna Viktoria Becker (= German Studies and Contemporary Literature 5), Wißner, Augsburg 2009, pp. 103–122.
  • Birgit Holzner: Thomas Glavinics end-time novel Die Arbeit der Nacht . In: Evi Zemanek u. Susanne Krones (ed.): Literature of the turn of the millennium. Topics, writing methods and book market around 2000. Transcript, Bielefeld 2008, pp. 215–224.
  • Sascha Löwenstein: "And like everyone else, he left no trace" - About the mystery of the self and the world in Thomas Glavinic's "Die Arbeit der Nacht" . In: Thomas Maier u. Sascha Löwenstein (ed.): More beautiful death. Lectures on literature at Heinrich von Veldeke Kreis. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Berlin 2013, pp. 228–262.

Podcast project

At the end of August 2006, the Carl Hanser Verlag started a podcast project of the same name together with the literature café on the Internet as a marketing campaign for the book . Thomas Glavinic and Wolfgang Tischer from the Literatur-Café visit scenes of the action such as St. Stephen's Cathedral and the Vienna Prater .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Glavinic: That's me (2007), p. 230