The city of white musicians

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The city of white musicians (Kurdish original title: Şarî mosîqare sipîyekan; Shari mosiqara spyakan) is a novel by Bakhtyar Ali . It was published in German in 2017. Ali writes in the Sorani language , a south-eastern variant of Kurdish, and has lived in Germany since the 1990s. For this novel he received the Nelly Sachs Prize of the city of Dortmund in 2017 .

content

The novel describes the life of the flute player Jaladat Kotr. He grew up in an unspecified city in the 1970s and was bequeathed a flute as a child. From the beginning he enchants his surroundings with his music. Brutal attacks accompany his path and finally he hides in the "yellow city", a huge makeshift solution for the military and prostitutes.

There a "learning teacher" is assigned to rob him of all art and talent so that Jaladat can work as a musician in the "White Orange" pleasure house.

Special relationships develop with the prostitute Dalia (who sleeps with all the officers to get information about her arrested friend), the doctor and art collector Musa Babak and with a torturer of the worst kind, Samir.

Samir had previously saved Jaladat's life - entranced by his flute playing, Jaladat brought the murderer and mutilator to a court of law: twelve torture victims decided on guilt and punishment.

Subsequently, Jaladat is an occasional guest in the city of white musicians, a place of longing: this is where the murdered Kurdish artists live, here are the works of art that were no longer allowed to arise in the brutal reality. It becomes clear that the protagonist has long been dead and can travel back and forth between the worlds as a mediator. Reality and imagination are blurred in other places in this novel too, for example in the intense orange scent that the torturer spreads.

The novel is narrated by Jaladat himself as a fictional first-person narrator in collaboration with a fictional "real" novelist, whose conflicts about the truth and beauty of the text are also told.

reception

The novel was rated differently. While Deutschlandfunk does not shy away from comparisons with Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and Die Zeit sees the author as an exception, "whose corners, edges and narrative craziness have not yet been sanded down by any literary establishment", the Süddeutsche Zeitung states that the text "unfortunately has has become a bloated epic ".

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Julia Gaß: Bachtyar Ali receives the Nelly Sachs Prize In: Ruhrnachrichten on September 7, 2017. Accessed on May 19, 2020.
  2. ↑ Hündür Erikson: Bachtyar Ali - The City of White Musicians (2017). In: DISCOURSE. February 17, 2019, accessed on February 18, 2019 (German).
  3. ↑ Bakhtyar Ali: "The City of White Musicians" - Manifesto for the Power of Poetry. Retrieved on February 18, 2019 (German).
  4. ↑ Stefan Weidner: "The city of white musicians": The language of ten million . In: The time . December 18, 2017, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed February 18, 2019]).
  5. ↑ Insa Wilke: The lost soul of the world . In: sueddeutsche.de . 2017, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed on February 18, 2019]).