The street (Maier)
Die Straße is an autobiographical novel by Andreas Maier that was published by Suhrkamp in September 2013 . It is the third volume of the eleven-part novel series local bypass . The first two volumes, Das Zimmer and Das Haus , were published in 2010 and 2011 .
Structure and content
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The focus of the previous novel Das Haus was the home of the author's family in the Barbaraviertel in Friedberg (Hesse) . This volume is now about the "road" as a symbolic link to the outside world. It is most important in the book as an access space to school and post-school activities. For example, Friedberger Kaiserstraße plays an important role for students as a place to stay after class and before they return home.
This autobiographical-essayistic novel dates from around 1980, so the author / first-person narrator is in his early teens and reflects his youth in Friedberg above all in the experiences of his older sister, whose interactions and behavior at night are strictly controlled by the parents.
The novel consists of the three main chapters
- "Down the Rabbit Hole" (pp. 7–85),
- “And the Happy Summer Days” (pp. 87–154) and
- “A White Rabbit with Pink Eyes” (pp. 155–194).
The chapter headings are allusions to Alice in Wonderland . With Alice one connects to the author educational experience . During a day's hiking he admits to a classmate that he liked Alice in a cartoon, whereupon the classmate teases him with the words: “You want to fuck her” (p. 71). The description of this experience is given by the theme of this volume: the sexuality of young people, which on the one hand is thematized in a vulgar and childlike way, but which on the other hand is not officially allowed to be talked about: “My parents' linguistic world was a whole life long a world without cohabitation , and I felt how, through the total absence of this word (or its circumscriptions), this word had total omnipotence over them. ”(p. 152)
expenditure
- Andreas Maier: The street . Novel. Suhrkamp, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-518-42395-0 .