This side of the Van Allen Belt
This side of the Van Allen Belt is a collection of six stories by Wolfgang Herrndorf . It was published in 2007 by Eichborn Verlag and as a paperback in 2009 by Rowohlt Verlag . The stories are linked to one another in terms of personnel and themes. Due to the subjective representation from the point of view of various unreliable narrators , some elements of the plot remain ambiguous.
For the story of the same name, which is the fifth of the six stories in the volume, Herrndorf won the audience award at the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2004 .
content
The soldier's way
The anonymous first-person narrator is accepted as a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg , together with Franco, who moves in with him and turns out to be enthusiastic and mentally confused. Later, the first-person narrator can move him to another student who has more space. Then Franco's Spanish friend Mara shows up. Franco is jealous and wants to confront her alleged lover in the narrator's apartment - and then spends the night with him because he is such an " Adonis " and the experience of bisexuality has " brought him further".
Franco and Mara win the Danner Prize for a joint art project: Mara swallows several tin soldiers, then x-rays of her stomach were taken, which should be understood as a pacifist statement. Franco buys an old car with the prize money and decides that all four (Franco, Mara, the narrator and Adonis) drive to Italy together. On the way they leave the Adonis at a rest stop. At another rest stop (already in Italy) the first-person narrator, who slept on the back seat, wakes up and is alone. While he is looking for Mara and Franco, they drive on and also leave him behind. He convinces another driver who is traveling with his wife and daughter to take up the chase. But they can no longer catch up with Franco and Mara.
Flower of Tsingtao
In the possession of a deceased patient, a male nurse finds a lacquered Chinese tin with a dragon on the lid, the fire coming from the back of the head instead of the mouth. The nurse finds a lot of money in the can, quits his job and goes on a trip around the world. On the way he encounters the same dragon motif three times as on the tin, but cannot fathom its origin even with more detailed research in China. In the end, he was arrested in Japan and extradited to Germany. It turns out that the male nurse is Hendrik, who at the beginning of the story The Path of the Soldier, together with the narrator and Franco, had applied to the ABK Nürnberg, but was not admitted there.
In the Oderbruch
Georg, the first-person narrator of this story, comes back from canoeing and finds that his car has been stolen. He hides his canoe, walks down the road and finds a house in the woods. He rings the doorbell and is initially brushed off by a young girl named Inka, but then allowed into the house so he can make a phone call. He calls the police, but they can't come by until later. Georg is meanwhile talking to Inka and drinks wine with her, then Inka leads him into the cellar, where they both play table tennis. Georg is just upstairs when the doorbell rings. He opens because he is expecting the police, but it is an ex-boyfriend of Inka who questions Georg, threatens him and then goes to Inka in the cellar. Georg leaves the house and walks through the night forest.
This overview is wonderful
Christine, Georg's ex-wife from the previous story, has moved to the country with her eleven-year-old son Paul and is celebrating a party. She is the boss of a company (apparently an advertising agency), her guests are partly employees, partly friends from their studies. Paul talks to Lydia, one of his mother's employees, and then leaves the party to visit Andrika - as it turns out later, Andrika is not his girlfriend, but a doe that he watches from a high seat in the forest.
The first connections to the other stories become clear: Franco from The Soldier's Way is one of the guests. Heidi, a friend of Christine's, is the sister of Hendrik, the carer from Blume von Tsingtao . It is now learned that Hendrik is charged with killing several patients, possibly at their request, by overdosing on morphine.
This side of the Van Allen Belt
The story is about the same day as Herrlich, this overview and the first-person narrator is Christine's friend, who, to Christine's annoyance, does not appear at the party. After a night shift, he doesn't get up until around noon, goes shopping and on the way back meets a boy from the neighborhood who is throwing stones on the sidewalk.
A neighbor of the first-person narrator has just moved out and the apartment door is still open. He looks around the empty apartment and then goes into his own, where he falls asleep and is later woken up by calls from his girlfriend. He returns to the neighboring apartment, where he is later surprised by the boy. They drink martini together , which the narrator actually bought for the party. The boy says he would like to become an astronaut and land on the moon, whereupon the narrator tries to convince him that the moon landing was staged because astronauts could not possibly withstand the radiation in the Van Allen belt that would be flown through during a moon flight . At night, the drunk boy staggers home disappointed and the narrator returns to his apartment, but cannot sleep there.
Central intelligence agency
The first-person narrator Heidi, who appeared in Herrlich, this overview , drives with Holm and Cornelius to Beesenstedt Castle , where the Central Intelligence Agency is to be founded. Various people from Berlin's creative scene appear at a party in the palace, such as Sascha Lobo , Joachim Lottmann , Wiglaf Droste or the poet Julia Mantel. Heidi feels like an outsider at the increasingly chaotic party, gets drunk and at the end watches the sunrise from the roof.
Even if most of the people and the organization founded are real, the plot is fictional, so the real Central Intelligence Agency was not founded at such a congress.
reception
The volume was received positively by the critics, for example by Katharina Bendixen :
“The plots of Herrndorf's stories are not only superficially uncomplicated, they are simple. There is nothing to be explained, nothing remains in the balance, nothing is pregnant with meaning or full of mood. Subtle, on the other hand, is the laconic style of language that Herrndorf uses and which explores the depth of the characters, and just as subtle are the absurd elements that run through the stories and then call the simplicity of reality into question. Herrndorf tells in an effortlessly intellectual and extremely funny way about the almost banal everyday life of his protagonists, and he always drives them towards a point in their everyday life where they must fail. [...] In general, the endings of Herrndorf's stories shine through a lack of punch lines, which in itself is pointed again. "
Martin Lüdke praises the apt portrait of a disoriented and only superficially self-confident generation and sees parallels to the stories of Ingo Schulze , while Wolfgang Schneider states that Herrndorf's unreliable narrators tie in with Vladimir Nabokov .
Uta Beiküfner, on the other hand, thinks that the book does not offer enough "aesthetic added value" because the characters are copied directly from the author's everyday world. With the representation of the ZIA he provokes "without hurting".
source
- Wolfgang Herrndorf: This side of the Van Allen belt. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2009, ISBN 978-3-499-24777-4 .
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