St. John's Night (novel)
Johannisnacht is a post-turnaround novel by the German writer Uwe Timm from 1996.
content
The main character and first-person narrator of the novel is an author stricken with writer's block who is supposed to write a report on the subject of "potatoes" for a newspaper. At first glance, this rather trivial topic leads from one completely crazy situation to the next.
The author suspects material relevant for his article to be in Berlin and therefore sets off from his hometown Munich . When he arrived in Berlin, he went in search of a potato taste catalog that portrayed the life's work of a deceased GDR nutrition expert. In this catalog he hopes to find the explanation for the last words of a potato-loving uncle: “Red Tree”.
But after the apparently good start of the research, he loses the potato archive while driving with an unfriendly taxi driver and then stumbles from one bizarre encounter to the next. From the dubious Italian designer to the Bulgarian arms dealers , the telephone sex lady Tina, the vengeful hairdresser of the former Politburo , to the alcoholic “Polish wedding”, his further research leads him through all layers of everyday life in Berlin at the time of the Reichstag veiling .
After the first-person narrator keeps getting further and further away from the actual topic and at the end of the story he flees back to Munich from the arms dealers prematurely, the secret of "Red Tree" is solved quite by the way and completely unexpectedly.
expenditure
- Uwe Timm. 1996. Midsummer Night. 3rd edition. Kiepenheuer & Witsch.
- Uwe Timm. 1998. Midsummer Night: Novel. German paperback publisher.