Force (novel)

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Kraft is the first novel by the Swiss writer Jonas Lüscher . It was published in 2017 by Verlag CH Beck and translated several times. The book was awarded the Swiss Book Prize in the year of publication .

action

The Hoover Tower on the Stanford University campus

The protagonist of the novel, Richard Kraft, is professor of rhetoric at the University of Tübingen (and as such, in fiction, the direct successor of Walter Jens ). In view of his precarious personal circumstances (unhappily married for the second time, alimony payments for a total of four children), an invitation from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Silicon Valley suits him perfectly. Because he is allowed to take part in a philosophical competition in which there is a million dollars to be won, awarded by the investor Tobias Erkner. Based on Leibniz 's theodicy , the best answer is sought to the question: Why whatever is, is right and why we still can improve it?

Kraft sets out to combine his liberal-conservative thinking, shaped in the era of Thatcher and Reagan , with the ideology of Silicon Valley . However, this project fails and, in view of his private misery, Kraft dies in the end by suicide by hanging himself in the bell house of the Hoover Tower.

In flashbacks, Kraft's career is told. This includes his friendship with the Hungarian István (Ivan) Pánczél, who was accidentally forgotten as a shirt washer for a Hungarian chess team in West Berlin and then declared himself a refugee from the Eastern bloc and made a career first in Germany and later at Stanford University. Much space is also given to the descriptions of Kraft's traumatic relationships with three women: to biology doctoral student Johanna, his first wife Ruth Lambsdorff (with whom he has two sons) and to his second wife Heike (twin daughters).

background

In 2012/2013, Lüscher spent nine months as a visiting researcher at the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University on a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation .

Editions and translations

  • Force. Novel. CH Beck, Munich 2017.
  • Force. Novel. btb, Munich 2018 (paperback edition)
    • Monsieur Kraft ou la théorie du pire (French translation). Éditions Autrement, Paris 2017.
    • Crash. Roman (Dutch translation). Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam 2018.
    • Крафт. Роман (Russian translation). ArsisBooks, Moscow 2018.
    • كرافت (Arabic translation). Al Arabi Publishing House, Cairo 2018.
    • Kraft (Hungarian translation). Typotex, Budapest 2019.
    • Force. A Novel (English translation). Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2020.

Research literature

  • Vera K. Kostial: GW Leibniz, Hans Poser, Jonas Lüscher. The Technodizee question in the novel “Kraft” (2017). In: Imme Bageritz, Hartmut Hombrecher, Vera K. Kostial, Katerina Kroucheva (eds.): Ford Step and Review. Negotiations of technology in literature and film of the 20th and 21st centuries. V & R unipress, Göttingen 2019, ( doi: 10.14220 / 9783737010146.187 ).

Reviews in German-language media

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Compare the thanks in the book.