Sand (novel)

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Sand is a novel by Wolfgang Herrndorf published by Rowohlt Verlag in 2011 . It is the last novel that Herrndorf was able to complete before his death. The novel cannot be clearly assigned to a genre , but has elements of a thriller , a spy novel and a crime novel , but can also be considered a parody of the genres mentioned due to its comedic elements . The protagonist of the novel is a man who suffers from amnesia and tries to find out his identity.

action

The plot of the novel takes place in the fictional port city of Targat and the nearby oasis of Tindirma in an unnamed North African desert state reminiscent of Morocco . It begins on August 23, 1972.

1st book: The sea. The novel begins with seemingly incoherent plot fragments that only connect with each other in the further course of the plot: two young detective superintendents, Canisades and Polidorio, issue fictitious ID cards with imaginary names on old, invalid forms to pass the time, which they later use when visiting brothels. - A policeman from the Tindirma oasis brings a young man named Amadou Amadou who is said to have killed four Europeans, members of a hippie commune. He denies the murders so persistently, despite overwhelming evidence, that Polidorio begins to doubt his guilt. - The American Helen Gliese arrives by ship in Targat on behalf of a cosmetics company and moves into bungalow 581d in the Sheraton Hotel . - A secret agent by the name of Lundgren, from whom we learn in the second sentence that he is dead, waits in vain for days in a street café in Tindirma for a contact to whom he is supposed to hand over microfilms with construction plans for ultracentrifuges for uranium enrichment . - Polidorio studies the confused files on the Amadou case, drives out to the commune and realizes that there is no doubt about Amadou's perpetration. - Lundgren, who is now suffering from sunstroke , finally meets the man to whom he can hand over the plans. - Amadou, who has meanwhile been sentenced to death, escapes in an accident with the prisoner transporter.

2nd book: The desert. In the attic of a building in the desert a man comes to with a head wound who cannot remember who and where he is. He watches three men explain to a fourth that a man named Cetrois has fled with something that the fourth, apparently their leader, wants, and how the four set off in a jeep in pursuit. With great effort, he manages to escape into the desert, escape the men in the jeep and reach a nearby track. There he asks two stoned tourists for help, who instead rob him and leave him behind after they have burned his identity papers to a tiny scrap. - Helen Gliese goes to the commune in Tindirma to visit her old school friend Michelle Vanderbilt. On the way back, she is approached by the man with no memory at a gas station. At his pleading for help, she takes him with her. He tells her his story, and since he frightened refuses to go to the hospital, the police, or a doctor, she takes him to her bungalow and tends to his wound. Together they set out to solve his secret.

3rd book: The mountains. The man with no memory is kidnapped while walking into the city and taken to Adil Bassir, a local underworld king, who explains to him that he has brought his wife and young son into his power. Bassir threatens her torture or murder if he does not get a mine that belongs to him back within 72 hours. The amnesia victim then tries to find out something about mines in the area with Helen, who has baptized him “Carl”. He also roams the city and unsuccessfully inquires about a Monsieur Cetrois. As he is sitting in a street café across from the police station, two police officers notice him. Carl flees from them, but is shortly afterwards the victim of a robbery, in which the unexpectedly appearing Helen saves him with her karate skills. She has since found out about a gold mine in the mountains near Tindirma. The two drive there, but only meet the lonely, unsuccessful gold digger Hakim, who shows them the labyrinth of the mine, the tunnels of which lead deep into the mountain to a large hall with a mud pool. Helen, who had previously urged Carl to consult a doctor about his amnesia, finds a somewhat strange advertisement for a psychological practice in the mailbox of the bungalow and persuades Carl to visit. The long conversation between Carl and the psychiatrist Dr. Cockcroft, an American, is characterized by the fact that neither trusts the other; Cockcroft explains that he thinks Carl is a simulant, and Carl has increasing doubts that Cockcroft is a real doctor. He then transfers this distrust to Helen, in whose suitcase he finds handcuffs and a gun. - Carl inquires in the demi-world environment about the prices for landmines. A conversation with a petty criminal, who has absurd features due to Carl's complete ignorance, reveals, however, that these mines are of little value.

4th book: The oasis. Canisades gets into trouble with his supervisor, who has discovered the false IDs and tears them up. While Canisades is investigating another murder charge, Amadou hides in his parked car, murders Canisades with an improvised wire loop and uses the car to flee south, where he finally disappears. - Michelle Vanderbilt shows up in Helen's bungalow because she has decided to leave the commune and needs money to fly back to America. When Helen explains to Carl that, according to her research, there is no one named Cetrois at all, Michelle claims to have heard from community members that a man named Cetrois made inquiries in the community shortly after the murders. Helen and Carl drive to the commune, but only Helen is admitted by the suspicious communards. Meanwhile, Carl wanders through Tindirma. A crushed beverage can under a parked Mercedes triggers a memory in him and he accidentally discovers that a car key that is in his suit fits the Mercedes. In the car, along with other insignificant objects, he finds a ballpoint pen and two small metal capsules in its refill. On the way back to the commune, Carl gets into a tumultuous ritual at the end of which a fire breaks out and the commune building burns down. He can't find Helen anymore. In the mess, a boy steals Carl's blazer with a ballpoint pen. He can take it back, but notices the four men from the jeep, including Bassir, who are trying to reach him. He flees from them into the desert, comes across Canisades' corpse, finds the snippets of the torn fake ID cards in his pockets, loses the two capsules from the mine in the sand and takes almost the whole night to find them. The next day he gets back to the slum area, calls the hotel from there and reaches Helen, who wants to pick him up. Shortly afterwards, he notices that he has given her the wrong part of town, and in his confusion, his blazer with the ballpoint pen is stolen from school children again. He drags himself back to the hotel, where there is a confrontation with Helen, to whom the stolen capsules are now apparently more important than the question of Carl's true identity. Helen develops a reconstruction of the events that amounts to Carl himself being a Cetrois. When she also finds the snippets of ID that match the remains of the ID that Carl had with him when he showed up, she accuses him of lied to her and only faked his amnesia and throws him out. When Carl returns to the bungalow one more time, she has left. Carl begins to think about inconsistencies in Helen's story. He also learns in the neighborhood that no one else has received a flyer from Cockcroft and finds the house with Cockcroft's alleged practice abandoned. Carl fetches the Mercedes from Tindirma and is seen by Bassir and his men, who immediately take up the chase. When they have almost reached him, they are mowed down by a volley of machine guns and Carl is thrown by two men in US uniforms into a jeep at the wheel of which Cockcroft is sitting next to another American. Another absurd dialogue unfolds when the third man, a Syrian, insists on having to offer his prayer on the way.

5th book: The night. After an unsuccessful attempt to escape, Carl is taken to the gold mine in the mountains, where the men, two US agents under the leadership of Cockcroft and the Syrian torture specialist, interrogate him and torture him with electric shock. Since Carl does not know anything, the interrogation remains inconclusive. When one is about to switch to worse torture methods, Helen appears, who also turns out to be a US agent. She explains to Carl that the agents assigned to the recipient of the construction plans, distracted by the massacre in the commune, had lost contact with Lundgren and were about to break off the mission when she happened upon Carl and suspected a connection. She gives him one last chance to cooperate. Since Carl can't say anything even now, he is, on the verge of drowning, chained in the mud pool of the mine to put him in extreme fear of death. When he still cannot provide any information the next day, the group of agents leaves him to die in the pool. After endless unsuccessful attempts at liberation, the memory comes back to him on the verge of death. Scraps of memory show that Carl is none other than Polidorio, who had issued his fake ID in the name of Cetrois. He happened to be sitting in the café next to Lundgren, who took him for his contact and gave him the pen with the plans. Bassir's men had seen this and pursued him into the desert, where he received the blow on the head that caused the amnesia, but survived due to a mix-up. - Before she leaves, Helen comes back to the mine, but doesn't find Carl anymore. Against all odds, he managed to free himself, found the exit from the labyrinth of the tunnels with the last of his strength and when he left the mine he ran into Hakim, who mistook him for one of the agents and shot him. - The ballpoint pen wanders around among the children of the slum school for a while until it ends up under a bulldozer with its last owner while “cleaning up” the slums.

shape

The five books of the novel are divided into a total of 67 unnumbered chapters of very different lengths. Each chapter is preceded by a motto that can be understood as an ironic commentary on the plot described in the chapter or in the entire novel; the series of motto authors ranges from Herodotus to Ulla Berkéwicz . The novel is mainly structured chronologically, only a few leaps in time break through this structure. In parts the story is told from an authorial, but mainly from a personal narrative perspective, whereby Carl’s perspective, which is characterized by disorientation and incomprehension, contributes to the confusion of the reader. Only in two places does an anonymous first-person narrator appear briefly, who was still a child at the time the novel was written.

Motifs

One of the central themes of the novel is the impossibility of finding out who or what a person really is. In the form of Carl's search for his own identity, it carries the entire novel, but also appears in numerous other reflections. The narrator describes Helen as "beautiful and stupid" when she first appeared, only to explain immediately afterwards that she was actually neither one nor the other. From the false identities of the joke ID cards to the question of Amadou's guilt, the increasingly questionable legends of Helens and Cockcroft, to minor characters like the old beggar who sits across from Lundgren's café every day, but one day causes him to flee quickly When Lundgren sees him fiddling with an electronic device, which in turn turns out to be a harmless transistor radio, until the beggar is finally revealed to be an agent of the agents, it determines almost everyone involved, but also plays an important role in Carl's conversations with Helen and Cockcroft.

Equally important is the consistent motif of futility and meaninglessness. Carl's efforts, repeatedly described in great detail, to flee, to free himself, to find out something, are either completely in vain or only bring as much success as is necessary to advance the plot. They culminate in his completely senseless death at the moment when he just seems to have found the final resolution and liberation. In accordance with a chapter motto in which Nabokov rigorously rejects a “good ending”, almost all the other characters in the novel fail, as do the agents. Herrndorf only treats two of his people, both women, to a happy ending: the naive, undisguised, emotional Michelle Vanderbilt, who meets a fat car mechanic of Polish descent on the return flight to the USA, with whom she then has a long and happy marriage, and Helen, who, according to her daughter, fell asleep gently after a happy and fulfilled life.

Alternative titles

In his internet diary, Work and Structure, Herrndorf lists various alternative titles in addition to Sand :

DESERT ROMAN

AMNESIA

SAND

SECRET SAND

INCIDENT AT THE TINDIRMA OASIS

IN THE SALZVIERTEL

THE FALL OF SAND

THE URANO OASIS

HEART OF SAND

SAND OF DESIRE

AT THE END OF FATA MORGANA

SONS OF SAND

DEATH IN THE HOURGLASS

HELL IS YELLOW

CASTLE OF SAND

THE SINGING OF THE SAND

WHERE THE SAND LIVES

THE GRAIN OF SAND OF ALLAH

TRACES IN THE SAND

SURS IN THE SAND

SAND IN THE SAHARA

ONLY THE SUN HEARS MY SIGH

THE SAND MASK

THE REMEMBERED DESERT

DESERTS OF ANGER

BEACH WITHOUT THE SEA

UNDER THE DUNES

FORGOTTEN SAND

THE DESERS OF EVIL

THINKING THE DESERT

THE LAST SAND

IN PLUSH DESERT

FOR A HANDFUL OF SAND

THE DESERT OF THE REAL

DEBT AND DUNE

Nothing new in the desert

ONE GRAIN TOO MUCH

SANDY GUITARS

THE GLASS SAND

THE SANDWOLF

WORLD AS DESERT AND IMAGINATION

THE WILL TO THE DESERT

THEY CALLED HIM SAND

SAND WITHOUT PROPERTIES

WALKING DUNE, LATER

THE MAN WHO CAME OUT OF THE HEAT

MEN, KITTIES AND MUSLIMS

THICK AIR IN THE SAHARA

A CAMEL TO SMOKE

COYOTS DO NOT LIE

DEATH TANGO IN DRIVE SAND

THE ULTRACENTRIFUGE MASSACER

THE AFRICAN ULTRACENTRIFUGE MASSACRE

THE DESERT KNOWS NO MERCY

THE COLOR OF HELL

DESERT WITHOUT RETURN

Coffins made of sand

THE SANDY TOMB

DESERTS OF INSANE

DUNE OF GRAY

THE INVISIBLE FATA MORGANA

1 SANDBOX AS LARGE AS HELL

OASIS OF MADNESS

MASSACRE OF DARRANCE

1000 DEGREES IN THE SHADOW

FOR A HANDFUL OF URANIUM 235

reception

The novel received largely critical acclaim. Some critics saw Sand as an alternative to Tschick , which appeared in the previous year : its tragic, nihilistic ending stands in stark contrast to the happy ending in "Tschick".

“But the fear that the novel might be a depressing copy of the brave disease coping genre is unfounded, as it quickly turns out. A shrewd and universally well-read artist is still at work here, juggling violence, death, ruin and oblivion on his tightrope and performing the nullity of human existence as a great feat. "

- FAZ

"" Sand "is a literary experiment on the border between existentialism and espionage thriller, courageous in form, baroque in language. Nothing snuggly. No joke. A hope. The hope lies in the fact that this is a writer who understands the diffuse feeling that we all know, namely to be surrounded by an all-encompassing stupidity. It is a very peculiar book, which is why it is so worth reading.

- The time

According to Michael Maar , Sand is "the greatest, gruesiest, funniest and brightest novel of the last decade".

Awards

Wolfgang Herrndorf was awarded the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair 2012 (Category: Fiction ) for Sand .

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Friedmar Apel: Where smugglers, hippies, artists and agents refuel. In: FAZ.net . November 11, 2011, accessed October 13, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Work and Structure: Thirteen: Work and Structure. Retrieved November 25, 2019 (German).
  3. ↑ http://www.merkur-zeitschrift.de/2013/08/zum-tod-von-wolfgang-herrndorf/
  4. ↑ [1]
  5. ↑ Andrea Hanna Huenniger: Wolfgang Herrndorf: So life consists only of an accumulation of mistakes . In: The time . No. 47/2011 ( online ).
  6. ↑ http://www.merkur-zeitschrift.de/2013/08/zum-tod-von-wolfgang-herrndorf/