Reed (novel)
Reed is a crime novel by Juli Zeh , in the two elite physicists and their abstract concepts of time and reality are confronted with reality. The abstract controversy surrounding the basic concepts of modern physics is developing into a disaster of child abduction, murder and broken human relationships.
content
Juli Zeh precedes her novel with a “prologue” that creates tension with vague predictions.
“A commissioner who has a deadly headache, loves a physical theory and doesn't believe in chance, solves his last case. A child is kidnapped and doesn't know anything about it. A doctor does what he shouldn't. A man dies, two physicists argue, a police chief is in love. "
The main characters in the novel are the two elite physicists Sebastian and Oskar, who have known and loved each other since their studies in Freiburg im Breisgau . But at the end of his studies Sebastian feels overwhelmed by the constant competition with the ingenious Oskar and flees into marriage with the beautiful and successful gallery owner Maike. He leads a happy family life with Maike and their son Liam in Freiburg, where occasionally Oskar appears as a guest. Physically, to Oscar's annoyance, Sebastian specialized in the exotic many-worlds theory , which is considered a scientific dead end. Oskar took his pioneering research on the nature of time to the famous Swiss research institute CERN , where he is working on "uniting quantum mechanics with general relativity".
A dramatic conflict develops from this figure constellation . On the drive to a holiday camp, Liam is kidnapped and a blackmailer apparently asks Sebastian to kill a doctor if he wants to see his son alive again: “Dabbeling has to go” is the request. This doctor Dabbeling is not only involved in a medical scandal, but also the subject of jealousy as a friend of Sebastian's wife. After Sebastian has committed this murder, the equally brilliant Commissioner Schilf, who is marked by a fatal illness, takes over the investigation.
Schilf's research begins in the vicinity of the hospital in which Dabbeling worked, but increasingly shifts towards Sebastian. In Geneva, where Schilf visits Oskar, he finally solves the case; Sebastian had misunderstood Oskar's request: " Doublethink must go" was what Oskar wanted to express both a criticism of Sebastian's many worlds theory and an expression of his jealousy of Sebastian's love for Liam. Schilf stages Oskar's transfer as a re-enactment of Dabbeling's murder in order to bring Oskar to his “inner judge”.
subjects
The fundamental motif, which runs like a red thread through the entire plot, is the influence of the observer on the object of his observation.
“For about a century, quantum physics has started to reflect the philosophical idea of constructivism. In natural science, of all places, where you have always said that you discover objective truths! Suddenly there are physicists who say: 'Oops, that's exactly what happens in the experiment. The observer has an influence on what is observed! ' I think this crossing point is groundbreaking, I can't get over it. "
In the novel it is mainly birds that play the role of observer. At the beginning of the action it is the mountains that send some birds to Freiburg as observers, while two ducks in front of Sebastian's house, Bonnie and Clyde, always keep an eye on the action. Rita Skura, who feels that the birds are watching, thinks of a cat as a scarecrow.
The most important observer, who is actually called that in the novel, is a voice in Schilf's head, who comments on the thoughts and actions of the commissioner. After a medical examination, Schilf finds its “seat” in the form of a brain tumor, which he describes as a bird's egg. The “hatching” of the observer, who soars as a bird and at the same time causes Schilf's death, can be interpreted in such a way that Schilf's existence depended on observation. Conversely, Schilf briefly fears that his girlfriend could spontaneously disintegrate and disappear when she meets Sebastian, an independent observer. Klaus Zeyringer explains :
“The first chapter begins with an approach, the epilogue with a departure. 'The birds report to the mountains,' says the penultimate sentence. The bird motif is condensed into a narrative perspective, which is occasionally juxtaposed with the perspective of ants for Sebastian and that of a butterfly for the inspector. [...] The world is the way it is, he [the Commissioner] thinks, 'because there are observers who watch it exist'. Observe, report - and the question of what is really and what is true. "
Last but not least, the observer motif also appears in a very classic form for a detective novel: Sebastian is seen by an entomologist shortly before Dabbeling's murder.
Another important theme of the novel is "the question of guilt". With the brilliant physicist Oskar, Juli Zeh designs a person who asks himself about all moral questions and tries to make all decisions from a kind of mathematical calculation. Nevertheless, it is precisely his coolly planned human experiment that triggers Sebastian's murder and the guilt entanglements. Ironically, Oskar's aim was to show the insignificance of terms like morality in the many-worlds interpretation.
Sebastian, his physicist friend, becomes a murderer through blackmail and a misunderstanding. Here, too, the question of ethical responsibility arises. What can a father do to save his child's life? Can he also sacrifice innocent people? The question of guilt has a secondary aspect here: The act, which was apparently carried out exclusively because of the extortion, has quite emotional secondary aspects, because Sebastian would have reason to be jealous of the victim, who was friends with his wife.
A considerable part of the conversations and thoughts of the characters in the novel revolve around problems of theoretical physics. From quantum mechanics is the speech and the nature of time. In particular, the so-called many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, represented by the fictional character Sebastian, is discussed. This interpretation, developed by Hugh Everett , says that a world of its own arises for every possibility of the universe, that every possible action in the universe happens and does not happen at the same time. The physicist Stephen Hawking writes in this regard:
“Since the universe is constantly rolling the dice to see what happens next, it has not just a single story as one might think, but every possible story, each with its own probability. There must be a story in the universe where Belize won all of the gold medals in the Olympics, although the likelihood of that story is rather slim. "
In her review, Brigitte Helbling points to the extensive literary reception of basic physical concepts from Thomas Pynchon to Michel Houellebecq's elementary particles . In contrast to Juli Zeh, many authors would not have really dealt with physics. Helbling considers it inevitable that this leads to passages on the world of theoretical physics that are sometimes difficult to understand.
A secondary topic is a medical scandal in Freiburg, in which the murder victim of the novel is apparently entangled. However, this topic serves rather as a wrong track and is casually clarified at the end of the novel.
Literary form
Juli Zeh deals with the genre of the detective novel with Schilf , even if she downplays the question of form.
“It's only since the book was published that I understood that crime novels are a genre of their own. The fact that my book has a detective and that the plot is a crime thriller wasn't a big step for me. My previous novels were also in a certain way criminalistic, they almost always dealt with injustices committed, with a moral borderline case and with the attempt to restore the world balance through enlightenment. "
She claims that she was only more interested in crime novels when she was young, and at that time also more in the trivial Al-Wheeler crime novels by Carter Brown , mainly out of sexual interest. “Book magazine: Those black and yellow paperbacks from the rickety revolving stand in the train station bookstore? Juli Zeh: Yes, yes, exactly that. Ingenious things. My father collected them. But I read it mainly because it always had sex. Hot stuff! Today I would probably understand that this is ironic. ... That's how I got it cleared up. "What bothers her about most thrillers is the fact that when reading the case one has to follow the resolution of the case without going astray," always having the target cross in front of his nose. "
Your approach of making the actual crime story the vehicle for presenting scientific questions or cultural and historical phenomena is by no means new. The concept of making the murder appear as an experiment is also reminiscent of Dürrenmatt's classic The Judge and His Executioner , just like the ingenious inspector who was marked by death . The self-reference of the text through evaluative comments by the author on his own writing is also known as a literary stylistic device.
Nevertheless, Zeh succeeds in developing an independent form in literary terms. One of the building blocks are the surprising and original literary images. The description of Freiburg as a place of action from the opening chapter is cited as an example.
“It lies there as if it had fallen from the sky one day and splashed right up to the feet of the neighboring mountains. Belchen, Schauinsland and Feldberg sit in a circle and overlook a town that was created about six minutes ago according to the time calculation of the mountains and yet pretends to have always been down there by the river with the strange name. 'Dreisam'. Like loneliness for three. "
In her criticism, Alexandra Mangel makes these stylistic elements, "the thought games, ... the clear construction, ... the - sometimes polished, cool, then again flowery - dandy aesthetics and ... the grotesque exaggeration of the figures" as the standard, if a reader likes toe book and even draws - as Wiebke Porombka - the man without qualities by Robert Musil used for comparison.
Juli Zeh is quite self-critical of her language-loving style: “I understand that my style annoys many.” Nevertheless: Although the scientific context has forced her to reduce language games, her main interest is the “potency of language”. Normally she still deals with metaphors in a much “baroque, extravagant and brazen way”.
reception
Juli Zeh's concept of confronting two scientific concepts with the core characters of the novel does not only meet with approval.
“For her last novel, Spieltrieb , Juli Zeh chose a form that is now the basis of her first crime novel. A figure constellation - in play instinct it was the perfidious game that two boarding school students play with their teacher - is set up in order - in this case - to play through questions of legal philosophy on them. A procedure that has earned her a lot of criticism: The FAZ etched that Zeh was probably interested in `` after the highest score and most internships also to write the thickest, most allusive and most prophetic novel of her level ''. In the reeds, too , Juli Zeh loads her figures with a heavy superstructure and opens up a further discipline that claims to explain the world - physics. "
Alexandra Mangel sees the weakness of the novel in the fact that the physical theories are not so much the construction principle of the novel as the constant talk of the characters who deal with it in ever new dialogues and inner monologues . As a result, from the point of view of lack, the figures do not become living people, but rather remain “highly talented test subjects in an experimental set-up”. Zeh's attempt to escape the “standard crime thriller” genre is a failed attempt to play with the tools of the genre in which Zeh “dismantled the entire tool box and decorated every single tool with question marks”.
The novel also appears to Sigrid Löffler as a “complicated test arrangement”. Sigrid Löffler, unlike FAZ and Alexandra Mangel, sees the literary experiment as a success:
“What went wrong literarily with Spieltrieb (the extravagantly conceived construction of the whole thing ) works very well with Schilf : off-the-wall plots with boldly conceived murder conspiracies are definitely in place in detective novels and do not disturb. Behind it, of course, is the love story of two men: Oskar wants Sebastian for himself, but Sebastian loves his son more than he loves Oskar, and he cannot stand that. "
The credibility of the two physicist figures is a central theme of the reviews. Bernhard Fetz sees in Oskar the “cliché picture of the ingenious, arrogant and his environment despising super researcher”, while he considers Sebastian as a counter-figure to be more complex and thus more interesting.
In response to criticism of her figures, which some reviewers appear to be very woodcut-like, Juli Zeh explains that she developed the two physicist figures from a binary scheme.
“Basically, they're two facets of the same character. Oskar got all black and all head characteristics and Sebastian got all light and emotional ones. "
On the other hand, their police officers Rita and Commissioner Schilf are more like “comic characters”, have “something grotesque and satirical”. At the same time, she characterizes her inspector, who is marked by death, as a literary topos, since the genre detective novel is closely linked to the themes of death and transience.
Nevertheless, the criticism catches the eye that Juli Zehs "characters, also in their previous novels, are always special gifts and exceptional talents". Opposite the two ingenious physicists, who were gifted from childhood on from the stupidity of the world, is the equally ingenious Commissioner Schilf, although he also approaches strategic questions in a meditative and unconventional way. Sebastian's wife shines less with her intellect, but with her cultural competence and stunning beauty. Criticism regularly couples this with Juli Zeh's “image of a special talent, even a nerd”.
“This only serves the quality of the book as a detective novel to a limited extent. For the detective novel, a coolness counts that Zeh's zeal for complexities is missing. If this novel were a schoolboy, he'd sit in the front row and keep getting in touch. The master voices of the genre, on the other hand - Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith - much more often resemble the slouches in the back bench who throw erasers at each other and still know the answer at the crucial moment - about them, when they feel like it, quite simply to refuse."
Brigitte Helbling also ironically targets the metaphorical style of Juli Zeh in her review.
“Gülden is a bouquet of colorful verbs that inspires touch, look and doze. Tree, mountain and street lamp - the entrance to Juli Zeh's latest novel is a cityscape like from a series of 'little sandmen'. The city is Freiburg. The idyll is there to be destroyed. "
Similarly, Bernhard Fetz also sees the imagery as partially unsuccessful, sees too strong a “will to literarize”.
"From the beginning, Juli Zeh pushed too hard. Her linguistic dexterity leads her again and again to a language that turns from good description into bad pathos and kitsch. This novel suffers from this like its predecessors. The poetically adorned noble metaphor horses regularly go through with Juli Zeh: There lanterns wear 'skirts made of light', a summer evening smells of 'a wind juggling swallows high in the sky', 'plates cough curry on the tablecloth'. "
Juli Zeh says she has already significantly reduced her weird metaphors while working on the novel. To this end, she spoke a version of the written text on tape and reduced the pathetic-sounding passages.
Stage version
The premiere of a stage version of the novel took place on December 13, 2007 under the direction of Bettina Bruinier at the Munich Volkstheater . The director and dramaturge Katja Friedrich was responsible for the text version. Bettina Bruinier was awarded the star of the year by the Münchner Abendzeitung for her production . The Austrian premiere took place in 2012 at the Wiener KosmosTheater under the direction of Esther Muschol.
expenditure
- July toe: reeds. Novel. Schöffling, Frankfurt 2007, ISBN 3-89561-431-9 ; btb, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-442-73806-9
Audio book
- Reed. Reading. With Tatja Seibt . Editing by Petra Meyenburg. Directed by Gottfried von Eine . A production by MDR Figaro . 6 CDs. DAV, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-89813-687-7
Movie
The novel was filmed by Claudia Lehmann from May to June 2011 in Weimar , Jena , Erfurt and the surrounding area and in Geneva . The main roles were played by Mark Waschke and Stipe Erceg . The film was shown in German cinemas from March 8, 2012. The work, funded with 800,000 euros, was seen by 10,000 paying visitors and shown in January 2015 at Einsfestival HD.
Web links
- Reed - Anything is conceivable exists in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Reading sample from the publisher
- Review notes at the pearl diver
- Juli's intellectual circus , review by Katharina Bendixen on poetenladen.de , September 6, 2007
- As exciting as the gray theory - failure because of wanting too much: Juli Zeh's new novel "Schilf" , review by André Hille in literaturkritik.de , No. 10, October 2007
- Birds everywhere, but where's Hitchcock? Review by Tilmann Lahme in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , October 10, 2007
- Parallel Worlds , review by Ulrich Greiner in Die Zeit , November 15, 2007
- Fly, bird fly , review by Petra Kohse in the Frankfurter Rundschau , January 15, 2008
- Film review and trailer for the film "Reed"
Footnotes
- ↑ Schilf, p. 128; see. Time # Limits of the physical concept of time
- ↑ a b c d Jens-Christian Rabe: Interview with Zeh in bücher , issue 5/2007
- ^ Klaus Zeyringer: Temporal phenomena with death; Book review in Der Standard , January 26, 2008 edition
- ↑ a b c World on Sunday : A corpse, the province and the physics. August 26, 2007
- ↑ a b c d e f g Spiegel Online : Writer Juli Zeh: “I understand that my style annoys many” . Interview from October 13, 2007
- ↑ a b c d Deutschlandradio Kultur : Sphinx des Zufall . October 1, 2007
- ↑ the daily newspaper : Sprachaufmotzerin . September 8, 2007
- ↑ a b Kulturradio : Juli Zeh: “Schilf” . October 1, 2007
- ↑ a b ORF : Absurd plot, well constructed ( memento of the original from October 13, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Reed - X Films Creative Pool Entertainment GmbH, Berlin
- ↑ Official website of the film ( Memento of the original from May 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Adrian Prechtel / Florian Koch: Film flops in Germany: A lost year . Evening newspaper Munich , December 5, 2012
- ↑ Einsfestival HD, January 3, 2015 8:15 p.m.
