Voices (Herrndorf)
Be right. Texts that should stay is a collection of texts from the estate of Wolfgang Herrndorf . The book was published by Rowohlt Verlag in September 2018 , the audio book, spoken by Clemens Schick , was published by Argon Verlag at the same time . The editors and authors of the afterword are Marcus Gärtner and Cornelius Reiber.
Origin and text selection
In 2010, after being diagnosed with cancer, Herrndorf began deleting texts from his computer and destroying manuscripts that he thought were not worth preserving. He also determined that all unfinished texts and draft texts should be destroyed after his death. The editors adhered to these guidelines and made a selection from the texts received. The decisive selection criterion was that the texts are not purely life documents, but were written by the author as literary texts and can be read by themselves. A large part of the texts arose between 2001 and 2009 as contributions to the Internet forum Höfliche Paparazzi , which Herrndorf published there under the pseudonym Voices .
construction
The editors have arranged the texts thematically and divided them into five sections:
- Section I: Texts about childhood and adolescence in which fictional and autobiographical parts cannot be separated
- Section II: Texts about life in Berlin at the turn of the millennium. There are thematic overlaps with Herrndorf's debut novel In Plüschgewittern .
- Section III: reflective texts, texts on writing and literature
- Section IV: The text Akalkulie , a kind of drama in which a person talks to God about questions about the meaning of life and about life after death.
- Section V: Poetry. The poems were written in the late 1980s and 1990s, before Herrndorf turned away from painting and only turned to writing. They make use of traditional motifs and shapes, which, however, are repeatedly broken with irony.
In the afterword, the editors present the creation and selection process and explain that this will be the last volume “with new texts” by Herrndorf.
source
- Wolfgang Herrndorf: Voices. Texts that should stay . Berlin: Rowohlt 2018. ISBN 978-3-7371-0057-1
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