Twelve grams of luck
Twelve grams of happiness is a volume of stories by Feridun Zaimoglu from 2004. It contains, among other things, the first copy of the story Skins , for which the author received the 2003 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize from the jury.
content
The volume contains twelve parabolic stories about the "little bit of luck". Seven short stories are set in Germany (titled “This Side” in the volume), the five of the second part play “Jenseits” in Turkey (Anatolia). The protagonists of all stories, however, blur the established cultural boundaries through their socialization, which is always related to both countries.
Reviews
Rolf-Bernhard Essig gave the work an unreserved positive review in the Frankfurter Rundschau and made a “compositional and linguistic” highlight in Zaimoglu's work: the stories had an “irresistible drive, their flow laconically crashes over short sentence cascades, then flows in a calm stream religious prose prose to suddenly lead to enigmatic diverse dialogues ”. The Tagesspiegel also called the volume of short stories “intoxicating, virtuoso, subtle.” Kristina Maidt-Zinke from the Süddeutsche Zeitung was somewhat surprised by the name Zaimoglu by “prose that comes across as natural as if he had never written anything else. It is completely at home and yet radiates an irritating strangeness, it shows strength without showing off, it is neither loud nor blatantly angry and yet vibrates with a dark anger in parts ”. In the meantime, Zaimoglu can actually be called a “poet”. Wolfgang Schneider from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung also praises Zaimoglu's verbal power, his “sentences are never indistinguishable, he approaches the phenomena as closely as possible and takes control of them with all of his senses”. In comparison with Zaimoglu's “art of language and description”, however, his “conceptual potency” falls a little in Schneider's opinion. Hubert Winkels sees it similarly in the review of the weekly Die Zeit , but in his opinion the volume shows the author for the first time as a “real” narrator. Nils Minkmar from the FAZ , who again had a predominantly positive review of the work, was particularly impressed by the volume's first story, Five pounding hearts when love jumps : only the “very best films” could compare with it when it came to its intensity. After reading it, Minkmar sums up: “A canon of German-language literature of the 21st century would be incomplete without Zaimoglu”. Daniel Bax from the taz also saw the work as socially relevant, although in contrast to most of the other reviewers, he was rather undecided about the linguistic quality.
effect
The work was published in several editions, such as a paperback. The author also recorded selected stories from Twelve grams of happiness with the subtitle Love in Germany 2004 as an audio book. In addition to the award-winning story Skins , the first story of the volume Five pounding hearts, when love jumps, was singled out as particularly successful in several reviews .