Versuch über das wüste Leben

by Gabriele Riedle

300 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2004

Reviews

[Kai Weber · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is like good music. It is tightly arranged on a microscopic and semantically loose and open on a macroscopic level. Even though I read it in the traditional form - from beginning to end - I think it's well possible to just dip in here or there, spend a little while al gusto with it and then put it away again. To a person like me this could be a severe problem, because I am a person without a memory for taste. So with this book it happened to me that I had totally forgotten I've read it once before, merely four years ago. Well, when I was into the first 10 pages I did remember something, checked my reading list and found a short note that I liked the book back in 2008. How could it have so totally escaped my mind? That must be because of its aforementioned looseness. In combination with the fierceness of all those daring images and metaphors, condensed into linguo-musical gems. Hard to imagine a lover of (German) literature who would not be spellbound by the opening lines:

Fühl ich mein Herz noch jenem Wahn geneigt? Noch glüht der Tag in neon-weißer Kälte, spätwinterlich, frühlingsfern. Doch weiß ich, hoff ich, weiß ich nicht, wie mir geschehen wird. Wie werd ich sein, wie er, wie ich, ich wie, er wie ich wie er? Ich: vor dem Spiegel. Probe von Gesichtern. Dann endlich wird er kommen. Er.

Those lines however sound more baroque than the book on the whole which is quite contemporary, up-to-date, a book of our times, dealing not only with timeless themes like evolution, friendship, love and identity but also with specific problems of our times like globalization. The main thread though is the imaginary talk of the female protagonist with a distant, lost lover. The narrator and the author of the book share the same name. It's playful autofiction. But I'm only interested in the fiction of it, not the autobiography. Actually, in spite of the namesakeness, the autobiographical aspect only fully came to my mind when the colophon of the book reminded me that Gabriele Riedle's first novel was a collaboration with Russian writer Victor Erofeyev. Not long ago I had heard a radio interview with Riedle where she was speaking about her intense, but difficult love affair with Erofeyev. So the narrator is bemoaning the lost love Erofeyev? I don't care. What counts more is that:

[...] und dann, meine Kinder, könnt ihr selbst sehen, wie ihr zurechtkommt mit dem Motivchaos, das ich euch werde hinterlassen haben, lose Enden überall, wo sind eigentlich die Georgier aus London geblieben, werdet ihr beispielsweise fragen, ach ihr Süßen, glaubt mir, die Georgier sind überall, genau wie die Rumänen, und eure mörderische Mutter war schon Gretchen und Faust, georgische Drachentöterin und größenwahnsinnige Frau Hilfs-Nietzsche gleichzeitig, als ihr noch Martin Walser gelesen habt, ihr müßt euch allmählich wieder an die losen Enden gewöhnen, sonst kommt ihr nie ins dritte Jahrtausend und werdet versauern in eurer fest verschnürten Europäischen Union.