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Freuden der Jagd
Auf der Flucht vor einer immer komplexer, immer unverständlicher werdenden Welt begibt sich ein Mann in den Wald, direkt auf das Terrain einfacher Wahrheiten und altbewährter, fundamentalistischer – sprich: sexistischer, rassistischer und religiöser Positionen. Sein Weg zum finsteren Herzen des Waldes, da er mit sich und der Welt in Einklang zu leben hofft, entwickelt sich immer mehr zum Höllentrip in die Abgründe der menschlichen Seele. Links und rechts des Weges harren seiner Abenteuer von manchmal märchenhaften, manchmal mythischen, selten banalen Ausprägungen. Philosophische Überlegungen, etwa die Praxis der Jagd betreffend, sind ihm Mittel zur Erbauung, doch über den Umweg der Sprache, in die er seine Gedanken zu kleiden versucht, hält der zersetzende Virus der Komplexität wieder Einzug in seinen Geist und zieht ihm vollends den Boden unter den Füßen weg. Orientierungslos in einer fragmentierten Welt wird er wohl noch ewig und drei Tage lang im Kreis herumwandern müssen, ohne jede Aussicht auf Erlösung, ohne die kleinste Verschnaufpause, ohne Halt.
1100 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
i-want-money
September 14, 2018Trans LATE Pleeze!!!
[yes yes, just because it's 1100 pages and noone nowhere nohow's ever heard of it]
The only thing's been written about it ::
"Dicht und licht"
https://www.nzz.ch/dicht_und_licht-1....
oh and hey! an audio interview with our Autor ::
https://soundcloud.com/litradio/sets/...
[yes yes, just because it's 1100 pages and noone nowhere nohow's ever heard of it]
The only thing's been written about it ::
"Dicht und licht"
https://www.nzz.ch/dicht_und_licht-1....
oh and hey! an audio interview with our Autor ::
https://soundcloud.com/litradio/sets/...
January 11, 2023
It‘s July 2022, 13 years have passed since the publication of Schlotmann‘s „Die Freuden der Jagd“ (2009). Yet somehow I feel like I‘m the one & only reader who is plowing through this chunk of a novel. No reviews on Amazon, no reviews on Goodreads. Oh, there are reviews on blogs, in newspapers, 2, 3, maybe 4, supposedly from critics, and that‘s pretty much it. Evidence points in the direction that this novel was forgotten & buried before it even took one single breath of fresh air. As far as I’m concerned, Engeler, the editor, printed less than a thousand - maybe around 700 - copies of this book, & 13 years later you still can get it directly from the publisher. It’s not out of print, it’s simply not bought & read at all. Reasons? Sure, there are a lot of reasons, good reasons:
As of posting this early review, I‘m on page 301 of almost 1100 pages. (Update: I have completed the book in August of 2022 & have subsequently updates the review.) It took me weeks of reading & jotting down notes, it also took an immense amount of patience to get that far. Not that I wouldn‘t enjoy it - oh boy, do I enjoy it. Still, it is daunting, challenging, excessive to the max. Compare it to Joyce, David Foster Wallace, or Arno Schmidt if you want. It‘s 1100 pages of text without paragraph breaks, basically without any plot & without any continuity or progression or chronological order. It‘s just variations of the same theme over & over again, a man going into the forest and encountering something, whether it is in the actual thicket or the thicket of his mind. Luckily, there are chapter breaks, but other than that it‘s pure excess, no easy parts, not a few lines that you would want to skip, since you‘ll get lost in the wood so easily, like the man who … once does. Lose your concentration for 5 lines & you‘ll start over with the page, read it again. This is basically what reading this book comes down to: reading a few sentences or even a page, again and again, trying to follow the flow of thoughts, trying to follow the free associations, that get you from theme A to theme B to theme C, then back to theme A, further on to theme D … you‘ll get the idea. Yes, for me it‘s all about solving the complete chain of thoughts, of getting into the head of the man who …, to think how he thinks, to make the same connections he does. Read this way, it certainly isn‘t relaxation. You don‘t read it for the plot - since there is none -, you read it for intellectual stimulation, you read it for having that awkward other experience only so few novels can give you.
„Die Freuden der Jagd“ starts off pretty manageable. A few lines of text per chapter at first, then the chapters become longer & longer, more complex. At page 243, the chapters are mostly 5-7 pages long. That doesn‘t seem too bad. Well, try following the chain of thought, try making a list of major themes for every chapter/scene/sketch. It‘s a heck of a challenge. If you have lots of books on your queue & book towers keep growing over your head, you probably don‘t want to read this one. It will take you weeks at least, maybe months, if you take it seriously, as you won’t read a hundred pages in one go, not even 50. It will consume all of your patience. Yet it is so rewarding. And it‘s somewhat beautiful, an intertwined path leading you through the otherworldly (but sometimes so familiar) wild, intertwined because you keep stumbling upon images or themes you’ve read about hundreds of pages before, time after time. It‘s like being in a wood for hours on end & suddenly seeing this one tree you think you‘ve come across before.
One of the other reviewers called the construction of the sentences, the language overall, a Sprachwald (Neue Züricher Zeitung), a language forest. Indeed, it‘s exactly that. There are so many hollow phrases shoved into every sentence, there’s so much Verbalmüll (Kiefer's term), verbal debris & waste, there‘s so sparse interpunction, there are page-long parentheses, paratactic constructions that reach about 7 layers deep, so that after the sentence extends to a whole page you have no clue where the sentence started or even what it was about in the beginning. Another specificity the text offers is its unique style of mixing a 1st and 3rd person narrative, switching within a sentence, back and forth:
Der Mann der in den Wald (hinein)geht – ihm sind (allein) über (ein)hundert (verschiedene) Arten von Schnee bekannt – „Pappschnee (etwa) zähle ich dazu“ – und die div. Termini – „sprich: die zu diesen (verschiedenen) Arten von Schnee passenden Namen“ – sind ihm ebenso geläufig. (Die Freuden der Jagd, p. 9.)
If you don‘t try to write an academic paper or a summary about it, you can easily let yourself drift, maybe really, thoroughly enjoy all of its glory, like the man who goes into the wood does, when he submerges in the depth of the forest and lets himself just drift, nothing more than that, nothing less, just drift. Yes, there‘s a beauty to it.
Nevertheless, there are ugly thoughts, ugly images, there‘s ugly language. Explicit language, explicit content. Racism, homophobia, misogyny. It‘s just part of what the man who … is. We have to take him for that, even if it makes us sick to the stomach.
So there are chapters, right, at the beginning manageable, brief, offering us clear sight, then getting more & more challenging, becoming a foggy forest itself. Closer to the end, chapters can take up to 50 pages, which will take everything you got. But is it even a novel? Engeler, the editor, doesn‘t even think of it as one, at least questions it, as an interview shows us. Again, there‘s no progression, no overarching narrative, it‘s all about the variation of a theme. And about the wood the man who … visits. Subsequently, you‘ll find chapters about mushrooms, sure, or about animals. Chapters about a mysterious yeti-like being in the sinister heart of the forest, or about a fantasy the man who … has: about happening upon a djinn in the wood, who grants 3 wishes, yet somehow tricks the man, all without even happening. And since the man who … is the medium (mostly), we see much of it through his lenses. There’s a stream-of-consciousness-like quality, so it‘s also about the man who …, probably even psychogeographical in its attempts. At last, it’s also a book about all the things getting carried into the wood from the outside world, our world, since we carry our thoughts with us wherever we may roam, so that the somehow autonomous world of the wood gets intermingled with all that externals. Yes, there‘s a lot in this book, just no narrative thread to follow, no narrative thread that gets you safely in & out of this Sprachwald like it got Theseus out of the labyrinth of the minotaur (another mythos that gets referenced in the book).
As demanding as it is, it is quantitatively not only one of the biggest works in german fiction - as I said, it‘s around 1100 pages long, which are printed in extra-wide format -, it‘s also one of the most interesting ones, primarily because of its radical uniqueness. Its uniqueness however does & will not appeal to the majority of readers, & even if it appeals to one or the other, he or she will hardly go so far as to read 1100 densely woven pages of this text, as 300 pages give you a good idea. Having almost no audience of course is a shame, although somehow inevitable in this case. If we remember right, many of the greatest novels of all time have been neglected before they became acknowledged. But if we just let it fade, wither away, it does exactly that, or to be constant with the imagery: gets lost in the wood.
(Please forgive any grammatical imperfections since I am not a native English speaker. Nevertheless, I want to give readers a chance to read about topics & books they would otherwise not have a chance to read about.)
As of posting this early review, I‘m on page 301 of almost 1100 pages. (Update: I have completed the book in August of 2022 & have subsequently updates the review.) It took me weeks of reading & jotting down notes, it also took an immense amount of patience to get that far. Not that I wouldn‘t enjoy it - oh boy, do I enjoy it. Still, it is daunting, challenging, excessive to the max. Compare it to Joyce, David Foster Wallace, or Arno Schmidt if you want. It‘s 1100 pages of text without paragraph breaks, basically without any plot & without any continuity or progression or chronological order. It‘s just variations of the same theme over & over again, a man going into the forest and encountering something, whether it is in the actual thicket or the thicket of his mind. Luckily, there are chapter breaks, but other than that it‘s pure excess, no easy parts, not a few lines that you would want to skip, since you‘ll get lost in the wood so easily, like the man who … once does. Lose your concentration for 5 lines & you‘ll start over with the page, read it again. This is basically what reading this book comes down to: reading a few sentences or even a page, again and again, trying to follow the flow of thoughts, trying to follow the free associations, that get you from theme A to theme B to theme C, then back to theme A, further on to theme D … you‘ll get the idea. Yes, for me it‘s all about solving the complete chain of thoughts, of getting into the head of the man who …, to think how he thinks, to make the same connections he does. Read this way, it certainly isn‘t relaxation. You don‘t read it for the plot - since there is none -, you read it for intellectual stimulation, you read it for having that awkward other experience only so few novels can give you.
„Die Freuden der Jagd“ starts off pretty manageable. A few lines of text per chapter at first, then the chapters become longer & longer, more complex. At page 243, the chapters are mostly 5-7 pages long. That doesn‘t seem too bad. Well, try following the chain of thought, try making a list of major themes for every chapter/scene/sketch. It‘s a heck of a challenge. If you have lots of books on your queue & book towers keep growing over your head, you probably don‘t want to read this one. It will take you weeks at least, maybe months, if you take it seriously, as you won’t read a hundred pages in one go, not even 50. It will consume all of your patience. Yet it is so rewarding. And it‘s somewhat beautiful, an intertwined path leading you through the otherworldly (but sometimes so familiar) wild, intertwined because you keep stumbling upon images or themes you’ve read about hundreds of pages before, time after time. It‘s like being in a wood for hours on end & suddenly seeing this one tree you think you‘ve come across before.
One of the other reviewers called the construction of the sentences, the language overall, a Sprachwald (Neue Züricher Zeitung), a language forest. Indeed, it‘s exactly that. There are so many hollow phrases shoved into every sentence, there’s so much Verbalmüll (Kiefer's term), verbal debris & waste, there‘s so sparse interpunction, there are page-long parentheses, paratactic constructions that reach about 7 layers deep, so that after the sentence extends to a whole page you have no clue where the sentence started or even what it was about in the beginning. Another specificity the text offers is its unique style of mixing a 1st and 3rd person narrative, switching within a sentence, back and forth:
Der Mann der in den Wald (hinein)geht – ihm sind (allein) über (ein)hundert (verschiedene) Arten von Schnee bekannt – „Pappschnee (etwa) zähle ich dazu“ – und die div. Termini – „sprich: die zu diesen (verschiedenen) Arten von Schnee passenden Namen“ – sind ihm ebenso geläufig. (Die Freuden der Jagd, p. 9.)
If you don‘t try to write an academic paper or a summary about it, you can easily let yourself drift, maybe really, thoroughly enjoy all of its glory, like the man who goes into the wood does, when he submerges in the depth of the forest and lets himself just drift, nothing more than that, nothing less, just drift. Yes, there‘s a beauty to it.
Nevertheless, there are ugly thoughts, ugly images, there‘s ugly language. Explicit language, explicit content. Racism, homophobia, misogyny. It‘s just part of what the man who … is. We have to take him for that, even if it makes us sick to the stomach.
So there are chapters, right, at the beginning manageable, brief, offering us clear sight, then getting more & more challenging, becoming a foggy forest itself. Closer to the end, chapters can take up to 50 pages, which will take everything you got. But is it even a novel? Engeler, the editor, doesn‘t even think of it as one, at least questions it, as an interview shows us. Again, there‘s no progression, no overarching narrative, it‘s all about the variation of a theme. And about the wood the man who … visits. Subsequently, you‘ll find chapters about mushrooms, sure, or about animals. Chapters about a mysterious yeti-like being in the sinister heart of the forest, or about a fantasy the man who … has: about happening upon a djinn in the wood, who grants 3 wishes, yet somehow tricks the man, all without even happening. And since the man who … is the medium (mostly), we see much of it through his lenses. There’s a stream-of-consciousness-like quality, so it‘s also about the man who …, probably even psychogeographical in its attempts. At last, it’s also a book about all the things getting carried into the wood from the outside world, our world, since we carry our thoughts with us wherever we may roam, so that the somehow autonomous world of the wood gets intermingled with all that externals. Yes, there‘s a lot in this book, just no narrative thread to follow, no narrative thread that gets you safely in & out of this Sprachwald like it got Theseus out of the labyrinth of the minotaur (another mythos that gets referenced in the book).
As demanding as it is, it is quantitatively not only one of the biggest works in german fiction - as I said, it‘s around 1100 pages long, which are printed in extra-wide format -, it‘s also one of the most interesting ones, primarily because of its radical uniqueness. Its uniqueness however does & will not appeal to the majority of readers, & even if it appeals to one or the other, he or she will hardly go so far as to read 1100 densely woven pages of this text, as 300 pages give you a good idea. Having almost no audience of course is a shame, although somehow inevitable in this case. If we remember right, many of the greatest novels of all time have been neglected before they became acknowledged. But if we just let it fade, wither away, it does exactly that, or to be constant with the imagery: gets lost in the wood.
(Please forgive any grammatical imperfections since I am not a native English speaker. Nevertheless, I want to give readers a chance to read about topics & books they would otherwise not have a chance to read about.)
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews