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Orkus #1
Der See
Paul Eck ist Vertreter für pharmazeutische Produkte. Überraschend erhält er einen Brief von seinem Vater, den er seit der Scheidung seiner Eltern nicht gesehen hat, den er nie wirklich kennengelernt hat. Der Vater lädt ihn ein zu einem Besuch am Neusiedler See. Trotz großer Vorbehalte macht sich der Sohn auf die Reise. Doch am Tag seines Eintreffens verschwindet der Vater spurlos, bevor die beiden sich begegnen. Es wird ein Bootsunfall auf dem See vermutet, dessen eigentümliche meteorologische und geographische Gegebenheiten berüchtigt sind. Der Sohn spürt seinem Vater nach und versucht, ihn – oder wenigstens seinen Leichnam – ausfindig zu machen. Er muß erkennen, daß sein Vater in allerlei dunkle Geschäfte und windige Vorhaben rund um den See verstrickt war. Bei den Anwohnern des Sees macht der Sohn sich mit den falschen Fragen zum falschen Zeitpunkt rasch unbeliebt, seine Suche wird keineswegs unterstützt, sondern nachdrücklich behindert.
Gerhard Roths handlungsreicher und suggestiv erzählter Roman nimmt Elemente der klassischen Detektivgeschichte auf. Sein angeschlagener Held – Eck ist tablettensüchtig – gerät in Verdacht, seinen Vater beseitigt zu haben. Als schließlich eine einzelne Hand aus dem See geborgen wird und die Polizei ihn ständig observiert, wird die Situation immer bedrohlicher. Alles steuert auf ein dramatisches Finale zu.
Gerhard Roths handlungsreicher und suggestiv erzählter Roman nimmt Elemente der klassischen Detektivgeschichte auf. Sein angeschlagener Held – Eck ist tablettensüchtig – gerät in Verdacht, seinen Vater beseitigt zu haben. Als schließlich eine einzelne Hand aus dem See geborgen wird und die Polizei ihn ständig observiert, wird die Situation immer bedrohlicher. Alles steuert auf ein dramatisches Finale zu.
235 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
28 people want to read
About the author
Gerhard Roth
93 books17 followersGerhard^Roth (this Austrian author)
Gerhard^^Roth (German Neurobiologist)
Gerhard^^^Roth (German travel guide books)
Gerhard Roth is perhaps the most important writer to emerge from that “hot-bed of geniuses,” the Forum Stadtpark, which has radically influenced German letters in the last two decades. His broad range of works, from experimental novels to plays and a children’s book, has earned him a number of major prizes, and several of his books have been filmed. An uncomfortable writer whose work revolves around extreme mental states and behaviour.
Gerhard^^Roth (German Neurobiologist)
Gerhard^^^Roth (German travel guide books)
Gerhard Roth is perhaps the most important writer to emerge from that “hot-bed of geniuses,” the Forum Stadtpark, which has radically influenced German letters in the last two decades. His broad range of works, from experimental novels to plays and a children’s book, has earned him a number of major prizes, and several of his books have been filmed. An uncomfortable writer whose work revolves around extreme mental states and behaviour.
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July 17, 2014Gerhard Roth is an Austrian author who started publishing in the 1970ies, and it is almost since then that I have wanted to read something by him. It took me over thirty years to finally get around to it – “gut Ding will Weile haben,” as the German saying goes, and while I’m not sure I would not have done just as well to have discovered his work earlier, I’m very glad that I finally did and will be busy catching up on what I have missed.
Roth’s best known work and chef d’oeuvre are two series of books, “Archive des Schweigens” and “Orkus” that consist not just of novels but also of collections of photography, of essays and an autobiography. That diversity of fiction and non-fiction as well as the tendency towards ambitious multi-volume works might remind one of William Vollmann (it definitely did me), but the resemblance is quite superficial and the two writers are very different in temperament. Where Vollmann is encyclopedic and sprawling, Roth keeps a narrow focus and is generally considerably more conventional – which does not mean that he’d not be doing interesting things both with content and form, quite to the contrary.
Der See is the first novel in Gerhard Roth’s “Orkus” series, a comparatively short novel (about 240 pages in the German original) that follows its protagonist Paul Eck over several days. At its heart, it is a mystery novel, although you’ll have to look twice to notice, as that heart is beating in a very unusual place. The vast majority of crime fiction is told from the perspective of the person attempting to solve the crime, a somewhat smaller portion from the perspective of the criminal, but Der See is the first mystery novel I have ever read that is told from the perspective of a red herring, i.e. one of those persons that invariably populate every mystery novel towards which the evidence points and who thus come under the suspicion of the detective (and often the reader) but in the end turn out to be innocent of the crime.
There are no less than three crimes Paul Eck seems involved in – a bank robbery gone violent, the discovery of corpse part at the shore of the lake around which the novel is for the most part set and the disappearance of Paul Eck’s father who was involved in some shady dealings and and to whom Paul has always had a strained relationship. The investigation into these crimes proceeds during the course of the novel and all of them are eventually solved, but all of that happens for the most part at the margin of Eck’s horizon of perception, brought to his notice only occasionally when a pesky detective convinced of his guilt keeps pestering him. During most of te novel for Eck as well as for the reader, the criminal investigation and the crime plot, respectively, are like a irritant buzzing just above the treshold of being audible, or a movement half-caught in the corner of one’s eye. What plays out in the foreground is Eck doing his day job – he is a travelling pharmeceutical salesman, and in that capacity visits a large number of doctors that he basically tries to bribe into prescribing his employer’s pharmaceuticals. I don’t know about other countries, but this is actually a common practice in Germany and apparently in Austria as well, and describing Eck’s tour gives the author ample occasion to vent his animosities towards the medical profession which are considerable (probably not a surprise if one is aware that Gerhard Roth at one time was studying medicine himself), resulting in some splendid satirical passages.
The protagonist’s profession is even more imporant for the novel in another regard: As the reader soon finds out, Eck is rather over-fond of sampling his company’s products and using his job to get at even more drugs (he steals prescreption blocks from the doctors he visits and then uses those to write fake prescriptions for himself). Almost every single of the novel’s 100 short chapters mentions at least once that Eck is downing some pills, and often flushes them down with alcohol, and as we experience events from a close third person perspective focused on him, his drug habit unavoidably begins to tinge the narrative. Roth’s writing throughout Der See is mostly sparse and restrained, reading almost like a report, but it is also brimming over with small, precise observations of often seemingly insignficant details. And time and again, the novel startles its readers by breaking unexpectedly into metaphorical flight, its words arranging itself into stunningly beautiful descriptions, like the flocks of birds that suddenly take from the ground to the sky and that form an imporant thematic tread of the novel. Spending his time mostly in a drug-induced haze, Paul Eck is a highly unreliable narrator, and with its oscillating between sober restraint and glimmering beauty the novel is sustains a weird, eerie atmosphere that pervades even the most trivial moments. It also constitues a hypnotic attraction that pulls the reader through the pages and makes what is essentially a very complex novel also an immensely readable one; even though it is a fairly slim I was surprised at just how soon arrived at the end. Thankfully, there are seven more volumes to the series (and even an English translation of this volume).
Roth’s best known work and chef d’oeuvre are two series of books, “Archive des Schweigens” and “Orkus” that consist not just of novels but also of collections of photography, of essays and an autobiography. That diversity of fiction and non-fiction as well as the tendency towards ambitious multi-volume works might remind one of William Vollmann (it definitely did me), but the resemblance is quite superficial and the two writers are very different in temperament. Where Vollmann is encyclopedic and sprawling, Roth keeps a narrow focus and is generally considerably more conventional – which does not mean that he’d not be doing interesting things both with content and form, quite to the contrary.
Der See is the first novel in Gerhard Roth’s “Orkus” series, a comparatively short novel (about 240 pages in the German original) that follows its protagonist Paul Eck over several days. At its heart, it is a mystery novel, although you’ll have to look twice to notice, as that heart is beating in a very unusual place. The vast majority of crime fiction is told from the perspective of the person attempting to solve the crime, a somewhat smaller portion from the perspective of the criminal, but Der See is the first mystery novel I have ever read that is told from the perspective of a red herring, i.e. one of those persons that invariably populate every mystery novel towards which the evidence points and who thus come under the suspicion of the detective (and often the reader) but in the end turn out to be innocent of the crime.
There are no less than three crimes Paul Eck seems involved in – a bank robbery gone violent, the discovery of corpse part at the shore of the lake around which the novel is for the most part set and the disappearance of Paul Eck’s father who was involved in some shady dealings and and to whom Paul has always had a strained relationship. The investigation into these crimes proceeds during the course of the novel and all of them are eventually solved, but all of that happens for the most part at the margin of Eck’s horizon of perception, brought to his notice only occasionally when a pesky detective convinced of his guilt keeps pestering him. During most of te novel for Eck as well as for the reader, the criminal investigation and the crime plot, respectively, are like a irritant buzzing just above the treshold of being audible, or a movement half-caught in the corner of one’s eye. What plays out in the foreground is Eck doing his day job – he is a travelling pharmeceutical salesman, and in that capacity visits a large number of doctors that he basically tries to bribe into prescribing his employer’s pharmaceuticals. I don’t know about other countries, but this is actually a common practice in Germany and apparently in Austria as well, and describing Eck’s tour gives the author ample occasion to vent his animosities towards the medical profession which are considerable (probably not a surprise if one is aware that Gerhard Roth at one time was studying medicine himself), resulting in some splendid satirical passages.
The protagonist’s profession is even more imporant for the novel in another regard: As the reader soon finds out, Eck is rather over-fond of sampling his company’s products and using his job to get at even more drugs (he steals prescreption blocks from the doctors he visits and then uses those to write fake prescriptions for himself). Almost every single of the novel’s 100 short chapters mentions at least once that Eck is downing some pills, and often flushes them down with alcohol, and as we experience events from a close third person perspective focused on him, his drug habit unavoidably begins to tinge the narrative. Roth’s writing throughout Der See is mostly sparse and restrained, reading almost like a report, but it is also brimming over with small, precise observations of often seemingly insignficant details. And time and again, the novel startles its readers by breaking unexpectedly into metaphorical flight, its words arranging itself into stunningly beautiful descriptions, like the flocks of birds that suddenly take from the ground to the sky and that form an imporant thematic tread of the novel. Spending his time mostly in a drug-induced haze, Paul Eck is a highly unreliable narrator, and with its oscillating between sober restraint and glimmering beauty the novel is sustains a weird, eerie atmosphere that pervades even the most trivial moments. It also constitues a hypnotic attraction that pulls the reader through the pages and makes what is essentially a very complex novel also an immensely readable one; even though it is a fairly slim I was surprised at just how soon arrived at the end. Thankfully, there are seven more volumes to the series (and even an English translation of this volume).
January 5, 2016
With The Lake, Gerhard Roth takes the classic crime novel and runs it through a meat grinder. The loose, disjointed plot centers on Paul Eck, a disillusioned pharmaceutical salesman who receives a letter from his long-estranged father inviting him on a fishing expedition. The arrival of the letter unleashes a rush of horrid memories and associations into Eck’s already fragile headspace. What follows is a series of brutal crimes that may or may not be connected and appear to involve Eck in at the very least a tangential way. Throughout the course of the novel, Eck attempts to “investigate” these crimes while popping an ever-changing cocktail of his own company’s products with increasing regularity, as well as swiping prescription pads and stamps from the doctors he visits on sales calls in order to acquire pills outside his own stock. While the narrative is told in third person, it follows Eck closely, and so much of what the reader experiences is filtered through his drug-addled mind.
Full review here.
September 3, 2013
paul eck erhält nach über 30 jahren eine einladung seines vaters zu einer segeltour am neusiedler see. die er verpasst. um dann festzustellen, dass sein vater vermisst und er bereits verdächtiger ist...
gerhard roth und ich. eine ganz neue liebe. wie schon bei "der plan" war ich von anfang an nicht nur in der geschichte, sondern irgendwie auch in der hauptfigur drin. irgendwie spannend und auch verstörend. gerhard roth beleuchtet das normale aus der sicht eines am rand des wahnsinns stehenden. oder umgekehrt?
gerhard roth und ich. eine ganz neue liebe. wie schon bei "der plan" war ich von anfang an nicht nur in der geschichte, sondern irgendwie auch in der hauptfigur drin. irgendwie spannend und auch verstörend. gerhard roth beleuchtet das normale aus der sicht eines am rand des wahnsinns stehenden. oder umgekehrt?
August 2, 2022
Die Suche nach dem verschwundenen, vielleicht verunglückten oder sogar ermordeten Vater und die Erinnerungen an eine belastende Familiengeschichte entfalten sich vor dem Hintergrund einer ebenso belastenden kollektiven Vergangenheit, die in die Gegenwart hineinwirkt. Fremdenfeindlichkeit, die in einem rechtspopulistischen Jungpolitiker Sprachrohr und Verstärker findet, Waffenschmuggel ins kriegsgeschüttelte Jugoslawien und Gewaltverbrechen sind die äußeren Symptome einer tiefenpsychologischen Zerrüttung, die ihren Ursprung unmissverständlich in der Verlassenschaft des Dritten Reiches haben. Auch die Landschaft des Neusiedlersees ist keine alpenländische Idylle, sondern ein aus dem biologischen Gleichgewicht gebrachter Sumpf, in dem sich Insekten und Aale tummeln. Bezeichnend ist der Blick des Protagonisten auf die Seebühne von Mörbisch, der ernüchternd von hinten auf die Operettenkulisse (Österreichs?) fällt. Ist die Tablettensucht des Antihelden ein Hinweis darauf, dass man das alles ohnehin nur im Nebel des Rausches verdauen kann, und sei es auch nur berauscht von der sprachlichen und erzähltechnischen Meisterleistung Gerhard Roths.
August 24, 2019
An interesting experience to read a book which is so close to oneself in time (the main character is the same generation as I, actually I was rather astonished to see that the author is another) and in place (though I live - and lived at that time - in Salzburg) - being so near to the plot, feeling reminded of the war in Bosnia, the people (a mercenary in Austria? - yes, at that time one could get to know one). And it makes me wonder if I miss half of the contents when I read an American or even English book because I do not know half of the background.
March 27, 2019
Reminded me of Simenon. But darker, even. More disorienting.
October 3, 2021
Wirr…
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews