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Zu einer Anthologie gehören auch Autoren, die in ihrer Zeit populär waren aber heute nicht mehr relevant sind. Nach der Selektion gehören für mich Brentano, Kerner, Uhland, Rückert, von Eichendorff und von Platen dazu. Von Eichendorff fällt auf mit seiner dunklen Grundstimmung. Rückert und Kerner haben je ein Gedicht mit einer vglw. modernen Aussage.

Schiller, Novalis und besonders Hölderlin überfordern mich. Da war Goethe doch mehr geradeaus. Die drei sind mir zu antikisierend, zu romantisch, zu poetisch. Schillers Bürgschaft mit dem Dritten im Bunde ist eine Ausnahme und der Sonnenuntergang von Hölderlin ist kurz genug, um in seiner Wortgewalt auch mich zu erreichen.

The narrator has an almost child-like tone of indoctrination. To the reader, the validity of the renegades position is obvious. The collectives correspond to filter bubbles. Communication with the outside has become rare after limiting the net regionally. In between the collective and the renegades is a bunch of lost ganja smokers. Too much unreflected drug usage as in Allegro Pastell. Drugs are not normal, Leif.

There's something wrong from the beginning with the collectives. What is supposed to be a stimulating competition in a peaceful environment, is a begrudging balance of power. The protagonists are rather ideas than characters. Worthwhile insights are foreshadowed but never materialize.
Does Randt intend his characters and the ideas to be so annoying? I already had this issue with Allegro Pastell.

Started with the glossary on the last 30 pages. World-building. Curious mix of SF and social fiction. Different factions on six different inhabited planets in one solar system compete for the perfect lifestyle. An AI is taking all decisions in the name of peace and prosperity. The concept reminds me of Lessing's Shikasta with feminism replaced by hedonism.

Galgut is a traveller out of anxiety. He moves because he has no connection with his environment. He is afraid and has a fear of dying (DeLillo?). He is hardly ever happy where he is. He's never going towards something but away.
Each travel starts at a point, not necessarily the start. The outside world flows inside. Weather reflects mood, landscape stands for feeling, everything turns into metaphor.

An intended death gone haywire, a premature death avoided, a foreseeable death not happening. Instead a romantic ending of chemical sunsets and supermarkets taking care. My initial WTF reaction gave way to accepting the need for such an absurd finale.

Babette has an affair to get an experimental drug against the fear of dying. Jack is more interested in getting to try the drug himself than jealous. Things get more interesting.
White Noise is best in the small observations and thoughts. Brillant people destroying others with their brillancy. Reaching an age of unreliable menace. Technology with a human face.
Panasonic.

What do we know when catastrophe strikes? What can we do when civilization fails? How do we react? Right-wing preppers do their own. Believing every shit from the national enquirer. Hoarding in a supermarket (for bad weather admittedly). DeLillo couldn't know but we've been there. Feels almost uninspired nowadays. Or is it all a simulation (SIMUVAC)?

Jack is creator and head of Hitler studies. Hitler was a massive creator of white noise with all the parades and orchestrations. They share a building with American environment studies, i.e. pop culture studies. Faculty discusses what they did when James Dean died. Family conversations are meandering white noise. Babette's medicine makes her forget. Wilder cries six hours. TV news & shopping producing white noise.

A mother being allergic to everything artificial. The relation of art and artificial. She is dreaming of people staring into lighted boxes showing photos of her life (narration probably takes place in the 80s). Father has disappeared after revamping the house to being completely natural. He disdained representation by photography instead of perception of life. Nickel shifts gear from talking art to sending message.

I'm torn between enjoying the intellectual banter and shaking my head about high-school graduates talking in the voice of a mid-fifties aesthete.

It's a rewarding challenge following Nickel's thoughts even when he skips in a professional article about the benefits of anonymity in arts as a lecture by Carl into the book. But how many teenagers know about Tieck and his Shakespeare translation.

The opposite of Strunk whom I just read. Mannered, ars gratia artis. The protagonist's friend is called Carl. For Spitzweg? Each description finely chiselled. Detailed talk about Chopin's Nocturnes among teenagers. Still looking for the irony.

An atypical escape from the daily grind into mediocrity is the success recipe for a summer in Niendorf. It's built from coarse blocks and simple common language. Too straightforward for my liking. A quick read on the beach in summer. Maybe while desperate somewhere in a 70'ish relict resort on the coast of the Baltic Sea.

What a coincidence. Niendorf makes headlines today in Germany as a whale is stranded there on a sandbank.
Strunk gives us Germany in all its mediocrity. Despite their circumstances, people mostly enjoy themselves and are happy. Or maybe, because of them? All is pointing toward Roth accepting mediocrity and banality in the end.

"The kindest thing you can say about life. It is not nothing."
Even war-torn Sri Lanka can be beautiful once past all the hate. All what remains of Maali's photo exhibition after death, are the perfect 10's, the beautiful photos. His war photography was a pointless cause. Nothing wrong with living a life of pointless causes as long they lead into the light.

Hate, plot, kill. Hate, plot, kill. Hate, plot, kill. The puppets change. Some actors become puppets. Always the same few people behind the scenes. The length of the book hammers in the repetition without adding anything new.

The evil that men do. The worst are on top. The minister gets his torturers trained by the CIA. Policemen have to cover up crimes instead of resolving them. Arms dealers cover up as journalists and NGO employees. The opposing Tamil forces kill moderate Tamils. The communist JVP has got eradicated between the fronts and India's involvement makes things worse by selfish motives and applying the same means as others.

Nakath is the Sri Lankan version of aligning actions with the stars. 1948, the year Sri Lanka was founded, must have been a bad year considering the mess it is in 1990 and has been for a long time. Other countries founded in 1948: North Korea, Myanmar, Israel and South Korea.

Didn't know how derogatory the Sri Lankan flag is to its minorities (tamils, muslims with the pseudo-inclusion of the stripes on the left.

First moon gone. Maali is getting familiar with the administrative hassle of the in-between of life and death and starts investigating his murder.

I read this as it won the Booker but it's a great way to get a glimpse of Sri Lanka's troubled history in the 80's and 90's. The premise of Maali revisiting places of his life as a ghost works surprisingly well thanks to the author's conception of the in-between.

I was surprised to learn that Bisnaga is based on the real nearly forgotten Vijayanagara empire which existed against the odds during the time Victory City is taking place. There were real kings behind the fictitious kings in the novel. This is historical magical fantasy fiction realism.

A fairy tale of juxtapositions, morals and lists.
- Religious zealots vs. non-believers, women vs. men, prudery vs. sensuality, warriors vs. peace.
- Golden times come with a united tolerant society, egoisms divide and lead the way down.
- Lists of revolutionaries, of the traits of a good ruler, of ways to approach a foe, of ways history has happened.

A storyteller passing on a tale for adults about an empire in South India in the 14th century. The colourful descriptions are the star of Victory City. How a 9 yr old girl becomes the voice of a goddess to put a stop to wifes following their dead men on the pyre and to get men to listen to women.

But where is power, there is corruption. Fear of loss and selfishness are the seeds of decline.

Again got the German translation by mistake. Like recently Franzen's Crossroads. Like Quichotte, the last Rushdie I read. I have to be more careful with my purchases, especially when the title stays the same in the German translation.

The road to paradise is paradise. Once arrived in Garden Eden, you discover, it is not paradise. Music on the way can be inspiration when it meets fertile soil.
Finally, Utopia Avenue is trademark Mitchell with the horologists discovering the link between Jacob and Jasper almost 200 years later. Knock Knock gets a name.

Stays in the mold of historical fiction. No deeper insights, no challenging literary means. Just narrating life as it was or could have been. But highly entertaining in an interesting period and place. Structuring it into LP sides for the parts and titles for the chapters is a nice idea.
Utopia Avenue is seeing success after Dean's return from an Italian prison and they are reaching for the top. I root for them.

The integration into the Mitchell-verse elevates it. The incorporeal Mongolian and the DJ Bat Segundo from Ghostwritten, Jasper de Zoet as descendant of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, the obscure compositions of Robert Frobisher from Cloud Atlas reappearing.
Add to this cameos of more or less known VIPs. Levon Frankland just had a gay night with Francis Bacon in the Colony Room of Muriel Belcher.

The band got its record deal, the first single just hit Top of the Pops. Jasper talks with Brian Jones about voices in the head. Jimmy Savile is creepy as hell. Utopia Avenue leads to the epicenter of the Swinging Sixties.
The characters are workable, so far they are on their heroes' journey. The breaking points are designated though. The immaterial being in the head of Jasper being the most noteable.

I wouldn't read historical fiction about a band's fate in the late 60's if it weren't by Mitchell. I love his first books up to The Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Since then, they are good but not special. Utopia Avenue is the least fantastic so far. Still, different viewpoints (3 of the musicians). Entertaining but I am hoping for more depth and inventiveness to come.

There are these rare scenes that burst open the doors of imagination. That compensate for the childish tone of Klara. I even can forgive the "and the sun" part owing to them. The reveal of the painter plan was one of them. The final scene in the yard another. So much contained and not spoken out in these scenes.