Why are we together? This is a mysterious, difficult question. “We” are in the new novel by the Swiss author Martin R. Dean, by the way, a whole lot. A series of imperfect pairs has made its appearance, a circle of friends, in which it is not always handled in a friendly way.
The a glorify your of jealous dramas accompanied the page jumps to the contemporary polyamory, such as the sex-addicted chief physician Axel, in times of engine suspension regular alcohol to decay threatens. With his African-American wife, Ona he collects, so to speak, “erotic capital”. Both “marriage is like a company that wants to IPO”. Until They destroyed the note, a suicide attempt. Others are trying to bring the feeling of turbulence under total control, like the rich, opaque Anatol. He has fixed his marriage with the artist Annette down to the smallest Detail: “Our marriage is based on a complex set of agreements, such as the EU, the treaties of Rome.”
The different deficiencies exert binding force
at All is Anatol, a man of flamboyant projects. Turn of the Millennium, he buys an abandoned Hotel on the edge of the city. Each of the friends is to be found in this future laboratory, which he called “Sanssouci”, his place and his workshop. The synergy flows, but only sparsely, rather, the Hotel serves as a retreat in the variety of relationship crises. Without worry from.
Careless man, however, is in the material sense. The ensemble of characters, among other things, an architect, a therapist, a television presenter, a media theorist, Bioengineering, and to drive Porsche, Maserati, or Alfa Romeo. Maybe these Swiss Saturation of the living conditions is a prerequisite in order to develop a General crisis of consciousness: “are We going to unstable times,” Anatol at the beginning; two decades later the phrase is still just as valid.
Martin R. Dean was born in 1955; his father was a doctor from Trinidad. In Switzerland, it is established, to discover in Germany. The best with this novel. He is convinced by subtle psychological narrative art which has a sense of delicate situations and weird moments. The question of what couples are together, he can not answer, of course. The above relations give the impression it was maybe just the different shortcomings, which have a binding force. For example, in the successful TV-presenter, Bea and the free music journalist, Finn, gets hardly any orders for years at a Bob-Dylan-biography works. He sits at home, admired his wife on TV and is jealous and frustrated when they cancel appointments because of her professional background is something in between. Rumors of violence in the relationship.
all are already in the middle of the novel is pretty plucked. Talking of future-oriented ideas, you must screw in the everyday life of the claim but back. Like Marc, the architect who does not deserve his money with the hybrid project for a “world garden of the future”, but, for example, with the design of “age-friendly fitness facilities” retirement home “Under the trees”.
The author has his hero in your marriage-misery
The marriage of Marc and the Translator Irma gets flip side, when Irma learns that her best friend Evelyne has an affair with her just-year-old son, Matti. That Marc does not share your outrage, is due to the fact that he has also with Evelyne slept. After the unveiling, the sex goes out the life of the couple. A sneaky irony would have it, Irma is just to transfer the new work of the French star author Dupral into German, a novel full of pornography. “The work was a torment. Dupral you led just now in the most luxuriant growths of sexual debauchery … In the German sounded this dirty expressions silly and embarrassing.“ For subtle Comedy, mismatches and the contrasts, there is always. Here is a diverse, well-read author in the work, without the narration is overloaded, because Dean leaves the formation of his characters. The narrator recedes behind you, is never before with interpretations, but the characters themselves are constantly Laying their lives busy. Sometimes you could evaluate this narrative Discreteness almost as denied assistance. The author does not back up its hero in your marriage-misery more often!
But just in the play of perspectives, not in a narrative omniscience about Couple of problems, the appeal of this novel and of its dialogues, which are reminiscent of early society comedies of Botho Strauß. A smart reading pleasure.
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New book on lifelong love For always. And, of course, for forever
Claudia Seiring
Martin R. Dean: Why are we together. Roman. Jung und Jung, Salzburg, 2019. 360 pages, 24 €.
