pynchon, hoffman, goebbels & schlingensief

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

  the literature supplement of today's "frankfurter allgemeine zeitung" (faz) 
  opens up with a review of a - probably: pynchonesque - novel by a guy i've 
  never heard of though he has published before. his name is georg klein and the 
  book is titled "barbar rosa". it seems to be a kind of detective-novel and it 
  takes place in berlin. here come, in own translation, two passages from hubert 
  spiegel's review which do evoke the man by his name: 


 "one never knows who'll let the glas of water wander across the table next: 
thomas pynchon or e.t.a. hoffmann, joseph goebbels or christoph schlingensief."


 "klein's alleged detective-novel is a postmodern ghost-story in the romantic 
tradition of the phantastic story or the artist-novel. kurti's vice, mühler's 
preference for dirty sex, the fellinesque-disgusting women-figures like hella 
and her friend, bertini's fountains of pus, an atmosphere in which everything 
sexual streams out with a morbid, decadent or perverse fascination, - all this 
reminds the reader of the death-loving and death-addicted eros we know from 
thomas pynchon's great novel 'gravity's rainbow'. and of course the crash of the 
military airplane is a reference to pynchon, who lets the v2-rocket strike in 
wartime london always there where the american (second) lieutenant slothrop is 
be lying with a woman in bed."

                                  the review's last words are "a great novel".

georg klein: "barbar rosa. eine detektivgeschichte". 203 pages, 38- dtschmrks. 
berlin 2001: alexander fest verlag.


                                     guess i'll check this out: kfl