Bricks and Mortar (Clemens Meyer)

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Clemens Meyer's second novel /Im Stein/ will be published in the English 
translation of Katy Derbyshire early in October. It's a very good novel 
I can recommend to anyone interested in the transformation process that 
took place in East Germany during the 1990s.

 > Originally published by S. Fischer Verlag and shortlisted for the 
German Book Prize in 2013, Bricks and Mortar tells the stories of men 
and women in the sex trade and charts the development of the industry 
from absolute prohibition to full legality in the twenty years following 
the reunification of Germany. The narratives emerge from the underbelly 
of a fictionalised Leipzig in the former GDR, from just before 1989 to 
the present day, and focus on the rise and fall of one man from football 
hooligan to large-scale landlord and service-provider for prostitutes, 
to, ultimately, a man persecuted by those he once trusted. But we also 
hear other voices: many different women who work in prostitution, their 
clients, small-time gangsters, an ex-jockey searching for his 
drug-addict daughter, a businessman from the West, a girl forced into 
child prostitution, a detective, a pirate radio presenter...In essence, 
Bricks and Mortar is a socio-economic portrait of the East German sex 
industry, a branch that grew out of nothing post-1989. Clemens Meyer 
pays homage to modernist, East German and contemporary writers like 
Alfred Doblin, Wolfgang Hilbig and David Peace but uses his own style 
and almost hallucinatory techniques. Time shifts and stretches, people 
die and come to life again, and Meyer takes his characters seriously and 
challenges his readers in this dizzying eye-opening novel that also 
finds inspiration in the films of Russ Meyer, Takashi Miike, Gaspar Noe 
and David Lynch. 'Meyer employs a number of the techniques from his 
previous writing here, sharp cuts or stream of consciousness, switching 
perspectives or making us reel with his characters as the ground falls 
away beneath their feet,' writes Katy Derbyshire, the novel's British 
translator. 'At times he reinvents modernism; snatches of song and 
conversation, wandering thoughts in the city - very Doblinesque. And he 
blatantly ignores the rules of reality, physics and even writing, to 
produce literature that nonetheless feels utterly true to life. Dreams 
never dreamt, conversations never held, dances never danced, dead men's 
thoughts. All these things that worked so well in his debut novel, Als 
wir traumten, and in his short stories that I translated as All the 
Lights, and in the diary-form collection Gewalten, come together here in 
an almost overwhelming structure. Meyer skips back and forth in time but 
propels us along as Arnold Kraushaar ages. He has buried mysteries in 
his bedrock, which we can trace as the story moves on. But they're not 
the driving force of this style-led novel.' <

http://bookshop.theguardian.com/catalog/product/view/id/436958/

"Jetzt, wo seit Jahren immer diese ganzen Jubiläen sind, dieses ganze 
Abgefeier mit Abgeseier wegen der Wende und der Neuerschaffung 
Deutschlands, da denk ich oft daran, was das eigentlich für 'ne Welt da 
drüben war, damals. Ich meine, jetzt verfällt der Pott hier endgültig, 
mehr Stein als Sein, und im Osten glänzen die Investpaläste, aber damals 
waren wir die Einzigen, die da geglänzt haben. Die Häuser waren da 
teilweise so runter, dass ich gesagt habe, wenn wir da irgendwo 'n 
Zimmer hatten, wo die Mädels die Kunden abmelken konnten: 'Macht nicht 
so dolle, sonst sitzt ihr im Keller mit dem Bett.' Ja, so war das. Ich 
meine, die richtig großen Geschäfte waren ja damals mit der Treuhand zu 
machen, wir waren da eher so Marke Handbetrieb."

Clemens Meyer: /Im Stein/, pp. 418-419


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