[ كتاب مقترح من Incentives ] Klara Grün, paleontology student, buses tables at the Viennese coffeehouse Neugröschl, a meeting place for schemers, dreamers, inventors and explorers. Here’s where everything comes together, here’s where Verena Roßbacher’s novel “Verlangen nach Drachen” begins. A dense, polyphonic novel about transformations, memories, entanglements, relationships and disturbances; a wonderfully funny, fantastic, outlandish debut that is also smart, thoughtful and serious. A novel in seven chapters about Klara and her men, about how attraction ignites and is extinguished, about the intoxication of falling in love and the sobering moment “when you realize, you were wrong.”

In the memories of the men who were left, who give voice to their pain, their grief and their anger, Klara appears as a mysterious, strange, fairy-tale figure, “beautiful to the limits of the tolerable,” sometimes Lulu, sometimes Lolita, femme fatale or innocent country bumpkin, sometimes cruel and callous, sometimes affectionate and perceptive.

For each of the men, Klara is someone else, and always an enigma. All of them – and with them the reader – remain caught in their respective personal, almost autistic, perspectives. This limitation obscures the plot’s logic as well as the temporal structure. On a formal level, it mirrors the lovers’ lack of empathy and mutual understanding. The failure of their relationships is due, in the final analysis, to insurmountable communication problems. Only images and memories remain, and even these change.

This insight feeds the figures’ longing for eternity, for enduring happiness – their yearning for the dragon, because it “conquered all – it escaped from its era and shall continue to grow [...] and live forever.” A hubristic wish, monstrous, like Roßbacher’s novel: another Recherche, a novel about the search for lost time, and for time yet to be won.

Review by Martina Wunderer, March 2009. English translation by Laura Radosh.
Complete version: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=7483

[ معلومات ] Roßbacher, Verena: Verlangen nach Drachen. (original language: Deutsch) Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln, 2009 . ISBN: 978-3-462-04097-5.