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[ book tip by Incentives ] ‘Indigo children’ were once regarded as an esoteric promise of salvation: children with special spiritual qualities who were thought to herald the arrival of higher beings on Earth. All that remains of such utopias in Setz’s new novel Indigo is a heap of rubble: in it ‘indigos’ are children whose presence causes severe nausea, headaches, disorientation, in the long run even damage to organs; their initially unsuspecting mothers vomit as soon as they bend over their cradles.
Clemens Setz is the name of the first-person narrator in Setz’s novel, and he is starting his teaching practice as a mathematics teacher in a boarding school for precisely such children. There some suspicious happenings start to occur: children vanish from the boarding school, between the lines there is talk of inhuman experiments and torture.
The first-person narrator investigates; from then on the majority of the book consists of the material he has collected. This collection remains puzzling for the reader, sometimes to the point where the threshold of pain is reached (and where reading on becomes all the more rewarding). The other half of the story is shown to us from the perspective of Robert Tätzel, a former indigo child who has got rid of his syndrome – and cannot cope with this situation. In order to take his mind off it he thinks ‘radioactive words’ (‘filthy cunt’, ‘sow of a Jew’, ‘degenerate’, nigger’) or traumatizes the woman next door.
Setz is a virtuoso at moral friction loss: the way the indigo syndrome gets the readers themselves into a hopeless situation when the whole of society is in a moral grey area is superbly done. The manner in which this is handled, namely that it is precisely the weakest who become a burden, is here by no means humane, but not unequivocally inhumane either. Setz has been much too clever for that, putting a multitude of voices on the stage.
All this means that Indigo – as well as being an ironic masque put on by the author (NB: Never ask an author what his favourite novel is!) – is first and foremost a terribly credible social novel: we see a version of ourselves, deceptively similar, and a spooky feeling comes over us.

Abridged from the review by Bernhard Oberreither, 7 November 2012
Full German text: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=9687

[ book info ] Setz, Clemens: Indigo. (original language: Deutsch) Suhrkamp, Frankfurt / Main, 2012 . ISBN: 978-3-518-42324-0.