[ book tip by Incentives ] The novel begins when its narrator wakes up. The first very dense section reveals the situation of a family with three small children in a house on a lake in the Austrian Salzkammergut, where the family spends their summer holidays every year. They go for a hike around the lake, talking over all manner of small conflicts. The events of the novel emerge from dialogues that range from the witty to the grotesquely comic. In the hands of Gustav Ernst, known for his drastic realism, these can also turn into verbal sparring.

After its sparkling opening, the narrative makes large jumps in time in seven more sections, each shorter than the one before, providing a minimalist sketch of the family’s history. The grown-up children, successful in their careers, are scattered around the globe with their various partners. They always come together in the wake of a loss; they mourn a death in the family and admit their own negligence. The father dies in an airplane crash in Asia; the brother drowns while swimming in the Atlantic at night; one sister is murdered in South America, the other dies of breast cancer in Brussels; the mother dies at home of complications from a broken leg. The members of the family, who have become increasingly lonely and alienated, are marked by self-reproach and feelings of guilt : “We have all become something we never were.”

The sections of the text are connected by recurring motifs; as regards form, it is the asynchronous and concisely formulated memories that are placed before each section that are noteworthy. As these memories slowly fade, so does the narrative – but not without referring back to its beginnings: the narrator’s granddaughter happens to drive past the lake one night. In the darkness she searches for the house that she knows only from stories as the site of her father’s happy childhood memories, and the manner in which she interacts with her partner recalls the couple with whom the story began.

Abridged from the review by Martin Kubaczek, April 2013. English translation by Laura Radosh
Full German text: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=9861&L

[ book info ] Ernst, Gustav: Grundlsee. (original language: Deutsch) Haymon Verlag, Innsbruck, 2013 . ISBN: 978-3-7099-7045-4 .