[ book tip by Incentives ] "Mittelstadtrauschen" begins like any romance. Marie and Jakob meet in a coffee house, check each other out and start a relationship. Like most people around the age of thirty, they each bring their own experiences to the table – in love and other things.

But the novel soon becomes refreshingly different. This difference is mostly a question of technique. Mittelstadtrauschen is a collage of many individual scenes that, pieced together, work as a whole. At the heart of the narrative is the city of Vienna. Margarita Kinstner takes the reader from the Alte Danube in the first district to the Prater. Page for page, it becomes ever clearer that Vienna, despite its population of two million, is not a real metropolis, but only a middling city, a Mittelstadt. There is no anonymity. In the end, everybody knows everyone else somehow or other.

The novel’s characters are all connected. They form relationships, become closer and drift apart again. For example, there’s Gery, the video artist who delivers meals on wheels. Drugs and women are his preferred escape from everyday worries and he ends up in bed with Sonja, who’s looking for the man of her life. But how do Gery and Sonja fit into the story – into Marie and Jakob’s story? Eventually the reader realizes that Sonja is Jakob’s ex-girlfriend. And the recipient of Gery’s meals on wheels is Jakob’s grandmother. The older woman becomes Gery’s confidante and helps him to deal with the suicide of his friend Joe. Joe, who was Marie’s lover and soul mate. These interpersonal relationships make up the story’s dynamics. Every once in a while it does feel like one coincidence too many. But you’re happy to ignore that and let Kinstner’s vivid descriptions and subtle humor carry you along. Kinstner also manages to keep up the suspense until the final pages. What will the mystery of Joe’s unopened last will hold? A happy ending?

Abbreviated review by Emily Walton, September 2013. English translation by Laura Radosh

Full German text: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=10141&L

[ book info ] Kinstner, Margarita: Mittelstadtrauschen. (original language: German) Deuticke Verlag, Wien, 2013 . ISBN: 978-3552062269.