Incentives - Neue Literatur aus Österreich

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[ Buchtipp von Incentives ] In freezing February, Sabine Scholl presents a mystery that takes place in summer, and whose main protagonist, Gina Sonnenfels, comes from Vienna, lives in Berlin, and has “a good nose for the wrong men.”

Gina is the prototypical representative of the precarious middle class. She works as a designer, journalist, and detective; as the latter she’s supposed to investigate the death of Gerlinde Presenhuber, an employee of the Austrian consulate in Berlin, whose dirndl caught fire at a restaurant. The main suspect is the designer Markus Ball, who sells traditional Austrian costumes, Madonna-print women’s g-string underwear, and other, similar wares in his Hashashin stores. Then there’s Ringo, the surfing instructor and waiter who is interested in bombs; Astrid Altmeyer, the lawyer of the women’s center “Grace and Grandeur”; and lastly, eco-crazy Lorenzo in Vienna.

We can read Scholl’s Giftige Kleider as light fare that allows us to forget for once the world’s problems. This reading gives us a rather intriguing thriller, a fashion-conscious detective with a longing for sex (or love?), and a solution that corresponds to this longing.

But the author wants more. She wants to shake up the mystery mold. Scholl’s tools are intertextuality and intermediality. The Medea myth, the history of the Hashashin, “The Sound of Music” and other references to songs, films, and literature create a subtext through which the novel reveals itself as formula. Meanings begin to oscillate; nothing stays put.

In Haut an Haut (Skin to Skin), Sabine Scholl illustrated how fashion makes the continuous transformation of the individual possible. Constant change is also examined in this book through use of the fashion metaphor. Fashion replaces literature. And this metamorphosis can be deadly. The descriptions of editorial work at Metropolitan, the precise observations of cafés and coffeehouses in Berlin and Vienna are an intricate, profound pleasure. The novel’s heroine Gina believes she has forgotten how to think like a typical Austrian and decides to take “lessons in cunning, intrigue, and slander.” The author of Giftige Kleider doesn’t need these lessons.

Abbreviated review by Helmut Sturm. English translation by Laura Radosh.

Complete version in German: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=7186

[ Info ] Scholl, Sabine: Giftige Kleider. (original language: Deutsch) Deuticke, Wien, 2010 . ISBN: 978-3-552-06117-0.