Incentives - New Literature from Austria

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[ Bogtip efter Incentives ]
"Don't cry - work!"
This instruction was chosen by the author Rainald Goetz as the subtitle for his early novel, Irre (Mad). Hence the underlying theme of the work: existential issues. All is one: living, writing, reality, literature. This is the case in Thomas Ballhausen’s new book, Bewegungsmelder (Movement  Detector), as well. In ten prose pieces, the Viennese writer and scholar of cultural studies relates episodes from the everyday reality of the media and the habitat of a radical solipsist.
The two parts of the slim volume are called Fluchtversuche (Attempts to Flee) and Interventionen (Interventions).The headings are the program. While Ballhausen inscribes his examination of history, guilt, and memory in the flowing form of the first six tales, a process from which his protagonists attempt to flee, he attempts to rebel against any form of determination by culture and its narrative in the rhythmical staccato of the four Interventionen.
Ballhausen writes a highly reflective, but at the same time sensuous prose. In the writing process the writer, the written and the described fuse into the text body, a texture in which fragments of dreams and memories, fictitious encounters and actual contacts, experiences and quotes are all juxtaposed as equals.
The programmatic candor and at the same time austere hermetic quality of Ballhausen’s prose are fed by its polyphony. The accumulation of quotes from “Pop and Poetics/ Poetics and Pop” reveals the intertextual entanglement as a game, which pushes through the boundaries of genre and category and presents the reader with the challenge of following the many tracks instead of looking for one central theme.
Basically the stories Ballhausen tells are, however, stories about love, albeit unhappy and frustrated love. What are most likely to succeed are fleeting relationships between strangers under the cover of false names and lives, with faces hidden behind masks and bodies purchasable. But what distinguishes all of them in their homeless state is their secret longing for romance and security.
And it is for them that Ballhausen, this serious, clever and decidedly intellectual author, finds – and this is perhaps the most astounding thing about this erudite book – wonderfully melancholy sentences full of silent poetry.

Abbreviated review by Martina Wunderer, November 2010.
English translation by Hillary Keel.
Complete version in German: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=8506

[ Boginfo ] Ballhausen, Thomas: Bewegungsmelder. (original language: Deutsch) Haymon Verlag, Innsbruck, Wien, 2010 (ja). ISBN: 978-3-85218-643-6.