Incentives – Új osztrák irodalom

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http://www.literaturhaus.at

[ a könyvtippet írta Incentives ] If anyone ever thought Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was the last word on the everyday horrors of bourgeois marriage, they were very wrong. Marriage dramas are still able to captivate and teach their audience, as Arno Geiger’s newest book shows.

The scenario couldn’t be simpler. Sally, an athletic, no longer quite so young English teacher, still has incredible drive. She longs for change and doesn’t seem compatible with her terribly well-behaved spouse Alfred, who takes cover behind his journal, a chronicler of uneventfulness. After thieves trash Sally and Alfred Fink’s house, the friendly facade begins to crack. While the introverted Alfred retreats completely into his inner world, his wife goes into the offensive and takes a lover. Erik, who is also in a (good) relationship with Nadja, is happy to take on this role and fulfill Sally’s erotic desires. But then the perfect lover admits that he has fallen in love with a young woman …

The material from which Alles über Sally is woven holds few surprises and hardly provides a convincing argument for reading this book. What should, however, awaken our interest in Geiger’s well-known fable is his seismographically precise account of his protagonists’ emotional oscillations. Both Sally and Alfred as well as Nadja and Erik have created for themselves a material environment that seems in principle to make private fulfillment possible. Nevertheless, romantic craving for love with a capital L and for the ultimate in sex puts seemingly well-functioning partnerships including children in question.

After closing the book’s covers it is hard to decide which figure one prefers, as none of the protagonists leave the stage a winner. What remains in the end is only the realization that happiness, in the sense of that which we desire, can be neither conclusively fixed nor forced and that the search for happiness remains one of the great absurd adventures of our existence.
 
That Geiger is able to transform this existential, banal story into a novel that is as intelligent as it is entertaining proves his mastery once again.


Abbreviated review by Walter Wagner, February 15, 2010. English translation by Laura Radosh.
Complete version in German: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=7300

[ infó ] Geiger, Arno: Alles über Sally. (original language: Deutsch) Hanser Verlag, München, 2010 . ISBN: 978-3-446-23484-0.