Cherrypicker | Literature   Log in to life

A hot summer day. Four young people are sitting in the vineyards, somewhat bored. Suddenly, one of them has a life-changing idea. Saša Stanišić turned it into an entire collection of stories.

Anyone who picks up Saša Stanišić's new book will first marvel at the title, if only because of its length: Möchte die Witwe angesprochen werden, platziert sie auf dem Grab die Gießkanne mit dem Ausguss nach vorne (If the widow wants to be addressed, she places the watering can on the grave with the spout facing forwards). This title sets the tone: a little bizarre, a little offbeat, a little ironic. Curious, the reader is keen to find out what this cemetery dating is all about. How does the cover full of postcard motifs of Heligoland fit in? The more than ambiguous role of this place is revealed in the course of the book of stories.

Stanišić's life story is characterised by improbabilities. Born in Višegrad in 1978, his parents fled to Germany with their fourteen-year-old son in 1992 after the outbreak of the Bosnian war. In 1998, the parents moved on to the USA. The son stayed and became one of the Germans' favourite writers. His first novel Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone) was shortlisted for the German Book Prize in 2006. He won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2014 with his second novel Vor dem Fest (Before the Feast), and in 2019 his fourth novel Herkunft (Where you come from) was honoured with the German Book Prize. His first children's book Hey, hey, hey, Taxi! was nominated for the German Youth Literature Award in 2022. For a man in his mid-forties, his list of awards is impressively long.

This year, Stanišić has been awarded the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize. According to the jury, his new collection of stories "harbours nothing less than the early romantic utopia: existence can be transformed into something different and better through literature".

Witty stories

They are witty stories - perhaps an appropriate word given the jokes the author allows himself to make with us readers. There are many stories in the subjunctive. Would you log into the life that is so seductively offered to you in the so-called rehearsal room, i.e. the fantasy, in the very first story Neue Heimat (New Home)? In it, four boys - all around 16 - hang out in the vineyards near Heidelberg before the 1994 summer holidays, throwing stones into the air that the others try to hit. Their names are Fatih, Piero, Nico and Saša and they are “foreigners in Germany”, including Nico, whose cool mother, who is admired by everyone, comes from the GDR. The young people have all the time in the world and no rosy prospects: “Statistically, shitty lives await those like us rather than shitty ones, don't they?” But those who have a lot of time sometimes get creative: Fatih has a captivating idea - a rehearsal room for life: “Like at Deichmann [a German footwear retailer], only not with shoes, but with fate.”

Pondering fate is the leitmotif in the following playful stories. Saša, whose parents can't afford a holiday, doesn't want to look like a “loser” in front of his mates. He brags about a supposed trip to Heligoland. Almost 30 years later, on this island, he is not only suspected of having stolen a pub sign as a teenager in 1994. He also met Heinrich Heine.

Stanišić intervenes several times on a meta level. Towards the end, there is a short episode in which Saša Stanišić has become something other than a writer. The rehearsal room also offers him an appealing life that he would have logged into.

An old form of virtual reality

His collection of stories reminds us that literature is, after all, a very old form of virtual reality. In one story, Dilek is at home in Heidelberg; in another, a dream novella, she is a cleaning lady in Vienna and experiences how time stands still and she emancipates herself both from her husband, who - against the wishes of his wife and son - wants to return to Turkey, and from her ossified employer, “a person with many answers and few questions”, whom she allows herself the fun of painting a “bold moustache” on her face.

This is followed by three stories about a lawyer called Georg Horváth, who starts playing Pokémon Go during his parental leave. He also despairs about sorting his rubbish and playing memory games against his eight-year-old son. When Horváth spontaneously quits his job, Miroslav Klose, the record goalscorer for the German national team, suddenly turns up - and seagulls mad about chips land in a tram.

The hair has forgotten something at home

Stanišić is not sparing with mockery and small jokes. A certain Siggi appears, for example, who is a chimney sweep and a Reichsbürger. He has a hairstyle that looks “as if the hair had forgotten something at home and couldn't figure out what it was for the life of him”. A documentary about dacha owners in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania is also being shown on TV: “At first glance, people like you and me, but when asked, they are xenophobic”.

Wish or reality, dream or truth, fun or seriousness - all opposites of life that literature like that of Saša Stanišić need not concern itself with. After all, it is about a variety of possibilities that cannot all be realised in life, but can be in literature - in the spirit of Robert Musil, whose novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities) states: “If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility”. Musil defines this sense of possibility “as the ability ... to think of everything that could just as well be, and not to consider what is more important than what is not”. Stanišić has this ability without a doubt!
 

November 2024