|
|  | |
Jobst Böhme, the protagonist of the new novel by Georg-Büchner-Prize-Winner Brigitte Kronauer, can’t complain about stress. An inheritance has made him the owner of a stationary store. His status as a computer expert is uncontested in his own shop, and business is good. Böhme doesn’t have much to worry about. But then again, he can’t hope for too much either. The marriage to his current wife Ellen has seen better days. She can only attract his attention by the odd habit she has of splaying her index finger whenever she does anything. By contrast, he is intensely aware of the erotic power of the tantalizing and "nubile” Russian Natalya, who works in his shop. She is the shining light in Böhme’s small world, which to him seems composed of nothing more than "cardboard dummies.”
It would not take much to bring some unexpected action into this life. Consequently, the triggering event in Blushing Murderers is also not particularly monumental. One day Mr. Böhme receives an offer from one of his customers, a writer, who suggests he take three days off to relax at his mountain chalet in the Swiss Alps. On one condition: The office supply dealer has to proofread three of the author’s manuscripts. Böhme decides to take off for the mountains. In terms of the novel’s structure, Jobst Böhme’s story frames the three embedded narratives in the writer’s manuscripts.
Much has been written about Brigitte Kronauer’s literary references to the romantic period; she sends her protagonists on a journey, yet she creates a new variation on a romantic theme. Her hero is not a person whose curiosity or love of adventure brings him to distant lands, and this is why Böhme neither experiences awe-inspiring adventures as he wanders through the mountains, nor is he faced with tests of courage. Instead, he reads one story per day, and in so doing, takes a completely different kind of journey. To himself?
The first story the writer commissions him to read is called, The Evil Wolfsen or the End of Democracy. Together, he and the novel’s reader delve into a delusional collector’s universe. They are introduced to a first person narrator for whom countless small things possess an inestimable value: he creates his own universe out of them. The crowded apartment turns into a homey cave, which stands in contrast to the uncontrolled, boundless world he feels is hostile and threatening. His contact to the outside world is limited to sending a few acquaintances newspaper articles about topics he considers suitable. Even if he isn’t able to make sense out of the "big world" anymore, he can still always fabricate meaning from his small reality on his own: he arranges his treasures so they form a tiny slice of meaningful and valuable experience. But something is missing in this world: his girlfriend Dottie. Where is she? Can the reader trust the feeling that overcomes the collector in the course of his narrative? Did he actually kill her?
It is a game of reality and its variations that Brigitte Kronauer so masterfully stages. As much as the protagonist lives in his own world and perceptions, so, too, does the narrative perspective remain unremittingly focused upon him. The reader perceives the world exclusively through the, perhaps, sick and delusional view of the hero – under such conditions can we believe our own perceptions are "reliable" or "real"? This contrast between the real, i.e. true, and the fictitious, is a leitmotif in Kronauer’s novel The Blushing Murderers and is the key to both the text and the title: Is the murderer, who blushes with shame in earnest about his emotion? Or is the redness in his face merely an attribute that the author ascribes to his invented character to make him seem innocent?
The question about the internal relationship of each narrating character to their narrated world is posed throughout the novel. In the second narrative (The Blushing Murderers) a young, somewhat stupid, testosterone-driven man named Strör gets in the wrong bus filled with old people. Only after the journey has begun, does he realize that this bus trip won’t take him to his new motorcycle, rather he’s taking part in a day trip with people from an old age home. Right from the beginning, the omniscient narrator makes us realize: Strör will not survive this undertaking. Brigitte Kronauer artfully contrasts the character’s cluelessness with the narrator’s mocking omniscience. He comments: "Mr. Strör is going to be on the road for a long time with that band of geriatric travel bugs. Longer than he’d like. Right now, the clueless, lout Strör just wants his peace and quiet and to get on his Honda."
And what is the wandering Jobst Böhme doing in the meantime? After reading the manuscript, he bumps into all sorts of strange characters in the mountains. The repeated encounters with a "conscience" (his conscience?) particularly unnerve him. This fellow wanderer continually crosses Böhme’s path, attracting his attention through a particularly unpleasant noise he produces while walking. Soon, however, these meetings become central to Böhme’s otherwise lonely trip. Increasingly, his surroundings, the mountains and valleys with their ascents and descents, become a symbol for life’s journey; it stands for a life that has become solidified to a crystal. There it is again, Kronauer making a reference to the romantic period: Nature becomes a mirror of the inner world. The subjective blurs with the objective, material existence.
This is also the theme of the third and final embedded narrative The Man with the Mouth Corners. The story is about a woman, obviously an art historian, who explains to a tour group the meaning of the figures on a relief. Yet: the woman is not an art historian and the tour group only exists in her fantasy. Relief and audience serve the sole purpose of allowing her to indirectly tell the story of her rape and her perpetrator’s death. This marks the divide between fiction and reality: specifically the telling and reading of stories. Jobst Böhme, whose former life had seemed to be populated by nothing but “cardboard dummies," also recognizes this connection at the end of his three-day trip to the mountains. He encounters other tourists at the train station and realizes: "In the end, they were made of flesh and blood just like him.”
Eva Kaufmann
July 2008
[Translated by Zaia Alexander]
|
to title overview
