Stilling? Nothing there! Frank Schulz remains an author of intimidating eloquence.
Photo: Imago/Lars Reimann
Oha, 750 tightly printed pages. After two major novel series, the “Hagener Trilogie” and the “Onno Viets” tread, and after many years of waiting, we will be dealing with a real romance bum again after many years.
There are two plot lines in “Amor against Goliath”, which are told in parallel and finally interweave in the town of Kalokairos in Crete. The first plays in Osnabrück. Ricky Kottenpeter, a disillusioned musician who stays afloat with advertising jingles, rotates into medium -sized depression. He suffers from panic attacks, world pain, listlessness. The Corona pandemic, which will soon break out, tightens the crisis. His “dream woman”, the psychologist Cathy, noticed little about it, meanwhile she rubs herself as a volunteer climate activist. So the two lovers gradually live apart; Ricky even suspects that Cathy could cheat him. A vacation trip to Crete, she hopes, should bring them together again.
At the same time, a good 200 kilometers away, in Hamburg, the women’s swarm Dr. phil. Philipp Büttner, one of these false noble feathers of the bourgeois feature clay, a Ménage-à-trois. Actually, he is happy with the pharmacist Franzi, but he begins an affair with her best friend Jette, who also publishes a successful cultural magazine and thus also becomes his boss.
“Philphil” Büttner has an erotic obsession that he still wants to put into work in front of the approaching, climatic apocalypse, the threesome without a helmsman. That’s why he persuades his two lovers for a vacation together in Crete. So the two couples meet there, you get to know and appreciate each other, and, according to the blurb, “from the random debate club soon develops an erotic round”.
It is about a lot in this book, about the mentally and socially stressful years of Corona pandemic, about the imponderables of friendship and love-and also about the intensely guided climate debate, which is spread out in all necessary complexity. The denials of the disaster are very nice and are put on the grain in all the rules of art, and the dispute are partially performed in long, sometimes somewhat too long footnotes and in the talks of the protagonists. “Amor against Goliath” is also an Agitprop novel, but at a high literary level.
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At Schulzʼ last book, the very touching narrative band “Grace and cowardice”, you believed that you could perceive a stent tension, but that was perhaps only a short breath before the next parforcer ride through slide, socio, idiolects, technical languages, etc. “Amor and Goliath” is a very amplified novel; Last but not least, his unscrupulous detailed descriptions of detail – “literary magnifying glass painting” this has once mentioned his colleague Karen Duve – are of an intimidating eloquence that sometimes gives the impression that the plot is only an alibi in order to be able to drive this linguistic pointillating art.
In addition, there is a forced parenthetic syntax here. Schulz sometimes uses four different clip types to read the digressive thoughts of his read Schöngeistes Büttner, who naturally exclude themselves even more quickly under the influence of alcohol. This is quite strange, but does not always make the reading very easy.
Schulz’s comic is a separate thing anyway. In parallel to this novel, a narrow band with two lectures by Sven Regener, “Between Depression and Joke Addiction – Humor in Literature”, with Regener’s laudation on the occasion of the awarding of the Kassel Literature Award for Grotesque Humor to Frank Schulz. It says: »The humor is a cold technique, heart and compassionless. There is no friendly humor. “
You like to write that, but is that even true? The fact that the component of laughter is part of laughter is a binary in the inventory of comic theory; Only I think Frank Schulzʼ comedy is not described correctly, at least not in this apodictics. I have created the impression that Schulz has created a form of comedy that does not separate the losing, but rather hugged it in a friendly manner. The joke is a privilege of belonging with him: Because you are one of us, we can also tear jokes over you. This loving-empathic, not destructive comedy is part of the deeply humanistic core of this work.
Frank Schulz: Amor against Goliath. Galiani, 750 pages, born, € 32.
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