Gambling addiction: constantly in transit | nd-aktuell.de

This novel seems as if it was not written but spoken. The oral nature of “The Seriousness of Life” immediately draws the reader into the text. It is as if Ulrich Peltzer was sitting at the bar of a hotel next to the first-person narrator Bruno van Gelderen and listening to him. A hotel bar because van Gelderen, like many of Peltzer’s characters in his novels, suffers from a certain transcendental homelessness. Constantly in transit, he doesn’t really know where he belongs.

Growing up in a Rhenish farming family, he represents the uprooting of origins and traditions in a paradigmatic way. Instead of becoming a farmer and taking over the farm, he breaks with his origins and goes to Berlin to study. There he gets stuck in a concert agency by chance, a place where he can move from project to project but never really gets anywhere. It is therefore no wonder that he gets along best with a colleague who, based on van Gelderen’s description, one can assume is trying to free himself from the traditional circumstances of a migrant family.

But then the “seriousness of life” catches up with him. It’s a mysterious movement and he can’t really explain it to himself: he becomes addicted to gambling. By chance he goes into a casino and sits down in front of a slot machine. After his first big win, he secretly spends more and more time in the city’s various arcades, starts drinking and getting pumped up with drugs. Little by little he puts his entire existence at risk – in the truest sense of the word.

First he borrows money from his agency colleagues, which he can never pay back because the machine always wins in the end, then he tells his brother, who has taken over his parents’ farm and successfully converted it into an organic farm with his wife, that he would like money for a business idea until he clears out his girlfriend’s account with a forged signature. When he is released from the concert agency, abandoned by his girlfriend, ends up alone and homeless on the street, he robs a gas station and a Späti just to be able to continue playing. He gets caught and ends up in jail.

Van Gelderen tells the story retrospectively and not linearly. This contributes to the oral nature of the novel. He repeatedly jumps forward in time in his life story, then back again. That’s why the reader quickly learns that after his time in prison he switches sides but somehow remains loyal to the industry. Instead of gambling away his own or borrowed money, he speculates as an asset manager with other people’s money. That doesn’t always go well. But everything is legal and he always points out the risk. But “five or ten percent more than with normal investments,” he says, “and the reason goes away even with very prosaic people.” The fact that he found this job happened again by chance. After prison, he initially worked as a sports reporter for an online magazine. A Georgian businessman and sponsor of a football club, whom he met in the stands, recognized his talent and hired him in his company.

If you want, you can read “The Seriousness of Life” as a bildungsroman in which the hero in prison realizes that things can’t go on like this. At the same time, Bruno van Gelderen can be understood as the author’s alter ego and the novel as a test act, as a play-through of an alternative biography: This is what my life could have looked like. Peltzer doesn’t tend to dramatize, even though there were always dramatic twists in van Gelderen’s life. But this is reported in a sober tone. The time in prison is not illustrated much either. In addition to the description of other characters and biographies, “The Seriousness of Life” is primarily about reflecting on van Gelderen’s biography. This is surprisingly exciting and profitable reading. The ending remains open. The journey continues, but on a different, new track.

Ulrich Peltzer: The seriousness of life. Fischer, 204 p., hardcover, €24.

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