Literature: Overtaking reality | nd-aktuell.de

And when reality overtakes you, you have no friends, not even alcohol,” says an old song by Fehlfarben on their first record in 1980. But you can also turn the tables and overtake reality: with fantasy, exaggeration and denial. This is what the protagonist J. decides in Julia Jost’s debut novel “Where the sharpest tooth of the Karawanken gleams up into the sky”.

J. grows up in Gratschbach, a fictional town in Carinthia, the southern tip of Austria. In the middle of a picturesque landscape – the Karawanken – there is the Gratschbacher Hof, which the father once bought cheaply and now lives in with his family of five. But the father is not granted a model family, despite his widely respected entrepreneurial activities in the heart of the ultra-conservative village: son Johann – called Hanni – wears his hair long and is a sensitive romantic. And his rebellious daughter, the eleven-year-old protagonist J., loves playing football, would actually rather be a boy and therefore prefers short hair.

J. tells a kind of coming-of-age story while she lies hidden under a truck and watches the activities of the adults from there. The story begins with her classmate Franzi, who was once sexually abused by a priest. Instead of the priest being dismissed from his position, the family then has to move to Gratschbach. Now, in the new village community, Franzi is trying to gain a certain standing as a newcomer. And so one afternoon, as a kind of test of courage, he decides to climb into a well to retrieve an old SS dagger that had previously fallen there. But the attempt fails and Franzi can only be rescued from the well dead.

The narrator returns to this event again and again throughout the book, as it exemplifies the innocence of young adolescents in an environment corrupted by adults, in which the sadistic horror of Nazi rule still continues to have an impact, even 50 years after its formal end.

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Seen from the outside, J. doesn’t have an easy fate: as a strange child who is forced by his environment into roles that he is unable to fulfill. Despite her obvious lack of talent and lack of motivation, J. is supposed to go to piano lessons regularly because her mother, who comes from a humble background, obviously sees this as one of the many levers that one has to use in order to come a little closer to the distant goal of a bourgeois way of life.

But luckily there is the neighbor’s child Luca, a girl from Bosnia and J.’s accomplice. The two share a tender relationship, which is often reflected in subtle details: when the two play catch, Luca counts in German, but J. counts in Bosnian . Their great feelings for each other are accompanied by great insecurity. It is heartbreaking, for example, when, after a fleeting kiss, J. Luca tries to convey with his hands and feet, despite the existing language barrier, that she is not a boy after all and finally, in great distress, exposes himself to her in order to reveal her physical characteristics.

Julia Jost’s narrative style is largely furious, eloquent, challenging and highly entertaining. Her humor, which is characterized by sarcasm, is reminiscent of Elfride Jelinek’s stories as well as the motifs contained in the book, from unreflective post-fascism, a desire for recognition and greed to restrictive gender norms. But where Jelinek occasionally takes refuge in cynicism in the face of the obviously incorrectly set-up world, Jost’s story is characterized by a downright serene cheerfulness that does not level out the horror of reality, but always plays tricks on it. And at times it overtakes them.

Julia Jost: Where the sharpest tooth of the Karawanken bares up into the sky. Suhrkamp, ​​231 p., hardcover, €24.

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