2023-12-12 22:36:08
It seems only logical to embark on a journey into space when the earth appears as barren and desolate as it does these days. The stars sparkle even brighter in dark hours; as if they wanted to tell us that there must be something other than our dreary earthly existence. Sahra Wagenknecht thought so too. She quickly left realpolitik to study space politics. Yes, you heard right: Sahra Wagenknecht, the renegade left-wing politician who should actually be preparing to found her party at the moment. So what the hell was she doing in space?
The new novel by Emma Braslavsky: “Erdling” can help with this question. The writer’s previous novels were wonderfully complex structures that were composed with linguistic ease. Now she has written a “fantastic local novel,” as Suhrkamp Verlag announces. In fact, on a fast-paced, four-hundred-page long journey into intergalactic foreign lands, we learn more about ourselves than we sometimes would like. The author’s subtle sense of humor allows for even the nastiest self-awareness.
An unsuccessful detective agency
But let’s start at the beginning. Emma Andreas Erdling, who is sometimes Emma, sometimes Andreas, runs a mercilessly unsuccessful detective agency with the financial support of her lonely great-aunt. But she doesn’t care much about that. In social networks, with her impostor virtuosity, she creates herself all the more successfully as a left-wing (evil tongue would say: woke) investigator figure who is always on the right side of “stable good-evil axes”. Part of the art of pretense is that we do not find out what is right and what is wrong, what is left and what is right. When a shitstorm due to unintentional blackfacing destroys her virtual existence, Erdling’s reality begins to falter. More specifically, Emma Andreas is confronted with many realities.
Emma Braslavsky: “Erdling”. Novel. : Image: Publisher
Instead of being brought back to the solid ground of facts, fictions expand and proliferate into the reality of life. She takes a wrong turn between the crammed bookshelves in her friend Cosmo’s used bookstore and ends up on a different track of reality: in 1844, with Karl Marx. But he doesn’t sit at his desk in Paris to put people’s alienation from themselves on paper. No, he gives a plebeian anti-Semitic incendiary speech. This shock is there. Marx becomes an alien for Emma Andreas, a stranger who holds up a mirror of self-alienation to her.
A little later, a distraught Oskar Lafontaine comes into her office. His partner Sahra was kidnapped by aliens – Emma Andreas’ first real case, which leads her on an interstellar search for clues. Sahra remains an amorphous, intangible figure on this journey through space until the end of the novel. Instead, what is gaining more and more shape is a grandiose epistemic world concept in novel form, which shows us that not everything has to remain as dreary and dull as it is.
Reality is a track in which we move
After an encounter with the supernatural Vril secret society, which, based on the science fiction novel “The Coming Race” (1871) by the Victorian author Edward Bulwer-Lytton, has now become one of the most absurd Nazi conspiracy theories, she calms down kinky Travel companion Angelika greets the visibly disturbed Emma Andreas with the words: “You are always in the right film, Earthling, you have no idea how changeable your world can be, you have just landed on another of the possible tracks. And now you are changing yourself and your relationships. And your world suddenly looks different. And now you too.”
#Emma #Braslavskys #FantasyDetektivroman #Erdling