2024-09-17 10:47:46
Clemens Meyer against the rest of the book world? The race for Germany’s most important literary prize is not a clear path this year. Novels by specially selected authors have great literary weight.
At first glance it seems like an unequal battle. There are five titles that are always long and easy in your luggage against a giant. As expected, Clemens Meyer’s 1000 page brick “Projectors” is on the short list for the German Book Prize.
Anything else would have been a legitimate scandal, because of this novel, which makes Karl May and his characters stumble through the horrors of the 20th century, which combines Winnetou films and the liberation of Yugoslavia, Nazi violence and wars India, is an exciting state of today. An epic, which cannot be missed from the short list of the best novels of the year.
So the obvious issue for the award ceremony in the Kaisersaal of the Frankfurter Römer, just before the opening of the book fair? Never. Even if “The Creators” takes as much reading time as the other five titles combined, sheer size, variety of characters, settings and subplots is not the only measure of literary quality.
Like things in chemistry, literature also has a certain weight. This can be illustrated by Maren Kames’ “Hasenprosa” (Suhrkamp), which is the narrowest of the selected titles. At the center of the inextricably embedded sentences that transcend the realms of meaning and understanding is memory and grief.
Other titles also contain materials of high density: in Iris Wolff’s “Lichtungen” (Klett-Cotta), the Romanian-German lifelines converge in a surprisingly dramatic space. In “Seventy-four” (Rowohlt), Ronya Othmann tells about the IS genocide against the Yazidis in a mixed personal-record form. And in “Hey, good morning, how are you?” (Klett-Cotta), Martina Hefter takes an original look at the ways and wrongs of modern love.
Only Markus Thielemann’s “Thunder Rolls From the North” (CH Beck), which reveals the idyllic Lüneburg Heath as a land haunted by history, appears as an outsider in this area. But who knows? So far, the judges have acted with confidence and have not been swayed by advance praise and well-known names. With no choice, the race prize book is open.
Richard Kämmerlingsliterary correspondent for WELT, has been writing novel reviews for thirty years and is a member of the jury for the German Book Prize twice: in 2009 and 2021.
#German #Book #Prize #shortlist