SSeries that make you puke in the first few minutes can’t actually be all that bad. In any case, Mandelkern, with whom we are locked in an airplane toilet in those first minutes of “Funeral of a Dog”, where he flushes his wedding ring down the toilet and looks in the mirror with a battered face about as confused as we look at the screen in the following hours , throws up quite violently.
That could be due to the wealth of relationships in the story that the writer Thomas Pletzinger invented around him a good decade and a half ago, but it is more due to what he drank again.
Mandelkern, whom his wife calls Mandelkern (the amygdala, which is also called Mandelkern and is responsible for feelings such as fear in the brain, could be cited here as proof of the richness of relationships), is an alcoholic and a feuilletonist, which of course almost necessarily belongs together.
Mandelkern, it’s the year 2010, is on his way to Piedmont, to Lago d’Orta. Mark Svensson lives in an elegantly crumbling villa by the water that only writers in novels can afford as a hermitage.
Svensson has written a mega bestseller. The novel is about two men and a woman who – they cannot have seen “Jules et Jim” – want to become like Borromean rings, who have those rings tattooed on their arms: friends, lovers. Finding stability in a world that is flying out of all anchors, becoming at home in a global present of being on the move.
Astroland is the name of Svensson’s novel. Mandelkern knows him almost by heart. He should portray Svensson, ask where the second part of the story is, which Svensson has been working on for about as long as Uwe Tellkamp has been working on the follow-up novel The Tower.
Love for three: Alina Tomnikov, Friedrich Mücke (with a beard) and Albrecht Schuch
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The person sitting next to him wants to help him. She is beautiful. He might know her. The script god in the writer’s room placed him next to her. She is the woman in Astroland. Little did he know that Mandelkern was about to become the impossible fourth ring of the impossible Borromean rings.
Even in his obvious frenzy, with his split lip, he looks downright handsome, thanks to Albrecht Schuch playing him in all the gripping forlornness that only he can. This will not change until the end of the Sky eight-part series, which is highly independent and cuts across all series models.
“The Burial of a Dog” is the title of Thomas Pletzinger’s debut novel. Someone called it “presence of mind literature” when it came out in 2008. It is full of references to Max Frisch’s “Montauk”, to a number of ethnology classics, to the American author Theodore Dreiser, who you really should definitely read again.
Freed from debutante prudence
With Hanno Hackfort and Bob Konrad, Pletzinger withdrew into a writing room, freed his novel from a few inconveniences of his debut antenna, screened it, rearranged it, changed names and places, sharpened motivations – Svensson had written a children’s bestseller in the novel, for example, no magazine columnist would for a children’s book author can do what Mandelkern does, as a life guide, as the “Astroland” in the Mandelkern series serves, a children’s book is rarely good.
The complex system has remained the same. “Funeral of a Dog” is a crusade and traverse through the years and (including the Mandelkern plot line) branching out like a little Mandelbrot tree and sub-stories.
It starts in the Colombian jungle. In 1998 they fell for each other, the serious Mark (Friedrich Mücke) and the beautiful Finnish doctor Tuuli (Alina Tomnikov) as well as the lifeless bird Felix (Daniel Sträßer). Swear eternal friendship. She shouldn’t be interested in the fact that this has never gone well in films and books. Because that’s what it’s all about. How something like fate and history happened to a generation of apparently fateless people who grew up in the economically well-cushioned west of the eighties.
They have to flee Colombia under fire, along with Lua, the three-legged (!) dog who ends up being buried at the lake, like their whole story. They are in New York on September 11th, Tuuli will have her child on that day (wealth of relationships! Nausea!) – from Felix or Mark, you don’t know for a long time. Felix disappears – that’s the red crime thread that keeps the aesthetic, spooky game in suspense – maybe drowned, maybe killed.
Above all, however, it is a masculine endgame that we attend, which Tuuli – who triggers everything, which Mandelkern brings into play as a kind of fourth ring – at some point only watches with some horror. Operated by deep miners capable of supreme poetry. Cockfights, canned beer, soccer – can’t go well.
As a series, it’s doing really well. Once trained in time plane hopping. And if the strange melancholy of this story has caught you, which happens relatively quickly. “Funeral of a Dog” has something of Anthony Minghella’s “Ripley” film adaptation. Every television is too small for the fabulous pictures. It’s nice to watch the people in there. The rhythm is right. At some point, the story settles like a cool fog around the brain. Which is probably to blame for the fact that she ultimately leaves you strangely cold.