AThere is no shortage of fans of Juli Zeh, and yet the number of updates to her books posted at www.fanfiktion.de is still in the low single digits for the time being. One would wish for a side piece in the form of a fictitious review penned by Dr. Renate “Reni” Werner. She is a minor or rather background character in the novel, really just a scrawled name on the Potemkinian wall of the biographical backdrop against which Zeh and Urban place their protagonists. But the carelessly invented Renate Werner would undoubtedly be competent in writing a review, in form as well as substance. She could tell something!
Because in a seminar on narrative theory that Dr. Werner held at the University of Münster, Theresa Kallis and Stefan Jordan met around the turn of the millennium, who in the present of the novel, the nine months between January 5th and October 4th, 2022, have to experience that their existence as a Brandenburg organic farmer and Hanseatic cultural journalist together with the associated social worlds break up what they process in detailed letters to each other, send and save using the forms of e-mail programs and messenger services. The loyal Zeh fan who would take on our thought-out writing task would inevitably have a conflict of conscience with the narrative theory specialist who was allegedly cheated out of her deserved professorship: Renate Werner would have to admit that she had failed and that the two thoroughly eager students with one in her Study time already somewhat old-fashioned preference for Martin Walser learned nothing about narrative theory in their seminar or at least have forgotten everything in the meantime. With devoted fan imagination, the reviewer confronted with this finding could be embodied as a comic or tragic figure, and the result could be funnier and more touching than all the character masks and puppets of the novel’s staff put together.
The cultural journalist cannot read situations
Now the subject of the discussion of our thought game would not be the exchange of letters, but the book, which consists of the letters. And one could tentatively read the book as an uneducational novel in which, as the ultimate proof, so to speak, of the unworldliness of all theories, as the novel would like to present in the currently much-discussed doctrines of anti-discrimination and inclusion, narrative theory reveals its insignificance for narrative practice. The advertising claim from the humanities that their studies enable them to read social situations is apparently beautifully refuted by Stefan, the cultural director of a Hamburg weekly newspaper with a cultural mission: he doesn’t see the editorial intrigue when it’s happening in front of his eyes and live in transmitted to social media. But Stefan’s blindness is not presented as a product of literary distortion, but can be explained entirely morally, based on the careerist’s arrogance. The technical weaknesses of the novel are so blatant that it is simply no fun to insinuate narrative intent in any formal sense.