Get to the womb of human experience: Jan Factor’s new novel “Trottel”

Ene of the many suspension bridges that one has to stagger across when reviewing books without falling into the abyss of phrases and scams is the suspension bridge into the text. What do you start with? With a sample from the factory? With a judgment to be justified later? With an anecdote about the author? With an original comparison?

In his new book, Jan Factor has thought of the needs of his reviewers. The cover of the book already contains “suggestions and suggestions” for professional critics. And they get straight to the point. That this novel is a declaration of love to the old, sleepy GDR, but at the same time full of disgust: “Unfortunately, that doesn’t really go together.” That the author should be punished after reading his novel: “For each of his many footnotes, this person deserves an electric shock appropriate strength and suspense.” That the book was “knowledgeably written” and even “excellently researched”, but unfortunately “partially full of nonsense”. Above all, “the hundreds of detailed information placed in the footnotes” would cause a lot of confusion. Oh yes, and most importantly: “Can it be good if someone cobbles together a most silly book about the death of their own son? The answer is clearly no!”

Trying to express loss

Now the verdict would have been made: The “idiot” failed! However, this is so fundamental that the actual work can now begin. The review of a novel that Jan Factor took twelve years to write. In 2010 he was nominated for the German Book Prize for his autobiographical picaresque novel about youth in post-war Prague. “George’s worries about the past or in the realm of the holy scrotum of Prague” was the title of this comic work, which brought the literary outsider Factor a lot of admiration. After that, an event blew up the author’s life. His son took his own life in his early thirties. “Drat” is the doomed attempt to find an expression for this loss.

“Doomed to fail” is not meant to be a silly criticism, but only to name the impossibility of finding a measure for something excessive in which it can be weighed and represented. So it may surprise one or the other, maybe even the author himself, that this has turned out to be an extremely cheerful book. At least not one that reflects the loss metaphysically and puts the pain in the foreground. Rather one that remembers the life led and its many errors.

Blooming fantasy landscapes

By writing about the birth, growing up and finally falling ill of his only son, Jan Factor is telling himself in the context of his environment, which he entered in 1978 when he moved to East Berlin to live with his future wife, a daughter of Christa Wolf (“something in me wanted to disappear from Prague, wanted to get out of this rotten, matted, pore-clogged dumpling tumor”) and immediately researched it ethnographically. Everything he sees is of Gargantuesque abundance – even in the notorious lack: blooming fantasy landscapes. “The GDR was simply a model country, it was brilliantly rotten, smoked deep in the stink and also dug up the lignite and savoy soil from under its feet.”

Luckily there is the literary Prenzlauer Berg, where everything is also rotten, but has the Kommune 2 glamor of a “left hell”, where everyone gathers who thinks outside the party doctrine: “I liked those from the circle anyway Impressively carefree dropouts – and I really didn’t care whether I wanted to call them cryptoanarchists, eurocommunism apostles or just chaotic people.” The sufficient presence of libertine women also makes the left-wing debating club a lifestyle experimentation shack, loosely based on the motto: “Better get on with it to the womb of human experience!” In short: “For me, Prenzlauer Berg was clearly the urban center and in my eyes, despite the high degree of decay, had something majestic about it. For the most part, the underlying urban areas struck me as unfortunate inherited but de facto abandoned relics of space that no longer played a significant role after the city was divided.”