DThis novel goes to extremes. Whereby the extremes intertwine in Senthuran Varatharajah’s “Red (Hunger)” as if they themselves were plagued by insatiable hunger. Or are they instead engulfed in the struggle of love? The most provocative thing about this novel is certainly the story of anthropophagy: becoming one through the incorporation of the other – that belongs equally to the longing figures of love as it does to the most cruel fantasies of fear. They have radiated their fascination since ancient tales of eating their own children (from Kronos to Thyestes). But it was also reflected, for example, in the imaginary worlds of Brazilian colonialists.
Varatharajah’s novel emphasizes the love side with its subtitle: “This is a love story”. Why does it have to be emphasized that it is about this? Because the theoretically well-versed religious scholar Senthuran Varatharajah does not believe in understanding anthropophagy only as a metaphor. Here people actually eat with skin and hair: “A puts the knife next to his face. / A waits. / A prays / A puts the blade up again / on B’s neck above his / larynx like – a gesture.” And then the cut. Too close? Too much information? Too much data density? Too high resolution? This is the second extreme of this novel. He ventures into the field of narrative drasticity. In the face of cruelty, the drastic applies: “Look / look more closely.” To repeat echo-like: “Look / look closely.” Still look where other stories have long since broken off, tear down the curtain of silence behind which the explicit is hidden.
Those who suffer seek to share their suffering
But it can be even more extreme: As with the incantation of looking closely, numerous other recorded sentences are (edited) quotations from the original correspondence between Armin Meiwes and Bernd Jürgen Brandes. The tabloids used to call the former the “cannibal of Rotenburg”. The documentarism charges the reading of the novel with additional intensity.
So bloody, so bestial, so rot the events may have worked; Varatharajah tells this story of devouring with a deep understanding of what Simone Weil once called “human mechanics”: those who suffer seek to share their suffering. And here two people who suffer from themselves and the world come together, who suddenly see the opportunity to share their suffering and to free themselves from it. With the encounter – as inescapable as gravity – a mechanism is set in motion to escape suffering, to absorb oneself in it. An extraordinary idea, familiar to religious thinking, which at the same time includes a counterweight: the way in which two extremes are intertwined here shows the coolness of a mechanical process.
In this machinery, Varatharajah narratively blurs the allocation of perpetrator and victim roles. Is the one who lives on with the guilt of consumption the sole culprit? Or is he the victim of the one who fulfilled his dearest wish to be incorporated into another? In B’s words “Drive me back. I want you to lead me back” ends the first part of the novel. The second part begins with the return from the train station, the ticket to Berlin has already been bought, and the words “you can do it” and “I ask you to do it”.
