In Franziska’s parents’ house there is a clock with a picture of a laughing ladybug. In Montpellier, in Cyril’s parents’ apartment, selected wooden furniture stands on a beautifully marbled stone floor. French elegance versus West German suburban philistinism. But that’s not why Franziska finally breaks up with Cyril, her very nice boyfriend who genuinely loves her. At a party he reminds her of a dog and she is ashamed of it. The relationship ended in an adult way, she feels. You’ve changed, say the looks of her friends, especially Mina’s.
Something has come to an end at the beginning of Carla Kaspari’s debut novel, something bigger than a relationship, an unbiased view of things and perhaps of oneself, perhaps a youth. Franziska has just turned 27 and is thinking about getting a pet.
A life in which one often feels like something, but never is anything
She writes professionally, earning money faster than she could spend as a copywriter in her early 20s. Over the years, which “Freizeit” depicts in non-chronological episodes, she develops artistic ambitions and begins to work on a novel entitled “Freizeit”. And because she writes so much, on her manuscript, on the autobiography of a motivational trainer, for the lyrics of Austrian rappers and with her friends from school and from the two years in Paris on Whatsapp, Franziska often experiences things and then immediately thinks that they are a cliché. Franziska finds “all her thoughts old and pessimistic”.
It is the postmodern, the eternal inauthenticity that plagues Franziska. A life in which one often feels like something, but never is anything. “Franziska thinks that for years it has seemed as if it was all over here, but it keeps going.” There are often such aphoristic one-liners in the novel, in their subtle irony one could well imagine them on Twitter. Which reminds that the author one of the few really good Twitter accounts in Germany Has.
Carla Kaspari: Free time. Novel. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2022. 298 pages, 15 euros.
Carla Kaspari was born in 1991 and lives in Cologne, studied literature and music in Bonn and Paris, and is currently entertaining 7,153 people on Twitter with sentences like: “It’s your fault that the 2022 moped race in Kliemannsland is canceled”. About Franziska, her protagonist, it says in “Freizeit”: “Contrary to the expectations of her 4365 Twitter followers, Franziska’s first text in the length of a novel was not a coming-of-age novel. He had not given reason to discuss it as a novel that conveys the attitude to life of a generation. Otherwise it did not suggest any connection with Franziska, because it had not been published under Franziska’s name.”
The reception of the work, which has already become part of the work, is the logical culmination of an ironic game of hide-and-seek that Franziska actually no longer wants to play. A few years ago she gave up the habit of finding things ironically good. Since then she has been following the normal couple Jana and Tim on YouTube without irony – simply because it gives her support. Jana and Tim show their everyday life in videos, chop vegetables, and that’s where Franziska finds what she imagines normal life in Germany to be. “There is no deviation, every detail fits.”
Of course, “Freizeit” isn’t about a generation, but about young people who often prefer to sleep well than have sex. There’s talk of trap and deep house pop genres, people moving to the country, taking MDMA, visiting ancient takeaways, making vegan spreads, masturbating and self-ovulating with yoga. “Hippies,” Franziska sometimes thinks about her mid-twenties world and all the critical people from her suburbs, sometimes with self-hatred, sometimes rather uninvolved. Franziska thinks that decisions are almost never right or wrong, but are mostly made so that things can continue.
“Leisure” is structured by friendships, old and new, between women and men and women and women. And the others who mutate into a tragically beautiful love triangle. The coming-of-age story, which it doesn’t want to be, is of course, albeit a dull, painful one in its detachment from things.
With its rather darkly humorous perspective on a student milieu and the female physicality that is so present, the novel is almost reminiscent of the bestseller “Normal People” by Irish woman Sally Rooney, who was the same age. One can only wish Carla Kaspari a part of Rooney’s global success, she already has the better Twitter account.