Cats are good. They do not have complex responsibilities like humans, they are not condemned to a crawlingly dependent existence like the dog, they do not have to fight for their life every day like a wild animal, but enjoy all the freedoms of such a thing when they roam around at night . They are fed and killed for fun, petted when they feel like it, and whatever else they want to do. And they have another privilege: while the other creatures, humans included, are simply dead when they die, cats have seven lives.
Michael Köhlmeier takes these seven lives seriously in his novel “Matou”, which is named after his whiskered first-person narrator. The nearly thousand pages of the book cover 230 years from the French Revolution to the present, in short: the whole of modern history. In his first life, Matou is the pet of the revolutionary rhetorician Camille Desmoulins, who at the height of the Terreurs suddenly preaches mercy and ends up under the guillotine for it; Matou himself is unlucky enough to be guillotined because he wants to try out the newly sharpened blade. Not so bad, because life number two is already waiting. Like all cats, Matou can choose himself. The place for this is the “made away”, a kind of waiting room where the rebirth candidates study the offers on a giant tablet.
Matou opted for the Berlin of the early 19th century and the household of ETA Hoffmann, where, unsurprisingly, he became the source of inspiration for the “life views of the cat Murr”. (Needless to say that this is only a weak copy of his role model.) In the third round he sets up a regiment of terror among his own kind on the cat island of Hydra, in the fourth round he transforms into a leopard thanks to a generous interpretation of the term “cat” at the time of the Belgian atrocities in the Congo. The fifth life leads him to an upper class family in Prague shortly before and during the First World War, the sixth to Andy Warhol’s New York. The seventh life, which he spends mostly in Vienna as the pet of the lady Ingeborg and her low-spirited nephew Daniel, provides the narrative framework in which Matou dips his claw in ink shortly before he finally has to resign and writes his sevenfold memoirs.
The hangover has not only human, but downright superhuman abilities
Given this abundance of material, two questions arise that will determine the fate of the book. First, is it possible to find a convincing narrative language for this hero at the interface of the animal and the human realm? And secondly: How do you keep the reader’s interest in mind when staff and storylines are constantly changing and what is most obviously not important at all?
Since Köhlmeier has no real answer to either question, the longer the book becomes, the more it becomes a strain. Matou has not only human, but downright superhuman abilities. It takes him twenty minutes to read “Anna Karenina” and then knows it by heart – a crude and nonsensical boasting not of the narrator but of the author. Only now and then does something like the elegant bestiality of a small predator flash up, for example when describing a merry cat eroticism that remains unencumbered by human shame and tragedy.
A befriended cat who values her theological education a lot can express her relationship to metaphysics as follows: “(…) that she is looking forward to the kingdom of heaven at least as much as she is looking forward to a pounding jam or chopped chicken liver”. What a wonderfully subtle hypocrisy there is in the little word “at least”! But these few beautiful spots do not save the big book. Instead it gives us sentences like this: “If you [Menschen] watch, you have a common world, when you sleep, everyone has his own; we cats only ever have our own, and in our world there is not much difference between waking and sleeping. “That is an apt insight and even a deep one. But Matou should not have it if he is to remain a hangover believably.
In general, one gets the impression that Köhlmeier uses his book as a kind of large moving box in which he stows everything that he has wanted to do for a long time. This applies to reflections such as the anecdotal or novellistic sprinkles quoted above, but above all to poetry. Spread over the book, they result in an entire, predominantly ballad-like cycle. In doing so, Köhlmeier relies on continuity with tradition. He deliberately blurs the boundaries where Eichendorff and Schiller, whom he likes to quote, end and his own production begins: So he wants to arch a complete oeuvre whose keystone he himself would be – a project that was initially not unsympathetic.
In the end, the mediocrity that just doesn’t stop is annoying
Some of these often song-like structures are not bad at all in their own way, but have a tendency to give what is communicated the tone of petty singing. This is particularly disturbing in the fourth life, when the ten million dead in the Congo Free State of the Belgian King Leopold curdle to the series of ballads of the leopard and the girl whose eyes the European rubber collectors have torn off and their feet chopped off, so that they are now with their powerful protector is traveling in a kind of self-made wheelchair. It sounds like this: “And behold, there lives such a bad man / in Belgium’s royal palaces / who lies that he is of the best / the best that no one can ever be like. / He appropriates animals and people, / the leopard and the girl / on his wooden wheel. ” That will not do.
Michael Köhlmeier: Matou. Novel. Hanser, Munich 2021. 960 pages, 23 euros.
As a matter of course, Köhlmeier takes with him everything his Matou encounters in literature, from Hoffmann’s Serapion brothers to Susan Sontag. In doing so, he carelessly reaches for what does not suit him: Kafka. No shame and no instinct for self-protection prevented him from absorbing the “report to an academy”, making the speaking chimpanzee Rotpeter a friend of Matou and converting Kafka’s text – an expressly written report – into a free speech to a circus audience transform, humorously interrupted by relapses into grunting and screeching animal-like: “Your monkeyism, gentlemen, if you’ve been through something like this, can’t be further from you than mine. Harach, hawk! Everyone’s heels tickles goes on earth, the little chimpanzee like the big Achilles. Harach harch, hu-hu-hu … “Köhlmeier has no feeling that, by calling up the far larger and teasingly deformed, he is charging himself the nemesis of deadly contrast .
When you have these torturous passages behind you, no matter how indecisive your reading may have been, you no longer tend to relativise forbearance. Then a grinning mediocrity annoys you who has made up your mind to soar to great fabulous stories by simply not stopping. Then you suddenly notice the undisciplined developments the book owes its annoying length. Then one feels the desolation of the long nominal rows that want to stage baroque diversity when they are something “pompous, vain, haughty, devious, malicious, malicious, malicious, shameful, infamous, arrogant, presumptuous, conceited, prepotent, splayed, depressed, pomadig downright, puffy, insolent, blasiert (…) “call. What? It doesn’t matter. Then you believe this tomcat, who has lived seven times and yet actually never lived, no longer even his last, final death, which is made up of 99 synonyms from “throwing the spoon” to “finally screwing himself up”. Then you can see that a book with drums and trumpets is marching into nowhere.