“I don’t want to meet them,” the brother whispered, “without a pane of glass.” But as is sometimes the case with things that one is afraid of, the two of them encountered them often. Attracted to these creatures in the terrarium. Indestructible for 300 million years: hissing cockroaches. The first-person narrator Tommi remembers. To childhood, the annual ticket for the Nuremberg Zoo. “I would have liked to come here with you again, my brother.”
Yes, one is missing. The brother, the big one. “A Cockroach” is the name of Robert Wolfgang Segel’s debut novel – published by the independent Munich-based Schillo Verlag. A novel like a long letter to someone who is no longer there. A reflection on the slow disappearance of a loved one.
Born in Fürth in 1984, Segel grew up with his brothers in a suburb of Fürth. The mother is a Protestant pastor, the father is a blank space whose study is kept in good condition even after he leaves so that he doesn’t have to come to terms with the finality. In this childhood, in this life, which is supported by the mother through Bible quotations, there is no room for exploring feelings.
Tommi becomes a cook, brother Micha has two children with his childhood sweetheart and even gets married, but little by little his existence becomes more fragile. As concrete as the first-person narrator is able to remember small details, it becomes difficult to grasp the looming depression. In this contrast, Segel manages to make the family’s disbelief real. Little by little, Brother Micha isolates himself from reality. It’s clear to see, in the memory, the ever-increasing imbalance between the brothers. While the younger one builds his own life, the other one’s life slips away, paralyzed and powerless.
When everything is over, the first-person narrator visits the Nuremberg Zoo again, stands in front of the terrarium, is amazed at the hissing cockroaches that took advantage of the simplicity: “But your cockroaches, they were anything but simple “They ate everything, my brother. Everything. Because they were underestimated.”
Robert Wolfgang Segel: A Cockroach, Schillo Verlag, reading on November 6th, 7:30 p.m., Book & Café Lentner