The new coffee maker sails through the air, followed by a series of cups. Not a simple coffee maker, but a portafilter machine! Kim threw her out the window in an angry impulse, she just got her physics paper back, an F. It was just an experiment, she explains her behavior to the school director, to the big bang theory.
For most people, Kim just has an “anger problem,” she’s kicked out of school, and no other school in town is willing to accept her for a final year after the Big Bang. So her mother contacted her ex-boyfriend René, who went back to his home village deep in the province after the relationship ended and now lives in the house of his aunt Agnes. He knows the principal of a comprehensive school in town a few miles away – a “boyfriend” – who would take Kim on. She will live with René, but – that’s the catch – alone, the mother stays back in the city, where she works in the hospital: “It’s not as if many doors are open to you.” That’s just the wrong wording in this case, and when the mother’s gone, Kim prys open all the doors in the apartment, she also rips down the bamboo curtain to the kitchen, and finally she’s about to throw the apartment door down the stairwell, four floors .
Kim writes on her forearm with a permanent marker: “You don’t mess this up.”
It is Kim herself who tells the story in Sarah Jäger’s third novel. She is rebellious and defiant, the logic and power of association with which she describes her outbursts and actions are naive and sometimes annoyingly precocious, but always consistent – you know the revolutionary potential that lies in it from the big social movements since the 1960s: “Break it before it breaks you.” And there’s a certain pride in her, a willingness to admit her mistakes and to reassess people once she gets to know them better. What she decided to do (and wrote on her forearm with an orange marker pen) for this last chance: “You won’t mess this up.” at Sarah Hunter young people are taken as seriously as Erich Kästner once did.
Sarah Hunter: Platypus Deluxe. Novel. Rowohlt paperback publisher, Rotfuchs 2022. 204 pages, 20 euros. 14 years and older.
(Photo: Rohwolf)
René is a quiet guy who is quite content with his life (including his new relationship), anything but provincial. But the aunt is unapproachable, she devours large quantities of pickles and tinkers with small snow globes and “soothing glasses”. Kim doesn’t like her and makes her disdain clear with razor-sharp, calculated signs – in a mean casual way she snaps off one of her aunt’s roses and throws it on the ground (“Their petals were already brown around the edges, it would have withered soon anyway , so it doesn’t really count.”).
Kim works at a local gas station to pay his mother for the damage she caused when the apartment was demolished, the job is boring, but one day Janne comes into the gas station shop, a boy with red bands in his hair who is in the barber shop works. He has his very own way of dealing with life, he always delivers the clearest statements and statements as if they had a question mark behind them. Kim also has good advice for Janne: “You can do anything … the only question is whether you want it.” An older girl joins them third, Alex(andra Sophia), who encourages them to go jogging. Later, the three of them go through an exalted cleaning orgy: “Tonight forget about your fears, because I wanna dance with you…” And: “Maybe one day, we will fly.”
The provinces with their everyday turbulence also acquire a cosmic dimension in this book: “Everything blew apart and then something new emerged from it,” Kim wrote in her work. “Roughly our universe. But it’s just a theory.”