Natasha Brown: Meeting
Natascha Brown: Meeting. Novel. Translated from English by Jackie Thomae. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2022. 113 pages, 20 euros.
(Photo: Suhrkamp Verlag)
The starting point of this narrow, dense, impressively intelligent novel by British author Natasha Brown is as follows: A young British woman gives lectures in schools about the fact that anyone can make it if he or she shows certain virtues, is hardworking and ambitious. She herself is the best proof: she grew up in a Caribbean immigrant family, made it to Cambridge and had a picture-perfect career in the London financial world. But soon doubts creep over her: Is what she is saying actually true? Does she lie to her audience?
The novel looks at the area where promises of advancement and issues of belonging collide. Although she has done everything right and is within reach of the highest echelons of society in Great Britain, she does not feel that she is a full part of society. Page after page the protagonist’s self-questioning unfolds, and she soon questions everything: society in its current form, storytelling and life itself.
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Orhan Pamuk: The Nights of the Plague
Orhan Pamuk: The Nights of the Plague. Translated from the Turkish by Gerhard Meier. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2022. 695 pages, 30 euros.
(Photo: Hanser Verlag)
Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has published a novel about a great plague in the midst of the pandemic. The focus is on the beautiful island of Minger, where the religions and social classes live in beautiful harmony with each other and side by side. But then the plague comes and the milieus fall apart. The open, inclusive Minger narrows, journalists and members of the opposition are persecuted, the new reason of state is “Minger for the Mingerern”. It quickly becomes clear that the novel is a bittersweet parable of Turkey’s authoritarian decline. In his home country, proceedings are already underway against Roman for “insulting Atatürk and the Turkish flag”.
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Helmut Klages: Expedition to the middle
Helmut Klages: Expedition to the middle – About the characteristics of the electorate between left and right. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2022. 159 pages, 25 euros.
(Photo: Campus Verlag)
Does the middle crumble? Sociologist Helmut Klages embarks on an expedition in the non-fiction book and dissects the legendary middle class with great curiosity, from historical considerations to sociological and political definitions. In the end, he came to a diagnosis that was as simple as it was illuminating: He saw her as the “electorate between left and right.” A herd animal that sometimes moves more to the left, sometimes more to the right – depending on which wing is stronger at the time. And Klages ennobles this sluggish opportunism and his unpredictability as possibly the most important pillar of the republic.
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Amia Srinivasan: The Right to Sex
Amia Srinivasan: The Right to Sex – Feminism in the 21st Century. Translated from the English by Claudia Arlinghaus and Anne Emmert. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2022. 320 pages, 24 euros.
(Photo: Klett-Cotta)
Should everyone have the same right to sex – regardless of appearance, wealth, power? At the center of the essay collection is a killing spree: Elliot Rodger killed six people in Santa Barbara, California, in 2014 to take revenge for rejection by women and girls. The young philosopher and Oxford professor Amia Srivasan examines his ideology and discusses differentiated and controversial questions about desire, pornography and femicide in patriarchal structures, about #MeToo or about pop culture phenomena such as America’s Next Top Model. In six essays, she surprises with fine observations without ever pretending to provide definitive answers.
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Mark Schieritz: Olaf Scholz – Who is our chancellor?
Mark Schieritz: Olaf Scholz. Who is our chancellor? S. Fischer Verlage, Frankfurt 2022. 176 pages, 20 euros. E-book: 16.99 euros.
(Photo: S. Fischer)
Who is Olaf Scholz and what does he stand for? One thing is for sure – the new Chancellor is not suitable for a real biography, he keeps his private life too secret for that. And the number of anecdotes about him is also manageable. But at least there are now initial approaches to the Chancellor’s declaration. He has one of them Time-Editor Mark Schieritz, who took a closer look at the political style of the man in the Chancellery. Schieritz attempts a kind of history of ideas about how the man from Hamburg went from the far left wing of the SPD to the “middle man” of social democracy, and in doing so he helps decisively to decipher the world view of the new chancellor. Here Scholz does not necessarily gain shape as a person, but at least as a political being.
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Steffen Greiner: The dictatorship of truth, a journey through time to the first lateral thinkers
Steffen Greiner: The Dictatorship of Truth. A journey through time to the first lateral thinkers. Klett Cotta, Stuttgart 2022. 272 pages, 20 euros. E-book: 15.99 euros.
(Photo: Klett Cotta)
Already 100 years ago, self-proclaimed apostles preached new ways of life, rebelled against the authorities and gathered like-minded people behind them. What can be learned from them about today’s “lateral thinking” movement? The publicist Steffen Greiner looked for historical connections and brought enlightening things to light. The strengths of the book lie in the presentation of historical events. But the author cannot escape two problems. On the one hand, the prophets and “inflation saints” are not real forerunners of the “lateral thinkers”, and on the other hand, one quickly falls into the trivialization trap if one compares the two epochs with one another. Nevertheless, the book helps to better understand today’s “lateral thinkers” without having to show understanding for them.
Read a detailed review here.