It is advisable to read the Wikipedia article about Armin Meiwes before starting the novel. In March 2001, the “Cannibal from Rotenburg” cut off the penis of a man named Jürgen Brandes, they eat it together or at least try to. Brandes had responded to an Internet advertisement from Meiwes a month earlier. At the end of 2002, the dismembered corpse of Brandes (called “B” in the novel) was found in a freezer, Meiwes (“A”) has been in prison since his conviction.
In Red (Hunger) the reader can be there as Senthuran Varatharajah develops a musical variation on the theme of cannibalism. The refrain is: everyone is actually looking for someone to talk to. In love, friendship and faith. And actually you want to get so close to the other person that you become one with him. “We speak of union, of connection, of: merging. We say: I love you to the bone.”
But incorporation is not the great motive in this novel. But – almost paradoxically – the distance. The gaps are obvious when you first look at the book. At the end of the line, some words break off in the middle without a hyphen, are literally cut up, dismembered. Some words are torn apart, creating huge gaps and spaces in the middle of a sentence, scattered all over the page.
Senthuran Varatharajah: Red (Hunger). Novel. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt/Main 2022. 128 pages. 23 euros.
In terms of content, too, the beginning of the novel revolves around distances of all kinds: the distance between the lighter and the face when the first-person narrator – who bears the name of the author Senthuran Varatharajah – lights a cigarette (Marlboro, red) and singes his eyelashes. The distance between the first-person narrator and the friend with whom he is lying on his parents’ sofa, and whose sweater leaves an imprint on his face.
Many tracks are laid on these first pages. Cigarettes are lit, pulled out of the pack in pairs. There are the two provisional names A and B and the question of what a name actually means. Some sentences seem strangely empty: “At the end of the language we will only be a story.” With others, one wonders whether or not they will become meaningful as we go along: “We can’t give ourselves a name. But we can wait for it to be taken from us. It’s not a question of time.”
Sophisticated literature always involves a gap between what you read and what you only understand later, because it only comes together as a unit in the overall impression and in the concept. You have to have this patience. Varatharajah even seems to be joking when he lets his friend on the sofa click on “Skip Intro” on the confusing first pages of his book while watching the series together.
The novel does not intend to investigate anything – this literature is essentially cannibalistic
The novel describes the crime meticulously and matter-of-factly, almost like a protocol. The strict structure of the chapters, which are always the same length, conveys an impression of inevitability. The only interruptions are the first-person narrator’s flashbacks to his on-site research: the Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe train station, the Wüstefeld district of Rotenburg, and Essen, the city where A grew up. But he describes this research as excursions. He is out with friends, he toasts them in Essen with a Stauder, he also writes down their thoughts. He seems to have plenty of what A craves: a human counterpart.
Varatharajah does not try to understand or make understandable the deed. That A grew up in difficult family circumstances and B was suicidal seems so obvious that the book neither questions nor spells out this narrative. Nor does the novel explore the actually rather interesting fact that the internet now makes possible what only chance would have done in the past: that two people with compatible pathologies can seek and find each other.
The novel does not intend to investigate anything – this literature is essentially cannibalistic. Reality is spoiled. Disassembled and frozen. The content, an interest in knowledge, is not important at all. It depends on the aphorisms, on the sentences that you want to underline while reading because they express something essential. The fact that two men found each other on the Internet under pseudonyms is only the starting point for sentences like: “A name is only a name if it keeps what it promises.”
“When they said skin, I peeled off my skin, at night, on the bed, with my teeth.”
The true crime story is just the big meat hook for thoughts. It’s also about religion. There are remarkable sentences like “When I pray, I pray backwards. I think of the things that I have forgotten and those that I will have forgotten.” It is not fully explained why the Christian faith is involved – although A prays from time to time, the association of A and B with the capital C is not obvious. Is Christ the greatest distance, the greatest opposite? Or is it about the old objection, often considered witty, that the Christian celebration of the Lord’s Supper is a kind of symbolic cannibalism?
Senthuran Varatharajah, born in 1984, studied Protestant theology as well as philosophy and cultural studies in Germany and England. In 2016 his debut novel “Before the Increase of the Signs” was published, who was consistently praised by critics, especially for his linguistic sensitivity.
He himself repeatedly makes language the subject of reflections: as a child he thought “that cable the abbreviation of vocabulary be”, where the cables end, “would be the vocabulary that my parents lack.” The first-person narrator also turns his childhood experience of racism in social housing through the merciless meat grinder of language: “If they go away said I peeled off my skin, at night, on the bed, with my teeth. You know it.”
Can a real relationship only exist if a distance is maintained?
The first-person narrator in the book is not necessarily likeable – or what does likeable mean? His life seems overfull and yet filled with emptiness. Lots of cigarettes, lots of cosmopolitan travel – sometimes he’s just back from Paris, sometimes he’s in Tokyo – there are many lines from the smartphone, many friends and many girlfriends. Will the next book be about a burnout? Or is it an adaptation, an empathy of the searching, restless A? Finally, the following sentence comes out early in the book, spoken by the indefinite you, who may be his girlfriend Leila, maybe God, maybe even the murderer with whom the first-person narrator is in correspondence during his research, maybe the first-person narrator in the Soliloquy: “You have to keep the distance. Between you and the novel.”
Can a real relationship only exist if a distance is maintained? Is there otherwise madness lurking in affection? “We will destroy the larynx to reach the larynx.” This sentence returns again and again and declines all parts of the body. It is as if the multitude of demons in A’s head are speaking here, who will kill and eat B in order to possess him. It is a variation on the famous Vietnam War dictum attributed to an American officer: We had to destroy the village in order to save the village. Even the best intentions and the most human longing tip over into inhuman madness if one oversteps the arc of logic.
And is distance also an underestimated, major enabler of political solidarity? This question is also raised in the book. Varatharajah’s Tamil family fled Sri Lanka’s civil war in the 1980s. Leila’s family is Kurdish. Are the liberation movements of the Tamils and the Kurds perhaps “far enough” apart and have “little enough” to do with each other for unconditional solidarity to be possible? Leila’s father says: “My son. You are Tamil. We are Kurds. We share a story. We believe in the same freedom. We toast.”
It is inevitable that when reading ambitious and virtuously composed literature, the wish arises that the philosophical ideas touched upon would also be discussed in the book itself. They are only fanned out associatively. Everything is messed up. We don’t have anything. The novel may leave us as frustrated as killer A: A very capable human being expends a great deal of energy dissecting another human being. But what for?