When play and life intertwine, it escalates. At least in literature. For works that wrest narrative potential from the motif of the game, you don’t even have to look to Stefan Zweig’s “Schachnovelle”. Gambling is also used in novels such as Luke Rhinehart’s 70s cult book “The Cube Man” or in the uncomfortable “The Third Reich” by the Chilean Roberto Bolaño. In these works, what is happening on the game board usually drowns out what is happening next to it – with unforeseeable consequences for the characters. With his second novel “Spyderling”, the German writer Sascha Macht is now following this tradition and risking everything.
Author Sascha Macht in 2016, the year he read at the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition.
(Photo: Jens Kalaene/dpa)
The 36-year-old was born in Frankfurt an der Oder and graduated from the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. In 2016 he read at the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and won the lit.Cologne debut prize with his first novel “Der Krieg im Garten des König der Toten”. His second album “Spyderling” is a gamble. Because power brushes the motif of the board game against the grain, so to speak. Instead of players, his novel is populated by game inventors, and they are particularly illustrious figures in the case of power.
Power is a witty narrator of absurd situations
Their names are Johanna van Tavantar, Arno Picardo or, like the heroine and first-person narrator, Daytona Sepulveda. Her physiognomy is just as unusual. For example, instead of hair, Arno Picardo has a huge mole all over his scalp. After all, “except for his face.” This global game development elite meets at the villa of the eponymous Spyderling on a vineyard in Moldova. Until the host shows up, those invited while away the wait with alcohol, sex and, of course, board games.
The host’s huge toy library has classic titles such as “Naked on the Beach” by Hosianna del Mestres, “Granny in the Garden” by Walter Kotzepitty and TT Tolliver’s “Tennessee Tabacco Tycoon”. Shelves full of such invented board games are piled up in Macht’s novel. He happily enriches them with pop culture and historical references and even takes up the debate about cultural appropriation when a Japanese woman is accused of not being allowed to invent a game about street gangs in Los Angeles. The gray eminence, the game creator Spyderling, makes himself so thin until the end that the characters eventually wonder if he even exists. As a reader, one soon wonders why one should wait for him.
Sascha power: Spyderling. Novel. Dumont, Cologne 2022. 480 pages, 25 euros.
The novel picks up some speed when the Ravensburger avant-garde heads to the capital of Moldova and picks up the punk band with the descriptive name “Taxi Terreur & The Hilterbabies” in Chişinău. Power shows itself again and again as a witty narrator of absurd situations. In terms of language, he designs his sentences as full-bodied as the descriptions of the Moldovan specialties and sometimes leaves them overflowing for pages. Despite their expressive appearances and names, his figures remain strangely colorless. Even the heroine Sepulveda, who with her tragic past and a lesbian affair would actually have enough room to gain depth, remains pale. Instead, power rises to ever new digressions such as a glossary of gaming behavior of individual nationalities that stretches over dozens of pages. The Yemenis, one reads there, lament their suffering while they play. It is quite possible that they would do the same when reading.
A board game is “compressed reality”, it says at the beginning of “Spyderling”. Life as a game on “brightly painted cardboard”. It’s just a shame that the author isn’t quite able to trust his credo when it comes to the narrative and, paradoxically, in this explicit board game novel, paradoxically lets his characters play far too seldom.