Carlotta, Lukas and Linus, that could be the names of Prenzlauer Berg children, lovely characters with meaningful hobbies, something that affirms life. Carlotta, Lukas and Linus: This is what Sebastian calls the three tumors in his body. Like the children of his family doctor, who had overlooked cancer for far too long. Nothing life-affirming, but something laconically pragmatic about life. It has to go somewhere, the silent grudge.
The mission, which begins for Sebastian with the diagnosis and which the author Stefan Hornbach writes right at the beginning of his novel: “Surviving the dog”, is also pragmatic. This dog is very old and will eventually develop a tumor. He lives in Sebastian’s parents’ house in a small town near Heidelberg, where Sebastian, now a patient, returns, slowed down by a halfway wild student life in Giessen. “Young man, I’m sorry too. But you can assume that we will be married for the next six months,” says the gruff Doctor Mittag, who will look after him from now on. So the tone is set: there is howling elsewhere.
Stefan Hornbach added a quote from Susan Sontag to his novel: “As long as there is so much military exaggeration attached to the description and treatment of cancer, it is a particularly unsuitable metaphor for those who love peace.” It comes from her essay “Illness as a Metaphor” from 1977. In short, the novel is nothing more than a demonstration of how a peace-loving sick person can get along without war rhetoric. So it is not a campaign that Sebastian starts against his cancer, not even a campaign. Nothing is exterminated or heroically defeated here. “I didn’t want to have to fight,” he says. “Maybe sit out, at most, if at all. I would turn down a duel, I didn’t feel like fighting back the misfortune.” In almost stoic acceptance, which the esoteric school friend Jasna, who now snows in almost every day, calls indifference, Sebastian simply does what needs to be done: He goes to chemotherapy.
The reader is there when the eyelashes fall out and the food no longer tastes good
And the readers accompany him, week after week, from the nursery to the chemo and back. It’s a pretty uneventful life that Sebastian leads, not even a dramatic one. A little love affair with the high school graduate Linus goes nowhere, that’s not really bad either. The eyelashes fall out, the food no longer tastes good, the father does not show his feelings, the dog accepts all of this unmoved.
Hornbach does not decorate anything, does not exhibit anything, does not ask for compassion. Amazingly, the book manages without any significant breakdowns on the part of the patient or his relatives. Just as therapy slowly but surely drains Sebastian’s energy, Hornbach also removes it from his story. The text slackens stylistically with its increasingly weaker first-person narrator, loses its color: “It smelled sour in my bed during the night and in the morning. Every night ten hours of sleep, well into the day. Wake up, stare. Fresh air, still Such a wish to open the window wide. But I stayed there. Didn’t stir. “
Stefan Hornbach: Surviving the dog. Novel. Hanser, Munich 2021. 276 pages, 22 euros.
The price of this stylistic pragmatism is a relative indifference when reading, one has to agree with the friend Jasna, who doesn’t understand Sebastian’s apparent equanimity at all and wants to encourage him to cry. But Hornbach enters into this deal. He is not interested in tearing up abysses into which he then lets the empathetic readers plunge, he does not buy compassion through tragedy, as for example John Green in his misery kitsch-oozing cancer bestseller “Fate is a lousy traitor”, in which he doesn’t let one, no, two teenagers fall ill, who naturally fall in love and also take a trip to Europe.
Stefan Hornbach, born in 1986, was diagnosed with cancer himself. It is very likely that this experience flowed into the novel and also his multi-award-winning play “Über Meine Leiche” (2016), which is also about a young man suffering from cancer. So Hornbach knows what he is writing about, including what he is not writing about.
The strength of the novel lies precisely in Sebastian’s apparent detachment from himself and his fate. It is the story of a life with cancer and not a drama. A stupid medical situation, as a result a bit boring in everyday life in small towns, framed by the good time before that, the student life, and, that seems important, because Hornbach spends a lot of time on it: the good time afterwards, parties and travel.
Sebastian is on his way, that is also not insignificant, not alone. Insofar as one can say that of someone who, as a result of the diagnosis, suddenly seems to be separated from all healthy people. The people around him are all individually helpless, but everyone tries hard. The always absent, but in a great mood, college friend Su, the mother who drives him to chemotherapy and always takes enough change for the parking machine, the esoteric Jasna, who shaves her head in solidarity. It is also this human affection that ultimately turns Sebastian into a resilient character.
So, as Stefan Hornbach shows in this quiet, often funny novel, you can get out of a great battle halfway unscathed, perhaps especially if you don’t understand it like that. In any case, the cancer will pass. The dog dies, Sebastian doesn’t.