When the postman hardly rings the bell: Moritz Rinke’s Lanzarote novel – culture

Anyone who has never been to Lanzarote will feel quite familiar with the Canary Island, its white villages and black beaches after reading Moritz Rinke’s new novel. He learns about the ocher-yellow-reddish dust that the east wind blows over from the Sahara, learns the difference between “block lava” and “knitted lava”, and that the fine-grained lava ash soil is called “picón”. He can get an idea of ​​the fire mountains of Timanfaya, the Famara cliff with the chapel on top and the southern Ajaches mountains with the Atalaya volcano. In general, all the volcanoes with their plastic names – beautiful Hans, the black roar – they all come into their own.

The Berlin-based playwright and writer Moritz Rinke has had a house on the island for many years, retires there to write, and speaks to people. Now he has not only written a novel about Lanzarote and the “volcanic people” there as well, it is his second – after “The man who fell through the century” from 2010 – it bears the capricious title “The longest day in the life of Pedro Fernández García “.

This Pedro Fernández García is not an adventure hero, as one might assume, but a simple postman, employed by the Royal Post Office of Spain like his father and grandfather. The only difference is that at that time there was still a high volume of analog letters, whereas in the age of digitization, the “post-hostile click-click and swipe” is increasingly being made superfluous. Although he still drives his daily tours with his company Honda, Pedro has less and less mail to deliver besides dismal advertising. Which is why he likes to spend his time at a café con leche and then tricks with the fuel receipts afterwards.

The post-setting was cleverly chosen by Rinke, so he can tell of the modern age of the Internet and its rationalization measures; but can also let us readers roar over the island with his title hero and perceive its raw beauty. In addition, the post is a romantic subject whose many references, for example to old love letters that have never been delivered or to prominent representatives of the guild – such as the young Abraham Lincoln – the author savored nostalgically.

The fact that the Portuguese Nobel Prize for Literature Laureate José Saramago lived in Lanzarote until his death in 2010 also plays a role (the novel is set between 2009 and 2010). And anyone who immediately thinks of “Il postino”, the 1994 film by Michael Radford based on a novel by Antonio Skármeta on the Italian island of Procida, in which the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda helps a postman to love him, be assured: There is nothing copied. Rinke addresses this analogy himself. And anyway, love-sad postmen and glorified writers appear on so many islands. Whereby José Saramago in Rinke’s novel remains unreachable because he is shielded by a strict housekeeper. But not the Nobel laureate Pudel, whom Pedro and his childhood friend Tenaro kidnap – one of the nonchalant folly of this duo, which is a bit reminiscent of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. In times of overfished seas, the fisherman Tenaro is without work, but full of ideas. He’s constantly coming up with crazy business models.

So all this is the topic: the island, globalization, the post office, friendship between men, love. Most of all love. What is meant is not the love between man and woman – Rinke knows surprisingly little about that – but that between father and son. Little Miguel may not be Pedro’s biological child, but he loves the boy idolatrously, takes care of upbringing, homework, and having fun. He is one of those caring housekeepers, while Miguel’s mother Carlota, whose greatest asset is apparently the visual similarity to Penélope Cruz, is pursuing a career at the Hotel Crystal Palace. Well, at least she works there day and night, and it is only when she leaves him that the good-natured, not exactly introduced Pedro, buckles that Carlota is having an affair with her boss Bruno. From then on, she runs a boutique hotel in Barcelona with this, and she takes seven-year-old Miguel with her. So that the hero of the novel is first of all a depressed suicide candidate.

As a leitmotif, football rolls over a field of ball kitsch and clichés

But then so much happens in the life of Pedro Fernández García that death has no chance and the author has a lot to arrange. First there is Amado, who has fled from Africa, who sits like a saving angel in the kitchen at the crucial moment. If it only looks like a fantasy hallucinated by too much “Congo grass” the previous night at the bar, it quickly becomes clear: No, it is real! In all his fairytale quality, Amado is Rinke’s figurehead for the asylum seekers from Africa stranded on Lanzarote – and for the refugee crisis in general. Because of course it shouldn’t be missing in a story that takes place in 2009/10 on a post outpost of Fortress Europe.

The Amado, who comes from Equatorial Guinea, is a real model refugee: He speaks Spanish, is an academic, a man with spirit and charisma. He introduces himself as president of the “Land of the Waiting”, a refugee camp between worlds in the enclave of Melilla. Amado teaches Pedro that “indifference is the most dangerous form of rudeness”. He also loves football, which ultimately makes him a friend and a Rinke model protagonist, and the novel is a boys’ thing.

Football, Rinke’s great passion – he is the goal-scorer of the German national team of authors – rolls through history as a leitmotif, also across a field of ball kitsch and clichés. He connects father and prodigal son and anyway the men who all believe in one God: Lionel Messi. He, who “stops the world in the shot”, is the secret hero of the novel and stands in a “Clásico” – FC Barcelona versus Real Madrid -, his superman. Goal!

Rinke can and loves dialogues. And situation comedy

This game at the Camp Nou stadium is part of the plan Pedro and Tenaro want to bring back little Miguel from Barcelona. What they undermine in the process is one of those Eulenspiegeleien that also turn the book into a picaresque novel. A mischievous, childlike disposition is reflected here with a love of tales. Introspection is not so much Rinkes’ case, but he can and loves dialogue. And situation comedy. You can tell how the author delights in his inventions and formulations; how it gives him pleasure to lead his somewhat simple heroes through bankruptcies, bad luck and mishaps and the blessings of the – at the time still relatively new – smartphone, but also through the heights and squabbles of real male friendship. Here it has just as sentimental traits as Pedro’s fatherly love.

Rinke’s story has a (manly) romantic retro touch. But also an all-inclusive will that encompasses problems. Therefore, Spain’s fascist past has to be included. And the entanglement with Nazi Germany, tied to a heavy heirloom piece of furniture from Pedro’s grandfather made of “German oak” that weighs heavily on the novel. There are also detailed excursions and internet research results – as Wikipedia has left many information trails on the 436 pages anyway. So this overloaded novel does not achieve a literary championship title. But, to stay in the language of football: it dribbles lively and agile into the final.