Wolfgang Herrndorf

People are complaining again just now about the mediocrity of contemporary German novels set in the middle of society, which, for the most part, are realistic. Yes – but why, then, do the complaining critics so often ignore authors who have nothing to do with this narrative middle class? The dreamy, eccentric, funny and lovingly written novel Tschick by Wolfgang Herrndorf proves the moaners wrong. (….) Herrndorf, who was born in 1965, writes sparingly, but is always surprising. Following In Plüschgewittern and Diesseits des Van-Allen-Gürtels, he has published another book that does not fit the usual pattern. It is called Tschick after its main character, a German-Russian schoolboy called Andrei Chikachov, and it sends its readers out of their suburban neighbourhoods of new bourgeois realism on a dream trip to a mad eastern Germany that follows Tieck’s or Eichendorff’s old Romantic journeys with contemporary, sometimes American-style means. This Tschick is a mysterious, even unnerving figure at first, but in the end, he is a moving character that few readers will forget.

Gustav Seibt: „Adel auf dem Rade. Verführerin auf der Mülldeponie“
© Süddeutsche Zeitung, 13 October 2010