Jan Brandt

…this is the tragedy of a boy who has innocently become guilty. Jan Brandt, who was born in 1974, throws his protagonist Daniel Kuper into the microcosmos of north-west German provinciality. His parents run the local drugstore. He spends his young life with space magazines, heavy metal and unusual powers of imagination, which soon come up against their limits in Jericho: "The village was ubiquitous. That was the realisation that spread out slowly within him. He would have to walk or travel a very long way to escape. But what then? What then? His imagination did not stretch that far." (…) Were one to sum up these 900 pages so succinctly, it could all too airily be taken to be a somewhat exaggerated account of growing up in a village, a story of adolescent ennui. If it were not for the novel’s construction and narrative style, that is, that suggest that the author Brandt is not interested only in Daniel Kuper but also in the village community living behind the façade of toy-train harmony. Jericho is a paradigmatic place in a period of transition before reunification and globalisation.

David Hugendick: „Die Apokalypse in Sehrnahaufnahme“
© ZEIT ONLINE, 31 August 2011