Ernst-Wilhelm Händler

In Jillian’s life, money has an equal status to that of glass, and yet it is only the means to an end. She is planning to split up from Jacob so as finally to be as autarkic as the many works of art made of glass that she loves so much because each of them unassailably encloses within itself and eternally preserves an individual world, a living “rhythm of ecstasies and tiredness". She can immerse herself devotedly in objects, making the novel shine with a fancier’s knowledge and reflections not only about the art of Venini and Martinuzzi, but also about Milan’s Prada and Dolce & Gabbana stores, whose spatial design Jillian walks through as if they were some sort of sensual adventure trail. Her intensive explorations of objects are a match for the escapades of her husband, who prefers to devote his attention to female bodies.
In his novels on academic and business cultures, architecture and the contemporary art business, Händler, too, has again and again taken an unconventional approach to the subject of physicality. While in Welt aus Glas, sketchy body choreographies and wafting body parts appear at best in a reader-friendly shrunken form, exciting things involving human bodies and inanimate objects happen here too, for example in the hard-nosed field of high finance, where Händler presents us with an influential glass collector: "People to whom money is important in its own right have a vast ego, but it is completely shapeless. It can only take on a shape by enclosing something. My ego would be just as shapeless if I did not collect glass."

Sabine Franke: "Im Glasroman"
© Frankfurter Rundschau, 30 September 2009