Michael Köhlmeier

Joel Spazierer was born in Budapest in 1949. As a child, he flees to Austria with his family. After a long prison sentence, he pursues a professional career in East Germany. He is a genius of manipulation, on this side of good and evil. In clinical terms, he is a psychopath who can read and control others perfectly while remaining emotionally cold. He is a prostitute at the age of nine, later becoming a blackmailer, counterfeiter, thief and murderer of at least five people and a cold-blooded, vindictive, greedy, brilliant and charming monster with no morals.(…)
Köhlmeier’s composition flashes backwards and forwards, making bold leaps in time that suspend the tedium of chronology. His strategically most important decision was his choice of perspective. Had he written the story from a third-person perspective, one would soon have turned away emotionally from this monstre sacré. But because he narrates in the first person from his point of view, the inevitable result is the Stockholm syndrome. Having been taken hostage by this lonely person, one cannot help gradually putting oneself in his shoes, even coming to sympathise with him in spite of the fact that his deeds speak so harshly against him.
The book is a page turner – you can hardly wait to see what will happen on the next page. But you never have any inkling of what it will bring, as the narrator surprises us each time.

Michael Maar: “Der Schelm als Monster”
© Die Zeit, 31 January 2013