Lisa Kränzler

Two children living on the same street make friends. One, the first-person narrator, comes from a middle-class home with the usual insignia of a well-tempered background: graduate parents, books, a piano and records. The other girl comes from the so-called underclass, a world of blows, paternal abuse, cigarettes and booze. (…) In the pre-puberty phase of innocence, they celebrate vows of sisterhood, but as the physical changes of adolescence set in, the social divide between the girls separates them for ever. Nothing can be done. The purity of the better world has to be upheld, and the risk of infection from social deprivation, dirt, suffering and brokenness is too great. (…) Is that it? Of course not. What is lacking in the plot of this obsessively introverted novel about growing up has to be made up for in the rhetoric, metaphors and allegories, and in the scenic density that makes time stand still. (…) While intentionally used, the utterly mannerist style and the narrator’s vain, claustrophobic perspective irritate. But seldom has so much realistic barbarity been squeezed out of a will to write poetry than is the case here. Dreaming amounts to a betrayal of friendship because in this novel the main purpose of the objective world is to narcissistically adorn the subjective world.

Adam Soboczynski: “Träumen ist Freundschaftsverrat”
© Die Zeit, 21 February 2013