Dirk Kurbjuweit

The opening scene is stunning. Randolph Tiefenthaler, an architect in his mid-forties, visits his father in prison, where the old man has just been detained. A topsy-turvy world and a nightmarish emotional constellation. Normally fathers visit their sons in prison, not the other way around. What has happened? A terrible act. A man has been killed. (…) Kurbjuweit’s novel tells the story leading up to this unusual constellation. And although he more or less clears up the murder around which the plot is structured (there is still room for a surprise), the novel loses none of its tension. One absolutely has to find out what could have happened in this middle-class world to make a son visit his father in prison. This is a story of vigilante justice, a genre in which law-abiding citizens become violent criminals. (…)
Privately using weapons within the family, above all things, now leads to a rapprochement between father and son. Kurbjuweit’s revelation that it is impossible to escape the fate of sonship is made in such psychological detail and so meticulously that unfortunately, in the end no questions are left unanswered. Here, Kurbjuweit has tied up his novel too immaculately, leaving it with no air to breathe.

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© Die Zeit, 17 January 2013