Thomas Melle

"Sickster" is the title of a terrific story of illness, the first novel by Berlin writer and nightclub visitor Thomas Melle. It begins in Bonn, the old capital of the ideal world of Rhineland social partnership capitalism and ends in a psychiatric hospital in Berlin–Mitte. There, Magnus Taue meets his old school friend Thorsten, who had meanwhile been his supervisor as a petrol station marketing manager for additional business optimisation. Until fear and alcoholism made Thorsten totter, that is. Thorsten’s girlfriend Laura, the epitome of paranoia, is also suffering from psychosis. Together, they devise the craziest anti–capitalist plan that crazy anti–capitalists could possibly come up with in 2011. By means of an online guerrilla campaign, they want to persuade the world’s dominant oil companies to reduce the price of petrol. A brilliant book! Not least on account of the skill with which Melle leaves calculatedly vague whether it is capitalism that has made us all so sick, or whether capitalism is so sick because the people of which it consists are born crazy.

Jens Balzer: „Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie“
© Frankfurter Rundschau, 14 October 2011