Botho Strauß

What Botho Strauß draws up here is less a technical vision than a mocking caricature of contemporary manners. People have forgotten the art of love and have replaced it with flexible relationships. A relationship, this fable teaches, is an open-ended contract that brings together desired qualities as dating agencies do. That means it is easy to imagine a well-made artificial human being going a fair way towards meeting certain expectations. Die Fabeln von der Begegnung (The Fables of Encounter) is the title of this new prose work. The characters in traditional fables are usually animals. Here, they are people, but they no longer appear to be the master of their fate, but driven by their interests. (…) Such narrative at such a high intellectual level, such concentration on the bases of our existence, and such an expedition into the impenetrability of our dreams are to be found in the work of no other German writer. Botho Strauß writes neither novels nor stories of self-discovery, and the usual realism that is limited to depicting what we all somehow know already is foreign to him. Botho Strauß is entirely singular. It is literature’s good fortune that he is there.

Ulrich Greiner: “Nach dem Sturz”
© Die Zeit, 14 March 2013