Nox
Nox
Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M 1995, 159 pages
Is this the long-awaited Wende novel, the new German reunification epic – 160 pages short, only seven chapters and one night long? Nox is about the night on which a murder occurred; in which a young women goes searching for her name, roaming through the reeling city; in which the ‘scar’ that divided Germany ‘like badly healed tissue’ breaks open and the sadomasochistically inclined from West and East press ahead with the unification below the waistline. It is the night on which Saturn reached its highest point; in which the ‘creative intellectual elite of the country’, stoned and sloshed, float up the Landwehrkanal in a ship towards the East; in which a ‘Noisemaker’ sets the tone and a talking guard dog crosses the ‘death strip’. This book is electric. Nox, night, is a phantasmagoria of the night on which the Berlin Wall fell, sombrely lighted and yet ablaze with hallucinations. A narrator is at work here who commands the siren song of seduction – suggestive, skilled and calculated.
Thomas Hettche – Biography
Bernard Imhasly: „Das Atmen der Dinge, das Droehnen des Sterbens"
© Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 23.03.1995
