Cherrypicker | Literature
Man and his machines

Jonas Lüscher's new book tells the story of man's relationship with technology. The Swiss author travels to very different places and times, and even ends up in the future of a megalomaniacal desert city.

By Holger Moos

With his literary debut, the novella Frühling der Barbaren (Barbarian Spring, translated by Peter Lewis, 2013), Jonas Lüscher was immediately nominated for the German and Swiss Book Prize. His first novel Kraft (Kraft, translated by Tess Lewis) received the Swiss Book Prize in 2017. Lüscher had to interrupt work on his second novel due to a serious coronavirus illness. The author was in a coma for seven weeks.

This novel has now been published under the title Verzauberte Vorbestimmung (Enchanted Predestination). The cover features the main motif of the historical engraving The Leader of the Luddites (1812). This satirical illustration alludes to Ned Ludd, the fictional and legendary leader of the Luddites. At the time, English textile workers were revolting against the Industrial Revolution and the resulting deterioration in their working and living conditions. Lüscher dedicates a chapter in his book to these historical machine strikers of the early 19th century, although it is set in the Bohemian town of Varnsdorf - a place that was once considered "Little Manchester".

No more killing, no more fighting

But the novel begins in the trenches of the First World War: an Algerian soldier fights on the side of the French and is caught up in one of the first poison gas attacks. He sees how his surprised comrades die in agony, how the yellow cloud of poison approaches him too - and he flees: In the second chapter, the writer Peter Weiss (1916-82) appears for the first time. For the first-person narrator, Weiss is a brother in spirit to whom he feels close: In 1960, Weiss travelled from Paris to the south of France and wrote the essay Der große Traum des Briefträgers Cheval (The Great Dream of the Postman Cheval). Lüscher builds on this story. He calls this chapter "Der Schatten des Traums des Briefträgers" (The Shadow of the Postman's Dream) and has his first-person narrator talk about his visit to the village of Hauterives, where the rural postman and trained baker Ferdinand Cheval (1836-1924) spent decades building a bizarre "Palais Ideal" from stones that he had collected on his daily rounds. This building was to be both Cheval's tomb and his legacy. It is now a historical monument and tourist attraction. To the first-person narrator, the postman's dream, this "pocket-sized pharaoh", seems like a nightmare, testifying to hubris, "of desperate grandeur and equally great futility".

A rich and enigmatic book

The last two chapters take us to Cairo and a dystopian future. The first-person narrator travels to Egypt's New Administrative Capital, which is under construction and characterised in equal parts by megalomania and yawning emptiness. He is in a delirious state characterised by bouts of fever, with Peter Weiss sitting on his shoulder in the form of a Ba bird. In Egyptian mythology, the Ba is an aspect of the human soul that only takes on form at the moment of death and can detach itself from the body. The last chapter is entitled " Conversation of a Man with His Ba and is based on the ancient Egyptian text "Dispute between a man and his Ba" and revolves around the narrator's "disruption, disintegration, dissolution," his "death-stricken state".

In his book, Lüscher reflects on the ambivalence of technological progress, which has always been accompanied by critical observations and has often enough been directed against people. Lüscher experienced the dichotomy between human dependence on technology and its "inhuman" flipside first-hand through his life-threatening coronavirus disease. His alter ego in the novel always speaks in general terms of a pandemic that almost cost him his life: "Severe course, almost didn't survive". As he gradually wakes up from his coma, he realises a few things: "Consciousness, as I had to learn, is not a binary state, but a gradual one ". He realises that he owes his survival to various "machines" and recognises the inextricable intertwining of man and machine: Verzauberte Vorbestimmung is a wild and challenging ride through different levels of place, time and narrative, peppered with allusions and quotations. Lüscher works a bit like Cheval the postman, except that instead of collecting stones, he collects very different thoughts and uses them to build a book that is as rich as it is enigmatic. For literary critic Wiebke Porombka, Lüscher has perhaps succeeded in writing a "novel of the century" that "tells of a significant turning point in the recent past in an impressive, precise and outstanding literary manner. Jonas Lüscher also knows how to skilfully interweave this narrative with the historical and philosophical foundations on which we stand" (Deutschlandfunk Kultur).