Verena Keßler's novel about fitness mania and beauty ideals
The perfect body as the purpose of life

A gym as the setting for midlife crises and personality disorders – plus a few serious lies in a team where everyone means well with the protagonist: can that work?

Thanks to the latest and best equipment, Ferhat's Mega Gym is full of well-trained bodies, and even a professional bodybuilder is a daily guest. Mega Gym is not a gym like any other, but a ‘palace of shiny surfaces’ where fitness drinks have names like ‘Sixpack on the beach’ or ‘Pina-Cool-Downa’. Being greeted for spinning with ‘Are you ready bitches?!’ is all part of the experience.

The nameless protagonist in Verena Keßler's novel Gym only gets the job at the bar when she tells the owner, Ferhat, who is sceptical about her completely untrained body, that she has just given birth. The sensitive ‘feminist’, as he describes himself, is understanding:

The spontaneous lie suggests that we are dealing with a rather brazen person. Added to this not insignificant untruth are fictitious milk pumping in Ferhat's office, photoshopped baby photos and an invented babysitting grandmother.

Disturbed personality

It quickly becomes clear that there is something wrong with the protagonist. After just 30 pages, we know that she has a probation officer. As the story progresses, she behaves increasingly strangely in her fitness obsession, acting overambitious and completely unscrupulous. Jumps between her life as a successful agency employee and her current life initially give us a faint hint that something terrible must have happened in her past, and then, at the climax, this incredible bombshell drops.

Not for hardcore vegetarians

Verena Keßler talks at length about beauty ideals and what people are capable of doing to conform to them. Committed vegetarians should be warned at this point that it can get pretty disgusting. This passage is still harmless: For anyone who has ever set foot in a gym, this book is sure to be a special treat to read. There is so much to recognise in it. Anyone who thinks they don't get enough exercise might take inspiration with them to do at least a few planks a day. And those who are completely unathletic will remain so, but will still enjoy Verena Keßler's third novel, a truly funny and witty work. Every word, every train of thought is spot on.