Cherrypicker | Literature  Jigsaw puzzle with a mafioso

Jigsaw puzzles, funeral speeches, and a Mafia crown witness - Wolf Haas shows us how to fit all this and much more into a novel that is as tricky as it is amusing.

A man called Franz Escher, a funeral orator by profession, sits in his flat waiting for the electrician and passes the time with his passion, jigsaw puzzles. When he has finished, he does something he doesn't really like: he thinks about his life. So we learn that his first jigsaw puzzle - attention allusion! - with a motif by M.C. Escher, the famous artist of visual illusion, was the gift of an unhappy childhood love. One missed passion was replaced by another.

The reason he finishes his puzzle so quickly is that it is the puzzle with the motif The Great Wave off Kanagawa, the world-famous colour woodcut by Hokusai. Escher is not particularly fond of this puzzle, not so much because the motif is "kitschified worldwide", but simply because it only consists of 500 pieces. This is not normally in Escher's league, he prefers puzzles with 1000 pieces, his "highlights" are all puzzles that depict works of art history: the Madonna with the Long Neck by Parmigianino, the Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder or Dürer's Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand.

The wait for the electrician continues. So Escher ends the unpleasant reflection on himself by indulging in his second passion: reading books about the Mafia, in this case a novel about a Mafia crown witness who is placed under witness protection and is supposed to start a new life with a new identity in Germany. Elio Russo becomes Marko Steiner.

A fatal short circuit

This is how Wolf Haas' new novel Wackelkontakt (Loose connection) begins. The fact that Elio, or rather Marko, also repeatedly tries to relax or distract himself by turning to a book about a man sitting in his flat waiting for an electrician, suggests that the two storylines - to stick with Escher's hobby - could be put together piece by piece like a jigsaw puzzle.

And so Haas constructs a double novel-within-a-novel consisting of two parts, succinctly called "Off" and "On" . While the two novels are still in an off-relationship in the first part, the relationship is switched to "On" in the second part and the protagonists realise that they are really being addressed in the other book.

Haas lets these interwoven stories race towards each other faster and faster. The book picks up speed when the electrician finally comes to Escher, but is soon lying dead in the kitchen, caused by an electric shock. Escher is not entirely innocent. To calm himself down, Escher continues reading his mafia novel. The plot jumps back to Marko Steiner, who is spending the first night of his new life travelling through a hotel in Rome, still worried about being murdered by a mafia hitman.  

Into the land of the schnitzel eaters

It goes back and forth, from one novel within a novel to another, with both Escher and Marko in desperate need of a break from their lives and turning to their respective books. To learn German, Marko reads a book given to him by his former cellmate Sven, a German junkie who was put in his cell during the mafia trial so that he could learn his future language. Sven's slang leads to Marko acquiring a rather coarse German. While still in Italy, he eats a schnitzel, "perhaps out of exaggerated conformity to his future compatriots or out of exaggerated prison sentimentality, because Sven had alternately called his compatriots ‘Schnitzelfresser’ (schnitzel eaters) and ‘Schnitzelfressen’ (butthead). It had taken him a long time to realise the difference. In his vocabulary notebook, he had also entered Sven's frequently used exclamation ‘meine Fresse!’ (Bugger me!) as well as ‘Fresse halten!’ (Shut your gob!) and ‘Diese Sackfresse!’ (This shitface!)".

There is still too much going on to be able to describe it here. Only this much can be revealed: The book is also a romance novel with several facets. Marko meets a woman called Gabi in Germany. This love at first sight quickly leads to an extremely harmonious marriage, the secret of which is that the two don't ask each other any pointless questions: However, problems do arise when their daughter begins to take too much interest in her father's past during puberty.

Playful and original in the best sense of the word

Haas' novel received mostly enthusiastic reviews in the feature pages and was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. According to the jury, this “tricky, intricate and playful novel” is an “original work in the best sense of the word”. Haas generally has a large fan base. You could almost say that everyone who knows him also loves him. But this is precisely what makes him suspicious to others and leads to the usual reservations about writers who are too popular and successful: Too popular to be really good! There must be a catch! Fellow writer Franzobel, for example, makes a reservation in the TV programme Das Literarische Quartett. He feels that the characters lack psychological depth. Nevertheless, Franzobel also admits that he loves Haas, and even if the novel is not "ingenious", it is at least "magnificent".

And of course, despite all its sophistication, a novel constructed in this way has the odd loose connection, but it doesn't come to a literary short circuit, the book is simply too much fun to read with its enormous wit. My conclusion: literature must be allowed to go beyond the realm of logic, because we are not and do not act logically anyway. Isn't life basically just a series of loose connections?
 
 

05/2025