When murder is simpler than life
Now and then - unfortunately not often enough - even the first lines of a book are enough to smooth the furrows in my sceptical brow. I instinctively feel that this is a book which works. This is a writer who can confidently carry you through the storm. That's how I felt about Astrid Paprotta's "Sterntaucher". Maybe I'm alone in my appreciation. Some critics have apparently refused to write about this book, because it disturbed them too much.
It begins with a memory, a photograph. Katja Kammer and her two sons. A strong young woman is holding her arms aloft as though she were gathering stars from the sky. Dorian, the eldest boy, is waving happily behind her. Robin, the younger one, is not completely in the picture. One leg is outside of the frame. The man remembering this snapshot of lost childhood happiness is in a cemetery. Next to him is a corpse, carefully tucked under a coat. The man remembering is a patrol policeman. Dorian Kammer. We soon discover that the dead man he found after responding to an emergency call is his brother.
A thriller has to grip you from the very first pages. Astrid Paprotta opens her story with images which, unusually, are not linked by the rules of cinematic plot development but by psychological processes. Her images unfold against a landscape of nightmare, with damaged souls editing furiously to protect the mind from remembering, and relying heavily on the survival technique of repression. The image of the cut off leg and the two brothers in the cemetery function as motifs until the bitter, inexorable end. The most obvious motif is that of the incomplete person. But which character is not intact? Is it only Robin, the first to be found dead? Ina Henkel, the detective superintendent investigating the death, soon finds out that no one in the history of this family was not disturbed, and gradually uncovers tales of drugs, blackmail, abuse, pornography, sadism and victimisation.
The cut off leg also suggests there may be a story taking place outside the frame. The family, made up of Katja, a singer, her two boys and the photographer, fell apart shortly after the picture was taken. The photographer died of an overdose and the village the family lived in cast them out. Katja's career collapsed and the boys were placed in foster care. After this, the three survivors could only ever meet on the premise of immediate, absolute forgetting. - or they would have been unable to go living. But even this didn't work.
Detective superintendent Ina Henkel (who makes her second appearance in "Sterntaucher") fails to get the measure of the two boys, neither Robin, who is dead, nor Dorian, who lives as though he were dead. She is fascinated by their mother, who appears to have been a great woman. Ina thinks she can find the missing Katja - or at least avenge her. Ina Henkel is an unprecedented character - a detective addicted to horoscopes and tabloids, both motivated and destroyed by the compassion the dead awaken in her. Ina hates murderers and abhors violence because she loathes the rotting corpses she is obliged to examine everyday. Her investigative tools are empathy, intuition, an antenna for the black emotional depths which can lead to murder. By the time she has completed her investigation, both she and we are left with the feeling that perhaps murder is the simplest and kindest way of dealing with the tangled mess of human lives.
Astrid Paprotta's first thriller "Mimikry" (1999) was a striking debut. "Sterntaucher" is even better. She propels the story forward via her protagonists' stylised monologues, skilfully meshing inner and outer events, reality and imagination, and driving deeper and deeper into the inevitable disaster like a drill. When critics describe Paprotta's work as "hard to take" they are referring to her psychologically accurate, linguistically convincing depiction of characters whose insane imaginings threaten to take them over. But few writers have depicted insanity - one of the most incomprehensible driving forces behind murder - so convincingly. Appearances can be deceptive, but Astrid Paprotta could well be Germany's answer to the great Patricia Highsmith.
by Tobias Gohlis
All rights reserved (c) Die Zeit, 25.04.2002
translated by Jane Paulick
Now and then - unfortunately not often enough - even the first lines of a book are enough to smooth the furrows in my sceptical brow. I instinctively feel that this is a book which works. This is a writer who can confidently carry you through the storm. That's how I felt about Astrid Paprotta's "Sterntaucher". Maybe I'm alone in my appreciation. Some critics have apparently refused to write about this book, because it disturbed them too much.
It begins with a memory, a photograph. Katja Kammer and her two sons. A strong young woman is holding her arms aloft as though she were gathering stars from the sky. Dorian, the eldest boy, is waving happily behind her. Robin, the younger one, is not completely in the picture. One leg is outside of the frame. The man remembering this snapshot of lost childhood happiness is in a cemetery. Next to him is a corpse, carefully tucked under a coat. The man remembering is a patrol policeman. Dorian Kammer. We soon discover that the dead man he found after responding to an emergency call is his brother.
A thriller has to grip you from the very first pages. Astrid Paprotta opens her story with images which, unusually, are not linked by the rules of cinematic plot development but by psychological processes. Her images unfold against a landscape of nightmare, with damaged souls editing furiously to protect the mind from remembering, and relying heavily on the survival technique of repression. The image of the cut off leg and the two brothers in the cemetery function as motifs until the bitter, inexorable end. The most obvious motif is that of the incomplete person. But which character is not intact? Is it only Robin, the first to be found dead? Ina Henkel, the detective superintendent investigating the death, soon finds out that no one in the history of this family was not disturbed, and gradually uncovers tales of drugs, blackmail, abuse, pornography, sadism and victimisation.
The cut off leg also suggests there may be a story taking place outside the frame. The family, made up of Katja, a singer, her two boys and the photographer, fell apart shortly after the picture was taken. The photographer died of an overdose and the village the family lived in cast them out. Katja's career collapsed and the boys were placed in foster care. After this, the three survivors could only ever meet on the premise of immediate, absolute forgetting. - or they would have been unable to go living. But even this didn't work.
Detective superintendent Ina Henkel (who makes her second appearance in "Sterntaucher") fails to get the measure of the two boys, neither Robin, who is dead, nor Dorian, who lives as though he were dead. She is fascinated by their mother, who appears to have been a great woman. Ina thinks she can find the missing Katja - or at least avenge her. Ina Henkel is an unprecedented character - a detective addicted to horoscopes and tabloids, both motivated and destroyed by the compassion the dead awaken in her. Ina hates murderers and abhors violence because she loathes the rotting corpses she is obliged to examine everyday. Her investigative tools are empathy, intuition, an antenna for the black emotional depths which can lead to murder. By the time she has completed her investigation, both she and we are left with the feeling that perhaps murder is the simplest and kindest way of dealing with the tangled mess of human lives.
Astrid Paprotta's first thriller "Mimikry" (1999) was a striking debut. "Sterntaucher" is even better. She propels the story forward via her protagonists' stylised monologues, skilfully meshing inner and outer events, reality and imagination, and driving deeper and deeper into the inevitable disaster like a drill. When critics describe Paprotta's work as "hard to take" they are referring to her psychologically accurate, linguistically convincing depiction of characters whose insane imaginings threaten to take them over. But few writers have depicted insanity - one of the most incomprehensible driving forces behind murder - so convincingly. Appearances can be deceptive, but Astrid Paprotta could well be Germany's answer to the great Patricia Highsmith.
by Tobias Gohlis
All rights reserved (c) Die Zeit, 25.04.2002
translated by Jane Paulick
