Israel novel by Nathan Englander: Everything is puzzle work

A decade full of lies. When Z understands that, everything turns, a "dizziness he never knew." Maybe because he thundered his head against the wall too often with rage. His keeper says he simply loses his mind.

You can not blame Z for it. There, in a nameless prison in the Negev desert, for almost ten years. Guarded by three cameras and an equally nameless guard. So far, in 2014, they have played tens of thousands of rounds of backgammon, and every year to Hanukkah Z gets a new bathrobe. And he writes letter after letter to the only man who officially knows he exists at all.

Nathan Englander places this nameless in-between at the center of his story. And makes it appear like an echo throughout the novel, as a stunningly oppressive image of the state of Israel. Because his "dinner at the center of the earth", agent story, love story and polithistory, above all, a feeling, oh what: feelings.

Ready to die for peace

The whole horrendous mix of despair, hope, fear, defiance and future two-nostalgia that stands for the future of Israel and Palestine. In an interview over the years he himself lived in Jerusalem, author Englander once said: "He was willing to die for peace at this time - and then left when he understood that it was in spite of all the dead there will be no change.

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Nathan Englander

Here writes one who has the faxes thick. That Englander succeeds so well in reproducing this insecurity is entirely due to the shooting of his novel - and his characters. First and foremost Z, once a Mossad spy, now a prisoner. His keeper and his mother. You, the eternal right hand of the "General". That general, who has been in a coma for years, is still the main character here - and clearly reminiscent of Israel's former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

The tension in the system

Englishman has built each of them separate worlds: As if he has sections of short stories (Can he also, see his story band "What we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank") fanned out wildly. Sometimes they play in Berlin, Paris, Jerusalem or in border areas, sometimes in 2002, in 2014. The tension is in the system: the connections are puzzle work.

The overwhelming amour between Agent Z, submerged in front of his own people in Paris, and an Italian waitress. The cautious friendship between businessman Joshua with his Wannsee villa and Farid, the once fled Palestinian, now in Berlin Yacht Club member. The general in the "intermediate realm" of the coma, full of memories. The two lovers, they Jewish, he Palestinians, who can only see themselves in the tunnel system under the two states-in-the-state. The nocturnal meeting of General and Arafat to a pot of Shakshuka at the kitchen table. Finally, finally, to end the cycle and to work out a peace solution.

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Nathan Englander
Dinner at the center of the earth: Roman

Publishing company:

Luchterhand Literaturverlag

Pages:

288

Price:

EUR 22,00

Translated by:

Werner Loch Lawrence

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Relentlessly, the story continues to be driven by action, reaction, action. As with a perpetuum mobile, the first impulse long forgotten. The fact that the 47-year-old New York author found a direct, clear language for it - unlike the scruffy tone in his junta novel "The Ministry of Special Situations" fits perfectly: to stumble into the mystery twists of this story more unsuspectingly, as if you were in the middle of contemporary history.

Undoubtedly, this is precisely why episodes about the General in a coma are the most grandiose. Not only because it's so crazy ingenious, how everything moves in slow motion in this Zwischenreich. So the general hears a shot three or four times and yet not again. He has the taste of figs still on his tongue, the newspaper sails from his hand to the ground, on the wall of the calendar of 1967.

And haphazard memories, of his military operations, of the clay Menorah, which his grandsons have tinkered, of his wife, who is just pounding the horses and saying: "It's tragic, this bloody, endless eye-to-eye." The coma as a moral position in limbo, a politics between heaven and hell. A pull, a spin, until you feel dizzy. This novel sounds like a wish someone might finally stop this thing.