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If you already know a few novels by Norbert Gstrein and then read his new one, a lot of it sounds familiar.
What sounds like a criticism - as if Gstrein was writing the same thing over and over again, knowing one person, knowing everyone - is rather a special quality.
Because the supposed repetition is a strange, almost uncanny familiarity that is independent of specific situations, places, figures.
Just like in a dream the colleagues from the open-plan office suddenly sit in the cubicle of a soccer team or the long deceased German teacher appears as a registrar who asks about the plot of a novel that one can no longer remember.
If one then reads earlier novels for an uncertain suspicion - Gstrein, who was born in 1961, has been publishing at a reliable rate for more than thirty years - one realizes that not only his stories are very different, but also his narrators.
What connects them, of course, is their notorious unreliability.
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Hardly any German-speaking author has
perfected
the literary theoretical concept of the
unreliable narrator
and varied it in an original way like Gstrein (the Irishman John Banville did something similar).
Behind this lies a fundamental skepticism towards the forms, genres, and plots with which we tell our lives - and the lives of others.
The writer Norbert Gstrein, born in Tyrol in 1961
Source: Oliver Wolf
In “The Second Jacob”, shortly before his anxiously anticipated 60th birthday, an actor struggles for the authority to interpret his own vita.
Jakob Thurner, who lives in Innsbruck but enjoys supraregional celebrities, was somewhat reluctant to be persuaded to provide material for a book to a professional biographer in interviews.
The sessions quickly end in a scandal because Jakob increasingly feels the questions of the author, who has been unsympathetic to him from the start, as overreaching.
Obvious things are mentioned, like his three failed marriages, the relationship with his growing daughter Luzie or the tension between his roles and his life.
Outrageous conclusions
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Jakob and Luzie, who is present during the talks, quickly agree: the biographer goes too far, suggests hair-raising connections, draws outrageous conclusions.
Noticeably often, Jakob has played villains in films, three times even a woman murderer, "just as if I had killed a woman for every marriage in reality in the film".
Finally the author is shown outside the door, and when the inevitably unfinished manuscript is in the mailbox, Luzie makes a devastating judgment: “It reads as if he could drive his bulldozer through any life, collect his particles and turn them into a pitiful one Push piles together.
In the end, everyone is trimmed according to the same pattern.
Nowhere love, nowhere disgust, nowhere even the spark of a flame. "Jakob is proud:" That was my clever daughter. "
In truth, Luzie's devastating judgment is aimed at his own father.
No biographer could please Jakob, because they would all only encounter the same abysses: that of a man who runs away from himself all his life, who does not stand by his origins, his decisions or his mistakes.
Jakob can only tell his life himself - the novel is the result of this attempt - but through all the justifications and distortions in the end all that remains is a great failure, trimmed with rhetoric.
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It starts with dealing with his origins in a Tyrolean ski hotel dynasty, which he denies even though he finances his luxurious lifestyle from his legacy.
Jakob has massive feelings of guilt towards Luzie, who was "given away" to an English boarding school after her parents separated as a teenager, which he compensates for with excessive protective role: the father secretly paid 5,000 euros to a former friend she smoked pot with he disappears from her life.
Jacob's greatest lie in life, however, is actually a crime that the unsuspecting biographer coincidentally drew to the surface of consciousness with his sensation-hungry poking around.
Crime in El Paso
In the 1990s, Jakob was involved in a fatal car accident as a passenger while filming in the Texas border town of El Paso.
No murder of women, but failure to provide assistance, hit-and-run, cover-up.
When Jakob tells the long-repressed story of his teenage idealistic daughter, Luzie is shocked and breaks off contact with her father.
For her, this confirms traumatic childhood experiences, when her egocentric father remained disturbingly alien to her in all his dark roles.
Where Luzie longs for real closeness, Jakob only offers her excuses and money.
Filming and Reality
The main part of the novel is Jacob's reconstruction of the long-ago events in the Texas-Mexican border region.
Gstrein is a master at drawing the reader as a participating observer into a psychologically highly dramatic constellation with just a few sentences.
In this novel, it is the complicated relationship dynamics within the film team with their rivalries and jealousies, with difficult-to-understand, but always noticeable power relations and an underground atmosphere of violence.
Private life and roles, theatrical poses and real breakdowns mix, the emotional conflicts are condensed like in a chamber play.
A playwright has also been lost in the novelist Gstrein.
In the film, Jakob plays a hardened, brutal border police officer who becomes a hit man.
The film project doubles the real horror: Femicide, especially of young prostitutes, was almost commonplace in Ciudad Juárez on the southern side of the border in those years.
In the midst of this emotionally acute situation, the accident occurs, which in retrospect for Jakob combines with real and imagined murders to form an inextricable conglomerate of guilt.
Criminalistic method
Without actually having done anything, Jakob is a woman murderer.
He cannot defend himself against the pull of his highly hated parade role, because no personality core offers resistance.
Jacob is empty inside.
"Nowhere love, nowhere disgust, nowhere even a spark of a flame," as Luzie said.
With his last novel “When I was young”, which won the Austrian Book Prize in 2019, Gstrein raised his routine narrative salami tactics to a new qualitative level.
Again and again, new, previously concealed or adjusted details lead to a completely different overall picture, as if the reader were witnessing a psychoanalytic process or a particularly sophisticated criminal interrogation method.
In “The Second Jacob” the first part of the novel is called “Tell them who you are”, the second “You are this one” and the third “Why everything is different I & II”.
And then there is a fourth part that offers a new twist.
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Since his very first books, the medium has played a central role in the question of the recognizability of the world, be it film, photography or, as this time, the genre patterns of a celebrity biography.
There is a lot of Max Frisch-like identity play in Gstrein's story, a lot of Stiller's running away from the consequences of one's own decisions and of course the life crisis issue, the defiant rebellion against the loss of opportunities that is called "old age".
The actor who is committed to a single, unloved role gets a foretaste of it.
Borrowed Identity
At the beginning of his career, Jakob Thurner borrowed the first name of his uncle, who was deported to a home for the “mentally ill” as a child during the Nazi era and never recovered from it.
Today the old man lives in the village as a tolerated noble tramp and pub philosopher.
The “second Jacob”, that is how the nephew was called in earlier times when the child interested in music did not meet the pragmatic expectations of the hotelier family.
Jacob has only borrowed his identity as a beaten rebel son.
In view of his international success, however, he had also changed his surname. Thurner is his grandmother's name: “The director had said that I didn't even need to try my name in America, he would look at the four consecutive consonants of my surname the film industry no light for me. ”And“ Gestirn ”,“ a variation of the letters ”, that was too much of a good thing.
Autobiographical reading
Norbert Gstrein himself suggests an autobiographical reading, also through the repeated examination of his Tyrolean origins, which already shaped the very first books such as “Das Register” from 1992.
At that time it was preceded by a quote from Thomas Bernhard from "Amras": "How many of our talents could we have developed to astonishing greatness in ourselves had we not been born and raised in Tyrol."
“The second Jacob”, the story of an artist who always struggled with his Tyrolean origins, ends with the fact that a celebration is to be held in his home village for his birthday.
On June 3rd of this year Norbert Gstrein will be 60. He has already given himself a present.
An old work looks different.
Norbert Gstrein: "The second Jacob". Hanser, 448 pp., € 25.