One man takes stock: three marriages ruined, three murders committed, albeit only as an actor in his films.

Her own daughter "given away" and put in an English boarding school, broken with the family and her home village, made herself hated, changed names, but never shook off her provincial origins and past.

Became a celebrity, but also, as daughter Luzie puts it, known as the great actor “who was so stupid as to turn down a role that John Malkovich then accepted”.

What should someone like that say when his daughter asks him what is the worst thing he has done in life?

Hubert Spiegel

Editor in the features section.

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Jakob Thurner has plenty of choice, but he doesn't have to think long. Years ago he was involved in something "that didn't turn out well". Then he tells what he had never told anyone before, and a world collapses for Thurner's daughter Luzie - “it was our common world”.

We find out immediately what happened during the shooting of a film in the border area between Texas and Mexico, but it wasn't until 150 pages later that Gstrein describes the event in detail, with all the details, all contradictions, all doubts. An actor and Thurner ran over a person in New Mexico at night, she was behind the wheel, he dragged the body into the bushes and tried to cover up all traces. Then filming continued, and Thurner played again what he had played before: a woman murderer.

Norbert Gstrein's novel “The Second Jacob” begins as an abysmal father-daughter story, which the author cleverly uses to keep the centrifugal forces in check, which tug at his complex narrative structure.

Because Gstrein unfolds a whole bundle of topics and motifs with remarkable speed and great skill, loads it with literary references to his own and other works and clear, sometimes all too clear autobiographical allusions, in order to put all this in the mouth of a man who is unmistakable belongs to the core family of Gstrein figures: artist, from Tyrol, notoriously unreliable as a first-person narrator.

Another one, one might say, and could think of the first sentence of the story "One" with which Gstrein made his debut in 1988: "Now they come and get Jakob."

Long since seen through

With “The Second Jacob” Gstrein ties in with the early story of an outsider who led a bleak existence as an outcast on the edge of the village community.

In the new novel, Jakob is the strange uncle of the first-person narrator, who was put into a home as a child because he was shy of people and taciturn and seemed to live in his own world.

Jakob was saved from the threat of murder by the Nazis only with great effort and at the last minute, as it were.

Thurner, who in an act of identification to compensate for feelings of guilt, takes the name of his uncle as his stage name, was supposed to manage Uncle Jakob's inheritance, but preferred to use the money to finance his luxurious lifestyle.

What's the worst that anyone has done in their life?