Every now and then you have to clean up your life: All the old junk has to be removed, as it is called in the motivational hit "Bring the sledgehammer" by Element of Crime.

It could also provide the motto for Andreas Moster's novel “Small Palaces”.

In one key scene, a woman named Sylvia decides to core the house that her in-laws built in the 1960s.

Jan Wiele

Editor in the features section.

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Now it's 1986, and the maxim is: Only the load-bearing walls are allowed to stay, even if Sylvia can hardly lift the heavy hammer above shoulder height at first.

But then it starts: “It was as if she was beating away the whole time.

Helga gone, Carl senior gone, the disregard gone, chasing down, keeping your mouth shut, ducking your head, gone, gone, gone.

She had lived like this for almost ten years.

Tolerated upstairs, in a bed from the Weimar Republic, between Helga's gala figures on the shelf and a cross over the door. "

In a criminalistic manner

But now it is euphoric: “Not renovation: metamorphosis, transformation”!

So the dark walnut wood, the coffee table with crank, the type case - and with it a stereotypical, but also really typical German interior design gives way to this hammer, which in its solidity seemed made for eternity and yet has barely survived thirty years.

The impressive image can also be transferred to the people in this novel, to their interiors and relationships.

The time of the sledgehammer is a flashback, in the narrative presence of 2018 Sylvia has already had an accident and Carl is a nursing case that his son Hanno is returning to the provinces to take over.

This also means that he will meet his neighbor Susanne again, whom he has not seen for decades and with whom he was apparently in love as a teenager.

According to the "BRD noir"

So with a long delay, will everything be fine here for two who previously just missed each other?

Susanne now helps Hanno to take care of her father, they “play family”, it is once said, and that order will be restored with her - but it soon becomes more and more clear that something is wrong.

Something else from the sledgehammer year 1986 is slumbering under the covers of everyday life from 2018, something that, for example, leads to Susanne Carl cutting while shaving, probably unintentionally.

In a partly criminalistic manner, the novel then slowly circles that incident from the past which, as it turns out, changed Susanne and Hanno's lives fatefully. Andreas Moster succeeds in painfully exploring the gap between the responsibility for the helpless Carl and a grave guilt that he took on at the time, until the reader fully understands how, of all things, at the inauguration of the new, freer life of their parents, theirs Children forever shaped and cherished. It starts with a dress that Susanne wore back then, which she has never worn again since, and then runs to the son's question to his father: "What did Susanne not want back then?"

The aesthetics with which Moster approaches the trauma is reminiscent of the concept "BRD noir", which experienced a certain boom in sociology and journalism a few years ago, the idea that behind the façades of the apparently solid, apparently homely Federal republic opening up abysses. Such as in Moster's novel are conceivable in any country and at any time, even if they are combined with the aesthetic, especially the (interior) architectural conditions.

To expose them, Moster also uses the narrative trick of letting an already deceased character speak about the others, commenting on them and the events from the ghost-off. This contributes to the eerie atmosphere of the novel, which, not least because of its title, is reminiscent of another song: Elvis Costello's “Little Palaces”. At the time, also in 1986, he described the “sedated homes of England”, “filled with plasterboard and hope” - and thus also expressed the backdrop of false hopes, above which the ominous line “And they'll soon be pulling down the little palaces “floated: soon they will tear down the small palaces. For the character of Susanne, who is most affected by all of this, the novel provides at least the prospect of an outbreak in addition to the demolition: to the Atlantic,where, between wind and water, she will walk longer than ever in her life.

Andreas Moster: "Small palaces".

Novel.

Arche Verlag, Zurich 2021. 302 pp., Hardcover, 22, - €.