"Tal Tal / Crew Crew Crew" raps Julia, the impressive heroine in Angela Lehner's new novel "2001".

Julia is angry and sad, thin-skinned and rough.

She succeeds in nothing, neither in school, where she is now part of the "residual waste", as she nastily notes, nor in the clique, her "crew", which, besides music, is the most important thing in her life.

The Austrian valley in which she lives is overrun by tourists every summer;

they appear to Julia like swarms of locusts, but unlike the biblical locusts, they not only devastate everything, but also ask her arrogant questions.

Julia is fifteen, and her class is full of young people of different ages who were stranded in the last grade of secondary school. There are ambitious students among them, but Julia is not one of them. She cannot and does not want to learn anything, feels inwardly frozen, and it only becomes clear as the novel progresses that her disturbance has to do with the situation at home, which is only hinted at at the end of the novel. After all, Julia still has a brother who goes to high school and takes care of her a little.

Angela Lehner describes the cold fog in which the girl feels trapped, thrifty and haunted - a mental state of emergency that correlates with the desolate surroundings in Julia's eyes that cause all tourists to burst into screams of delight.

“Even now, when the cows actually have to hibernate, the streets and paths are filled with manure as if by magic.

Poop is omnipresent here ”, even the houses are“ stuffed with poop ”, Julia thinks desperately.

A fine, melancholy sense of humor

As in her first novel, "Our Father" from 2018, the idyll is a single abyss of hypocrisy and cruelty. For her first work, the author was awarded the Austrian Book Prize for the best debut and was compared with the Austrian writer Josef Winkler. In "2001" religion no longer plays a major role, instead the young people of the valley are split into two rival political camps. In one of the most haunting scenes, Julia, who has been drunk for days, meets two couples from the enemy camp: One of them offers her a hand to help her up, then suddenly lets go of her, and Julia falls to the ground again - but she had expected that. This scene is told as if in slow motion, and one has great empathy for the sensitive, chubby,short-sighted Julia, who was previously brought down by a cockchafer that slammed her eyes.

A great strength of this story is the convincing portrayal of speechlessness and its fine, melancholy humor.

It feeds on Julia's hopes and her deep conviction that she will somehow manage to get out of the valley.

He doesn't leave her even in difficult situations, for example at the police station, where she is held in her favorite disco after a fight and somehow tries to explain the situation to the rough policemen.

A good twist at the last moment

Everything changes when Julia's ambitious and increasingly relentless teacher begins a social experiment to impress the school board. He is giving away political roles that his students have to play in class, there is the Pope and the UN, the press, Gerhard Schröder, Jassir Arafat and Slobodan Milošević. The students, that is the incident that surprises and frightens the teacher, identify themselves passionately with their roles, and great dialogues emerge, some of which are naive, some are human and politically extremely clear.

The young people let their whole life experience and frustration flow into it. Even if some passages seem almost too eloquent, the conflicts that were previously hidden under flippant slogans are finally breaking out openly. Unfortunately, friendships and love relationships are also destroyed, especially tragically: the girlfriend of a Yugoslav refugee has to play Slobodan Milošević. An interesting and depressing, cleverly told scenario that is reminiscent of the infamous Milgram experiment of 1961 - and which Lehner takes a good turn at the last moment because a student rebels in his newly found language.

"The madness will pass / With a little humanity / You mustn't be afraid" raps the Austrian band Texta, whom Julia adores ardently.

The band gives a concert in the valley, and Julia, who caught the audience's attention with her enthusiasm, is actually allowed to go on stage for a song - it seems like a dream, and these minutes change her life.

The novel tells over nine months, it ends on September 11, 2001 with the speechless television images from New York.

The shock finally transforms Julia's disturbance and paralyzing sadness into open anger, while her mother - who appears here for the first time - lies indifferently in silence on the sofa.

This moving novel is about a neglected child, about loneliness and the fear of no future.

But Julia, the lovable, very young heroine, with whom you fear to the last page, can do it.

Angela Lehner: "2001"

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Novel.

Hanser Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2021. 283 pp., Hardcover, € 24.