Nobody has a finer nose for unusual and bizarre topics than Clemens J. Setz.
It may be that this special talent has now contributed to the almost simultaneous awarding of the Kleist and Büchner prizes.
In his acceptance speech in Darmstadt, Setz takes up the astronomical horse from "Woyzeck", which can apparently count by hoofbeats.
With the animal psychologist Karl Krall and his book “Thinking Animals” (1912) – both genuine – Setz makes the most improbable plausible.
The so-called planned languages in “The Bees and the Invisible” (2021), from which one hoped global understanding through sign systems, was once a major discussion among linguists.
The narrative documentary style predominant here with a high level of erudition already characterized the book "Indigo" (2012),
which also avoids a literary genre designation.
Like The Bees and the Invisible, it is not a novel, short story, reportage, non-fiction, essay, science fiction - and yet a bit of all of these.
Indigo Children are being described by esotericists as a new generation of highly sensitive chosen ones with puzzling behavioral abnormalities that school psychologists may diagnose as attention deficit disorder ADHD.
The author Setz, who is himself involved with Asperger's syndrome and synaesthesia, invents a teacher named Clemens J. Setz, who taught such Indigo children at a special boarding school in Styria.
In the book, however, this difference is blurred; a supposedly biographical note on the author is actually for the character Setz, who is presented as a "math tutor in the Proximity Awareness & Learning Center Herianau, among other things," which does not exist.
The narrative character Setz lost after opaque allegations of skinning a human
his job and began extensive research and interviews about the mysterious syndrome.
This documentary investigation is the subject of the book, which the actor Ole Lagerpusch reads in consistently calm parlando for more than fourteen hours.
Sometimes the tone is didactic like in radio college, then again understandingly sympathetic like in therapy.
You follow him with pleasure and with increasing excitement.
You can't trust anything here
At the special boarding school for island talents, every weakness has its rightful place.
Everything is as gently inclusive as that "completely pointless" version of the trip to Jerusalem with as many chairs as participants.
Author Setz has his character Setz extensively investigated, both in Heliau and in the places to which individual students are secretly relocated.
In doing so, he himself begins to suffer from the "Indigo Strain" that afflicts anyone who gets close to those affected for too long.
Headache, dizziness and vomiting are among the classic symptoms.
In the class lists, the “I number” is given after the name, which indicates in seconds how long you can endure being in the near zone of a student.
With Robert Tätzel it ranges between 60 and 180 in 2002 and 2004. In a time change to the year 2021, because it is also a story about the future, we meet this strange person again.
A mother from the house apologizes for the insult "Dingo", which her son calls after the now 29-year-old Robert Tätzel for his indigo suffering.
As an adequately traumatizing answer, he imagines shooting himself in front of the kneeling boy in such a way that "jawbone splinters and teeth spread out as a red-black cloud in the courtyard".
Such crass splatter fantasies flank the story of Tätzel, which forms one of the few common threads in the book.
The researching narrator figure visited him in 2006 and collapsed unconscious at the first close encounter.
Of course, there is a system in which the plot "evades any summary", as the blurb announces.
In fact, one is confronted with a complex web of puzzles in which individual threads and patterns have to be identified.
It's a bit easier in print than in the audio book, because Judith Schalansky has laid some tracks through changing typography and photos, which actively blur the boundaries between fact and fiction.
Inserted analogy documents to the island-gifted children are sometimes mere invention: Hebbel's fractured and apparently originally illustrated calendar story "Die Jüttnerin von Bonndorf" about a "comet child" with indigo symptoms from 1811 is a fake.
The ancient Arbre du Ténéré in Niger depicted in the audio booklet as the loneliest tree in the world,
whose disappearance caused a nearby desert well to turn poisonous, actually existed.
Or passages about long-distance ill effects on other people in Burton's "The Anatomy of Melancholy" or Frazer's "The Golden Branch".
You can't trust anything in this erratic text montage.
Clemens J. Setz is the author of a narrator of the same name who replaces the old "Poeta doctus" and becomes a great player.
In order to be able to follow him, Ole Lagerpusch offers everything to increase our powers of concentration.
Setz has signed up as an author for a narrator of the same name, who replaces the old "Poeta doctus" and becomes a grandiose player.
In order to be able to follow him, Ole Lagerpusch offers everything to increase our powers of concentration.
Setz has signed up as an author for a narrator of the same name, who replaces the old "Poeta doctus" and becomes a grandiose player.
In order to be able to follow him, Ole Lagerpusch offers everything to increase our powers of concentration.
Clemens J. Setz: "Indigo"
.
Reading by Ole Lagerpusch.
Roof Music Bochum 2021, 2 MP3 CDs, 846 minutes, €20.