Life experience can never hurt when writing novels: “I watched Odra in silence as she swallowed her little blue pill and drank an excessive amount of water, as we all do with ritual pomposity at the beginning of our drug history.” Although you can be sure of that doesn't think every day, maybe even never thought of it, the situation is immediately apparent.
Involuntarily, the question even arises as to why even today, even the ridiculously large cup of water is washed down with every aspirin treatment, as if it would otherwise rip your stomach to pieces.
In this respect, Angelika Meier's new novel is an unsparingly funny look at the rituals of our civil moral self-soothing.
And what setting would be better suited for this than an old art professor's villa full of busts and paintings, bibliophile first editions, family mustiness and painful memories of a not-so-easy childhood?
The Dissolution of House Decker is a novel about trying to unwind something that instead is becoming more and more involved against your will.
Strange locations
The woman who in turn implicates us here has already published four novels and two collections of short stories.
In 2013, her psychiatric novel "Heimlich, heimlich mich vergiss" was granted a place on the long list of the German Book Prize.
Another great novel, Osmo, about a solar plant in California, received little attention.
Angelika Meier is apparently one of those easily overlooked authors who have been stubbornly and persistently writing what they have to write for almost twenty years.
Your novels are strange.
Your characters are weird.
The locations of the action are strange or, to put it more pompously: suspect institutions.
For example clinics, derelict industrial plants, educational institutions, family homes.
There Angelika Meier then confidently moves in the strongholds of modern ego education or ego abuse.
The man in Meier's novel is undoubtedly a patient in the insane asylums of family and society.
He is a prisoner of his neuroses, a puppet in a game that he only half understands and from which he tries to escape through insanity or stubbornness.
And that none of this sounds like Foucault with Kafka footnotes or Kafka with Foucault footnotes is only because Angelika Meier's prose was kissed by the muse of comedy.
“The Resolution of the Decker House” is primarily about a woman in the author's age, i.e. a woman in her mid-sixties.
She comes from Berlin, where she has been leading a life as a failed artist for some time.
In the Ruhr area, she has to clear out her father's villa.
Professor Decker was a sixty-eight-year-old who, without any notable resistance, settled accounts with his parents' Nazi muff, which also became the main theme of his art-historical research.
Keyword: “negative picture addiction”!