"Let's try it out for a week," suggests Katja, the artist who actually came to the country on a scholarship.

Now she would like to work as an intern on the farm that Jakob has been running since he was fifteen.

He's now in his mid-twenties, a little younger than Katja, and he's used to getting by without any help.

What should the artist do with him?

Tilman Spreckelsen

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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"So you're a farmer?

I can imagine that being exciting,” she had previously written to Jakob, who found it difficult to find anything exciting about his everyday life.

It quickly becomes apparent that she is serious about her work on the farm in Upper Austria, that she learns quickly and likes to lend a hand.

One week turns into two, in the end Katja stays there, the two get married, a son is born.

Father's wild ideas

At the moment she is probably not sure which family she is joining, and although the novel "Wilderer" by Reinhard Kaiser-Mühlecker is told solely from Jakob's perspective, much remains a mystery to the reader.

In any case, as the novel progresses, the young farmer proves to be extremely reliable at work and a very questionable source for depicting the past and present of the family.

You can't count on his father, Jakob believes he brought the farm down with wild ideas and is to blame for the fact that acre after acre of the family property had to be sold to the neighbors.

The family is actually rich, the talk is of "Jewish money", of assets,

Because his father was not a farmer and his older siblings Alexander and Luisa quickly fled, all the burden is on Jakob's shoulders.

He has an unhappy early love life, uses Tinder without real-world encounters, and unsuccessfully tries his hand at farming fish while working as a farmer.

The harshness towards himself and others that he needs for this way of life becomes clear on the first pages of the novel, when he secretly poisons the farm dog, whom he suspects of poaching.

The father, who is watching him, does not dare to confront him.

Our worldview is cracking

Kaiser-Mühlecker tells all of this in a soothingly factual manner and with so much understanding for his protagonist that the abysses of this story only gradually become visible – but then all the more intensely.

What is completely plausible for Jakob, connections, evaluations, decisions, is also good for convincing the reader.

Depicting the process by which this worldview is cracking, aided by sparse, casual, and increasingly agitated comments from those around Jacob, is no mean feat on the part of the author.

Signs of Jacob's desperation and anger, which the young farmer himself persistently pushes aside, are present from the start, but their extent can only be recognized in retrospect.

There's the numbing work, but there's also an old revolver in the bedroom,

which Jakob uses for a kind of Russian roulette with himself.

There is an all-encompassing anger, the consequences of which Jakob ignores for a long time and only becomes aware of towards the end of the novel.

And there is the fear in the eyes of his family members, which he takes to himself - and to the reader - as a sign of respect, a sign that his self-denigrating work on the farm is recognized.

In this situation, Katja acts as a catalyst.

The author describes the rapprochement of the two as well as the rift that soon goes through this partnership, from Jacob's eyes and with the strongly colored gaze of the farmer who is used to being alone.

He is absolutely certain that he loves his son Marlon like nothing in the world, and at the same time finds it perfectly normal to yell at the infant.

He blames the dog that accompanies him for the fact that Katja sometimes hastily picks up the child from the ground and hugs her protectively, and it never occurs to him that it is he himself who makes Katja worry about the child.

And when that dog trembles so violently in his presence, is that really the animal's "blood lust" as Jacob believes?

At this stage of the novel, the reader's confidence in Jacob's description has long since been shaken.

And while the farmer, who ended up inheriting his grandmother's fortune instead of the right-wing extremists, enjoys the growing respect of his neighbors, Katja's looks at him become more and more stunned.

"I must never lose this woman," Jakob thinks once while he's been at it for a long time.

The author does not denounce him, he takes the perspective of a person who takes on a burden that robs him of his youth.

The fact that he so convincingly portrays a world view that is formed as a result and at the same time so decisively relativizes it makes this novel an aesthetic event.

Reinhard Kaiser-Mühlecker: "Poachers".

Novel.

Verlag S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2022. 352 pages, hardcover, €24.