In order to get close to Thomas Hürlimann's new novel "The Red Diamond", a small detour is necessary.

It leads to Thomas Bernhard, the singular tragic comedian of our literature.

One of his lucid definitions is “the philosophy of laughter”, naturally including a corresponding “laughing program”.

Bernhard illustrates it with his debut and despair novel "Frost" from 1963: "When you read 'Frost', for example, it actually makes you laugh out loud every moment .

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That doesn't mean that I didn't write serious sentences too, in between, so that the laughter sentences are kept together.

This is the putty.”

Jochen Hieber

Freelance writer in the feuilleton.

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The application in terms of Hürlimann is: This serious and melancholy narrator shows himself in his new book as an eminent laughing philosopher.

As a laughing-philosophical novel of doom, "The Red Diamond" is a triumph.

So much joy at so much loss.

So much joke despite endless terror.

So much humor with permanent sadness.

As a carnival of catastrophes, this novel is above all a celebration of comedy.

In the spirit of Bernhard, Hürlimann must have needed a lot of window, joint or glazing putty to somehow hold his narrative structure together.

It now stands there in impressive solidity.

But what is going down?

No less than the Catholic itself: church and cross, monastic life and catechism, pilgrim piety and reliquary.

Also, people just run away.

In the end, two actors are left behind: the Vatican, who of course is only allowed to appear at the very last moment, and the main character of the book, for his part a character so remote from a hero and so irresistibly endearingly ridiculous that one is filled with admiration for his durability, his closeness to people and their, there is no other way to put it, metaphysical cunning no longer wants to pause.

This main character is called Arthur Goldau.

You should remember the name.

The novel is reminiscent of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.

As a story about monasteries, heretics, monks and murder, “The Red Diamond” is of course also reminiscent of one of the most successful novels of doom in recent literature, Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” from 1982. In Eco there is, in the chapter “ Second day.

Tertia", a debate about the nature of comedy and, more fundamentally, about the meaning of laughter.

The blind Jorge von Burgos, the brilliant villain of the book, goes so far as to claim that comedies and fables are reprehensible simply because they are an invention of the “pagans” and that “our Lord Jesus” avoided them for the same reason.

Instead, he told "clear parables" that showed us "how to get to paradise".

Because paradise is true and beautiful, but also a very serious matter, “Christ never laughed either”.