Three books by women, three by men. The six titles on the Shortlist are well balanced. The novels are above all: young and very contemporary.
With the German book prize, the Foundation honors book culture and promote reading of the börsenverein of the German book trade, the German-speaking novel of the year. The winner receives 25,000 euros. The price had advertised 203 of the title, between October 2018 and the 17. September 2019 appeared. Here are the six titles Shortlisted for 2019 are:
Raphaela Edelbauer: liquid Land
The hole was of unknown depth, the ramifications and moisture. It was an underground mycelium under the hilltops and settlements, broke out in tubes and networks on the surface and pushed continental drift-like the nervous ground to a coarse-grained breathing heaps, where the rotting, pilznetzige process of Decay had taken root.
This book is the exception to the Shortlist of the German book prize: While the other titles will tell comparatively conventional and fictitious from the real life, is a “liquid Land” is a single of surreal nightmare. It is a small town, whose centre, the market square, in a hole sinking and the environment with in depth tear. Large A country, so the place is called, decreases more and more, what the highly gifted physicist Ruth presents an almost insoluble Problem. Your in an accident, fallen parents have to be in the place of her Childhood buried. But the place is not to be found, he hides. An influential Countess, the rich dominated the memories of a whole community. The residents of Large-Acountry not talking about the hole. The story is not to decrypt.
The 1990 born in Vienna, Raphaela Edelbauer has written a Austrian Anti-Heimat novel, in the footsteps of Elfriede Jelinek’s. Extruded past rumbling in the underground, the “hole”-a metaphor for the power of human chasms visible. The novel is also nominated for the Austrian book price 2019.
Raphaela Edelbauer: liquid country, Verlag Klett-Cotta 2019, 350 pages
Miku Sophie Kühmel: Kintsugi
“Kintsugi” is cause the Japanese word for the art, broken ceramics with ultra-thin Gold together again. The vessels are thus more valuable.
Miku – this japanophilen name you thought of yourself – Sophie Kühmel has staged her novel as a “chamber play”, she says. Four persons, a house on the lake, a weekend. Changing perspectives, changing forms, and some chapters consist of dialogues and stage directions, such as for the Theater, clocked time processes. They are for exactly twenty years, a Few of the artists Reik and the University Professor Max. In all the rest you want to celebrate your love. Are only invited to her oldest friend, Tonio and his daughter, Pega, which is as old as the relationship of Max and Reik.
The 27-year-old author told rapidly of relationships, of Sex and the growth of love, of shared history and projections. She dives deep into the inner lives of their gay protagonists, promotes cracks to the fore, conjuring up the bone-chilling atmosphere of the early spring at the lake, tells the story of Pegas young people uncertainty and confusion of being in love. Beauty is not in the perfection, this is the teaching of the Tradition of Kintsugi, but in the loving care of fractures and tearing fixes. But an already patched tea Cup a second Time gold kitten?
Miku Sophie Kühmel: Kintsugi, S. Fischer Verlag 2019, 304 Pages
Tonio Schachinger: Not as your
What don’t people understand the morons that say, Ivo would have thought a lot about other things and so his career is damaged, is that some can simply think of two things, even two people at the same time. Or not thinking, but one thing and another think. The A is anyway right in front of Ivo. The Other, the Other, the invisible lines of the body must follow just as rehearsed run-of-ways.
Ivo hates it when his colleagues do so, as they played football just out of passion. He is a professional, knows how much he has to train to stay one of the best-paid footballer in the world. He is cool and attractive, earns 100,000 euros a week, drives a Bugatti, has a wife and two children, whom he loves above all. But then the love of his youth Mirna appears all at once and brings the construct of ambition and boredom falter.
Also, the Austrian author Tonio Schachinger is only twenty-seven, 1992, in New Delhi born. His cheeky debut novel full of wit and peppered with the Viennese milieu of language from the world of high capitalist professional football.
Tonio Schachinger: Not like you, Verlag Kremayr & Scheriau 2019, 304 p.
Norbert Scheuer: Winter Bees
“Soldiers stand in the garden, shoot at the bee-house. I point you to the speech: Why my innocent bees, they would freeze to death now, all in the Frost. You just shoot more on my peoples, to the bee house from falling in on itself; then one turns to me, pushes me to the gun muzzle to the forehead, and screams that I should disappear.”
The author Norbert Scheuer lives in a barren Region in the West of Germany, in the mountains of the Eifel. Here, his protagonists life. In “winter bees”, it is a early from the education service who are made redundant Latin and history teacher. Egidius Arimond’s epileptic, what saved him in the war service, and beekeepers. During 1944, the circles above the Eifel mountains, British and American bombers, he brings the Jews into the prepared hives to occupied Belgium, and even in the highest risk.
He tells of his escape stories, and of the danger to a sick person, and by the Nazis as worthless regarded person at any time picked up, in a diary. The in a beehive hidden manuscript is found later.
Norbert Scheuer was born in 1951, writes about existences in dictatorial regimes, he tells of the destruction and the longing for a peaceful future. Scheuer works with great narrative subtlety. His novel is a science-painting with a Epistle on the history of beekeeping in the Eifel monastery, a Latin Glossary, and notes.
Already Scheuers novel “Over noise” 2009 Shortlisted for the German book prize and was a 2010 “book for the city of Cologne”.
Norbert Scheuer: Winter Bees, Verlag C. H. Beck, 2019, 319 Pages
Saša Stanišić: origin
“Yesterday I finished the fourth book,” let Saša Stanišić on 9. January of this year, announced on Twitter. “I wrote and researched and thought, almost exactly two years. The book is called ORIGIN. It has 335 pages and 467.757 characters. It is a self-portrait with ancestors. And a Failure of the self-portraits.”
Stanišić was born 1978 in Višegrad (Yugoslavia), and since 1992 lives in Germany, visited in the spring of 2009 with his grandmother, the 13-souls-village Oskoruša in the Bosnian mountains, the homeland of his ancestors. “Origin” has a lot to do with this trip, it was for him the first impetus to deal with his parentage.
Is a book with a colorful, inclined staff, on the coincidence of the biography, about language, youth, summer, memories, and dying at the end of memories. While Stanišić wrote it, he learned of the death of his dementia large diseased mother. “The book lives on. I wear them through the night. You wear to your own funeral and have to let you go again die on the paper. Nothing of the goodness of this woman is righteous, no word can be as vivid as they was once.”
For its in more than 30 languages, translated debut novel “How the soldier, the Gramophone” was repaired in the real life as a film. His Twitter entries, he finished that day with the remark: “A more personal book, I can’t write. Today, the 9 is. January 2019 and I am very tired and very happy.”
Saša Stanišić: Origin, Luchterhand Verlag 2019, 368 Pages
Jackie Thomae: Brothers
You do not know that they are brothers. Anyway, half-brothers, both dark skinned, both born in the same year, 1970, in the GDR. The one in Leipzig, the other in Berlin. Mick, of Berlin, lives as a soldier of fortune, is reflected by the wild nights in the mid-nineties, and later in their own Club. Up to an accident, after which he loses everything. The woman he cheated on for years, its share of the Club, his German existence.
The life of the Other, Gabriel, could hardly be more different. He is a successful architect in London, father of a family. However, its existence collapses when he loses in a case of the nerves. A prominent man is suddenly the underdog.
The two brothers connects nothing other than the skin color. But what is the role of skin color, how it determines our identity, how we are perceived in different environments? To these questions, Jackie Thomae, 1972 in Halle an der Saale born is encountered, again and again. The journalist and TV writer, has color have the same skin as their protagonists. Jackie Thomaes book poses the question as to the origin, and its meaning for the society.
Jackie Thomae: Brothers, Hanser Berlin In 2019, 432 Pages