september came with 2 tough german books for me: first Katharina Hackers "Die Habnichtse" (The Have-Nots). it's the story of some loosely related people, all in their thirties, living in Berlin and London, all of them maintaining an inner distance to their overwhelming surrounding world. the darkest scene: a graphic designer working on sketches for a children's book, and mentally blocks out the regular screams and the odd silence in the next appartment, where a child is being abused, then neglected.
without knowing in advance, Jan Weiler's "Drachensaat" (Dragonseed) drafts a counterpart picture of human behaviour: in his novel, he portrays 5 different persons who get so fed up by society's madness and wrongs that at some point, they all choose to make a public statement - which gets each of them diagnosed as mad. The "dragonseed" in the story is a reference to the dragon's teeth in the classical Greek myths which, once planted, grow into fully armed warriors.
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i guess my next reading pick will be a romantic fairytale that ends happily ever after.
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