Novel of the Year: Why the German Book Prize missed a possibility | EUROtoday

Right initially of the award ceremony in Frankfurt’s Römer, as yearly, the standard German gospel of the range of literature was sung in entrance of the assembled literature trade choir: “Literature has different voices” – “and that’s a good thing,” “Become authors increasingly diverse, the identities too, and that’s a good thing” – “Yes, that’s a good thing, but it’s not just about identity, it’s about quality.”

Oh yeah! Anyone who has been there for a couple of years is aware of the tune and will simply get in earlier than the Frankfurt Book Fair has even began. Everything is necessary, the whole lot is true – however can that basically be all that’s related to literature and literary prizes at present? The German Book Prize, awarded for the primary time in 2005, primarily based on the mannequin of the Booker Prize and Prix Goncourt, awards one of the best German-language novel of the yr with 25,000 euros.

Ina Hartwig, head of the town of Frankfurt’s cultural division, made it clear initially that the calls for positioned on literature haven’t modified, however the world round this literature has. If this historical-critical and, sure, ethical declare is to be legitimate, if a novel maybe even follows its personal aesthetic rules and continues a literary custom: then the ebook prize ought to have gone to Clemens Meyer for his novel “The Projectors”.

Not as a result of Meyer, born in 1977, labored on this novel for nearly a decade or, a author’s author however exactly as a result of the thousand-page novel is a distinction to the modern German novels that are actually typically set within the small world of personal and familial life: Meyer’s view is a cruel have a look at a world as a complete threatened by regression into probably the most brutal barbarism – and his novel a novel that believes itself that literature is the one artwork kind to banish them.

The jury awarded this yr’s ebook prize to the novel “Hey, good morning, how are you” by Martina Hefter: a novel that’s devoted to the theme of affection in an age of uncertainty, from the attitude of a middle-aged lady who, apart from her husband in a wheelchair, found herself and her energy as a girl – typically in a laconically humorous method, not less than in a really distinctive tone that makes the author and efficiency artist, born in 1965, accessible to a large viewers.

In the 20 th yr of the German Book Prize – in a yr that appears to be extra politically turbulent than every other lately – there would have been a possibility to have fun the novel as a really nice type of literature.