New novel by Helene Hegemann: cracks within the glass bell | EUROtoday

A sturdy physique also can home a fragile character. Helene Hegemann’s novel “Striker” strikes within the space of ​​pressure of this reverse. Identity is so fragile right here that the protagonist initially doesn’t expertise a reputation and at last solely the preliminary of her first identify. NS physique can face up to lots. On the primary web page, Jürgen, her coach, throws a drugs ball towards her stomach. The leather-based bounces off the athlete’s stomach blanket forty instances. It does not matter to her. She hardly feels the spanking she faucets throughout her fight coaching. She can ignore ache. Not their spirit. Because what you actually do is worry. The lady who is meant to face her in her subsequent combat did her on the final joint combat Ko. That sits deep; Your coach notices that she would somewhat not take a look at this sense very rigorously. She covers it with on a regular basis life, with coaching, with intercourse.

Nevertheless, she scares of sleep at night time. There are noises, somebody goes within the attic above their condominium in a circle. When she seems to be out of the window within the morning, the hearth wall, on the grey facade she seems to be, is roofed with black characters. For some time n dives within the seek for the creator of graffiti. They instantly discover her in all places. On the journeys by S-Bahn from her dilapidated district to the stylish district, during which the politician lives with which she has an affair, the fighter found the sprayed artistic endeavors on the rushed homes, that are as giant because the indicators on the neighboring hearth wall. At night time she searches the web for references, loses watching movies.

The same obsession develops her on the digital appearances of her challenges: “If n does not look at the fights on her cell phone, she calls up the profiles of her opponents and, meticulously, pursues the spiral of selling out in which they have tangled up in the last five to ten years.” N didn’t take part on this sale. The community retains capturing it many times, eats free time, provides her new meals for her unrest. Elsewhere, it says: “Jack Kerouac has lost his generation to madness. N that Jack Kerouac does not know but would like, loses her generation on Instagram.”

The protagonist will not be misplaced there as a result of she was by no means actually there. Although you observe her how she drives by way of the nightly metropolis, hits her affair or makes wealthy enterprise individuals sweat throughout martial arts coaching till her personal garments have absorbed the moist smells of the boys, you may hardly get n – extra ghost as a emotions, drifts by way of her life. Who she is, the place she comes from, what motivates her in her actions stays unclear. This will not be the creator, Hegemann proves in her fourth novel that she is aware of what she is doing. The blurring is pure intention. The uncertainty of identification shakes the entire textual content, even strikes by way of to the extent of the narrator. The first sentence is already a query: “Is the season important?”, Which the narrator solutions himself half motivated: “Yes, probably.”

If the protagonist remembers a dream, the narrator notices that this “could be important for history”, he’s actually not. And if n at night time on the smartphone organizes a procuring marathon at Zara Home, solely a obscure try and classify comes near your motifs: “This buying frenzy is probably about control.” N stays a phantom, which is especially clear with regards to the individuals who need to do along with her. Because in the identical place it says: “The same control that the politician with whom she is sleeping believes to get back when she was manic, as if it were about the NATO double decision or an operation on her own open heart, all surfaces in the Art Nouveau villa of her ex-husband wipes off with neutral cleaner.” In this sentence, elegantly suits collectively a whole psychogram of the politician. There is not any such rationalization for N.

Hegemann additionally drives the thriller round her major character to the acute when she places her fight mantras on a single web page: “This is not about you”, “You are not so important” and “You are Worthess”. Like Motti, the sentences are alone on the facet head as a lonely black line in a sea of ​​white area. So lifted out, cease the circulate of studying, meet like boxer strokes and on the similar time remind you of the graffiti dysfunction on the hearth wall.

“Striker” tells of the loneliness, which is especially broad within the huge metropolis. N has fallen out of society, unable to speak with its fellow human beings. Or have the man human beings develop into unable to speak to one another? The novel considers consumption and social media because the phenomena of civilizational decline. The frictional space on which the final remnants of truthfulness finds are the homeless of their quarter: “In the rapid presence of Penner, particularly those that maintain the road nook in entrance of her home as their territory, which she might observe and subsequently believes for months, will get the glass bell beneath which it’s dragging by way of town, as whether it is bragging right into a small crack, as whether it is separated from the remainder of the world exists and solely often involves breath due to the cracks brought on by the bums, contemporary air flows in. “

The younger lady feels nearer to the bums “than the hipsters, who stand for black croissants within the morning, on which Deli, which began just a few months in the past, plugs a knife tip of activated carbon to each piece of dough, which remains to be uninteresting and thereby tripled its turnover”.

When a homeless man turns her bags directly in front of NS apartment door, the boxer panic. The homeless person sees her similar. She speaks of a connection that she feels. And n has the feeling that it is finally facing yourself. The novel switches off every doppelganger creep: “This will not be a combat membership. This will not be a movie during which it’s revealed {that a} break up character has fought towards itself on a regular basis.” Instead, n must finally go in search of itself, and for that she has to open her life for others.

Helene Hegemann: “Striker”. Novel. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2025. 189 pages, born, 23, – €.