Tschick

I hate that the publisher makes sure I know the circumstances this book was written under; if I dislike a book written by a dying author, that makes me feel like an asshole. If I like it, I'm forever (or at least for a while) going to wonder how much of that is me projecting what I know of the author onto the text.

That said, I definitely wound up liking this a lot more than I expected. It looks really clichéd - two bored young teenage outsiders from Berlin, a rich dork and a dirt-poor immigrant, decide to just "borrow" an old car and take off on "holiday" for a few weeks. Because why the hell not, mostly. Turns out that the adult world is a strange and incomprehensible place, and it takes more than just knowing which pedals to push to make your way ... Along the way through the former GDR they bump into various strange people. Or at least they think they're strange, but what do they know?

Again, yeah, you've seen this plot before, and when it's all narrated by one of the 14-year-olds it makes me even more wary. But I ended up scoffing the whole book down in two long reads, because it's just that well done. There's a hunger, a force behind Herrndorf's writing, a sense of humour that refuses to turn into comedy. The situations the boys find themselves in aren't just wacky adventures, though they initially appear that way when filtered through a not-as-smart-as-he-thinks kid's view. There's a new Europe out there, one which consists of layers of lots of old ones, and it takes more than just a hotwired Lada to understand it. Freedom's just another word for nothing, etc.