I’ve finished my first book for #GermanLitMonth: Echtzeitalter, by Tonio Schachinger. Deutscher Buchpreis-winner this year, it’s a Bildungsroman following a teen gamer at a Viennese school very similar to the one Schachinger went to, where he encounters first a Snape-like teacher dedicated to torturing him, and then a barely-distinguishable pair of precocious girls, Feli and Fina, who take his life by storm. The ending is very nicely-judged.
Schachinger’s style is borderline metafictional — the Snape comparision and the indistinguishableness of the girls are explicit, for example, while the book is packed with references to Schlüsselromane and Austrian writers from Adalbert Stifter to Thomas Bernhard and Stefanie Sargnagel. I was incidentally pleased to find that my brain had retained the insulting Austriacisms I’d learned from Eva Menasse’s Dunkelblum (“schiach, Gschisti-Gschasti, deppert”).
I spent most of the book waiting for a major event to happen, and it doesn’t really; this is more a book about remembering or discovering what life is like as a teenage boy. Which brings us back to the ending.