And my fourth #GermanLitMonth book, my second for Austria, makes a nice pair with Schachinger’s Echtzeitalter: Die Inkommensurablen, by Raphaela Edelbauer. It again takes place in Vienna, and is viewed through the eyes of an outsider teenager, but this time is is essentially rooted in its setting of the city on the eve of the outbreak of war. It is a very odd book.
We follow the protagonist, Hans, and two friends which he makes — the upper-class aesthete-soldier Adam and the maths prodigy from the underclass Klara — as they spend the day and night before her viva visiting various underworld dives and discussing maths, philosophy, psychology and the paranormal. Again as with Schachinger, Edelbauer is aware of and addresses this improbability, and by doing so to some extent defuses it. There is a big reveal towards the end, which is satisfying enough while leaving enough open for the reader to continue thinking about the book.
That, I think, is the crux. This isn’t a masterwork — it requires a lot of suspension of disbelief, and the mathematical content is shoehorned in. But the characters are diverse and interesting enough to want to keep following them, the milieu of a hysterical city, riven with psychoanalysis and jingoism, is fascinatingly weird and uncomfortably contemporary, and the balance between realism and the uncanny is constantly and skilfully reexamined. There is a lot to think about, and it’s a book which I’ll come back to.