Funny, savagely ironic, Raw Material is a great modern European novel
J.rg Fauser was born in Frankfurt in 1944. After abandoning his studies he lived in Istanbul and London before moving back to Germany, where he made his living as a writer of fiction and poetry. He died in Munich in 1987. Raw Material is his masterpiece.
What you are about to read is, in many ways, like nothing else you
will have read before. To foist a genre on it, it's a picaresque,
but what a crazed, leaping, unmoored and hilarious voyage it is. It
opens in the spring of 1968, a time of socio-political upheaval and
an atmosphere drenched in revolutionary fervour, in Paris, Prague,
Vietnam, Northern Ireland. . . . The Baader-Meinhof gang is active;
the Red Army Faction, too. Lady Chatterley's Lover and Last Exit to
Brooklyn are in the dock, as is Oz. Our hero, Harry Gelb
('gelb'='yellow') is twenty-four and living on a rooftop in
Istanbul with his partner in crime, Ede. Gelb is a struggling
writer (struggling so hard that he's crashed through the garret
roof and landed on the tiles) and a struggling junkie (is there any
other kind?), a swindler, a rip-off merchant, a scammer, a thief.
This is the 60s, yes, but there's no peace-and-love, release the
doves, flower-power, incense-and-kaftan idealism here; Gelb is
'rapidly approaching the season of hell'. No sooner are we settled
on that roof-top with him, though, than we're whisked away, with
Harry, scooting across Europe, to a commune in Berlin, to
Frankfurt, Vienna, back to Berlin, squat to squat, dead-end job to
dead-end job, all in the company of an intensely observant and
cuttingly incisive commentator, achingly aware of the terribly
transitory nature of existence, the flux and the chaos of it, a
breathless whirl of drugs and drink and women and doomed
enterprises around the one point of solidity in Gelb's life: his
heavy old typewriter, and the masterpieces he will write on it, one
of which, Stamboul Blues, accompanies him wherever he goes, hawking
it to various hopeless publishers in superbly comedic
set-pieces.
*Niall Griffiths*
The best book I've read since I came out of prison
*Howard Marks*
Bukowski meets Withnail on schnapps. As beautiful a mess as the
characters he wrote, Jörg Fauser's trawl through the anarchist
squats of the 70s lays bare the seeds of Germany's new cool. While
we were still making war films, Fauser ran with a generation intent
on destroying the state and itself; through the voice of Harry Gelb
his savage wit leaves no truth unturned in describing its most
foibled and hopeless endeavour - decadent revolution. This book
makes me wish I was there
*DBC Pierre*
Sad, funny, cynical and deeply authentic, it's the best novel of
the period I've ever read
*Barry Miles*
What you are about to read is, in many ways, like nothing else you
will have read before. To foist a genre on it, it's a picaresque,
but what a crazed, leaping, unmoored and hilarious voyage it
is...[a] crazed cut-up collage of wanderings and wishes and the
inevitable destruction of dreams. Tremendous
*Niall Griffiths*
Cracking - nothing more needs to be said
*Nik Cohn*
One of the best German novels of all time
*Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung*
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