A monumental, cinematic novel on European history and one of the sadest and funniest novels on friendship of the last decades. The German version of The Savage Detectives.
This is the crazy story of Soli and Noah, best friends and almost brothers ever since their Bar Mitzvah in the Hamburg synagogue in 1976, linked by their origin, their sense of humour and their bizarre sexual fantasies – and both involved in a grotesque tale of blackmail and abduction on a global scale.
Soli Karubiner, a writer and the narrator of this epoch-making novel, leaves Germany for Prague when he causes a scandal in a sauna, and a young German writer threatens to post the video recording of the incident online. Meanwhile, millionaire’s son Noah Forlani, who is determined to run through his inheritance, induces the Hollywood star Gerry “El Dick” Harper to get involved in an arthouse video – in which Noah himself plays the part of Joseph Goebbels, naked, of course. While there is an abduction during the shooting of the video in the Sudan, back in Prague Soli has to stand up to his hysterical and possessive Jewish Maxim Biller family, and sees no escape from this oedipal superdrama but flight to Tel Aviv. From there, he goes on with Noah to Buczacz, the place of origin of both their families, and gets on the trail of the secret of his inscrutable father, an ex-communist, businessman and double agent.
A unique book: never before has there been anything in German literature like this novel, with its themes of development, love, the lives of artists, families, post-reunification Germany, tension, the homeland and the Holocaust. Fast-moving, epic of dialogue, and for all the gravity of its subjects very funny.
