Parsifal would never have thought his time would eventually come. He died young and naïve. Even Job didn’t want to lose his religion. It’s a similar case with Joachim Lottmann’s narrator, a modestly successful Bohemian from Berlin who follows his own decline with a keen interest and a cheerful disposition – until the only thing that can save him is a miracle.
“Without ever thinking about it, the first and last of all truths for me was that the leisured classes neither talked nor thought a great deal about money,” claims the protagonist at the beginning of the story. After separating from his wife, he lives with a proletarian slut and works – like everyone in digital Bohemian circles – for some online newspaper for nothing. Conning people, leaving restaurants without paying the bill, eating his fill at cold buffets – these are his common and extremely amusingly described survival tactics. He makes light of his poverty, exclusion and even social ostracism. But his hopes prove to be illusions. He is plagued by a barbaric hunger and severe humiliation. The optimism he has spent his whole life trying to cultivate eventually fades away. Just as Job lost his religion, our protagonist gradually loses his positive world outlook. But just as he is about to give up, the financial world crashes and the story makes a strange turn. As if by a miracle, he regains his money and with it recognition, food and even his ex-wife. While the financial crisis causes everyone’s downfall, he goes against the flow and heads towards happiness – and can’t help but wonder.
Joachim Lottmann’s tragicomic episodic drama about new poverty draws a psychogram of the crisis – and is the book of the recession year!
