By day during the week, I was writing about vacuum pumps and all the exciting and less exciting ways you could use them. Then came Friday. Sometimes I sat down with a bottle of wine and just wrote. Often, I went out afterwards. In Basel. I was usually out and about in Basel a few nights a week, and in the early days, when I was living in Lörrach as a sub-tenant, I was burning the candle both ends, as my dear grandmother used to say. Midnight oil, and candle burning both ends. When my landlady texted me from Italy that I should perhaps think about finding another flat, I moved to Inzlingen and something changed. It wasn’t just because an autumn storm blew down two enormous spruce trees and opened up a perfect view over garages to Basel from my living room. Other things were happening. Nevertheless, I looked over this benign, peaceful city, then descended into it on many an evening. Some Saturdays I drove to Freiburg, just to get out of the region. Saturday night I often wrote. But I had no design or plan when I wrote. That came later. I also wrote songs on the guitar. I was jamming a lot in Basel’s Markthalle. Then I imagined that a narrator – maybe even an Australian narrator – promises to write a love song to woo a Brazilian physicist. Chapter I took shape.
As it happened, I also knew a soccer player who was a forward for FC Basel in the women’s 1st division league. Every second Saturday or so, a friend and I picked up the tickets from her letterbox in the women’s players’ quarters and watched FC Basel matches. “Football Entropy” took shape – Chapter II. My imagination started to run away from me. A friend had a house-warming and I dragged a Corsican friend along. We went down into the Schutzkeller (bunker) to check it out. “Fallout Shelter” took shape. Same place, but different people. These people were all figments of my imagination. But they were very real to me. And that’s probably why the Australian narrator (no relation) says at one point that we only imagine every person and every place we think we know.
At some point, reading all this, someone said, “There’s a novel in this.” I began tying it together. I’d write a chapter and send it out. “Yes, well written, but I absolutely hate football and it bored me,” came the feedback from one friend. With friends like that, you don’t need enemies. They remain very, very good friends.
While house- and cat-sitting in Aachen, I wrote “Darkness” over 10 days. “Christ Stopped at Inzlingen,” a chapter about why Henry – a Colombian dopehead – was always stoned, came somewhere in between. And then came “Light,” the resolution that would free our characters from the cages of their banal and picaresque world.
I handed chapters and the complete novel around. People cherry picked. I even asked a publisher in Basel (we were meeting to discuss another book) to leave it on the lunch desk in the hope that someone would pick it up. Some loved “Light” and hated “Darkness.” Others liked the transitional chapter “Travels with Tanya,” a sunset between contemporary Europe and Nazism. Time was, I’d decided without really knowing more than anyone else, an Einsteinian block of three dimensions, where the past, present and future all existed at the same time (and space). I could do anything. Time in the history of the novel always has been a thing. But I also I resigned myself to my fate – readers would like some chapters and hate others. My ex-wife asked, “A coming of age novel? I didn’t quite expect you to come up with something like that.” Well, it’s more like coming undone, I said, trying to save myself. But when do we really come of age? I juggled ages. Most of the characters are in their mid-twenties.
In Germany, if you go by the playbook, you have sex at 14, drink beer at 16, drink anything distilled and smoke grass at 18. And at 21 you lose all your legal protections of youth. This tells us that there is no absolute “coming of age,” even at that young age. And generally it happens much later than we expect, depending on circumstances. A soldier comes of age quickly in a trench. In peace time, it happens at a lazy pace.
Anyway, this is a novel about context and coming undone. Earnest. Trivial. Coming of age. Peace. War. The search for love. Absurdity.
Like all novels, it is what it is.