"Grundlsee" by Playwright Gustav Ernst

The father has come on a business trip in Asia in an aircraft explosion killed. If only he had quit his job! His wife would not have minded, but they never talked about it. Now he is dead and can only look down on his family from a higher dimension. The memories of the beginnings of marriage and the great time with the children fade away: “Your name and my wife, I do not know already more.” A bit monotonous it is already to read the entire text consistently only “my wife”.

But in the end refers to the short story from the first-person perspective of the father.

Review: Lakeside Viennese family spends every summer beautiful, untroubled hours in their house. Parents and children John, Bella and baby Lili romp, play, hiking, swimming, boating. With such a turbulent days of the young family, the novel begins. No sooner has the sun risen, the children John and Bella cuddling already to their parents to bed.

To plan an excursion to swim at Sommersbergersee, because that is warmer than the Grundlsee. They want to run around him and eating roast pork at the fisherman’s hut. So come on (the parents are an experienced team): alluring, Lili wrap breakfast. There is life in the booth, and the day succeeds magnificently. After evening pork ribs and “filled with plum jam dumplings with vanilla sauce” there is still a cartoon on TV, then the children are finally ready for their boxes. The parents breathe. At last, a peace”.

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In its enviable family idyll, the children can not understand what it may have been a divorce on themselves as they know it from their friends: “That Papa not at home lives, even though he’s the daddy? ” No, they always want to all stay together as a family and are in grave beeinander. The strange request from a child’s mouth will not meet. Time jump, ten years later.

The youth – meanwhile 17/15/10 years old – making holidays abroad, while the parents to the fullest their vacation at Grundlsee enjoy, as far as allowing the troubled thoughts that constantly revolve around their brood time jump, fifteen years later. John lives in the Hague, developed computer games, is married and has a daughter named Miranda. Bella (married, two children) is working as a doctor in Baltimore. Lili lives in Brussels, where she works at the EU Parliament and the men changes as …, well, you know. Where all are fully occupied, they create not wait to meet; even a phone call with mother in Vienna is hard to set up time. Here father is just crashed on his flight to Asia and mother alone with their grief. Time jump, fifteen years later. Tragedy strikes more capers.

Gustav Ernst’s family novel “Grundlsee” is a special piece of literature constructed over three generations. The story is not told chronologically, but opens up from the dialogues of the characters. The spoken sentences are terse briefly but are also lined up to endless chains, without quotation marks, without a heel, but the verb “say” pushy ended every speech content. The product looks artificial. But it is direct speech, and suddenness draws the reader along with the rapid speaker changes as a slip stream and further into the depths. After a short time you bound across the annoying “says my wife / John / Bella / …” -Einsprengsel easy time.

The only time telling each including a possible viable at every stage, and they contribute in different locations to: Hotel Amsterdam, after his father’s death: Lili and John meet with her mother in a Thai restaurant. Together they reflect childhood memories, processed past quarrels, is wistfully: “You will each sure someday need,” warns mother. For Grundlsee she does not drive this year: “I alone?” Trieste fifteen years later John and Bella have arranged to meet in a cafe. They regret how the siblings have increasingly grown apart, geographically and in character. Each had its own problems, its own head. They could have another urgent use, everyone has been longing for the other, but no one has really open, the others can ask for help. “To call it strangely never enough. Because I would rather bite my tongue.”

After all, they exchange views on these occasions. Only in this way – as a narrator hardly occurs – we Readers will learn the internals of the family: father was married before; John’s wife is a drug addict. So artificially comes this novel, straw of narrative tone sounds (a little music bring only the speech portion), so stir us the characters and their development. It hurts that the siblings forget to show their love for each other. It hurts that allegations remain unspoken for years, to no forgiveness is possible. It hurts that even such a stable common ground as the Grundlsee decay can not prevent it.

In the end, Bella is left alone. Your self-criticism is bitter: “All my life I have come too late.” Now no one is there anymore, with which they could return home to their carefree childhood to the Lost City: “The Grundlsee is my biggest grave”. Gustav Ernst’s “Grundlsee” is not an ordinary reading;. it acts brittle. But it is a rewarding experience.