The Song Of The Doings Of Jan Böttcher Review

The 60-year-old music and English teacher Manuel Mauss summer holidays. Actually, he could now relax in the garden of his farmhouse or turn on his stereo in the old former bakery and play your music collection. But first, he must be the one-armed janitor all workbenches from the workshop in the basement of the private school to the attic hauling. With his last Abi-born Mauss had in fact built instruments. But that is now finally concluded.

Mauss is a codger popular with the students, but reject some judgmental unpopular with his colleagues, some of his smile very specific teaching style envious.

Although he is regarded as strictly and consistently, but with his projects he honest in to his students, they say. Even on the playground he liked to surround himself with them, they invite you to open discussions, first-name basis with them. In his Music Performance course he has drawn a great project, using all modern media. Fascinated by the free teaching style many Eleven Mauss explained to her favorite teacher.

But how quickly students solve their academic ties, even their favorites shelve, Mauss will find painful later. After high school, some of them put his project into practice, founded the music band “Animal Museum”, touring through France and Spain and give concerts. Their contacts with Mauss as Internet manager will be less and less.

Mauss’ strong orientation towards his students reveals his life insecurity. During the breaks, he avoids his colleagues deliberately; held in the staff room to find him in the basement workroom on his sofa.

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In his village, he only maintains contact with another oblique bird Singer, who bought an old, dilapidated house and want to renovate everything in-house work

Clarissa Winterhof sat in Mauss’ Abi-born -. A very powerful student and an outsider. But in recent years it has changed: They denied benefits, is closed, dresses always black, looks for the “we” in the group. In the band it is integrated, but really happy and free it is not. All their thoughts, feelings and events she confides in a diary-blog on the Internet. She is the only one that is not easily cope with the suicide of her classmate Meret. Why is Meret jumped from the roof of the school

To address this question, a reviewer of the school board comes for inspection: John Engler shadowed in lessons, makes a picture of the building and from the crime scene, collect impressions – and meets Clarissa.

Engler is divorced (his wife and son live in Potsdam) and strapped for cash. He seems insecure and disoriented. In his board room Clarissa pours her heart to him: since Meret death, life is so meaningless; the ignorance and sorrow resistance of her classmates were unbearable to her. Their confidentiality and their overtures may Engler not resist.

Each of the three protagonists who meet, communicate and experience in common, a separate chapter is dedicated. What appears to be a truth that arises from scratch from any particular perspective, is put into perspective, broken, questioned. So believe Engler, Clarissa had become intrusive, while Clarissa him long like going would find his constant calls annoying. Mauss turn interpreted Clarissa’s appearance – she was emaciated, tearful, closed, aggressive in conversation – as a result of Liebesleid: You had something with an older man …

The young author and musician Jan Böttcher, 1973 Lüneburg born, has undoubtedly literary and musical qualities. For his novel “money or your life” he received the Ernst Willner Prize at the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition 2007. Nevertheless, I can not quite captivate “The Song of action and inaction”. Since changing passages in the report style, in dialogue form, sometimes very personal, sometimes quite objectively distanced each other from, supported by italics – all running good, varied and functional legitimacy, but still, this narrative seems designed to stylized. Because on top of that (or equivalent), the three protagonists are willful characterized, I felt never touched emotionally. By the end of the novel they remain arrested their problems and artificial. In addition, the big question over all, why Meret has for now killed depends.

We learn that she always had been suffering from depression, took tablets, however, was bullied. But these tracks are as yet a bit poor, and the author leaves the reader also in respect of that loss back plots. Thus, the author sets his novel between several chairs and occupies no right, Will he work the suicide or bullying or a student-teacher or a relationship issue, or he wants to make the relativity of truth, or was the linguistic game with perspectives and stylistic devices in the center of his attention?