Markus Werner

Festland

«Meinesgleichen flattert bloß, fällt also nie aus den Wolken, leider, ein Hühnerleben.»

Julia wants to leave, it doesn’t matter where she’ll go, she just wants to leave. She just graduated and now faces a big emptyness which her complacent boyfriend is unable to fill. Then her father calls, she hasn’t seen him for five years. He wants to leave, too. She agrees to visit him because she wants to learn more about her origin. She is a «child of absentmindedness», she learns from him, a child born from a shallow love between an attractive mother and a shy father who could not stand up to her. Julia was placed at her grandmother’s.
In an intense conversation – essentially her father’s pensive soliloqui – they speak about their failed relationship. Finally, Julia heads down south in order to bring clarity to her thoughts through writing. It is from her viewpoint that Markus Werner narrates an old tale with gentle clarity. The various levels are delicately interwoven, and, layer by layer, the past is brought to the surface. This is how the formally perfect novel charms the reader. Elaborately, without being obtrusive, the author embeds the dramaturgy of happenstance into a net of motives, symbols, allusions and correlations and thereby captures the existential contingency in a compact form.

(Beat Mazenauer, transl. by Anja Hälg)

Translation of title: Mainland

Residenz-Verlag, Wien 1996

ISBN: 3-7017-0969-6