LiteraturSchweiz

Reading tip

Andreas Neeser, Unsicherer Grund: A narrator remembers a football game when he was at school, while he was silently watching a beautiful woman in the swimming pool. Or he goes to the theatre in the evening and his heart almost comes to a standstill. Andreas Neeser’s stories contain moving events, yet without any obvious external impact. States of consciousness are described with fine analysis and they hold up a mirror in which the world collapses into meaningful particles. The narrative identity attempts to secure a firm position on uncertain ground. Andreas Neeser’s eight new narratives reveal the true lyricist. The author visibly attempts to position every word in the right place and not to employ a single word too often. His prose gains a concentrated density which produces coherence but lacking overhasty conclusiveness. This precision is in tantalizing contradiction to the uncertain ground on which the narrative identity stands with respect to characters within the narrative. The “changing uneventfulness of my provisional existence”, which must be absorbed with all the senses, only wins stability and permanence through flashes of memories. Neeser’s prose is bound-up instability. Even if or precisely because nothing happens, this works surprisingly well, because true stories are concealed behind poetic masquerades – in spite of everything. (Beat Mazenauer)