Michael Lentz

Our narrator is held in complete darkness and isolation. His endless thoughts are turned into the book we are reading—Schattenfroh—directed by none other than the narrator’s mysterious jailer by the same name. Undulating through explorations of Renaissance art, the German reformation, time-defying esoterica, the printing process in the 16th century, Kabbalistic mysticism, and beyond, Schattenfroh is a remarkable book that, in turn, asks the remarkable of its readers.

Interruptions, breaks, and annotations both buoy and deceive, and endless historical references, literary allusions, and wordplay construct a baroque, encyclopedic quest. Schattenfroh’s publication in English marks a seminal moment in the history of the literary form.

Schattenfroh

Pazifik Exil: Roman

One of the most immediate things pain teaches us is that there are no words to express pain. It is precisely this that makes Michael Lentz’s Motherdying such an achievement, for its subject matter is the universal and inescapable pain of losing one’s mother. 

Now translated into English for the first time, Motherdying was recognised in Germany as a work of literary brilliance. In 2001, it won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, with critics acknowledging it as a necessary break from the platitudes of mourning.

Motherdying is at once a chronicle of the dying body and a psychic inventory of grief. The narrator’s childhood self watches flies caught in wet paint on a whitewashed house; his father retrieves a box of love letters, long put away but never discarded; his mother can no longer bear to look out the hospital window. For Lentz, language is material. A student of sound-actionist Josef Anton Riedl and a saxophonist-composer of the German avant-garde, he fuses literature and sound alongside his ensemble, Sprechakte X/TREME. In Motherdying, the language of pain is not figurative: a cry or scream doesn’t point outward; it simply occurs. Words and sentences fuse or break apart. Memories, quotations, and history surface unannounced, without a supervising consciousness to explain them. In Lentz’s prose, grammar doesn’t express grief – grammar is the grief.

Like Ornette Coleman’s music, Samuel Beckett’s plays, or Gertrude Stein’s poetry, Motherdying announces an avant-garde voice and a new possibility of expression. For an age struggling to articulate loss, it is less a novel than a lexicon for the unspeakable, affirming every death matters and every absence merits its own broken language. Its music is discordant, unfinished, unresolved – and we must listen, because it plays for us all.

Motherdying

Roman

Liebeserklärung

Einer stirbt. Einer wird vergessen. Einer wird umgebracht. Etwas kommt abhanden. Was tun? ›Muttersterben‹, das sind Momentaufnahmen alltäglicher Erfahrungen, die vom Abschiednehmen handeln. Sie erzählen vom Erinnern und davon, wie der Versuch, sich Situationen und Vorgänge zu vergegenwärtigen, tragisch werden kann, oder absurd oder komisch. Kleinigkeiten werden zu Monstrositäten, Existentielles wird zur Bagatelle. So melancholisch wie unsentimental schildern die Geschichten die zum Teil grotesken Versuche, mit einem Verlust umzugehen, der plötzlich ein Eigenleben entfaltet. Alles gerät zur Sensation und wird zugleich belanglos und nichtig. Eine Reise im Flugzeug lässt den Erzähler den Boden unter den Füßen verlieren, das Rauchen einer Zigarette transportiert die Leser unweigerlich in den Zoo, das Betrachten eines Fernsehkrimis bringt gehörig die Phantasie durcheinander. Hier lernt man das Tierreich kennen, besucht Berlin, Paris und Olevano Romano bei Rom und stellt vielleicht fest, dass Sprache sich auch immer selber spricht, nie aber die Dinge auf den Punkt bringen kann.

Michael Lentz

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