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WORK TITLE: Moor
WORK NOTES: trans by Alexander Booth
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1974
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: German
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Austria; Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
AWARDS:Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize, Moor, long-listed.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Gunther Geltinger is a writer from Erlenbach am Main in Bavaria, Germany. He studied scriptwriting and dramaturgy at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Austria, and at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany. Geltinger has written two books, Mensch Engel (Man Angel) and Moor. He lives in Cologne.
Moor, Geltinger’s second novel, was long-listed for the prestigious Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize. The book is divided into four sections, each named after a season.
The story begins with Dion Katthusen, the protagonist, as a thirteen-year-old boy living in Germany with his mother, Marga. Dion suffers from a stutter so debilitating that he is essentially unable to speak. Dion and Marga live between the pig farm and the village in the countryside of Germany, not far from the moor and a pond where Marga bathes each day, Dion silently looking on. Marga works at a fashion house, which is actually a brothel, a secret of which Dion is unaware. Their relationship is strained. Dion views his mother as a heavy drinker with never attained dreams of being an artist. Marga’s behavior toward her son is erratic; at times she is an adversary, at other times she displays overbearing affection. Marga’s mental instability is clear when her behavior crosses into sexually inappropriate boundaries with her son.
As Dion and Marga’s relationship becomes ever more tense, Dion retreats to the legendary and mysterious moor nearby, seeking isolation. As Dion spends more and more time alone on the moor, the moor begins to speak on behalf of Dion, since he cannot express the words himself. The relationship between Dion and the moor becomes unbalanced; Dion becomes powerless while the moor assumes his voice.
While Dion is the protagonist, there are three voices in the story: Dion’s, Marga’s, and that of the moor itself, which all lead the plot along at different points in the story. Dion leads the majority of the book, though the moor takes on a central voice while Dion is suffering and seeking isolation in his adolescence. Later in the book, Marga’s narration takes over. As an adult, Dion has written an award-winning memoir describing his childhood. In this section of the book, Marga’s voice comes forth as she responds to passages within the memoir.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly wrote that Moor “traces a lavishly descriptive path through the titular landscape … but ultimately sinks beneath the weight of its dense prose and heavy-handed emphasis on the grotesque.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, October 17, 2016, review of Moor, p. 46.
ONLINE
Zeit Online, http://www.zeit.de/ (August 4, 2017), David Hugendick, review of Moor.*
Gunther Geltinger was born in 1974 in Erlenbach am Main and lives today in Cologne. He studied Scriptwriting and Dramaturgy at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna and at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. His critically acclaimed debut novel Mensch Engel (Man Angel) was published in 2008. Moor, long-listed for the prestigious Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize, is his second novel.
Moor
263.42 (Oct. 17, 2016): p46.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Moor
Gunther Geltinger, trans. from the German by Alexander Booth. Seagull (Univ. of Chicago, dist.), $30 (376p) ISBN 978-0-85742-368-9
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Geltinger's (Hombre Angel) second novel traces a lavishly descriptive path through the titular landscape--finely rendered in Booth's translation--but ultimately sinks beneath the weight of its dense prose and heavy-handed emphasis on the grotesque. The story centers on Dion Katthusen, a 13-year-old boy with a debilitating stutter living in Germany. Divided into four sections named after the seasons, the book begins with Dion's adolescence as he struggles through the complexities of his own sexuality, as well as the sexuality of his mentally unstable mother, Marga, who rapidly transforms into the main adversary of the tale. Seeking isolation, Dion begins to explore a strange moor filled with legends and mystery; the moor speaks for Dion, who cannot summon the words to convey his own experience. This literary device, however, pushes Dion to the role of powerless outsider and observer. Strikingly, the sections told with the most clarity come through Marga's voice, as she responds to Dion's award-winning account of his childhood, which he publishes later in life. Marga's responses to specific passages within her son's writing--"a heavily detailed and vindictive tapeworm of a sentence, without any break"--illustrate the mentally exhausting ordeal of trudging through the tortured, time-jumping structure of Geltinger's novel. Lush imagery abounds, with gorgeous depictions of the northern German countryside. Unfortunately, the effort of reading Geltinger feels more like hacking through a jungle than traversing a rain-sodden moor. (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Moor." Publishers Weekly, 17 Oct. 2016, p. 46+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468700006&it=r&asid=f6782c7e4a93ec87359bd77b1b7a5442. Accessed 3 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A468700006
And the moor rises
The young man and the pond: The writer Gunther Geltinger has written an artistic, energetic novel about speechlessness.
By David Hugendick
20 September 2013, 13:34 Updated on September 20, 2013, 2:55 pm
CONTENT
Page 1 - And the moor rises
Page 2 - The nature fluctuates, proliferates, lies
Read on a page
The moor is not necessarily a favorite literary landscape. No comparison to the forest, ever since the longing for German literature, less of a place than a state of mind, surrounded by firs and oaks, the romantics wrote to the golden age. The moor is not a mountain, where the sublime dwells, where Büchner's Lenz went mad and one can get these tingling existential frost bumps. At the moor one falls on the fast the Schauerlyrik of the Annette of Droste-Hülshoff, perhaps still the walks of Arno Schmidt, the genial Misanthropen. The bog is silent, empty, and unpoetic.
In the new novel by Gunther Geltinger it now rises. In Moor , a whole landscape awakens: "When you are lying down, there is water, alders, in the rush winds, even mist has no sound, only its shapes coming out of nowhere, staring at you and going (...) One drips into the other, a breeze hissing through the foliage, throwing up nauseous waves, tearing the haze and confusing the reeds, you can hear my voice in all this. " This voice strikes a high note. It belongs to the moor itself, which Geltinger has promoted to the tomb of the narrator. And it appears to you that all the sweeping language movements apply: it belongs to Dion Katthusen, a 13-year-old, lonely boy.
It has an intimate relationship with the moor that surrounds the village of Fenndorf. There he lives with his mother Marga, between the pig farm and hostile village community. Every morning he accompanies his mother to the pond, she takes a bath, he looks up; So their everyday ritual runs. It promises a residual order in their relationship, which is gradually becoming a disaster.
Sensual speech adventure
Dion and Marga are wounded figures. She works in a fashion house disguised brothel, of which her son knows nothing. He appears to him full of pills, as a repellent stinking drinker who dreams of an artist career. In the next moment, as a mother-best-angel, who crushed the son with strange affection. In such moments, she even crosses the sexual boundary between mother and child. How far, Geltinger leaves like many others in Vagen. Between Marga and Dion there is an overpowering speechlessness.
"No one speaks here," is the first sentence and in Dion this even finds its physiological counterpart: He stuttered. He is "dumb as a pond," the letters are "alphabetical torture instruments" that take him from the rest of the world and drive Dion into the solitude of the bog: the D, the K, "actually is the W with its five peaks in the alphabet The most heavily armed letter willing to be even more deadly than the Z, or the angular K, which is threatening with its teeth, and you leap to death over the waterhole to the nearest Wollgrasinsel, and run into the expanse, the desert, into the wilderness Confused and scorned words, getting farther out to me ".
This novel lives on such descriptive descriptions. You notice it at such passages: Here someone writes, who has said goodbye to the realistic forward telling. And Gunther Geltinger, born in 1974, has already shown in his debut, Engel Engel , that he understands literature as a sensual language adventure rather than as a plot-selfe rapporting of the world. Geltinger is someone who is not satisfied with describing the real. At that time, the reviewers divided his artistry into two camps. One criticized the artificiality, the others excited the courage and the creative power.
Page navigation
Gunther Geltinger also takes a great venture in moorland . From Dion's struggle for autonomy, his liberation from the mother, other writers would have made a social drama that could be transformed. Geltinger has charged it allegorically up to the tree tops and the shallows of the ponds. The moor is not a mere backdrop. It does not serve to boost the fundamental tone of futility or to enlarge Dion's melancholy, which accompanies his puberty, in cinemascope. And it is indeed a daring, but an intelligent idea to let this mire be reported - in an energetic language from which Dion's whole longing, his inward grief, his sublimated freedom of will burst out.
That a nature empowered to the narrator does her work very unreliably, lies in her nature. Geltinger does not call her to order either. She swayed, she hissed, she deceived, she grew, she suffers, she chuckles, lies and whispers. Once you have trusted yourself in this extremely pretentious moor, a dense language richness opens up. If the storm is blowing in the bog, then he jostles in the imposing style at the windows of Dion's house, cries "Voran, Voran!" And amused by the puberty fantasies which are to finally be realized in the house. Then he cries, "It takes me all too long." If the moor is bored around, it jokes: "I used to be the untamperable monster in front of their doors, today I am their expensive museum, at the parking lot there is a donation."
Aesthetically plausible
From time to time, Nature lyrical arrogance takes hold of the pathos, and is filled with words: "The sky dissolves the clouds, clears the horizon, only the crow on the tree stump is still in white, a last line, now blurred . " In many places such a style tends to be redundant, to a semantic surplus. However, this is due not only to the rhythm, but also to a poetic process: the narrator reacts to the speechlessness between the figures by opposing an excess of language. Yes, one can at times find this composted fullness, which is a breakthrough from one of Geltinger's novels. Aesthetically, however, this concept of art is perfectly plausible.
"All the children have brought the stork, only the Dion not, the moor has done" - the inhabitants of Fenndorf tell this and it also explains the form principle of Geltingers prose: the Du-speech, which quickly under the suspicion of Mannerism and The auctorial paternalism, thus attains its meaning. For if it is true that man first gets into the world through language, Dion, the tidy dumb, needs an instance that breathes life into him grammatically. This is a very clever principle. The moor creates Dion. But the marsh takes him back in the end. That is the deterministic logic of history. If one wanted to assign this book to a genre, it might be psychedelic naturalism. Or you just call it an extraordinary novel.