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WORK TITLE: Sand
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 6/12/1965-8/26/2013
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: German
Suffered from an incurable brain tumor and committed suicide in 2013.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 2003045635 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2003045635 |
| HEADING: | Herrndorf, Wolfgang, 1965-2013 |
| 000 | 00845cz a2200217n 450 |
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| 005 | 20140308074231.0 |
| 008 | 030630n| azannaabn |n aaa |
| 010 | __ |a n 2003045635 |
| 035 | __ |a (OCoLC)oca06089837 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |d DLC |d NjP |
| 046 | __ |f 1965 |g 2013 |
| 053 | _0 |a PT2668.E7572 |
| 100 | 1_ |a Herrndorf, Wolfgang, |d 1965-2013 |
| 370 | __ |a Hamburg (Germany) |b Berlin (Germany) |2 naf |
| 374 | __ |a Artists |a Authors |2 lcsh |
| 375 | __ |a male |
| 377 | __ |a ger |
| 670 | __ |a Herrndorf, Wolfgang. In Plüschgewittern, 2002: |b t.p. (Wolfgang Herrndorf) jkt. (b. 1965 in Hamburg; studied painting in Nuremberg, lives in Berlin and works as an artist for a satire magazine) |
| 670 | __ |a Arbeit und Struktur, 2013: |b t.p. (Wolfgang Herrndorf) jacket (born 1965 in Hamburg; died 2013 in Berlin; author) |
| 953 | __ |a ld03 |b fd07 |
PERSONAL
Born June 12, 1965, in Hamburg, Germany; died from a suicide, August 26, 2013.
EDUCATION:Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg, Germany, studied painting.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Novelist, painter, magazine illustrator, blogger.
MEMBER:Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur, art and writing collective, 2001.
AWARDS:Leipzig Book Fair Prize, 2012, for Sand.
WRITINGS
Writer of books in German, including Plüschgewittern (title means “Storm of Plush”), 2002, and Diesseits des Van-Allen-Gürtels (title means “This Side of the Van Allen Belt”), 2007; Bilder einer großen Liebe (title means “Pictures of Your True Love”), 2014. Contributor to blogs Wir höflichen Paparazzi (We Polite Paparazzi), Riesenmaschine (Giant Machine), Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur, and Arbeit und Struktur (Work and Structure).
SIDELIGHTS
Wolfgang Herrndorf was a German writer and painter. Born in Hamburg, he studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg, then moved to Berlin and worked as a magazine illustrator and blogger on Wir höflichen Paparazzi (We Polite Paparazzi) and Riesenmaschine (Giant Machine). He was also a member of the art and writing collective Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur. Herndorf published several books in German, and his young adult novel Tschick (Why We Took the Car) was published just months after his 2010 diagnosis of a brain tumor, and was translated into twenty-four languages. His next novel, Sand, published in 2011, won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. Herndorf started the blog Arbeit und Struktur (Work and Structure) to document his illness. He committed suicide in 2013. After his death, his unfinished sequel to Tschick, Bilder einer großen Liebe (Pictures of Your True Love), was published in 2014.
Why We Took the Car
Why We Took the Car was translated into English by Tim Mohr and released in 2014. In the story, teenage social misfit Mike Klingenberg teams up with badly dressed Russian immigrant boy Andrej Tschichatschow (Tschick) to steal a car and get noticed by the cool kids. They take the car to the party of the year at the house of beautiful Tatiana, whom Mike has a crush on. After the party, the two boys decide to take a road trip on the German autobahn to where Tschick’s grandfather lives, a part of Romania called Wallachia (a German euphemism for the middle of nowhere). Mike narrates the story at the end of the odyssey to explain why they took the car.
“Each episode in the boys’ journey grows more outrageous, leading readers to wonder how far they’ll go,” observed a Kirkus Reviews writer, who also explained that Herndorf combines a literary tall tale and coming-of-age picaresque. In a review in Voice of Youth Advocates, Cathy Fiebelkorn praised the authentic teenage voice, comparing the characters to Holden Caulfield and Huck Finn. Fiebelkorn added: “Readers will be anxious to discover how the journey ends, with consequences that are serious and life-changing, in ways both negative and positive.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly noted: “This alternately wild, sad, hilarious, and tender tale chronicles the development of a strange and beautiful friendship.”
Sand
Herndorf’s novel Sand was translated by Tim Mohr in 2018. Set in North Africa in 1972, in an unnamed former French colony, the story is a hodgepodge of events. Four people in a hippie commune are murdered and a bag of money is stolen. Two incompetent French detectives are sent to investigate but may have arrested the wrong man. A Swedish double agent with nuclear secrets is also involved. Meanwhile, an amnesiac with a cracked skull is wandering the desert and is being chased by the Stasi, the CIA, and a sinister psychiatrist. “The characters’ stories occasionally intertwine until they come together in an unsatisfying ending,” declared a writer in Publishers Weekly, who noted that the story will have limited appeal to American readers.
Exhibiting postmodern bafflement, the book is “bizarre, wacky, and broad—but highly entertaining, especially for fans of the Vonnegut/DFW school of the absurd,” according to a Kirkus Reviews critic, who lamented that Herndorf doesn’t seem to know if the story is a satire, spy novel, or thriller. On the other hand, Gulf News website contributor Justin Huggler announced that the book was dazzling and original and “Fittingly, it is a masterpiece: at once a thriller, a surrealist comedy, and a dark satire, culminating in one of the greatest twists I’ve read.” Although a twist ending is cliché, Huggler noted: “Where thriller writers usually sacrifice realism for the sake of the twist, in Sand it works the other way around. Reality crashes down on a novel that had felt like a flight of fancy.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2013, review of Why We Took the Car; April 15, 2018, review of Sand.
Publishers Weekly, October 28, 2013, review of Why We Took the Car, p. 63; April 16, 2018, review of Sand, p. 73.
Voice of Youth Advocates, December 2013, Cathy Fiebelkorn, review of Why We Took the Car, p. 61.
ONLINE
Gulf News, https://gulfnews.com/ (May 3, 2017), Justin Huggler, review of Sand.
OBITUARIES
Goethe, https://www.goethe.de/ (March 1, 2014), Tobias Rüther, “Wolfgang Herrndorf Died at the Age of 48.”
Wolfgang Herrndorf
Wolfgang Herrndorf (1965–2013) studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg. After graduating, he moved to Berlin, where he worked as a magazine illustrator and posted frequently on the Internet forum Wir höflichen Paparazzi (We Polite Paparazzi). In 2001, Herrndorf joined the art and writing collective Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur, eventually contributing to their blog, Riesenmaschine (Giant Machine). He published his first novel, In Plüschgewittern (Storm of Plush), in 2002. This was followed by a collection of short stories, Diesseits des Van-Allen-Gürtels (This Side of the Van Allen Belt, 2007), which received the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize Audience Award. In early 2010, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor; his novel Tschick (Why We Took the Car) was published just months later and would eventually be translated into twenty-four languages. Sand was released in 2011; it was short-listed for the German Book Prize and won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. Herrndorf committed suicide in the summer of 2013. His posts on Arbeit und Struktur (Work and Structure), the blog he started after receiving his cancer diagnosis, have been published as a book of the same name. An unfinished sequel to Tschick, Bilder einer großen Liebe (Pictures of Your True Love), was released in 2014.
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Wolfgang Herrndorf The Internet as a way of life
Wolfgang Herrndorf died at the age of 48.
Wolfgang Herrndorf died at the age of 48. | Photo (detail): © Steffi Roßdeutscher
Writing need not lead to loneliness, and a text need not be a book to be great literature. That is the legacy of author Wolfgang Herrndorf, who took his life in 2013 following a long illness.
Through “Tschick” Herrndorf wrote his way back to his youth. Through “Tschick” Herrndorf wrote his way back to his youth. | © Rowohlt It’s not easy to think of a large number of German-speaking writers today who sell millions of books and write a blog. None, in fact. Daniel Kehlmann? Doesn’t have a blog. Frank Schätzing? He doesn’t either, nor does Charlotte Roche. The big exception was the Berlin author Wolfgang Herrndorf, who was born in 1965 and took his life in August 2013 following a long illness. Herrndorf became involved with the Internet at an early stage, not as an experiment but as a way of life. He got to know about writing on the Internet, and from the other people who also wrote on the Internet. Herrndorf hated modern painting and admired Thomas Mann. He loved German Romanticism and his MacBook. And he left behind a book that in the future is destined to stand alongside Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan and Catcher in the Rye by Salinger. A book that will be read by generations trying to understand what it is like to become adult. That book is called Tschick.
Fortunately the books remain
The love story that developed between Wolfgang Herrndorf and the readers who got to know him through Tschick was short and intense, and the despair at Herrndorf’s death was correspondingly great. Fortunately, the books remain as consolation; more than one million copies of Tschick have meantime been sold. Herrndorf, who qualified as a painter and illustrator, experienced his breakthrough at a point when it was almost too late for him. When Tschick appeared in autumn 2010, he had been incurably ill for months with a brain tumour. What Herrndorf did then was to report live that he was determined to wrest sufficient time from the ticking clock to complete as many books as possible. He did this in a blog he started for his friends and later activated for everyone. He called that blog Arbeit und Struktur (Work and Structure). It was what he needed so stay in his lane.
Arbeit und Struktur was read above all as a diary about dying, understandably, given that Herrndorf used his blog to document his rebellion against the tumour, chemotherapy, operations, doctors, his minor victories and major relapses, his impatience with things that took up his time, time he no longer had: silly books, bad films, faith healers. He also documented his exit strategy, not wishing to let cancer have the last word: “I need a weapon,” he wrote in March 2010. Three and a half years later he shot himself at the Hohenzollernkanal in Berlin.
And three months after that his blog Arbeit und Struktur appeared in book form, which made it harder not to read the end between the lines of every entry, now that it was a hard fact. But to read it that way is to overlook the fact that Arbeit und Struktur is an idealistic document, a plea against a casual treatment of art, of language, above all, an appeal to us to read as if it were to save our life.
Booktrailer – Wolfgang Herrndorf reads from “Tschick”
No time for sentimentality and pomp
Basically, the entries he made in just about four years, from January 2010 to August 2013, contain the whole Herrndorf, as we know him from his books: his debut In Plüschgewittern, 2002, about the journey through Germany of a young man in search of his footing; from the stories Diesseits des Van-Allen-Gürtels, 2007, one of which was awarded the Bachmann Audience Prize in Klagenfurt in 2004; from Tschick, and from the spy novel Sand, which received the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair in 2012. Here an author with no time for sentimentality and pomp reveals himself, even at a point in time when he still seemed to have enough of it.
In his blog, Herrndorf gave the name “Project Regression: how I would like to have lived” to what was later to become his novel Tschick. It is the story of Maik and Tschick, who aim to travel to the Wallachia in a stolen Lada, don’t get very far, but learn a lot of useful things for life. And just as Herrndorf, as it were, wrote his way back into his youth, although there is no way back there, so too his many readers were also able to go down that road again, by reading. This kind of shared experience is very rare in literature, as is the close bond between author and reader.
The book of friendship
Tschick is a book about friendship that would not have been possible without the friends Herrndorf himself found on the Internet and who stood by him to the end, continually accompanying his work. They jointly agreed on the title Tschick for the novel, and when Herrndorf found writing his blog increasingly difficult, his friends also helped him with it. Herrndorf was part of a circle who, around 2001, got together on the website Wir höflichen Paparazzi (We Polite Paparazzi). Not all of them were artists, but many of them became artists thanks to that forum – by writing to one another about what they like to read and watch, what they loved and hated, and what they found amusing.
The loner Wolfgang Herrndorf emphasised again and again in his blog how helpful the social space was that he found on the Internet. That neither writing nor reading need make one lonely, that the Internet instead of isolating people opens up a whole new world, that a text need not be a book to be great literature – that is the legacy of Wolfgang Herrndorf.
Author
Tobias Rüther is an editor for the culture section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Translation: Pauline Cumbers
Copyright: Goethe-Institut e. V., Internet-Redaktion
March 2014
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This category contains 9 posts
The Living Truth
Author: Andre van Loon
Posted by brb ⋅ December 30, 2016 ⋅ Post a comment
The Russian thinker Alexander Herzen (1812-1870) is an elusive figure: just when you think you’ve got the right idea about him, a central insight, he turns away. In her book ‘The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen’, Aileen M. Kelly makes a heroic effort to give unity and coherence to Herzen’s oeuvre. Correctly seeing Herzen as an anti-systematiser in an age of grand theories and projects, Kelly grounds her subject in the natural sciences. She casts him as a humanist par excellence, who nonetheless started with a fierce interest in science, developing into a Darwinian before Darwin, later taking evolutionary theory to be a paradigm for exploring all that is contingent, messy and disruptive. And yet, argues BRB reviewer Andre van Loon, for all her intellectual brilliance and elective affinity with Herzen, Kelly focusses too much on the brain, often remaining neutral or silent about the heart, in a way her subject certainly did not. But this does not diminish Kelly’s achievement: to synthesise Herzen’s enormous literary output into various interconnected themes and strains.
Excellent Sheep, Excellent Shepherds?
Author: Bruce Fleming
Posted by brb ⋅ November 30, 2014 ⋅ Post a comment
In his book ‘Excellent Sheep’ (New York: Free Press 2014), William Deresiewicz offers a probing indictment of America’s top universities which, with few exceptions, turn young people into narrow-minded and career-oriented drones, who are more likely to pad their resumes in order to secure a job in finance than to cultivate intellectual growth or develop world-changing insights. The student-inspired title of Deresiewicz’s book (the term ‘Excellent Sheep’ is traced by Deresiewicz to a comment by a Yale student) is supplemented by two subtitles, joined together somewhat awkwardly with just an ampersand: ‘The Miseducation of the American Elite’ & ‘The Way to a Meaningful Life’. While this three-part title reflects the three main strands of the book, they do not always sit very well together. Thus, BRB reviewer Bruce Fleming argues, it is unclear what the search for a ‘meaningful life’ has to do with the curricula of elite universities and the alleged miseducation of the elites: Surely Deresiewicz does not want to suggest that there can be universal institutionalized ways for finding one’s true self and becoming the person one truly wants to be? We may all dream of being bohemians, but most of us aren’t cut out for it. And even for those of us who are, the quest for meaning can hardly be reduced to the problem of curriculum reform.
Work and Structure
Author: Frank Berzbach
Posted by brb ⋅ September 1, 2014 ⋅ Post a comment
Writer Wolfgang Herrndorf committed suicide in the summer of 2013, at age 48. He was best known for his bestselling novel “Tschick”, which garnered Herrndorf many literary accolades, even as he was diagnosed with a brain tumour shortly before its publication. Herrndorf documented his thoughts and the final years of his life in a blog, which has now been published as a book entitled “Arbeit und Struktur” (“Work and Structure”, Rowohlt, Berlin 2013). The title is derived from a comment by one of many doctors (Herrndorf, in his diary, resorts to referring them by numbers), who had recommended “work and structure” as a way of confronting fear and despair. Yet, as reviewer Frank Berzbach observes, no matter how depressing the diary’s entries are getting, at no point does Herrndorf allow his suffering to wrest control of his life from him: “This, indeed, is a reason to read his book: so as to maintain the upper hand, come what may. So as not to be driven to madness, or to escapism.”
Herrndorf, Wolfgang: SAND
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Herrndorf, Wolfgang SAND New York Review Books (Adult Fiction) $17.95 6, 19 ISBN: 978-1-68137-201-3
A beguiling, idiosyncratic exercise in postmodern bafflement by the late artist/novelist Herrndorf (Why We Took the Car, 2014, etc.), awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for it in 2012.
Somewhere along the coastal desert of northwestern Africa--Herrndorf isn't specific, but it's a former French colony, so perhaps Mali--four disaffected foreigners living in a commune have been killed in a murder whose payoff is a basket of fruit and a wicker suitcase full of an unknown currency. The case draws attention: There's an American woman "best seen from afar"--no surprise that her last name and hotel room add up to the moniker of a far-distant star--and a Swedish double agent with nuclear secrets to sell. Then there are two cops assigned to the case, one of them a Frenchman who took the gig to get away from a girlfriend in Paris and who "didn't have a clue about Africa." He worries that he doesn't have a clue about much of anything, since he scored lower on an intelligence test than his partner, who's dumb enough to bring about his own demise thanks to a miscalculation having to do with the political influence of the prime suspect. Then there's the guy whose head was bashed in and wanders in from the desert, an amnesiac, apparently well connected enough to international plots of derring-do that the Stasi, the CIA, and a sinister pseudo-psychiatrist are after him. Electrical shocks ensue, whereupon the amnesiac "talked about everything he knew, and he talked about the things he didn't know, too." In this rollicking shaggy-cum-sandy dog of a tale, no one knows much of anything, save that the badder the bad guy the more reliable the information. Herrndorf, it seems, had trouble deciding what this story would be--a satire? a spy novel? a thriller? Suffice it to say that if you mashed up the Ian Fleming of Casino Royale with Tin Drum-era Gunter Grass and threw in a little Paul Bowles for leavening, you might get something approaching this concoction.
It's bizarre, wacky, and broad--but highly entertaining, especially for fans of the Vonnegut/DFW school of the absurd.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Herrndorf, Wolfgang: SAND." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375265/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=54177788. Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375265
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Sand
Publishers Weekly.
265.16 (Apr. 16, 2018): p73. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Sand
Wolfgang Herrndorf, trans. from the German by Tim Mohr. NYRB Classics, $17.95 trade paper (464p) ISBN 978-1-68137-201-3
The murders of four European members of a hippie commune in a North African oasis drive this meandering thriller set in 1972 from German author Herrndorf (1965-2013). French detectives Polidorio and Canisades quickly arrest a young man who lived near the commune with his large family, but the lazy and incompetent detectives, relegated to this backwater in the remains of the French empire, obviously have the wrong person. Meanwhile, an amnesiac wanders out of the desert after being attacked by a group of men quarreling over a suitcase full of practically worthless East German money. He staggers into a gas station, where he meets Helen Gliese, a cosmetics saleswoman who offers to help him find his identity and gives him a temporary name, Carl. What Helen and Carl have to do with the murders isn't immediately clear. The characters' stories occasionally intertwine until they come together in an unsatisfying ending that only the most patient reader will persist in reaching. A big hit in Germany, this will have limited appeal to an American audience. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Sand." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 73. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532710/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=42202be3. Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532710
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Herrndorf, Wolfgang. Why We Took
the Car
Cathy Fiebelkorn
Voice of Youth Advocates.
36.5 (Dec. 2013): p61. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 E L Kurdyla Publishing LLC http://www.voya.com
Full Text:
4Q * 5P * S (A)
Herrndorf, Wolfgang. Why We Took the Car. Arthur A. Levine, 2014. 256p. $17.99. 978-0-545-48180-9.
In Why We Took the Car, it is pedal to the metal from the opening pages as fourteen-year-old Mike Klingenberg sits in a police station beside the German autobahn, reeking of blood and urine, reeling from the possibility of criminal charges, and wondering what happened to his buddy, Andrej Tschichatschow (Tschick) now that their wild summer road trip in a stolen car has come to an end. Mike then narrates from the beginning, revealing how this adventure came to be. Mike and Tschick, both outcasts at school, both from homes without much parental supervision, unite when neither is invited to the hottest party of the year hosted by Tatiana, Mike's unrequited crush. According to Tschick, it is a simple problem to solve: Mike needs to find a way to stand out. After they make a memorable appearance at the party in the "borrowed" car, Tschick convinces Mike to accompany him on a road trip to the fabled Wallachia, where Tschick's grandfather apparently lives. Madcap, almost surreal adventures ensue as they find themselves in unusual places and situations with unusual people. Their experiences are alternately entertaining, bizarre, and at times worrisome, thanks to their monumentally bad decision-making.
Readers will be anxious to discover how the journey ends, with consequences that are serious and life-changing, in ways both negative and positive. Though knowledge of German history and culture would be helpful, it is not necessary for readers to appreciate the humor and heart in Herrndorf's compel ling coming-of-age tale. His authentic voice will resonate universally with teens and will draw some comparisons to Holden Caulfield and Huck Finn.--Cathy Fiebelkorn.
Fiebelkorn, Cathy
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Fiebelkorn, Cathy. "Herrndorf, Wolfgang. Why We Took the Car." Voice of Youth Advocates,
Dec. 2013, p. 61. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A353516769 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=795ea1f4. Accessed 14 July 2018.
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Herrndorf, Wolfgang: WHY WE TOOK THE CAR
Kirkus Reviews.
(Nov. 15, 2013): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Herrndorf, Wolfgang WHY WE TOOK THE CAR Levine/Scholastic (Children's Fiction) $17.99 1, 7 ISBN: 978-0-545-48180-9
Social misfits hit the Autobahn. Mike Klingenberg has just finished another boring, socially awkward year in middle school and is staring down a solitary two-week stint at home, thanks to his mother's latest round of rehab and his father's "business trip" with a suspiciously attractive personal assistant. Just as he's watering the lawn, imagining himself lord of a very small manor in suburban Berlin, class reject Tschick shows up in a "borrowed" old Soviet-era car, and the boys hatch a plan to hit the road. Mike's rich interior life--he meditates on beauty and the meaning of life and spins self-mocking fantasies of himself as a great essayist--hasn't translated well to the flirtatious physical swagger required by 8th grade. Tschick, meanwhile, is a badly dressed Russian immigrant who often shows up to school reeking of alcohol and who is also given to profound leaps of psychological insight. Their road trip (destination: Wallachia, a German euphemism for "the middle of nowhere"; also a region of Romania) is peopled by unexpected, often bizarre, largely benign characters who deepen Mike's appreciation for humanity and life. Each episode in the boys' journey grows more outrageous, leading readers to wonder how far they'll go before coming to a literal screeching (and squealing) halt. In his first novel translated into English, Herrndorf sits squarely and triumphantly at the intersection of literary tall tale and coming-of-age picaresque. (Fiction. 14-17)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Herrndorf, Wolfgang: WHY WE TOOK THE CAR." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2013. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A348856297/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=ea03cbfb. Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A348856297
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Why We Took The Car
Publishers Weekly.
261 (Annual 2014): p94+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2014 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Why We Took The Car
Wolfgang Herrndorf, trans. from the German by Tim Mohr. Scholastic/Levine, $17.99 ISBN 978-0-545-48180-9
German novelist Herrndorf makes his YA (and U.S.) debut with this action--and emotion-packed story of surprise summer adventure. When German eighth-grader Mike Klingenberg discovers that he's among the few "Boring kids and losers ... Russians, Nazis and idiots" who are not invited to his crush Tatiana's birthday party, he is devastated, Mike is facing a miserable summer, with his mother in rehab and father away at a "business meeting" with his sexy assistant, when his new Russian classmate, Tschick (whom Mike considers "trash"), arrives at his house in a stolen car. An unlikely compatibility leads to a candy-fueled road trip, complicated by their lack of a map or cell phone. Driving all over Germany, the boys face conundrums like avoiding the police, buying gas and food when clearly underage, and vaguely seeking Tschick's grandfather. Prepared by life to expect ill will, Mike and Tschick instead meet "almost only people from the one percent who weren't bad." Beginning at the end, with Mike narrating the explanation suggested by the title, this alternately wild, sad, hilarious, and tender tale chronicles the development of a strange and beautiful friendship. Ages 14-up.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Why We Took The Car." Publishers Weekly, Annual 2014, p. 94+. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A394685197/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=c2068506. Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A394685197
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Why We Took the Car
Jessica Tackett Macdonald
The Horn Book Magazine.
90.1 (January-February 2014): p91+. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2014 The Horn Book, Inc.. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Sources, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.hbook.com/magazine/default.asp
Full Text:
Why We Took the Car
by Wolfgang Herrndorf; trans. from the German by Tim Mohr Middle School, High School Levine/Scholastic 250 pp.
1/14 978-0-545-48180-9 $17.99 g
e-book ed. 978-0-545-58636-8 $17.99
Two teens abandon their lackluster lives and hit the Autobahn in this audacious tragicomedy. Mike Klingenberg, boring and unpopular, lives a life of quiet desperation at his Berlin junior high. New kid Tschick comes to class drunk and might be in the Russian mafia; he's not winning friends, but at least everyone's paying attention. So when Tschick rolls up to Mike's house in a hotwired car and proposes a road trip without a map, destination, or driver's license, Mike says yes. Although the telling begins at its ignominious end, their story is, in many ways, a traditional road trip: the characters ponder their existence and gain independence while mastering the stick shift, evading local police, and encountering a collection of increasingly weird locals. Mike's narration is an anxious stream of wry humor and linked anecdotes, but the moments when his facade slips are abrupt and startling windows into the pain of social exclusion and the aching loneliness of being fourteen. A sharp coming-of-age journey, hilarious and heartrending in equal measure.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Macdonald, Jessica Tackett. "Why We Took the Car." The Horn Book Magazine, Jan.-Feb. 2014,
p. 91+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A362606137 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=a9f9d84d. Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A362606137
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Why We Took The Car
Publishers Weekly.
260.43 (Oct. 28, 2013): p63. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Why We Took The Car
Wolfgang Herrndorf, trans. from the German by Tim Mohr. Scholastic/Levine, $17.99 (256p) ISBN 978-0-545-48180-9
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
German novelist Herrndorf makes his YA (and U.S.) debut with this action-and emotion-packed story of surprise summer adventure. When German eighth-grader Mike Klingenberg discovers that he's among the few "Boring kids and losers ... Russians, Nazis and idiots" who are not invited to his crush Tatiana's birthday party, he is devastated. Mike is facing a miserable summer, with his mother in rehab and father away at a "business meeting" with his sexy assistant, when his new Russian classmate, Tschick (whom Mike considers "trash"), arrives at his house in a stolen car. An unlikely compatibility leads to a candy-fueled road trip, complicated by their lack of a map or cell phone. Driving all over Germany, the boys face conundrums like avoiding the police, buying gas and food when clearly underage, and vaguely seeking Tschick's grandfather. Prepared by life to expect ill will, Mike and Tschick instead meet "almost only people from the one percent who weren't bad." Beginning at the end, with Mike narrating the explanation suggested by the title, this alternately wild, sad, hilarious, and tender tale chronicles the development of a strange and beautiful friendship. Ages 14--up. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Why We Took The Car." Publishers Weekly, 28 Oct. 2013, p. 63. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A350676950/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=86f93c02. Accessed 14 July 2018.
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Why We Took the Car
Sarah Bean Thompson
Booklist.
110.8 (Dec. 15, 2013): p48. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Why We Took the Car.
By Wolfgang Herrndorf. Tr. by Tim Mohr.
Jan. 2014. 256p. Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine, $17.99 (9780545481809); e-book, $17.99 (9780545586368). Gr. 9-12.
German teenager Mike Klingenberg is an average student. He goes unnoticed by the other students, has an unrequited crush on the hottest girl in class, and is just a bit boring. But when Andrej Tschichatschow, aka Tschick, shows up, things change. Tschick is definitely interesting-- he sleeps in class, always looks like he's been in a fight, and just might be part of the Russian Mafia. When Mike and Tschick are not invited to popular girl Tatiana's summer birthday party, they decide an adventure is in store. They steal a car and head out on a road trip across Germany. Do they have any idea what they're doing? Not a clue. But this is their chance to take charge and do something. While some of their mishaps are a bit over-the-top and Tschick's big secret is revealed without much of a punch, Mike's journey from dull to confident teen is an enjoyable one. Well translated, this is a good choice for readers looking for a contemporary realistic novel with a humorous sense of adventure. --Sarah Bean Thompson
Thompson, Sarah Bean
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Thompson, Sarah Bean. "Why We Took the Car." Booklist, 15 Dec. 2013, p. 48. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A355673511/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=90883c8d. Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A355673511
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Herrndorf, Wolfgang: Why We Took
the Car
Gillian Lathey
School Librarian.
62.2 (Summer 2014): p118+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2014 The School Library Association http://www.sla.org.uk/school-librarian.php
Full Text:
Herrndorf, Wolfgang
Why We Took the Car
Translated by Tim Mohr
Andersen, 2014, pp256, 6.99 [pounds sterling] 978 1 78344 031 3
A young runaway with an alcoholic mother and abusive father: thus far the scenario resembles that of a swathe of contemporary young adult fiction. Yet this novel stands out from the rest by several miles. Narrator Mike Klingenberg's voice is that of a naive, self-deprecating, observant, and constantly amusing companion who tells his story --including moments of deep despair-- without a trace of self-indulgence. He and his young Russian friend Tschick take off from Berlin in a stolen Lada to visit Tschick's grandfather in Wallachia (Romania), sleeping rough, siphoning off petrol and playing cat and mouse with the police as they encounter a range of unique characters. Some are recognisable social types and others behave in a manner that defies all logic, yet all are depicted with wit and sympathy. Ultimately the boys have to return to their routines and families, but only after the best summer ever and a journey that has brought unexpected developments in their lives.
Translator Tim Mohr has done an excellent job in rendering this succinct and captivating narrative, with all its slang and contemporary references, into an English version that convinces entirely. Highly recommended indeed.
Lathey, Gillian
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lathey, Gillian. "Herrndorf, Wolfgang: Why We Took the Car." School Librarian, Summer 2014,
p. 118+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A376205592 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6a1e2e34. Accessed 14 July 2018.
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Herrndorf, Wolfgang: Why We Took
the Car
Jessica Tackett MacDonald
The Horn Book Guide.
25.2 (Fall 2014): p112. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2014 The Horn Book, Inc. http://www.hornbookguide.com
Full Text:
Herrndorf, Wolfgang Why We Took the Car
250 pp. Scholastic/Levine ISBN 978-0-545-48180-9 $17.99 EBOOK ISBN 978-0-545-58636-8
(2) Translated by Tim Mohr. Berlin teens Mike and Tschick abandon their lackluster lives and embark on an increasingly weird road trip. Mike's narration is an anxious stream of wry humor and linked anecdotes, but the moments when his facade slips are startling windows into the aching loneliness of being fourteen. A sharp coming-of-age journey, hilarious and heartrending in equal measure. Review 1/14.
MacDonald, Jessica Tackett
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
MacDonald, Jessica Tackett. "Herrndorf, Wolfgang: Why We Took the Car." The Horn Book
Guide, Fall 2014, p. 112. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A385996307/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=55407a81. Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A385996307
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Herrndorf, Wolfgang. Why We Took
the Car
Bob Hassett
School Library Journal.
59.12 (Dec. 2013): p128. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2013 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
HERRNDORF, Wolfgang. Why We Took the Car. tr. from German by Tim Mohr. 256p. Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine. Jan. 2014. Tr $17.99. ISBN 9780545481809; ebk. $17.99. ISBN 9780545586368. LC 2012044118.
Gr 8 Up--Mike, 14, is one of the only kids in his middle school not invited to the birthday blowout thrown by Tatiana, his secret crush. His home life is dismal--his alcoholic mother is in and out of rehab and his father is embittered, unfaithful, and nearly bankrapt. But everything has shifted with the arrival of transfer student Tschick, a child of Russian immigrants who is obviously bright but withdrawn and is frequently drunk during school. When Tschick hotwires an old Lada, the two boys light out for the territory and encounter a sequence of oddball characters, including Isa--a fiercely independent girl who lives in a junkyard and casually asks Mike whether he'd like to have sex or, as an afterthought, kiss her--and Horst Fricke, a gnn-waving communist with a disconcerting interest in "the alabaster body of adolescence." The novel was a 2010 bestseller and award winner in Germany. Opening with "the smell of blood and coffee" and ending with Mike and his mom tossing furniture into the swimming pool, the story is offbeat and funny, and the main characters incisively drawn. For the right reader, it's a teen road movie with a bundle of twists. Still, while some cultural references will be transparent to American teens (Wikipedia, Beyonce, Grand Theft Auto for PlayStation), the translation is also rich with local allusions and arcane discussion of German soccer. And though much of the story has a rollicking Gordon Korman feel to it, the language is often coarse and the mood chaotically dark.--Bob Hassett, Luther Jackson Middle School, Falls Church, VA
Hassett, Bob
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hassett, Bob. "Herrndorf, Wolfgang. Why We Took the Car." School Library Journal, Dec. 2013,
p. 128. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A354086390 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=48e79aa2. Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A354086390
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Review: TEENAGE FICTION: An
illicit road trip seen through 14-year-
old eyes thrills Philip Ardagh: Why
We Took the Car by Wolfgang
Herrndorf, translated by Tim Mohr
245pp, Andersen Press, pounds 6.99
The Guardian (London, England).
(May 24, 2014): Arts and Entertainment: p13. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2014 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian
Full Text:
Byline: Philip Ardagh
I was eating breakfast in a hotel, reading a book, when the German illustrator Axel Scheffler (of Gruffalo fame) sat down opposite me. "Do you know about Herrndorf?" he asked. I shook my head. "He got cancer," he said. "Wrote a blog about it. Died." "How sad," I said. "Killed himself," said Scheffler. He had my full attention now. "Shot himself." Pause. "In the head."
He'd asked about Herrndorf because he'd seen I was reading the American-English translation of Herrndorf's Tschick, with the English title Why We Took the Car. I'd assumed "Tschick" to be the equivalent of our "Twoc" (Taking Without Owner's Consent), but it turned out it was short for Tschichatschow, the name of one of the two teenage-boy protagonists.
I have been irregularly reviewing children's books for the Guardian for more than 10 years and, if memory serves - with the exception of Tove Jansson's Moomin books - this is the first book I've read in translation for review. The lack of translated children's (in this case Young Adult) fiction is our loss. Fellow German Cornelia Funke aside, I am hard-pressed to think of other contemporary foreign children's authors available in English (though I know the Pushkin imprint is trying to redress this). Translator Tim Mohr has done an excellent job with Why We Took the Car. Its American stoops and faucets and pants for trousers mixed with euros and kilometres-an- hour make for an interesting hybrid.
The story seems a simple one - two 14-year-olds sort of borrow a car - but the execution is beautiful. From the outset, it is clear that Mike is a square peg in a round hole. At school he is aloof and seemingly disconnected. At home, he has to deal with an alcoholic mother and a father
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who appears to be having a rather obvious affair.
Mike's crazy about Tatiana, a girl in his class, but is one of the few classmates who doesn't get invited to her party. He has done an amazing pencil drawing of Beyonce for her but ends up tearing it to pieces. Tschick - the new Russian kid at school, who sometimes turns up reeking of booze - insists that they drive to Tatiana's house and give her the reconstituted gift. They arrive in a beaten-up old Lada that Tschick sometimes uses, borrowing it without permission from the street but always bringing it back. Until now. Until the road trip.
For much of the time, little happens. There are no big police chases (except for one involving a bicycle) and none of the more obvious rites of passage. But they do meet some interesting people in interesting places and, because it's seen through Mike's eyes, not too much is explained. This adds a very surreal edge to proceedings. In the same way that Frank McCourt's memoir Angela's Ashes related events as they were experienced at the time, with little, if any, adult reflection, we watch events unfold as Mike perceives them. The result is insightful and funny.
After finishing Why We Took the Car, I investigated Scheffler's breakfast revelations. Sadly, they were true. Diagnosed in 2010 (the year this book was originally published), Herrndorf shot himself in August 2013. Apparently, one of the first things he did after being told he had cancer was get himself a gun. He said it was his link to reality and his exit strategy. His was an extraordinary mind.
Philip Ardagh's The Further Adventures of Eddie Dickens omnibus edition is published by Faber. To order Why We Took the Car for pounds 5.59 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.
Philip Ardagh
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Review: TEENAGE FICTION: An illicit road trip seen through 14-year-old eyes thrills Philip
Ardagh: Why We Took the Car by Wolfgang Herrndorf, translated by Tim Mohr 245pp, Andersen Press, pounds 6.99." Guardian [London, England], 24 May 2014, p. 13. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A369125408/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=011f341f. Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A369125408
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Murder, memory loss and nuclear secrets
Winner of the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2012, Sand is the dazzling final work of a novelist who died young
Image Credit: Luis Vazquez/Gulf News
Published: 16:17 May 3, 2017
Gulf News
Reviewed by Justin Huggler
Sand by Wolfgang Herrndorf, translated by Tim Mohr
Pushkin, 480 pages,$18
Sometimes you come across a novel so dazzling and original you cannot wait to see what its author will write next. Tragically, in the case of Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Sand, there will be no more: in 2010, the same year he burst upon the German literary scene, Herrndorf was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour. Three years later he shot himself before the tumour could kill him. Sand, which won the Leipzig Book Fair prize in 2012 but has only now been translated into English, is the last book he wrote. Fittingly, it is a masterpiece: at once a thriller, a surrealist comedy, and a dark satire, culminating in one of the greatest twists I’ve read.
Set in 1972 in an unnamed North African country that is a thinly veiled version of Morocco, Sand opens with a police investigation into the brutal murder of four Westerners at a desert commune. But it soon becomes clear this isn’t the real focus of the story. That belongs to Carl - except Carl isn’t his real name - a man who wakes up in the desert with a nasty blow to the head and no memory of who he is or how he got there. Pursued by murderous thugs who believe he has something that belongs to them, he finds himself caught up in a dangerous plot - only he has no idea what they are after or what his part in it all is.
With the unlikely help of an earnest young American saleswoman, he sets out to find out who he is before his enemies can track him down. Herrndorf laid to rest the old canard that Germans have no sense of humour in his breakthrough novel, Tschick (2010), which sold over a million copies in Germany and was published in English as Why We Took the Car (2014). There is plenty from the same vein of anarchic comedy in Sand, in which we encounter a terrorist arms dealer named Khach-Khach, a gangster known as the King of Crooks, a Swedish spy with sunstroke, a lone madman mining for gold in the mountains and a dubious American psychiatrist who makes a living out of treating damaged Western tourists. But Herrndorf was dying as he wrote Sand, and it shows in more than the mysterious headaches that plague one of the minor characters.Why We Took the Car was written for young adults; Sand, with its brutality and bleakness, is most definitely for grown-ups, and the humour is as black as it gets. “Use your last conversation to make a statement that isn’t completely meaningless,” one of Carl’s pursuers tells him. “You make me want to throw up,” he replies. And for all the jokes, a dark thread of seriousness runs through the book. “I’m afraid we’re the good guys here,” a CIA torturer tells Carl. “Nothing is more important than a human life. Even when it is the life of a liar. Every life is priceless, unique and worth preserving. Says the lawyer. The problem is, we’re not lawyers.”
The book’s English publishers describe it as “part Le Carre, part Coen brothers”. I’d say it’s rather more the latter than the former. There’s also a distinct flavour of Thomas Pynchon at times: Carl runs into an LSD-fuelled rock band who perform in US military uniform and call themselves Marshal Mellow, and it’s not long before the paranoid realisation dawns: “You guys are really military, aren’t you?” But at the end of the novel, Herrndorf does something quite different with Sand.
Just as you are beginning to fear the mystery will be left unexplained and ambiguous, he resolves it. All the loose ends are tied up, and we find out who the mysterious protagonist is, in a reveal so dark and brilliant I doubt anyone will see it coming.
The twist is one of literature’s more overused techniques. But in his last work Herrndorf found a way to revitalise it: where thriller writers usually sacrifice realism for the sake of the twist, in Sand it works the other way around. Reality crashes down on a novel that had felt like a flight of fancy. It is a fitting final work for a man who declared, on being given a year and a half to live: “I’ll write a book. If I get a month, I’ll write a chapter every day. If I get three months, I’ll do it properly. A year is pure luxury.”
Justin Huggler’s new novel, The Return Home, has been recently published by Short Books.
– The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2017
Why We Took the Car by Wolfgang Herrndorf review – an illicit journey
The funny, insightful story of two boys who end up on a road trip using a 'borrowed' car, told through the eyes of a 14-year-old
Philip Ardagh
Sat 24 May 2014 03.30 EDT
First published on Sat 24 May 2014 03.30 EDT
Wolfgang Herrndorf
'An extraordinary mind' … Wolfgang Herrndorf.
I was eating breakfast in a hotel, reading a book, when the German illustrator Axel Scheffler (of Gruffalo fame) sat down opposite me. "Do you know about Herrndorf?" he asked. I shook my head. "He got cancer," he said. "Wrote a blog about it. Died." "How sad," I said. "Killed himself," said Scheffler. He had my full attention now. "Shot himself." Pause. "In the head."
He'd asked about Herrndorf because he'd seen I was reading the American-English translation of Herrndorf's Tschick, with the English title Why We Took the Car. I'd assumed "Tschick" to be the equivalent of our "Twoc" (Taking Without Owner's Consent), but it turned out it was short for Tschichatschow, the name of one of the two teenage-boy protagonists.
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I have been irregularly reviewing children's books for the Guardian for more than 10 years and, if memory serves – with the exception of Tove Jansson's Moomin books – this is the first book I've read in translation for review. The lack of translated children's (in this case Young Adult) fiction is our loss. Fellow German Cornelia Funke aside, I am hard-pressed to think of other contemporary foreign children's authors available in English (though I know the Pushkin imprint is trying to redress this). Tim Mohr has done an excellent job with Why We Took the Car. Its American stoops and faucets and pants for trousers mixed with euros and kilometres-an-hour make for an interesting hybrid.
The story seems a simple one – two 14-year-olds sort of borrow a car – but the execution is beautiful. From the outset, it is clear that Mike is a square peg in a round hole. At school he is aloof and seemingly disconnected. At home, he has to deal with an alcoholic mother and a father who appears to be having a rather obvious affair.
Mike's crazy about Tatiana, a girl in his class, but is one of the few classmates who doesn't get invited to her party. He has done an amazing pencil drawing of Beyoncé for her but ends up tearing it to pieces. Tschick – the new Russian kid at school, who sometimes turns up reeking of booze – insists that they drive to Tatiana's house and give her the reconstituted gift. They arrive in a beaten-up old Lada that Tschick sometimes uses, borrowing it without permission from the street but always bringing it back. Until now. Until the road trip.
For much of the time, little happens. There are no big police chases (except for one involving a bicycle) and none of the more obvious rites of passage. But they do meet some interesting people in interesting places and, because it's seen through Mike's eyes, not too much is explained. Are they at some sort of religious community now? Is this scene set in a disused quarry? How and why did this girl get here?
This adds a very real, yet, at the same time, surreal edge to proceedings. In the same way that Frank McCourt's memoir Angela's Ashes related events as they were experienced at the time, with little, if any, adult reflection, we watch events unfold as Mike perceives them. The result is insightful and funny.
After finishing Why We Took the Car, I investigated Scheffler's breakfast revelations. Sadly, they were true. Diagnosed in 2010 (the year this book was originally published), Herrndorf shot himself in August 2013. Apparently, one of the first things he did after being told he had cancer was get himself a gun. He said it was his link to reality and his exit strategy. His was an extraordinary mind.
• Philip Ardagh's The Further Adventures of Eddie Dickens omnibus edition is published by Faber. To order Why We Took the Car for £5.59 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.
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Why We Took the Car
Book review by Andrea Beach, Common Sense Media
Why We Took the Car Book Poster Image
Common Sense says
age 14+
Dark humor, edgy details elevate teen road trip.
Wolfgang Herrndorf Contemporary Fiction 2014
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The parents' guide to what's in this book.
Educational Value
Positive Messages
Positive Role Models & Representations
Violence
Sex
Language
Consumerism
Drinking, Drugs & Smoking
What parents need to know
Parents need to know that Why We Took the Car tells the story of 14-year-old Mike and his classmate Tschick as they take an underage, unsupervised road trip (in a car they've appropriated without its owner's knowledge or permission) through the German countryside. Violence is infrequent but important, although there's not a lot of detail or gore. Sexual incidents are rare but fairly sophisticated and more matter-of-fact than romantic. There's lots of wide-ranging strong language, with "ass," "crap," "s--t," and "piss" being most common. Lots of brand names are mentioned once or twice, without suggesting any particular benefits or superior qualities. Mike's alcoholic mother is frequently depicted drinking or drunk; alcohol is mentioned on a few occasions, and Mike drinks beer a couple of times but doesn't like it. Teens smoke at a party, and Tschick is seen smoking twice.
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What's the story?
Left alone for two weeks during the summer after eighth grade, 14-year-old Mike befriends his mysterious classmate Tschick. Against his better judgment and with nothing better to do, Mike agrees to go along with Tschick on a road trip to Romania in a "borrowed" Russian wreck of a car, without a map. Taking back roads to avoid attracting police attention, the boys encounter colorful characters and spectacular scenery. Despite their best efforts to lie low, they can't seem to avoid trouble. When it all comes (literally) crashing to a halt, Mike and Tschick have to face serious consequences. Mike returns to the next school year with a whole new reputation and a newfound ability to endure, and even appreciate, the craziness of his dysfunctional home life.
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Is it any good?
WHY WE TOOK THE CAR, by German author Wolfgang Herrndorf, is a funny, intriguing, and absorbing coming-of-age story. Fourteen-year-old hero Mike Klingenberg is likable and relatable, with an authentic voice that rings true. Other characters are colorful and well developed, from the ones, such as Tschick, we come to know well, to the oddballs and good Samaritans met only in passing. But don't be surprised if your favorite character turns out to be the Lada, the old Russian hunk of junk the boys "borrow" to hit the road.
These edgy details, the dark humor, and a narrator who doesn't hate everything shift the focus away from run-of-the-mill teen angst, elevating it to a solid buddy adventure that's more about friendship and finding your place in the world. Firmly rooted in its German setting, yet universal in its themes of growing pains and dysfunctional families, it will broaden kids' horizons as they gain a better understanding of how much we all have in common. Tim Mohr provides a deft, smooth translation from the German that reads as though it were written, with only a slight German accent, in English in the first place.
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Talk to your kids about ...
Families can talk about feeling alone and isolated, even in the midst of a classroom. Almost everyone feels that way sometimes, so how do you know when someone might need help?
In the original German, the book was called Tschick. Do you think the U.S. title is better or worse? Why would it be so different?
Mike says he went along on the trip because he didn't want to be boring anymore. Have you ever tried to change something about yourself? Were you successful? Why, or why not?
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Book details
Author: Wolfgang Herrndorf
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Topics: Cars and Trucks, Adventures, Friendship, Misfits and Underdogs
Book type: Fiction
Publisher: Arthur A. Levine
Publication date: January 7, 2014
Publisher's recommended age(s): 14 - 17
Number of pages: 256
Available on: Nook, Hardback, Kindle
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‘Why We Took the Car,’ by Wolfgang Herrndorf
By Mary Quattlebaum December 31, 2013
Buckle your seat belt. You’re in for a bumpy, exhilarating ride with this winner of the German Youth Literature Award. Even in today’s connected world, relatively little young-adult fiction from other countries is published in the United States. With its car window on the German landscape and teen culture, the late Wolfgang Herrndorf’s novel (nimbly translated by Tim Mohr) fuels an especially expansive reading experience. Lonely and caustic, Mike Klingenberg seems like the Berliner descendant of Holden Caulfield , but this 14-year-old’s tale veers from that angsty course with a classmate named Tschick at the wheel of a hot-wired car. Mike, a “rich scaredy-cat,” and his smart, “low-class” Russian friend share the bottom rung on their school’s social ladder and an affinity for philosophical reflection, which bonds them on an erratic road trip. They careen from a party at the home of Mike’s crush to a chance meeting with a young dump dweller to a too-close encounter with a pig truck on the autobahn. Believably, the boys must face the legal consequences of their joy ride, but Mike realizes that it has taught him that the world, far from being a danger, is “bigger, the colors brighter” than he ever imagined. Though labeled boring by fellow students, Mike proves anything but in this lively bildungsroman, rich with funny, poignant riffs on nicknames, boomerangs, Beyoncé, aging and the possibility of life on other planets.
— Mary Quattlebaum
WHY WE TOOK THE CAR
By Wolfgang Herrndorf
Translated from the German by Tim Mohr
Why We Took the Car by Wolfgang Herrndorf
Reviewed by Katherine Dretzke
25 Nov 2013
Mike Klingenberg has no friends. He believes this is because he is boring, which is cemented in his mind when he never receives an invite to the party of the year being held by the most popular girl in school (and the love of his life). With his alcoholic mother in rehab and his father on a business trip, Mike has the whole holidays to himself. That is until the new, slightly odd kid from school, Tschick, turns up at his house and makes himself comfortable.
With nothing to do but sit around and play video games, Mike and Tschick decide to take a road trip with no destination, no map and no mobile phones. They will take wrong turns, commit a couple of crimes and meet some eccentric people. But one thing is for sure: if they return, neither of them will be boring anymore.
Why We Took the Car is a heart-warming coming-of-age novel about two boys who form a beautiful, caring friendship that doesn’t judge or ridicule. In a world where male friendships are often portrayed as tough and blokey, Why We Took the Car does the opposite. Brilliant.
Ages 14 and up.
Katherine Dretzke is a bookseller at Readings Hawthorn.
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Why We Took The Car
Why We Took The Car
Wolfgang Herrndorf, Tim Mohr
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Why We Took the Car
By Reviewed by John Bailey
12 January 2014 — 3:00am
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WHY WE TOOK THE CAR
Wolfgang Herrndorf
Scribe, $19.95
Wolfgang Herrndorf died of cancer last year at only 48; his first novel translated into English makes evident the loss of a mellifluous and memorable voice in YA literature.
Mike Klingenberg is a 14-year-old "walking sleeping pill" to his schoolmates, with the exception of the equally outcast Russian no-hoper Tschick.
As their friendship burgeons, Mike decides the only way to shake off his deadly boring status is to accept his delinquent buddy's proposal to steal a car and go on a road trip across Germany to Wallachia.
They set off at night with neither map, compass nor clue. They do have a goatee made of duct tape, a Richard Clayderman tape in the stereo and plenty of experience playing Grand Theft Auto, however, so they're off to a good start.
What follows is an addictive and artfully rendered ride through a vivid landscape that becomes increasingly strange the further from home the boys flee.
The characters they meet, too, might in another novel come across as overly bizarre or eccentric, but Herrndorf does a fine job of capturing the mixture of wonder and suspicion through which a mid-teen can view the world once he or she steps outside the bubble of childhood.
When things get weird - and they occasionally get very much so - there's still a sense that the driver is in complete control of his vehicle. So Mike and Tschick will be shot at, traverse moonscapes, be charged at by a hippo and befriend a filthy waif as they rack up an impressive list of petty crimes.
There's plenty left unexplained, lending a slightly surreal edge, but it's more because Mike has only a fleeting, blinkered understanding of what he witnesses.
Genuinely funny moments occur when the two leads bicker over things they have no real knowledge of, while there's a tremulous undercurrent of sadness that stems from the lack of control the boys are able to wield over their miserable home lives.
There is no shortage of chase scenes and the fast pace, along with Mike's endearing narrative voice, might go some way to explaining the millions of copies sold in Europe already. But the action is matched by a sweet (if not saccharine) view of humanity.
Late in the game Mike marvels at the way they've met no truly bad people on their voyage. Good and bad aren't part of the world view Herrndorf constructs here.
People aren't so simple. But every last one is incredibly odd, and much more interesting for it.
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Children’s Books
Hitting the Road
By Peter Behrens
Jan. 10, 2014
In Len Vlahos’s debut novel, the Scar Boys are a punk band from Yonkers that hits the road riding a rusty van and working out personal problems while playing gigs in college towns as far south as Georgia. “Music to the rescue,” muses Harry, the book’s narrator. Playing and touring demand creativity and commitment, forcing the Scar Boys — actually three guys and a girl — to come of age in this wry, stylish tale.
There are no American idols here, not even an Internet, so the mid-1980s setting — which includes CBGB — might feel prehistoric to contemporary young adult readers. But clubs and technology come and go. Music is forever.
Harry (formally Harbinger Robert Francis Jones) was burned during a lightning storm as a kid and grew up with a wrecked face, zero friends in middle school and a deep, dark fear of the world. After he meets the gifted, charismatic Johnny, they play every LP they can get their hands on. “We should start a band,” Johnny says. To Harry, “it was like a magic phrase — abracadabra, hocus-pocus and open sesame all rolled into one.”
Harry struggles with a hovering mother and a father who alternates between overbearing and incompetent while flashing unexpected bursts of affection at a son he doesn’t understand. Harry’s dad and Johnny, the band’s ambitious lead singer — a loyal friend, and at the same time a bit of a self-serving rat — are the most original and satisfying characters. With Richie, the blue-collar drummer, and Cheyenne, who plays an edgy and spirited bass guitar, all four Scar Boys are well-etched original characters. But though they’re talented and hard-working, the band isn’t ever going to be discovered; they discover themselves, and one another, during their sub-rock-star summer on the road.
In Wolfgang Herrndorf’s “Why We Took the Car,” originally published in German and ably translated by Tim Mohr, the title question never really gets answered. And the two teenage boys who take the car — a beat-up Lada — on a summer road trip across Germany don’t really know why they do it, exactly. Which seems about right, for two high-spirited social misfits stuck in the German equivalent of a big-city junior high. Their trip is all about getting away — from damaged parents, from unpopularity, from hectoring teachers. There’s a lot to run from and no clear direction in which to travel.
The narrator, Mike Klingenberg, lives in an apartment with a mother befuddled by booze and a real-estate-developer dad who’s on the road himself — with his college-age secretary. Mike’s partner in crime is Andrej Tschichatschow, known as Tschick, a Russian immigrant who some mornings leaves “a vapor trail of alcohol” in his wake. Tschick and Mike are perhaps the most uncool kids in school, certainly not cool enough to be invited to pretty Tatiana’s birthday party. That’s reason enough for Tschick to grab the semi-abandoned Lada, for Mike to pocket 200 euros left by his disappeared dad and for both guys to hit the road. Because they haven’t a clue where they’re going, they call their destination “Wallachia,” actually a region of Romania, but shorthand for Hicksville, nowheresville, the end of the road.
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By no means a wholesome story, “Why We Took the Car” is exuberant and without a mean bone in its narrative. American teenagers shouldn’t have trouble relating to Mike and Tschick, recognizable characters from the universal school of teenage angst. The autobahns of Germany have, from Herrndorf’s point of view, a lot in common with the interstates of, say, Kansas: fast-food restaurants, truck stops, blurred towns.
The liveliness and charm of the two boys carry the reader along, until at last Mike taps into the real lessons of the road: that it never ends. “I was overcome with a strange feeling. It was a feeling of bliss, a feeling of invincibility. No accident, no authority, no law of nature could stop us. We were on the road and we would always be on the road.”
EDITORS’ PICKS
The Artist Is Not Present
The Border Patrol’s Last Line of Defense Is Not at the Border
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf Scientist?
THE SCAR BOYS
By Len Vlahos
256 pp. Egmont. $17.99. (Young adult; ages 14 to 17)
WHY WE TOOK THE CAR
By Wolfgang Herrndorf
Translated by Tim Mohr
245 pp. Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic. $17.99. (Young adult; ages 14 to 17)
Peter Behrens’s most recent novel is “The O’Briens.” He blogs about roads and road trips at autoliterate.blogspot.com.
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 11, 2014, on Page 15 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Hitting the Road. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Review: Sand by Wolfgang Herrndorf
Alastair Mabbott
Wolfgang Herrndor
Wolfgang Herrndor
Sand
Wolfgang Herrndorf
Pushkin, £14.99
Review by Alastair Mabbott
Sadly, bestselling German author Wolfgang Herrndorf killed himself in 2013 after being diagnosed with an incurable brain tumour, leaving behind him only this and his debut, Why We Took the Car. We’ll never know quite where his sharp intelligence would have taken him, but Sand shows an author capable of taking well-established structures and bending them to his own designs.
Sand, then, is a sort of literary pastiche of a geopolitical thriller, set in an unnamed African country shortly after the 1972 Olympics massacre. It’s the height of the Cold War, when the continent was the stage for all kinds of intrigue, espionage and intelligence games. It begins with two policemen, Polidorio and Canisades, presented with a suspect who is believed to have killed four people at a hippy commune. It’s Herrndorf’s first piece of misdirection. A little later on, he presents us with a second beginning, when a man, who will shortly adopt the name Carl, recovers consciousness with a head wound in a barn in the desert. He has no memory of who he is or how he came to be there, but snatches of overheard conversation convince him that he’s enmeshed in some criminal activity and in imminent danger.
After staggering, bloody and bruised, across the desert, he’s picked up by Helen Gliese, an American woman who takes pity on him. Taking Carl back to her hotel, she tries to help him piece together who he is and what’s going on from the scraps of information he’s been able to glean. It’s not long before Carl is snatched off the street by a local crime lord with whom he’s apparently had dealings before. “Seventy-two hours,” the gangster grants him. “Then the mine is mine again.” Not wanting to let on that he’s got amnesia, Carl has to somehow work out what the “mine” is before he can even formulate a plan of action.
There comes a point, and it will vary from reader to reader, when it dawns that Herrndorf doesn’t intend us to take any of this at face value. It might be the revelation that the kind of amnesia Carl suffers from – basically a full-on Jason Bourne – is so vanishingly rare it’s virtually non-existent. The very odd American psychiatrist who informs him of this, who Carl doubts is actually a psychiatrist at all; the gunman who wants to pull over during a car chase so that he can get out and pray; the entire character of Helen Gliese. What started off as a convincing thriller is now looking like the most bone-dry of comedies. And Herrndorf’s enjoyment as he plays with our expectations is almost palpable.
Nevertheless, for all the fun he may be having deconstructing the thriller genre, Herrndorf endows Sand with enough literary gravitas to let you know he has serious points to make too. It’s the kind of book you’re tempted to re-read once you know how it ends, but there’s a bleakness underlying these nearly 450 pages that is likely to put off all but the most determined.
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#RivetingReviews: Heike Krüsemann reviews SAND by Wolfgang Herrndorf
Apr 12, 2017 • No comments
North Africa, 1972. A man with no memory wakes up in the desert with a massive hole in his head. So far, so yawn: please, not another one of those lost memory characters stumbling around the plot trying to solve a mystery slash crime. Been there, done that, keep the T-Shirt. But hold on, not so fast: Carl (named after the label in his suit) is not your average unreliable narrator. In fact, although we’re trapped inside his head most of the time, he’s not the narrator at all. Somewhere, someone’s sitting at a desk writing all this down in the first person, someone who was there as a seven-year-old dressed in a T-shirt with Olympic rings and short lederhosen with red heart-shaped pockets. Who’s he? Not sure – everyone in Sand is reliably unreliable, apart from the author himself, Wolfgang Herrndorf, who’s reliably, and sadly, dead.
After the German writer Herrndorf was diagnosed with an incurable brain tumour in 2010, he churned out some literary gems, including the bestseller Tschick in 2010 (English, 2014, “Why We Took the Car”) and Sand in 2011 (English, 2017). In 2013 at the age of 48 he shot himself. Understandably, fittingly, ‘Sand’ is stuffed full of pain, gallows humour, false hopes, dead ends, absurd coincidences, misunderstandings, senseless chance events, torture and death. It’s set under a desert sun so merciless that a mere glance at the book’s hot cover triggers in us the reader an inverse Pavlov’s dog reaction of dry mouth. Does this all sound offputtingly soul-crushing? Not so! What holds this long novel together, over sixty-eight chapters and five ‘books’ (Sea, Desert, Mountains, Oasis and Night), is the search for meaning. Never mind the answers, it’s the questions that matter. And there are many questions. All together this make for an hilarious, intriguing, heart-breaking and ultimately gratifying read.
And now Lundgren had a problem. Lundgren was dead. A young simpleton murders four hippies in a commune (it is the 1970s…); a mediocre spy doesn’t survive a handover; a pair of bumbling policemen investigate, not to much avail. What else happens? A dangerously smart American beauty muscles in on the act; a fake psychiatrist tries to get to the bottom of Carl’s subconscious; a small-town crook and his henchmen get involved in the odd bit of kidnapping, torture and blackmail, and, the hunt is on for a man called Cetrois, who may or may not exist. A mysterious centrifuge makes an appearance, or it might be an espresso machine, who knows? More important seems to be a mine. This could mean a number of things: a bomb; a pit; a cartridge for a pen.
A ‘cartridge for a pen’?! Yes. Now let’s talk language and translation. The characters in Sand are supposed to be speaking French, and thanks to Pushkin Press and Tim Mohr we can now read Sand in English. Translator Tim Mohr, also a writer and former Berlin Club DJ, constructs an achingly immediate desert world by locating Sand’s English prose somewhere between 1970s nostalgia and today. In German and French, ‘mine’ can mean the inside of a pen, and the fact that Carl knows this brings him one step closer to solving the puzzle. But is he close enough to completely solve it? Well, you must decide for yourself, but really, that’s not the point. He tried, he really did. And in the end, that’s what matters.
Reviewed by Heike Krüsemann
Sand
written by Wolfgang Herrndorf
translated from the German by Tim Mohr
published by Pushkin Press (2017)
Heike Krüsemannis currently completing her PhD thesis on representations of Germanness in UK discourses, whilst keeping herself afloat as a teacher, researcher and freelance writer. Her Quirky Guide to Oxford will be published by Marco Polo in German and English in 2018. Heike’s 30 second video review of Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Tschick. Heike’s blog German in the UK. Twitter: @HeikeKruesemann
Another ‘Sand’ fan is Eileen Battersby of The Irish Times: read her review here.
Wolfgang Herrndorf: Sand
(Sand)
Review
The false leads and complex plot reminiscent of Kafka’s text, make Wolfgang Herrndorf’s novel Sand an ideal template for the screenplay of a psycho-thriller. The location of the criminological confusion is the desert, which becomes a central theme – it is endless, deadly, unforgivable, empty, mysterious, but at the same time attractive.
Although it becomes apparent, that the African country in which the story is set must be Mali, it is never mentioned in the novel by name, probably because at the time of the cold war the whole of Africa was the show place and location of conflicts that had their origins outside of Africa. Moreover, the novel alludes to the trade of nuclear weapons, terrorism, espionage, and competition for the control of oil reserves. In this novel Africa serves rather as a stage for international affairs and is a place which cannot be separated from global developments. It is therefore not surprising that almost all important characters in the novel are Europeans or non-Africans. Among them are the members of the European-American hippie commune. There are also various other mysterious foreigners who are obviously involved in international affairs, for example, the Swedish spy Lundgren, who wants to sell the know-how for the construction of nuclear bombs to North-African Arabs. He does so in the hope that his potential clients would use this knowledge to fight Israel.
The country depicted in the novel seems to be a "typical" post-colonial African country, burdened by the heritage of colonial rule and still under the influence of the former colonial powers, which makes it representative for so many African countries. In this way the novel treats typical problems like violence and crime, corruption, the contrast between poverty and wealth, as well as the underdeveloped infrastructure.
The two French-born police inspectors of the coastal town Targat, Polidoro and Canisades, and their colleague Karimi have been commissioned to solve the murders of the hippie commune. However, they cannot cope with this task because of their incompetence and their corruption. Canisades, for example, has close contacts with the decadent demi-mondes of Tindirma and Targat, where drug use, promiscuity and prostitution are common practice.
Karimi, on the other hand, uses the stir that the murders have caused in the mass media for his own purposes by offering his private security services to survivors. And so it is no coincidence that the murder suspect Amadou Amadou later escapes and kills Canisades, who thus becomes a victim of his own incompetence. When it turns out that Amadou Amadou is related to an influential person in government, the police abandon the search for him.
The image of Africa that the foreigners in the novel have and their reasons for coming to Africa may be summed up in the words of one of the book's characters: It is an escape "into a society, into a way of thinking, a creature in the full bloom of its youth".
Wolfgang Herrndorf's novel is multi-faceted and mysterious. His strength lies in his vivid descriptions of places, people and situations – a narrative style, that might on the one hand be confusing, but on the other hand encourages the reader to keep on reading. Every chapter starts with a quote which does not always fit in with the context, but this strengthens the mysteriousness of the novel. Somewhere in the middle of the novel a first person narrator appears unexpectedly and soon disappears again. In order to understand the complicated plot, it is best to read the novel twice. It remains an exciting read, even the second time round.
Sand
by Wolfgang Herrndorf
Following the murder of four westerners in an oasis town in the North African desert, a man without memory appears, trying to make sense of his location and the various groups pursuing him.
Review
The North African coastal city of Targat stews under a punishing sun, and the 1972 French administration assigns detectives Polidorio and Canisades to a multiple murder in the nearby oasis town of Tindirma. The deaths seem clearly the work of one Amadoro Amadoro, who entered a commune complex and left with a case full of worthless East German currency. Both Amadoro and the money have since gone missing.
An American, Helen Gliese, is returning from Tindirma after checking on her friend Michelle, one of the survivors of the killing. A man approaches her at a petrol station, seeking help: he is suffering from concussion and has no idea who he is. All he can remember is escaping from a laboratory, and then being robbed of his wallet, so he has no proof of identity. Helen takes him back to her hotel bungalow and provides support; the man declines to involve the police, or even a doctor.
Shortly after, the man is apprehended by a group who seek the return of an unspecified article, and threaten the man’s wife and child if it is not produced within 72 hours. The man knows nothing of a family or the article. He makes investigations based on words he overheard at the laboratory, to do with a mine. But is this to do with explosives, or an excavation, or an even more obscure meaning?
The book proceeds by way of brief chapters, each commencing with a quote from such diverse sources as Herodotus and Nabokov which provide an amusing commentary on the narrative. There is humour to be found throughout the story: the complete lack of understanding in communications between the locals and the foreign interlopers, attributable to the irreconcilable concerns of the various parties, Michelle and her obsession with the tarot, in particular. Herrndorf in fact has a perceptive eye for such matters, and dissects the activities of his characters in a forensic, unsentimental manner.
Sand has undoubted literary merit and I enjoyed it, despite certain aspects of the plot being somewhat hard to make sense of, and the time taken to introduce the two detectives at the beginning who then largely disappear from the story. It certainly sustains uncertainty until the final pages, both for the reader as well as for the protagonist.
Reviewed 01 April 2017 by Chris Roberts
Chris Roberts is a retired manager of shopping centres in Hong Kong, and now lives in Bristol, primarily reading.
Sand
by
Wolfgang Herrndorf
general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author
To purchase Sand
Title: Sand
Author: Wolfgang Herrndorf
Genre: Novel
Written: 2011 (Eng. 2017)
Length: 457 pages
Original in: German
Availability: Sand - US
Sand - UK
Sand - Canada
Sable - France
Sand - Deutschland
German title; Sand
Translated by Tim Mohr
With an Afterword by Michael Maar (translated by Isabel Fargo Cole)
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Our Assessment:
B+ : wonderfully off-kilter, if ultimately too narrowly tortured
See our review for fuller assessment.
Review Summaries Source Rating Date Reviewer
FAZ . 11/11/2011 Friedmar Apel
Irish Times A+ 8/4/2017 Eileen Battersby
NZZ . 7/1/2012 Rainer Moritz
Publishers Weekly . 16/4/2018 .
The Spectator . 15/7/2017 Jeff Noon
TLS . 17/5/2017 George Berridge
Die Zeit . 17/11/2011 A.H.Hünniger
Review Consensus:
Almost all impressed - though note it is very tricksy
From the Reviews:
"Der Leser muss es in Herrndorfs grandiosem Spiel der Mehrdeutigkeiten und Irrtümer selbst herausfinden. Verraten wird ihm hingegen, wer der identitätsvergessene Mann ist beziehungsweise war. Metaphorisch begabte Leser können sich in ihm aber auch selbst erkennen. Im Nachhinein erscheint jedenfalls alles so logisch wie bei Hitchcock, Stendhal oder Borges." - Friedmar Apel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"German original Wolfgang Herrndorf’s anarchic, brilliant and very funny thriller is like no other book, although it may help to think Catch-22 or even better, William Gaddis’s Carpenter’s Gothic. (...) Sand is a clever, outrageous demonstration of hold on to your hats -- and stomachs -- storytelling which is also strongly cinematic" - Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
"Ja, das lohnt sich, sofern man bereit ist, sich auf die vom Autor genüsslich ausgebreiteten Irrwege zu begeben, für Slapstickeffekte empfänglich ist und gern den Fundus der Literatur- und Filmgeschichte besichtigt. (...) Kurzum, Wolfgang Herrndorf hat einen ungemein unterhaltsamen, verspielten Roman geschrieben, der kein Sandkorn auf dem anderen lässt, und im Sieb der Leser sollten für jeden ein paar Nuggets übrig bleiben." - Rainer Moritz, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
"The characters’ stories occasionally intertwine until they come together in an unsatisfying ending that only the most patient reader will persist in reaching. A big hit in Germany, this will have limited appeal to an American audience." - Publishers Weekly
"Every element of his story is woven together masterfully, with grain upon grain of detail added to a landscape that never stops shifting underfoot. It’s part Pynchon, part Beckett, a crime story told by Lewis Carroll in a particularly nihilistic mood." - Jeff Noon, The Spectator
"The nihilism that runs through Sand -- supported by Herrndorf’s bleak humour and irony, which shines through in Tim Mohr’s translation -- is a useful ploy. The protagonist’s flattened affect amid the chaos and carnage he finds himself a part of, the ostensible tangentiality of characters (among them a crazed spy, a reluctant detective and a half-blind bootlegger) and the frustrated denouement might lead to the conclusion that this is an exercise in absurdism. Sand, however, is a careful subversion of the crime thriller genre: no grand exposition is given, only an elegant conclusion left for careful readers." - George Berridge, Times Literary Supplement
"Gerade die Tatsache, dass sich der Leser lange ratlos durch dieses rätselhafte Geschehen bewegt, bringt das eigentliche Lesevergnügen. Denn der Roman wird so zur Spielwiese. Eine Spielwiese, in der es sich lohnt, nach Spuren und Andeutungen zu suchen: Man blättert zurück, nimmt Details unter die Lupe, weil man doch bei der Aufklärung des Verbrechens mit von der Partie sein will. Und da stößt man auf das Motiv des Elixiers. (...) Sand ist ein literarisches Experiment an der Grenze zwischen Existenzialismus und Spionagethriller, mutig in der Form, barock in der Sprache. Nichts Anschmiegsames. Kein Scherz. Eine Hoffnung." - Andrea Hanna Hünniger, Die Zeit
Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.
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The complete review's Review:
Sand is set in an unnamed North African country in the summer of 1972, and it begins with an investigation into the brutal murder of four members of an agrarian commune in the oasis town of Tindirma. The case seems entirely straightforward, the responsible party one Amadou Amadou who is quickly caught and judged. He denies being involved, but the evidence is pretty overwhelming; with the victims Westerners, everyone is interested in closing the case quickly. Amadou Amadou isn't exactly brought to justice -- inconveniently, he soon escapes custody -- but the case seems cut and dried. As throughout the novel, however: nothing is quite so simple, with ripple effects reverberating through much of the rest of the story..
This case, and the police activities -- featuring colleagues Polidorio and Canisades -- dominate the first part of the novel, the first of its five books. Police work is frustrating in this country -- especially for recent arrival Polidorio, a Frenchman with Arabic roots who, only two months into the job, already deeply regrets having ventured across the Mediterranean and taking the position.
Another significant character also arrives in coastal Targat in the course of the first section of the novel, Helen Gliese, who happens to be friends with one of the surviving communards but explains that she is in the country on (rather unlikely-sounding) business. The man who seems to be the central character in Sand, however, only surfaces (as such) in the second book, well into the novel.
He enters the story here almost entirely as a void and blank: he is literally a mystery man, a comprehensive amnesia leaving him functioning quite normally but unable to recall even the basics, such as his name. He comes to in an attic, in the middle of the desert. He received a blow on the head, and his first instincts are to flee -- which proves easier said than done. For each step forward there seems to be another back as his tries to make his way towards civilization again -- including the loss of possible clues to his identity.
Eventually, Helen chances on the pathetic, beat-up figure, and she picks him up and helps him out, despite his suspicious unwillingness to go to the authorities or a hospital. She puts him up in her hotel bungalow, and tries to help him figure out who he is -- with little luck. He continues to maintain he has no recollection of his past or identity -- while people continue to doubt him. Eventually, Helen starts calling him 'Carl', to give him some name -- "I have to call you something" --, the name chosen from the maker's label sewn in his jacket.
Carl doesn't know who he is, but others seem to have some idea, or at least expectations. He seems to have been mixed up in something -- illegal, he surmises (and worries), though he has no sense of the extent of his involvement -- and can't quite escape it: he is, for example, given a seventy-two hour deadline to fix things by one interested party who briefly kidnap and threaten him -- not that Carl has the foggiest idea what he can do to fix anything or extricate himself from this situation.
Carl stumbles around a lot, with and without Helen, trying to figure out who he is and what he was involved in. Apparently a mine was involved -- but they don't even know what kind of mine, whether a hole-in-the-ground mineral excavations site, or the ink-mine for a pen .....
So Sand is kind of a thriller, with murder, international intrigue (a case filled with (worthless) East German currency seems to play a role; the concurrent Munich Olympics tragedy playing out in the (distant) background), a variety of shadowy groups and figures, as well as the locals who seem to live in a completely different world. Carl's amnesia compounds the sense of mystery about everything -- occasionally admittedly irritatingly, when others dangle their knowledge in front of him (and the reader) but don't spell it out, but on the whole quite effectively.
Helen remains helpful and supportive -- suspiciously so, perhaps ..... Among the desperate attempts to figure out what's wrong with Carl is a visit to an extremely unlikely local psychiatrist -- offering introductory rates ..... Dr Cockroft is semi-professional, and asks what seem to be plausible diagnostic questions, but is ultimately unconvincing as a psychiatrist. But then practically everything and everyone Carl deals with has an air of irreality to it.
Carl somehow found himself in the middle of something significant -- but he has no sense of what it is, with those interested in the knowledge they're certain he has getting no closer to getting at it. Eventually, the game gets more basic again, the attempts to get at whatever Carl might know more direct. Carl suffered a lot early on in the story, and he doesn't fare well as it draws itself to its conclusion -- Herrnorf indulging rather too much in drawn-out brutality, to too little end. But the novel's resolutions are satisfying, despite not quite following traditional thriller- or novel-expectations: beyond resolving the thriller-plot, a handful of not so happy endings are surprisingly satisfying in (or despite) their black-tinged humor and banality.
Sand makes no secret of being a novel about someone who is not who he seems. That's sort of the point -- with the twist that Carl himself -- apparently -- has no idea of who he is: while others (including perhaps at times the reader) have doubts about whether or not he is dissembling, Carl's identitylessness remains his defining characteristic, his search for answers (and that answer in particular) the one thing that drives him. But others' identities are also indistinct, and it can't come as much surprise that they aren't quite who they claim to be either.
The fun of the novel -- and for a lot of the novel it is a lot of fun -- is in the telling, the short chapters, each with a well-chosen epigraph, shifting among the large cast of characters and the overlapping storylines. Herrndorf weaves the tale around the black hole of Carl's amnesia and what it might hold, but he's also really good in the incidental and observational -- indeed, that's the real strength of the novel (also in that much of the apparently incidental does fit into the larger picture, if not immediately obviously). Ultimately, Herrndorf does fall back and then rely too much on Carl's agonies, in a turn to more traditional thriller-fare -- but he redeems it somewhat with a perfectly realized series of conclusions (which are the antithesis of neat thriller endings, even as they also, after a fashion, tie up the remaining loose ends).
Sand is an artfully constructed puzzle that leans a bit too much (or too long) on its central amnesiac conceit and is at its best -- and a really very good best it is -- when it isn't wallowing in just that. Some of the chapters are first-rate pieces all their own; the fact that so many also fit together in this odd, larger puzzle is all the more impressive. If not quite sustained over the whole novel, a lot of Sand is nevertheless wonderful entertainment, and it is a very impressive work.
(Note: Michael Maar's Afterword dissects the story and connects the dots, if readers missed them, well -- though this key-to-the-novel arguably unlocks and reveals too much (or rather takes it out of the hands of the reader (i.e. spoils some of the fun, in what the reader might have taken from the book), spelling so much out). In any case: spoiler-heavy, it certainly should be left as after-word, rather than consulted earlier on.)
- M.A.Orthofer, 4 July 2018
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Links:
Sand:
New York Review Books publicity page
Pushkin Press publicity page
Rowohlt publicity page
Editions Thierry Magnier publicity page
New Books in German information page
Reviews:
Berliner Zeitung (German)
Crime Review
Deutschlandfunk Kultur (German)
Elle Thinks
European Literature Network
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German)
der Freitag (German)
German in the UK
The Herald
Irish Times
Kirkus Reviews
literaturkritik.de (German)
Lizzy's Literary Life
love german books
Neue Zürcher Zeitung (German)
Publishers Weekly
schiefgelesen.net (German)
The Spectator
Der Tagesspiegel (German)
Die Welt (German)
Die Zeit (German)
Other books of interest under review:
See Index of German literature
Other books from New York Review Books
Other books from Pushkin Press under review
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About the Author:
German author Wolfgang Herrndorf lived 1965 to 2013.
Sand review: hold on to your hats – and stomachs
Wolfgang Herrndorf’s brilliant, anarchic, darkly comic thriller is a true original
Wolfgang Herrndorf’s dialogue stands equal to that of William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon
Wolfgang Herrndorf’s dialogue stands equal to that of William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon
Eileen Battersby
Sat, Apr 8, 2017, 04:00
First published:
Sat, Apr 8, 2017, 04:00
Book Title:
Sand
ISBN-13:
978-1782271284
Author:
Wolfgang Herrndorf, translated by Tim Mohr
Publisher:
Pushkin Press
Guideline Price:
£14.99
It is 1972 and back in stately old Europe Palestinian terrorists have just massacred 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the Olympic Games in Munich. As the world watches on in horror, details of vicious torture prefacing the killings provoke further outrage. Calls to abandon the games are ignored. Meanwhile somewhere in the Sahara desert, a madman arrives at a predominantly American hippie commune and leaves four people dead, apparently all for a plate of fruit and a suitcase crammed with worthless money.
German original Wolfgang Herrndorf’s anarchic, brilliant and very funny thriller is like no other book, although it may help to think Catch-22 or even better, William Gaddis’s Carpenter’s Gothic. It must be said that Herrndorf’s dialogue stands equal to that of Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon, no mean feat, and it is masterfully rendered by translator Tim Mohr on inspired form.
Sand is a clever, outrageous demonstration of hold on to your hats – and stomachs – storytelling which is also strongly cinematic; the publishers have already referenced the Coen Brothers, and to that endorsement include Quentin Tarantino.
The book examines staples of children’s literature such as Winnie the PoohBeasts at Bedtime: Revealing the environmental wisdom of children’s literature
Margaret Drabble in 1974: the young novelist had been feeling neglected, on the sidelines of her social group, and thinking, That’ll fix them! as the pages mounted up. Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Margaret Drabble: ‘What you choose to see is important, to catch the spirit of change’
Virginie Despente: sequel continues her picaresque tour de force with the same driving energy. Photograph: Thoman Samson AFP/Getty ImagesVernon Subutex 2 by Virginie Despentes: more vicious wit and stark insight
Suspended in time
A dazzling cunning is at work. Herrndorf who trained as a visual artist and was terminally ill while writing Sand, killed himself at the age of 48 in 2013 soon after its initial success in Germany was acknowledged. He delighted in vivid images and this wry novel abounds with moments suspended in time. His characters are desperate, despairing and, with the exception of the hapless ‘Carl’, largely unpleasant.
The conversational tone of the narrative voice contrasts with the frenetic pace and if ever there was a novel ideally suited for an uninterrupted read through a long night, this is it. The chapters are short, yet invariably leave the reader reeling if eager to continue. “And now Lundgren had a problem. Lundgren was dead.”
Yet it all begins so calmly, with an eccentric teacher calling his children less to class and more to learning. There is an air of benign community. And so the sun rises “and shone down on the living and the dead, the believers and the non-believers, the wretched and the wealthy.” How gentle, how wrong – considering the mayhem about to be unleashed; Herrndorf wants his reader to feel exhilarated but also bewildered and aware of having read something that will be difficult to forget.
But first to the initial crime; the dastardly attack at the commune. Manning the investigation is Polidorio who doesn’t want to be in Africa at all. “It had been two months since Polidorio started his job here. And for two months he’d wanted nothing else but to return to Europe.” His grandfather was an Arab but had emigrated to France when he was young. Polidorio had a French passport but, following his parents’ divorce, grew up in Switzerland. Later he studied in Paris. “If his serve had been better, he might have been able to become a tennis pro.” Instead he became a policeman.
As the novel opens Polidorio is fretting about having only scored only 102 in an IQ questionnaire intended for French school children aged between 12 and 13. Admittedly, he was drunk at the time, as was his sidekick, Canisades, a charming liar who managed to do better, achieving 130.
Curtain raiser
The two men have little interest in solving the crime. It is an effective comic curtain raiser which then acquires darker complications but soon loses any lingering significance as the central story, which is introduced as almost a tentative aside, develops.
Amid the sun, the heat, the relentless sand and the screaming children, all of which are described with stylistic panache, a man, lying in a deserted barn, slowly returns to consciousness: “The radiance. The silence. He tried to turn his head and felt pains he couldn’t pinpoint. As if a fist were trying to push his eyes out of his head from the inside . . . With his hand he felt around and, where he had expected to find a hole in his skull, found a giant lump. Dried blood and slime. They had smashed his head in. Why?”
From this point onwards, a fine novel which had been immensely appealing shifts onto an even higher level of excellence. The injured man is disoriented and in pain. Worse is to follow: he can’t remember his name. A stranger armed with a pitchfork stands between him and flight but a heavy weight falling from the roof of the barn settles that and the nameless man runs out into the empty desert.
The nightmare sensation of stumbling through sand becomes important. Through a series of chance twists the fugitive, who appears to have slightly Arab features and is handsome, reaches a service station just as Helen, a cold, resourceful American woman and another central character, arrives. Having managed to fix a hire car that was out of action, she proves to be able to clean up any mess, including the nameless man’s head wounds. Despite being warned not to get involved, she remains calm while the man, soon to be called ‘Carl’ from the label in his jacket, begs her to take him with her – and she does.
Kept guessing
Nothing is at it seems and Herrndorf enjoys the languid ambivalence which he sustains throughout. Even at its most comic, there is a compelling darkness about Sand. While in the comparative safety of Helen’s keeping – he moves in to her hotel chalet with her – Carl continues to suffer misadventures. He is beaten and questioned by various baddies. But his memory remains blank.
Eventually he is brought to a dodgy psychiatrist, Dr Cockcroft, who works from a hotel, in a room with two books. It is a hilarious, very strange sequence. All the while Carl becomes increasingly sympathetic and his ordeals multiply. A strange woman who seems to know him offers him sex, while a crazed young drug addict taunts him for drugs. After all the beatings he finds himself in a shocking plight, chained in muddy water. He makes a bold bid to live. Herrndorf does not make it easy for anyone, in a bravura performance bound to keep one guessing.
Eileen Battersby is literary correspondent and author of Teethmarks on My Tongue