Moor
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- 24,99 €
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- 24,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
It’s the early 1970s and Dion Katthusen, thirteen, is growing up fatherless in a small village in northern Germany. An only child plagued with a devastating stutter, Dion is ostracized by his peers and finds solace in the company of nature, collecting dragonflies in a moor filled with myths and legends. On the precipice of adulthood, Dion begins to spill the secrets of his heart—his burning desire for faultless speech and his abiding relationship with his mother, a failed painter with secrets of her own. Even as Dion spins his story, his speech is filled with fissures and holes—much like the swampy earth that surrounds him. Nature, though so often sublime, can also be terribly cruel.
Moor is Dion’s story—a story of escaping the quicksand of loneliness and of the demands we make on love, even as those surrounding us are hurt in their misguided attempts to bear our suffering. Powerfully tuned to the relationship between human and nature, mother and son, Moor is a mysterious and experimental portrait of childhood. Written by up-and-coming German novelist Gunther Geltinger, the novel received critical acclaim in Germany and is now presented in English for the first time by translator Alexander Booth. Evocative and bold, Dion’s story emerges from the forces of nature, his voice rising from the ground beneath the reader’s feet, not soon to be forgotten.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Geltinger's (Hombre Angel) second novel traces a lavishly descriptive path through the titular landscape finely rendered in Booth's translation but ultimately sinks beneath the weight of its dense prose and heavy-handed emphasis on the grotesque. The story centers on Dion Katthusen, a 13-year-old boy with a debilitating stutter living in Germany. Divided into four sections named after the seasons, the book begins with Dion's adolescence as he struggles through the complexities of his own sexuality, as well as the sexuality of his mentally unstable mother, Marga, who rapidly transforms into the main adversary of the tale. Seeking isolation, Dion begins to explore a strange moor filled with legends and mystery; the moor speaks for Dion, who cannot summon the words to convey his own experience. This literary device, however, pushes Dion to the role of powerless outsider and observer. Strikingly, the sections told with the most clarity come through Marga's voice, as she responds to Dion's award-winning account of his childhood, which he publishes later in life. Marga's responses to specific passages within her son's writing "a heavily detailed and vindictive tapeworm of a sentence, without any break" illustrate the mentally exhausting ordeal of trudging through the tortured, time-jumping structure of Geltinger's novel. Lush imagery abounds, with gorgeous depictions of the northern German countryside. Unfortunately, the effort of reading Geltinger feels more like hacking through a jungle than traversing a rain-sodden moor.
