Even the introduction to Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s new novel “More beautiful than ever” turns out to be a sad punchline: “I never told anyone about it. Of my being chosen, if I may call it that. ”But the first-person narrator is neither chosen, nor can one believe him that he has hid his life story up to now, and even if: He will be it down to the last painful detail spread.
Andreas Reiss is the name of the man who longingly wishes to be someone else, a clever and attractive guy who even has a film diva at his feet. His hubris is by no means just cocky, but always hesitant. This inferiority complex grew in his youth when he constantly compared himself to his school friend Erik. The grades, the popularity with girls, the successes in sports: Erik was always more successful.
After graduating from high school in the north German province, the two will move to West Berlin. One is studying Romance languages, the other is interested in film architecture. After a few professional detours, Andreas will earn his living in teacher training. Erik seems to have had a career in Hollywood. Both lose sight of each other, but Andreas cannot stop idealizing his school friend in a competitive way.
He calls him a “competitor of life”, although this competition is mostly to his disadvantage. Especially since it is important to Andreas that Erik doesn’t notice his thoughts: “I trained distance and something like friendly indifference. After all, I wasn’t a stalker. And I wasn’t mentally disturbed in any other way either. “
What madman would admit that he was not quite comforted? Hans-Ulrich Treichel tells the story of a tormented average hero with fine laconicity. Especially in the first third of the novel a curious tension arises, which is also nourished by the hope that the book will turn the figure constellation upside down again. First, however, Andreas meets his dissimilar friend again many years later. Just an average German, he has just separated from his wife, is looking for an apartment, and the cosmopolitan, generous Erik offers him a temporary apartment in Charlottenburg. It stands empty anyway while he works in the USA.
The novella of a normal man
The luck in misfortune seems perfect when a movie star, Hélène Grossmann, whom Andreas has adored since his student days, reports. Instead of informing Erik that Hélène has asked about him, Andreas spends a few hours with her. You could also say: The film star lets an admirer drive her through Berlin, who in turn likes his role and dreams of headlines in the tabloids: “Chauffeur reveals: Hélène Grossmann – more beautiful than ever!”
This also clarifies the title of the novel. Whereby “more beautiful than ever” reads more like a novella by a notorious normal man, but it does not come to an unheard of event. Treichel does not leave the world of the basically honest narrator, whom you sometimes want to shake and ask him not to just live in fantasies and to really do something that challenges the world. It is true that the “killing instinct of the injured admirer” is mentioned in passing, but the fan remains in the inferior position until the end.
That makes the text as artificial as it is monotonous, if at some point you would have liked to know what Erik or Hélène think of this weird owl who smuggles his way into other people’s lives. Andreas considers himself “chosen” because he can stand between Erik and the famous actress for a few hours, but everything is based on the imagination of a lonely one. When Hélène asks him directly about Erik, the illusion bubble bursts.
The new book disappoints
Hans-Ulrich Treichel has repeatedly written about middle-aged men from the academic mid-level who adore the great masters of life and art, for example in his composer portrait “Tristanakkord”. The evocation of old West Berlin, for example in the novel “Grunewaldsee”, is a classic bell-shaped motif. But neither one nor the other is more beautiful than ever in the new novel. On the contrary. The prose, which seamlessly follows the narrator’s loquacity, seems more like a strange swan song to one’s own work, which began with poetry and culminated in the novel “The Lost”. The author, born in 1952, grew up in Versmold, Westphalia. At the end of the 1960s he went to Berlin to study German, philosophy and political science at the FU.
In addition to his first publications, he initially embarked on an academic career, then taught at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig from 1995 to 2008. “The Lost One” tells the horrific escape of his parents from the “Eastern Territories” and relates these experiences to their own youth in the Federal Republic of Germany. This prose was as rich in history as it was in language. The new book, on the other hand, disappoints with the question of what relevance the celebration of the slightly authoritarian mediocrity has in current discourses. “More beautiful than ever” is a promise that is not kept. Perhaps this is precisely where the novel’s ideology-critical appeal lies.
I am a technology author with 8 years of experience in journalism. My writing covers the latest technology advancements and trends, drawing on my expertise in news journalism and social media platforms. I have contributed to major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Reuters.
