Positive. Incredibly positive. Infectiously positive. Why does he have such a charisma? Anyone who experiences Bernhard Aichner, whether during a reading or an interview, soon wonders where the dark stories come from. The early provincial crime novels about the gravedigger Max Broll and the international bestsellers of the "Dead Woman" trilogy, in which the single mother Brünhilde Blum transforms into a goddess of revenge and kills as cool as if she had sprung from a Tarantino film.
How gloomy fairy tales are his novels, in which the native Tyrolean rushes his heroes and heroines through the darkest valley, only to let the beginning of a bright day at the end between the peaks. He called his latest fairy tale "The Fund," and Aichner recounts in it the story of Cinderella.
Only his Cinderella is called profane Rita Dalek, and she finds no silver shoes, but several kilos of cocaine. In a banana box. In the supermarket, in which the mid-fifties wastes a large part of her otherwise less spectacular life.
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15.10.2019, 10:37 clock
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Bernhard Aichner
The find: thriller
Publishing company:
btb publishing house
Pages:
352
Price:
EUR 20,00
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Pure entertainment, pure escapism, permanent movement
Aichner, the happy-ending storyteller, begins his new novel with the end, and this time promises to be anything but happy: "Rita still has no idea what will happen in the next three weeks." Rita will kill someone And then somebody will kill her because she opened that box, Rita will die, soon. "
Right at the beginning he is back, this Aichner staccato style. The sentences in the breathless present are short. And the shorter the sentences, the more important it becomes that something arises between them that makes them vibrate. How to do it? Eliminates the analysis. But few authors, mostly Americans, master the art of short sentences. Don Winslow. James Ellroy. The Austrian Bernhard Aichner is also getting better at it.
Ursula Aichner / btb
Bernhard Aichner
Unlike Winslow and Ellroy, Aichner is not one who uses his novels to dissect the corrupt and broken world that seeks to work out the political from a material. His books are pure entertainment, pure escapism, permanent movement. Where Winslow, in his big cycle of "Days of the Dead", shows the all-corrupting power of cocaine and other drugs in all its facets, Aichner only uses coke as fuel to keep the narrative engine running at full speed.
With kitsch and happy ending
In Rita Dalek's last three weeks, more has happened than in her last thirty years. Her dreams of acting have already buried her as a young woman, her dream man turned out to be a disgusting package, the child together has died, the job in the supermarket of mind-numbing monotony. No Future, a present that is hard to bear, and a past full of painful memories - that's where 12 kilos of coke come in handy.
Rita attacks, and her life begins to stand upside down. And not only because she uses herself abundantly: she soon finds a buyer, the billionaire Ferdinand Bachmair. His prize for the good stuff: He should introduce Rita in the best company. Bad luck: This is not "Pretty Woman" and Bachmair is not Richard Gere. But a pronounced creep. But the first of all, not Rita's biggest problem is that the Albanian mafia wants their drugs back.
Aichner manages to create such a narrative pull that the reader soon forgets that the initial situation is a bit too implausible, the love story a bit too cheesy, the heroes like the villains a bit too one-dimensional. Aichner focuses on the action, constantly pushing his characters, his sentences, his readers, whipping them forward. Into the dark, into the unexpected.
And when you're so deep in the tunnel that you think you'll never come back to light, Aichner suddenly flips a flashlight. And so "The Fund" will end well. As Aichner gets it done, one may dismiss as a literary sleight of hand. Or celebrate as an ingenious plot-twist. In any case, it is very, very Aichner.