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The new novel by Benedict Wells: "Hard Land" delivers a lot of Wells pain

2021-03-02T14:43:26.722Z


Benedict Wells is a literary star. Now his new novel has been published, the ordering status is preprogrammed. "Hard Land" pays homage to the youth films of the eighties - and is similarly predictable.


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Scene from John Hughes' film "The Breakfast Club" (far left Judd Nelson as John Bender)

Photo: ddp images

Sometimes the best summer can be the worst.

Anyone who was ever 16 and has not spent this time in front of the Playstation or at the JU regulars table knows that. At no other time do grief and happiness alternate more rapidly, at no other time can a sore heart sprint faster.

With Sam, however, this is not entirely related to being a teenager.

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Author Benedict Wells

Photo: Roger Eberhard / Diogenes

Sure, this summer he falls in love for the first time.

And, of course, also suffers from lovesickness for the first time.

Benedict Wells knows what should not be missing in any coming-of-age novel.

He's already written a few.

But with Sam, the hero from Wells' new book "Hard Land," the grief has another cause.

"I fell in love that summer and my mother died," Wells lets his first-person narrator begin the story.

Wells has already shown in his most popular novel to date that Wells loves to let such first sentences rain on the pages like small bombs.

That he is interested in dying, too.

"I've known death for a long time, but now death also knows me," he let his protagonist open "From the end of loneliness".

Without friends, beard growth and self-confidence

Although Wells had already become famous through "Spinner", "Becks last summer" and "Fast genial", this novel made Wells a shooting star in German literature in 2016.

With him he was on the bestseller list for a year and a half, and hundreds of young women made the pilgrimage to his readings because of him.

Why?

Because he works his way through Weltschmerz, always basing his stories with a sound that oscillates between pathos and depth and between kitsch and melancholy.

And because he creates characters who are looking for themselves, for life and love, and for a way to finally plug the gigantic hole that is eating them up from within.

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Title: Hard Land

Editor: Diogenes

Number of pages: 352

Author: Wells, Benedict

Buy for € 24.00

Price query time

03/02/2021 3:42 p.m.

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One of those characters is Sam, a skinny teenager with no friends, no beard or self-confidence.

He lives in Grady, a small town in Missouri, surrounded by more fields than people and a cemetery whose silence only swallows the buzz in his head.

Because he once suffered from panic attacks, his classmates consider him a freak (and probably also because he is incredibly good at maths).

He just thinks he's a coward.

When his mom, the only person who understands him, got cancer, the strings tightened around his ailing heart.

Of course that will all change that summer of 1985.

An underdog rarely remains an underdog, and certainly not one that is made up of as many outsider clichés as Sam.

The readers already suspected this when the teenager started his vacation job in the only cinema in town - and there he met not only Marty McFly (from "Back to the Future") and John Bender (from "The Breakfast Club"), but each other there befriended his colleagues Kirstie, Hightower and Cameron.

Because Sam revealed in the first sentence that his mom will die in the next few weeks, waiting for her death becomes a sad tact of reading.

Perhaps that is why one often has the feeling that only predictable things are happening in "Hard Land".

Or maybe that's because of Wells' subject.

30 decimal places from pi

The US American small-town summer of the eighties is canonized by an insane number of novels, songs and films.

The longing for it is now as worn as the stereotypes through which we tell it.

Instead of exposing the clichés as such or answering why we still want to be detained with the Breakfast Club, Wells is further thickening the eighties soup.

With Sam's new friends and his empathetic mother, Wells has succeeded in installing adorable supporting characters.

Unfortunately, they do not help either over the stenciled plot or over the first-person narrator, who enumerates 30 decimal digits of PI during anxiety attacks, and is thus probably the first underdog to actually annoy because of his outsiderhood.

That he overcomes his fears at some point is nice for him.

But also a shame - because a scary boy who rebels against masculinity clichés and growing up would have made a more exciting figure.

And a story about the fact that it's completely okay to be afraid of the future and this world, which unfortunately doesn't mean it very well with introverted characters, a more appealing novel.

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Source: spiegel

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