As of: February 18, 2024, 9:40 a.m
By: Michael Schleicher
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With a clear view: Slata Roschal's second novel is a highlight of the book spring.
© Ammy Berent
Slata Roshal's new novel “I want to drink wine and wait for the end of the world” is a highlight of the still young spring for books.
Our criticism:
Yes, it's incredibly boring to discuss appearances.
And yet it has to be here, because the graphic designer Marion Blomeyer achieved something extraordinary when designing the title of Slata Roschal's new novel: she condensed the DNA of the story told by the Munich author into a motif by the illustrator Eiko Ojala.
So on the cover there is a clothespin hanging from some flat textile.
Mind you: This clamp doesn't hold anything together, but instead creates folds - and is also in danger of falling.
“I want to drink wine and wait for the end of the world” is Roshal's second novel
An image that reflects the condition that plants Roscal's protagonist Maria Nowak's unrest in her brain and heart.
“The discrepancy between what is and what should be is killing me,” it says at one point in the book with the title, “I want to drink wine and wait for the end of the world,” which shimmers wonderfully between comedy and reality.
Slata Roshal, who was born in St. Petersburg in 1992 and now lives in Munich, where she also received her doctorate, has presented a highlight of the still young spring for books with her second novel.
The author has her first-person narrator sit in a hotel room in Berlin, where she is taking part in a translation seminar.
That's where Nowak opens the big barrel: love, children, work, politics - all the questions that shimmer through this stream of thoughts: Why all this?
And for what?
At first glance, the protagonist has everything she needs for a good existence.
The relationship is going well, the children are bright, the job offers opportunities – everything fits, somehow.
And yet there is gnawing dissatisfaction and the feeling of not being enough.
Slata Roshal was successful as a poet
Of course, a number of books have recently been published that examine what the many construction sites in life do to people.
And this particularly affects women, who are still mostly responsible for managing family, career, relationships and their own needs.
Roshal's novel does not join here, but points beyond it.
Your book is a great success with quiet tones.
The fact that her novel is so worth reading is also due to the second narrative level that the author has incorporated into the story: Nowak is busy translating historical letters that German emigrants sent to their old homeland in the 1920s;
Some of these are documented in the appendix to the novel.
The needs and dreams that were formulated around 100 years ago lead directly to the translator's present day.
Maria Nowak therefore enters into a dialogue with the long-faded writer across time.
A dialogue that one follows with fascination due to Roshal's style and her virtuoso use of language.
She was successful as a poet in 2019, when her volume “We renounce the promised land” (Reinecke & Voß) was published, and in 2021 she followed up with the volume of poetry “We exchange views and fears like soft, warm animals” (Hochroth Verlag).
Her debut novel “153 Forms of Non-Being”, published by Homunculus in 2022, was nominated for the German Book Prize and awarded the Bavarian Art Promotion Prize.
Her precise, pointed writing, which is clearly trained in poetry, makes her second novel a pleasure to read.
Sentences break off, others meander on, the verb is suddenly missing. All of this, however, is never vain or an end in itself, but serves a narrative that only knows one thing for sure: “Time flies, and as it flies, no one can keep up , the best runners don’t.”
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Information about the book:
Slata Roshal: “I want to drink wine and wait for the end of the world”.
Claassen, Berlin, 176 pages;
22 euros.
Reading:
Slata Roschal will present her book on February 22, 2024, 8 p.m., in the Münchner Zirka, Dachauer Straße 110c;
Tickets are available at www.dice.fm.