Natasza Goerke, who lives in Hamburg, writes rarely but delightfully. She plays masterfully with her fictions and presents her readers with riddles such as: what literary work does this sentence bring to mind? Where does this phrase originate? This, of course, is addressed at literary connoisseurs, while less expert readers take pleasure in dealing with interesting prose, all the more alluring because of the sense it is an intellectual game. This is also the case with Goerke‘s lastest work, a ‘longer short story’ called 47and a Smack in the Face. The reader frantically searches his memory: it sounds familiar, but what bell does it ring? The title might conceivably have something to do with Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49, although the significance of this relationship should not be overestimated. The number refers to the protagonist’s age – and the rest of the title? The day has come when he recalls the events of his life, it stands before him and „smacks him” with its hopelessness, tediousness and many frustrations. But perhaps it is not as it seems? Perhaps it is only a dream? Goerke leads the reader a dance with extreme scene changes and leaps in time, and, characteristically for a dream narrative, she fleetingly introduces the concrete person of the narrator, who looks on from the sidelines on the protagonist telling his story and then disappears again. Goerke paints a witty portrait of the contemporary „man without character,” who has not achieved anything, who has failed to mark his presence in the world. She mocks contemporary culture, which glorifies the nobodies of this world, which is happy to raise monuments to living people and idolises people whose only distinction is that of being indistinct.
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