Come in yourself. free Press

As a boy, he is only allowed to enter the counseling room in which the father receives his patients if he has eaten anything. The father then receives her behind the desk with a stethoscope around her neck and lectures her with appropriate punishment as “therapy”. “I looked at the guilt, and when I left the room – half depressed and half relieved – I heard my father go to the sink to wash his hands, as he would after every patient visit. . “

No wonder the nameless protagonist in George Magneau’s novel “The Canadian Knight” does not have a very good relationship with his father. He did not see her for almost 30 years. Only when the 91-year-old is dying after falling down a ladder, the son leaves for Canada, where his father has found a new home after retirement. The journey is right for her: her current book project in Berlin failed. For two years he worked on “Forgotten Biography, or Never Famous Poet”. When the book was over, the widow, a painter, vetoed her. Two years of work wasted. At first he was suspected of meeting on the plane. “Why look for someone who is dying when you’ve missed yourself for a lifetime?”

This journey itself becomes a journey. While he drives with his father to a black VW Golf in British Columbia, which he borrows from the airport in Calgary, which comes from a previous pass. You can read about her mother, who had run away from living with this cold man in an affair with a piano teacher and died of cancer a few years after her divorce because she loved natural medicine and Rudolf Steiner Promoted him for traditional medicine. The father’s second wife moved to Canada with him and became depressed by his side. And then of course there is the father himself, who has only one love for Holderlin with a son. As far as the narrator is remembered, his father was always absent in childhood. “Perhaps that’s why I wrote autobiographies about famous writers over and over again because I lacked a father. An absent father was a blank that had to be filled.”

Born in 1961 in Ludwigsburg, Järgh Magenau must have written a lot of his own experiences in his first novel. As a journalist, he wrote only about others in “Taz”, “FAZ” and “Suedeutscher Zeitung” for years. The sensitive biographies of Christa Wolf (2002), Martin Walser (2005) or brothers Ernest and George Friedrich Jonzer (2012) have emerged from this. He never talked about himself or his experiences. Why not? Because, when he judges his protagonist in the book, he lacks eccentricity and imagination? Was it uncertainty? Escape yourself Magenau has done a long study of literature to leave the North open. In his novel he prefixes the quotation of Ackerman’s conversation with Goethe, according to which the poet said of his “voluntary thoughts”, “There is not a line that is not experience, but a line not as experience.” it was done”.

Magenau also leaves open whether the book has an actual role model for the poet and painter. It does not matter. If it is a fictional story and the emphasis on whether it is an important novel only increases the attraction of reading. With all the skills of an experienced columnist, Jarg Magenau has written a life-wise novel that contains many truths and lots of psychological insights. The story of a moving father-son who lives through powerful images. He thinks about life for writing as well as social character, love or art. He also mentions the initiation of a writer. The future will tell if it is Jorge Magenau himself and will he only write novels from now on. Hopefully this will be the beginning of them wanting you more.