At beginning of Gerhard Falconer’s for German Book Award nominated novel Romeo or Juliet is an outrageous event. The writer Kurt Prinzhorn discovered in bathtub of his Innsbruck hotel room, in which he homologated for a meeting, long black, glued in bath foamed hair. The summoned police reacted skeptically, hotel director was unwilling to suspect Prince horns that, during his absence, a woman would have gained access to his room. In fact, a burglary appears questionable, because all valuables are unaffected. Only after a while did I-narrator notice that besides notebooks his handsome keychain is lost.
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Why he has so many keys asks a participant of meeting. Prinzhorn makes this woman so blatant sexual advances that it seems surprising when at same time he finds idea of a strange woman in his bathtub not exciting, but immediately threatening. One half of keys, explains Prinzhorn, he needs to away himself, or to let himself out again. What sounds like a joke gives an actual access to that of allusions and motifs densely Durchwobenen Roman falconers, who as a mixture of thrilling crime and his literary works farce.
The keys remain gone, and thus Prinzhorn has slipped an important part of control. Someone unauthorised can now unlock, and something locked in it gets free rein. What a poet naturally means: imagination. Or paranoia? So while Prinzhorn is in Innsbruck and in following weeks in Moscow and Madrid, where he believes or literary company invitations are being beaten, pursued by a stalker, observations, memories and literary references to an increasingly Narrower network. It turns out, for example, that long black hair for Prinzhorn was already significant before bathtub incident, but positively erotic connotes: After passionate nights with much younger Jana Blanchefleur, he found ir black hair Even in remote places of his apartment.
Anor motive: thunderstorm. The far of Jana was struck by lightning, Prinzhorn himself had years ago – as he suddenly regained consciousness – a fierce encounter, while in sky flashes were twitching. And doesn’t a thunderstorm also rage, while Werr visits a ball with Lotte? Almost too much of symbolism that Prinzhorn always rediscovers clothing combinations in blue and yellow. The connection between love and death has long been closed – not as something unifying, but as a dualism: only Romeo or Juliet can survive.
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The reality is condensed, and that all more panic, closer inevitable finale moves, Prinzhorn of course also derives from literature. Chekhov’s rule is that a pistol, which will appear in first act, must be fired at latest in third.
Given criminal side of Gerhard Falconer’s Romeo or Juliet, it is prohibitive to betray wher Prinzhorn is actually being persecuted by a woman who is obsessed with him and who might want to assassinate him. Something else is crucial anyway. Of course, it is no coincidence – as lyricist Falconer does not leave anything to chance – that Prinzhorn poems by Anne Sexton have in ir luggage, that mentally unstable representative of confessional poetry, but is afraid to turn up book. Also, Prinzhorn approaches, deprived of its security mechanisms, a confession that shakes it, although it may only be nourished by its fear of its own abysses. The reader has fallen into this novel in meantime, without need for hair.
Gerhard Falconer: Romeo or JuliaBerlin Verlag, Berlin 2017; 272 pp., 22, – €
