[Battwenue]

For various reasons, when her latest novel, Corpus Delicti: Ein Proze?, came out, I picked it up. It?s my first Zeh novel, and in many ways, it?s said to be an atypical effort, so my impressions of the book will not be transferable to other Zeh novels. That said, it?s an ok read. It?s not great, not even very good, and Zeh, as many contemporary German novelists, is an excruciatingly bad stylist, sometimes, but you won?t regret reading it and it has some good moments. Most of the good moments are, of course, ?borrowed?, that is, they are not due to Zeh?s original writing and/or thinking, but to the source material she used to cobble together the intellectual construction of the book. Corpus Delicti is a science fiction novel, albeit with the SF aspect toned down as much as possible, which depicts a dystopian, in some respects vaguely dictatorial society; as could be expected, the novel owes much to greats of the genre such as Huxley?s Brave New World and Orwell?s 1984. Sadly, taking a SF framework seems to give Zeh the excuse to go for caricatures instead of characters, for puppets instead of persons. Stylistically, and especially in what concerns atmosphere, other important references are stories by Kafka (reading the book, the word ?Kafkaesque? comes to mind repeatedly), or by Kunert (for instance the justly celebrated story ?Zentralbahnhof?). As with Davis? collection, Zeh?s novel, too, never transcends her predecessors or is able to beat them at their own game.


This is not a bad thing, however. Zeh?s novel is less an effort to create an original work of Art (note the capital letter), it?s rather an angry screed against developments that Zeh perceives to be harmful in her society; it is meant to be much more disposable than your everyday novel. Zeh doesn?t allow her readers to read the book as an idle or entertaining exercise in thought, instead she hammers home the topicality of it all time and again. The book is a good though preachy read, a quick read, enlivened by the anger of Zeh who thinks we?re ceding control over our bodies. the rest here Disorder: Juli Zeh?s “Corpus Delicti” shigekuni.

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