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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
In a well-appointed examination in London, a young woman unburdens herself to a certain Dr Seligman. Though she can barely see above his head, she holds forth about her life and desires, and her struggles with her sexuality and identity. Born and raised in Germany, she has been living in London for several years, determined to break free from her family origins and her haunted homeland. In a monologue that is both razor-sharp and subversively funny, she takes us on a wide-ranging journey from outre sexual fantasies and overbearing mothers to the medicinal properties of squirrel tails and the enduring legacy of shame. With The Appointment, her audacious debut novel, Katharina Volckmer challenges our notions of what is fluid and what is fixed and injects a dose of Bernhardian snark into contemporary British fiction.
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‘The Appointment is a wonderful first novel – at once savage and precise, hypercomical and furious. It has all the authority of true chutzpah.’
— Adam Thirlwell, author of Lurid & Cute
‘The Appointment is an incredible debut; utterly compelling, its vibrant, incisive voice surprises and enlivens the reader on every page. It’s darkly hilarious, moving and original. I loved it.’
— Megan Hunter, author of The Harpy
‘A book destined to enter the list of great monologues of literary history. If Dostoevsky’s underground man had read both Thomas Bernhard and Maggie Nelson, he might have conjured something as brave as this.’
— Carlos Fonseca, author of Natural History
‘The Appointment is transgressive, spiky, full of ideas but astonishingly light-footed, written in beautiful, unsettling prose, and very, very funny – in short, everything a novel should be.’
— Adam Biles, author of Feeding Time
‘Katharina Volckmer is a wild new talent, and unlike, say, twentieth-century Europe, The Appointment succeeds in justifying its obscenities.’
— Joshua Cohen, author of The Book of Numbers
‘The Appointment is an epic truth bomb, a radical, hilarious roller-coaster, raw and wild as they come. The way this novel delights in itself, taking pleasure in its singularity and perversity, is the perfect antidote to boredom and bullshit. To read stories that are unapologetic is to be granted the courage to be more honest ourselves, which is one way literature actually can save the world.’
— Elisa Albert, author of After Birth
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THE APPOINTMENT
(Or, The Story of a Cock)
KATHARINA VOLCKMER
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In memory of David Miller – in whose chair I wrote this novel.
Contents
The Appointment
I know that this might not be the best moment to bring this up, Dr Seligman, but it just came to my mind that I once dreamt that I was Hitler. I feel embarrassed talking about it even now, but I really was him, overlooking a mass of fanatical followers, I delivered a speech from a balcony. Wearing the uniform with the funny, puffy legs, I could feel the little moustache on my upper lip, and my right hand was flying through the air as I mesmerised everyone with my voice. I don’t remember what exactly I was talking about – I think it had something to do with Mussolini and some absurd dream of expansion – but that doesn’t matter. What is fascism anyway but ideology for its own sake; it carries no message, and in the end the Italians beat us to it. I can’t walk for more than a hundred metres in this city without seeing the words pasta or espresso, and their ghastly flag is hanging from every corner. I never see the word sauerkraut anywhere. It was never feasible for us to hold down an empire for a thousand years with our deplorable cuisine; there are limits to what you can impose on people, and anyone would break free after a second serving of what we call food. It was always our weak point, we never created anything that was meant to be enjoyed without a higher purpose – it is not for nothing that there is no word for pleasure in German; we only know lust and joy. Our throats never get wet enough to suck anyone with devotion because we were all raised on too much dry bread. You know that horrible bread we eat and tell everyone about, like some sort of self-perpetuating myth? I think it’s a punishment from God for all the crimes we have committed, and forthwith nothing as sensual as a baguette or as moist as the blueberry muffins they serve here will ever come out of that country. It’s one of the reasons I had to leave: I no longer wanted to be complicit in the bread lie. But 10anyway, as I was delivering what we would now have to call a hate speech, I felt that the orgiastic applause coming from beneath me only served as poor compensation for my obvious deformities. I was so painfully aware that I looked nothing like the Aryan ideal I had been going on about for all those years. I mean, I did not have a club foot, but still, not all of the dead Jews in the world, nor even my alleged vegetarianism, would make me eligible for one of those hot Riefenstahl pics. I felt like a fraud. Had no one noticed that I looked like an old potato with plastic hair? I can still feel the sadness I woke up with that day, the sadness of knowing that I would never get to be one of those beautiful blond German boys with their Greek bodies and that skin that turns so wonderfully golden in the sun, the feeling that I would never be what I felt I should have been.
I don’t want to say that I felt sorry for Hitler, and it’s still not acceptable to wipe out an entire civilisation because you feel unhappy in your body and because they represent what you hate about yourself, but it did make me think about his private life. Hitler’s everyday. Have you ever thought about the Führer in his pyjamas, Dr Seligman, waking up with messy hair, stumbling across the room looking for his slippers? I am sure some sad person has written a book about his domestic life, but I much prefer to imagine it myself; books would only find a way to make it dull. I can see the swastika-themed bedsheets and matching pyjamas, everything down to his breakfast bowl. I saw those once in Poland in one of those weird antique shops entirely dedicated to the memorabilia of their tormentors, where they were selling bowls and plates with tiny swastikas at the bottom. It almost felt like some sort of perverted Barbie universe where if you saved long enough, you could buy a whole 11new life, shiny and matching. I could even imagine little TV spots with a well-oiled Hitler doll on one of those glittering horses, saving a good German woman from the hands of some leering Jew, riding off into the sunset, the race protected and safe. Savvy as they were when it came to the media, I think the Nazis really missed out on a marketing opportunity there, imagine all the fun the little German children could have had with something like a LEGO concentration camp called Freudenstadt – build your own oven, organise your own deportations and don’t forget to conquer enough lebensraum. They could even have gone for an adult line – aside from all the gloves and lampshades made from skin they could have had horse-themed butt plugs made from real enemy hair. But I guess that ship has sailed now. And I don’t mean to offend you Dr Seligman, especially now that you have your head between my legs, but don’t you think that there is something kinky about genocide?
