Once in a lifetime you have to have lived your dream, Olav is convinced of that. He and his wife Helen are the main characters in the new novel by Ludwig Fels, a master of expressive storytelling.
“Moonquake” is about an escape that could not be more difficult: the escape from yourself. Already “Hottentottenwerft”, the 2015 novel by Middle Franconia born in 1946, who has lived in Vienna for years, told of an escape from poverty and oppressive Relationships. But this time it’s about more.
Helen and Olav, who got married in prison, where Olav was serving a two-year sentence, are among the sad and unlucky. He works as a debt collector and has to scare people because of his job.
This depresses him so that he can only calm down with a lot of alcohol. He saved Helen from her violent husband, but struck too hard, the judge said. Olav secretly agrees with him. But suddenly they are lucky: Helen inherits, and the world seems to be open to both.
They are amazed at this grace of an overturning feeling. “Sometimes he’d tried to tell her that what was between them was all about love, like a beautiful wild flower, with thorns and poisonous dew and carnivorous, but beautiful, as I said, beautiful and wild.”
Painfully beautiful landscapes
Olav is an idealistic rebel, defiant and impulsive. He rebels against the injustices of the world. “In order to stay human, he commits every crime,” Helen is convinced. That’s exactly why she loves him. They long for the sun, palm trees and the sea, their kitschy dream, as Olav laughs. They follow him to West Africa, in a resort with luxury villas. The landscape is painfully beautiful, but they cannot read the signs of life there. They cheat, Helen is seriously injured. They came to one of the cruelest places in the world, and Ludwig Fels takes us with his idiosyncratic pictures to this island, which only seems idyllic from a distance.
Fels’ laconic descriptions of the street children, the whores and the lying, wafer-thin layer of tourist luxury go to the limit of pain. Olav and Helen find in the Pakistani doctor Dr. Chalie a powerless protector. He is a loving cynic, to whom nothing can happen because he has already lost everything. Inevitably, he works with the junta and treats the victims of torture, he is not allowed to ask questions.
[LudwigFels:MoonquakenovelVerlagJung&JungSalzburg2020313pages€24[LudwigFels: MondbebenRomanVerlagJung&JungSalzburg2020313Seiten24€]
These descriptions in the novel are oppressively realistic. This haunting love and adventure story is about the longing for a successful life, for a place in the world, for fear of loneliness and the attempt to escape your own speechlessness. “Journey to the center of the heart” was the name of an earlier novel by Ludwig Fels.
This is exactly the place his two characters are looking for in Africa. Only at the very end do they admit that their escape failed – and that is why they succeeded.
