Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

At last something great! Amazing! It feels like heaven. The story of the Nose. The man who knew everything about aromas but nothing about anything else and was a one of a kind criminal. I don`t want to tell you the plot, because it would make no sense doing so. Also I would like to mention that it was the first book I read in German in the last few years, but even despite the problems with the language which very disturbing at first, I certainly felt what a great master of words Sueskind is. An absolute must for every fan of modern literature, although there`s nothing crazy about the book that you could discuss among `the cool people`. It just strikes you like a thunderbolt and there`s nothing more to it.

A man in his 50s lives a partly normal life until the day he sees a pigeon in the corridor leading from his room to the bathroom, and it scares him almost to death. Not the most popular beginning to a book? Quite so, and there you can discover Sueskind close to his best. A character that doesn`t make any sense, doesn`t do dirty things (unlike most characters in modern books) and is absolutely out of his mind. At some part of the book he has envy towards a clochard who begs money outside the bank the hero is guarding, but everything changes when he sees the beggar shitting in public and realises how tragically it is when a person can`t lock the door even in the most sacred moments. Groovy!

Just like Haruki Murakami who`s book I finished reading before switching to Sueskind, this here is one of my favourite writers. Having already swallowed the hook of the creator of "The Perfume", "Contrabass" etc., I didn`t expect these four stories to be something around average. And they really weren`t! First there`s "The Attraction to Depth" - a story about a young female painter that goes crazy and can`t continue her work after an art critic has said that there`s not enough depth in her art which he only said not to overrate the girl. And as she died from a suicide the critic wrote that all her works showcased attraction to depth. "The battle" tells a story of chess playing in the park, where the local champion (an old drunk) is challenged by a young charistmatic opponent whom love all the spectators. And only after the victory the champion understands that he had played against a complete fool and that his win wasn`t better than a loss, he decides to give up chess. The third story "Jean Messar`s Testament" tells us about a weirdos theory that the whole earth is getting overwhelmed by shells. And then there`s the observation - how a man reads a book and sees different notices on the sides and only in the end understands that it was him who wrote all the comments, and that he doesn`t remember anything he`s ever read. Like Sueskind usually likes it to be all the stories are both very funny and very sad at the same time. And you can surely say that it`s one hell of a recipe he has found.