Literature | Read - been there

Yugoslavia, was there something there? Oh, yes, Tito. His death in 1980 was the beginning of the disintegration, but that is only marginally the subject of “Jugo” by Ilija Matusko. Photo: Unsplash/Sporisevic Photography Ilija Matusko wrote a declaration of love to his Croatian father. He left his German wife in Bavaria and went back to Croatia, where he lives by the sea but never goes swimming. Unlike his son, who comes once a year for a summer vacation and is then annoyed that when he orders a coffee in Croatian he has to pay the tourist price because his Croatian is not good. A Croatian friend asked him what he called his father. "Papa." Then he was German, she said, otherwise he would say "Tata."

Matusko was born in 1980, when Tito died. Contrary to the book's title, "Yugo," the political problems and wars in the old and former Yugoslavia are dealt with in a disinterested, succinct manner. His father took down the Croatian flag in front of his house again: “What should I be proud of? That capitalism brings out the worst in people here and has ruined the country?" he asks. Even this book, called a “novel,” could have been made more, for example a much shorter text for a magazine. Matusko needs 192 pages to tell his father, with whom he often argues, that he loves him.

Do more with your notes. If they also want to read others, that is a great art. For a year, the writer and philosopher Christoph Narholz published a daily note on Instagram that had been made over the past 33 years, albeit handwritten and on the verge of illegibility. Now it is available in print, edited in an exemplary manner and with a table of contents organized by topic (art, religion, science, family, etc.). It's about music, books, films in action, about situations, comments and insights as if in passing and the associated feelings and flashes of inspiration - in short, about "letting the constant crackling of consciousness become text."

Narholz actually just wants to “bring a few distinctions into the world” and “scatter scattered, inflammatory, levitating glances.” And somewhere the Bee Gees would play along, or he would meet Long John Silver at a bar, or he would think about Heidegger, or Silvia Plath, or the “Criticism of the Grand Gesture.” You can simply browse through it or choose a promising heading in the table of contents and navigate to this note like a song on Spotify. Or read like scrolling down Instagram or listening to a few quotes in a Godard film. The publisher calls it a "Fluxus-like document," but it is "the thirst for theory of the material," as Peter Sloterdijk, under whom Narholz did his doctorate, puts it, only that his "crackle" gets to the point much more than Sloterdijk did in his rambling "Notes." Yes, “long live modern art, long live the Republic,” as he notes about Picasso’s painting “Guernica.” One of the best books of the year, isn’t it?

A day in the life of a man who wants to throw himself off a bridge in Munich. He has ruined his restaurant as well as his marriage and is now "squatting at the bottom of the inner crater that he single-handedly bombed into his life." What he hates is the phrase “Everything’s fine,” because to him it just sounds like “Kick my ass.” He wanted to be an artist and became an innkeeper. To be on the safe side, he can only remember very little, but then a few things happen to him that make him feel something, and quite positively. How can that be? Is it because of the weather? A small, finely formulated educational piece as a novella by the very good crime writer Friedrich Ani. If you read it in one go, remember: "You only rarely have any influence on things out there; the only ruler over you can be yourself."

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