A Follower Story

 

Work was way too overwhelming last weeks, therefore I spent most of my reading time going through my list of English books tours and eventually some French authors. Therefore, I still have a lot to catch up with the list of German authors I want to discover this year.

My latest reading from my German TBR is by an author that is often in the media those days for his latest published novel: Eugen Ruge. However, I still have to catch up with his older books: Follower - in English in the original German edition. Ruge, mathematician by education, is the son of the famous DDR historian Wolfgang Ruge. Although his family history is inpiring some of his books, this is not the case of Follower which is a dystopian novel set in 2055.

I usually do have issues to imagine things set in the future, but in the case of this novel, everything looks like today, highly digitalised and with an online world taking over the reality. I´ve wrote several times about this quasi obsession of German mentality in denouncing the e-control threatening our everyday lives and this book is not different. It´s like a local canon for fiction. Ruge, who despite his elitist communist family background escaped the Socialist dictatorship to the West in the last years of the DDR, may be concerned by the possible raise of a new dictatorship, beyond borders and languages.

In the world of 2055 there are no nations, just business conglomerates. The language of this world is ´overpolitically´ correct, although the main man character Nio Schulz keep thinking as a mysoginistic man in his midlife crisis (a frequent topic in novel written by German men authors, I wonder why) - he just went 39 as we get to know him.

Mathematically, there are ´14 sentences about a fictional oncle´, that do set the chapters and the thread of action. Nio Schulz is disappearing as the work of his own fiction and the search for him and his efforts of disappearing in the folders of the fictional reality. 

I personally liked the writing, a recommended read to anyone looking to improve their ´hoch´ German, but the story itself either annoyed me - all the critics against the political corectness and the ´crisis of the white/hetero man´ sounds so cliché - and the story although well elaborated, totally displeased me.

I would probably give this author a next chance, with his family inspired novels, but as for now, I betetr skip any dystopian story, unless it is one of those everyone is saying only good things about.

Rating: 2.5 stars