Über Flüche. Album II
Book launch with Robert Stripling

Reading
Talk
← / →

© Julie Kerdellant

Please note that the event will be held in German.

Three years ago, Unter Stunden. Album I by Robert Stripling (born 1989 in Berlin) was published—a book conceived as two volumes and the result of ten years of work by the author. Even then it was already apparent that this would be one of the great prose ventures of recent years. Prose, yes—but here one already begins to hesitate, for it is no coincidence that the albums are published by kookbooks, one of the most distinguished poetry presses in the German-speaking world. Indeed, Stripling’s text resists any clear generic classification: in their musicality, his sentences follow every impulse with a lucid and idiosyncratic distance from prose, branching out into the finest ramifications of each and every subsidiary thought.

The text pursues a question posed right at the beginning of the first volume: “Wo bin ich, wenn nichts feststeht?” Shortly before, it reads: “Ich bin im Aufbruch, wo ich geh.” With this, the central themes are named—themes that, as can already be said, resonate throughout the entire work. Critics marveled at the first volume and saw in the project a “zutiefst romantischen Beitrag zur ästhetischen Verwandlung der Welt,” even an “Andachts-Buch der Angst” (Michael Braun), one that virtuously blends fiction, biography, and narrative. The author was described as someone halfway toward universal poetry—or perhaps already fully arrived there—as someone who, in the spirit of Jean Paul, is capable of submerging everything in poetic waters.

Now Über Flüche. Album II has been published by kookbooks (the “Flüche” are described at one point as the opposite of wishing), and readers are given the very welcome opportunity to follow the continuation of the project. Once again, a poetics of simultaneity prevails: the attempt to take everything in at once—the parasol above the lottery counter or an extinguished tealight that, glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye, turns into a mosquito—even though (or precisely because) at one point it is said: “Alles ist allem stets hinterher.” It is a method that, in relation to the work of James Joyce, has been called “The Aesthetics of Hoarding.” In Album II, Stripling formulates it like this: “ich arbeite mit allem, was mich umgibt, was so rumliegt, messiehafte Papierfitzel, ausgelagerte Speichermedien & liegt natürlich nicht völlig willkürlich rum; immer wieder ›Phase für Phase‹ genügend Restvernunft, Ordnung zu schaffen; mit diesem Horten aufzuhören.”

On this evening, Robert Stripling will read from the new album and will be questioned by Paul Jandl.