My Name Is Marcel and I Like Avril Lavigne
The day I bought the Rocko Schamoni novel already had too much going on. I’d just watched my friend Gulcan get a piece of metal pushed through her ear—she held eye contact with me the whole time, which was touching and slightly unsettling—and I’d nearly walked straight into my ex-girlfriend at the lift on the way out of our media design midterm. A flash of her, a reflex smile to her best friend, then the doors closed. The piercing was beautiful though. It caught the light.
Rocko Schamoni is one of those German cultural omnivores—musician, comedian, author—who writes with the looseness of someone who doesn’t particularly care whether you take him seriously. Sternstunden der Bedeutungslosigkeit—roughly, insignificant hours of glory—had been recommended to me by a friend as either a cure for the quarter-life crisis or a precise diagnosis of it, depending on your mood. I started reading it on the subway while some guy from the outer boroughs gave my Chucks a withering look.
The book is fine. Schamoni writes in the present tense of his own life, directly, without pretension—not the lyrical weightless quality Murakami pulls off, not the feverish raw edge of Mian Mian, just grounded and honest. And yet there’s a Michael Sonntag in there, a semi-fictional stand-in living the author’s experiences at a convenient remove. I keep running into this wall with contemporary fiction: why does everyone need an alias?
Charlotte Roche sold millions of copies of Wetlands, a novel about a woman’s body that was clearly autobiographical and clearly pretending not to be. Same trick, classier packaging. I understand the instinct—there’s safety in the fictional frame—but it also makes the whole enterprise feel slightly cowardly. You’re confessing, but you’re doing it in costume.
So here. No costume. My name is Marcel Winatschek. I like Avril Lavigne. I pick my nose. I enjoy fooling around with women who probably deserve better options. That wasn’t so hard. Now the rest of you try it. We can talk about the anal sex thing another time.