Heinz Helle

Der beruhigende Klang von explodierendem Kerosin

«Is that something you can help me with? Over everything the reassuring sound of exploding kerosene. Greenland is grey. How much orange juice can you fit in an Airbus A310? The air hostesses’ attractiveness must be proportionate to the distance from the earth at which they serve. To the suppressed proximity of death. Air and laughter made of plastic.»

The pivotal figure in Heinz Helle’s first novel –«The Reassuring Sound of Exploding Kerosene» – is an anonymous ‹ I › – a first-person narrator, who wants to discover, who this ‹ I › is; who tells this story about himself; about the world around this ‹ I ›; and about his girlfriend, with whom he’s been together for some time.
The narrator is studying for his doctorate of philosophy; he comes to New York to spend a semester as a Visiting Scholar at the City University and to give a lecture on Consciousness.
He spends a lot of time moving about the city and is continually checking his thoughts and observations. Does the world about him really exist, or is it just a construct? What is this ‹ I ›, that is simultaneously both consciousness and perception, experience itself and the representation of experience? These are questions about identity which countless disciplines have been grappling with for centuries – the ‹ I ›-narrator is well aware of this. “The words in my head don’t exist, I tell myself with the words in my head.” His attempt to observe himself through self-observation is bound to fail. His uncertainty brings him no peace: he moves forward, only to fall back, for he is in no position to mould his experiences into a practical philosophical theory. And so, he has to trace everything that happens to him back to hard facts and he has to base everything on strong, unambiguous points of reference. He strives for a kind of ecstatic alienation, he seeks out sexual encounters and turns to heavy drinking. At the same time, he shrinks from everything that is routine, habitual. When his girlfriend comes to visit him in New York, he evokes the time when everything that went on between them was still open, new, touchingly fresh...before the time, when it all became routine – which he knows all too keenly how to describe – and which leads to their mutual alienation and finally to their splitting up. Heinz Helle has created an exceptionally authentic language for his characters, which envelops the painfully absent precision of their lives.

Recommended for translation by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia:
www.12swissbooks.ch

Translation of title: The Reassuring Sound of Exploding Kerosene

Suhrkamp, Berlin 2014

ISBN: 978-3-518-42398-1