Bricks and Mortar E-Book

Clemens Meyer

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Bricks and Mortar is the story of the sex trade in a big city in the former GDR, from just before 1989 to the present day, charting the development of the industry from absolute prohibition to full legality in the twenty years following the reunification of Germany. The focus is on the rise and fall of one man from football hooligan to large-scale landlord and service- provider for prostitutes to, ultimately, a man persecuted by those he once trusted. But we also hear other voices: many different women who work in prostitution, their clients, small-time gangsters, an ex-jockey searching for his drug-addict daughter, a businessman from the West, a girl forced into child prostitution, a detective, a pirate radio presenter…    In his most ambitious book to date, Clemens Meyer pays homage to modernist, East German and contemporary writers like Alfred Döblin, Wolfgang Hilbig and David Peace but uses his own style and almost hallucinatory techniques. Time shifts and stretches, people die and come to life again, and Meyer takes his characters seriously and challenges his readers in this dizzying eye-opening novel that also finds inspiration in the films of Russ Meyer, Takashi Miike, Gaspar Noé and David Lynch.

Leseprobe

‘A journey to the end of the night for 20/21st century Germany. Meyer reworks Döblin and Céline into a modern epic prose film with endless tracking shots of the gash of urban life, bought flesh and the financial transaction (the business of sex); memory as unspooling corrupted tape; journeys as migrations, as random as history and its splittings. A shimmering cast threatens to fly from the page, leaving only a revenant’s dream – sky, weather, lights-on-nobody-home, buried bodies, night rain. What new prose should be and rarely is; Meyer rewrites the rules to produce a great hallucinatory channel-surfer of a novel.’

— Chris Petit, author of Robinson

‘This is a wonderfully insightful, frank, exciting and heart-breaking read. Bricks and Mortar is like diving into a Force 10 gale of reality, full of strange voices, terrible events and a vision of neoliberal capitalism that is chillingly accurate.’

— A. L. Kennedy, author of Serious Sweet

‘The point of Bricks and Mortar is that nothing’s “in stone”: Clemens Meyer’s novel reads like a shifty, corrupted collocation of .docs, lifted off the laptop of a master genre-ist and self-reviser. It’s required reading for fans of the Great Wolfgangs (Hilbig and Koeppen), and anyone interested in casual gunplay, drug use, or sex.’

— Joshua Cohen, author of Book of Numbers

Praise for All the Lights

‘His is a voice that demans attention, unafraid to do different, sometimes seemingly wrong-headed, things, confident in its ability to move, confront and engage his readers.’

— Stuart Evers, author of Your Father Sends His Love

BRICKS AND MORTAR

CLEMENS MEYER

Translated by KATY DERBYSHIRE

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEEINS, ZWEI, DREITHE LONG NIGHT OF THE RIDERIN THE YEAR 2525MANDY, THE BED IS BREAKING!AMALGAMETERNITY TWOON THE BORDER RIVERTHE CONFERENCE OF THE WHORESLIGHTS IN THE CATHEDRAL MY HUCKLEBERRY FRIENDSTEEL TOWNTHE COLUMBUS BUTTERFLYTOKYO, YEAR ZEROEARLY EVENING IN EDEN CITYTHE GREAT COUPIMPORT / EXPORT 90FACESBEHIND THE MIRRORSDEAD PIGEON ON FLUGHAFENSTRASSE THE REINHARZ DREAMTRANSFER (BYE-BYE, MY LADYBOY)I’D LIKE TO GET A HORSE, ONE DAYABOUT THE AUTHORCURRENT AND FORTHCOMING BOOKS BY FITZCARRALDO EDITIONSCOPYRIGHT

EINS, ZWEI, DREI

I. (GIRL GIRL GIRL / WAITING FOR A STAR TO FALL)

When the evening comes I stand by the window. I push the slats of the blind apart with my fingers and look at the evening sky behind the buildings on the other side of the road. It’s still getting dark early. The year’s not even a month old and already it feels long and hard. Mind you, there’s not much work at the moment. We all complain in January. I just want to catch one last sight of the sun and the last ray of light. I leave for work at eight in the morning; it’s still not really light then. Everything’s better in the summer. I bet everyone says that but on the other hand, in summer I think of holidays and I often don’t feel like working. And I think things go best in the winter, if you leave January out of it. Mind you, lots of us probably see that differently. It’s a shame the flat doesn’t have a balcony. I could sit out there in the summer and sunbathe, better than the stupid tanning salon, and in winter I could stand out there before sunset and have a smoke and watch the sky, watch it turning red. I like to look at the moon on clear nights. It always reminds me of that song. My mother used to sing it to me before I went to sleep. ‘The Moon Has Arisen’. When I hear it now, and that doesn’t happen often, I don’t know when I hear it at all, so… I can’t really describe it. Sometimes I sing it in my head. Magda always used to say: ‘I’m getting feelings,’ when she meant she was feeling sad. But it’s rubbish actually, that thing about the seasons. Summer or winter, autumn or spring, the phone always rings. Just not that much in January. When I was a child I used to think, when I was very little though, that there was a fifth season. And once I asked my mother if the year starts on the first of January every year and if New Year’s Eve is always one day before that. And if it ever snows in June. She laughed and hugged me – that’s why I haven’t forgotten it. Just like the song. I’ve often thought about the white mist in the song, before I go to sleep. When I have a child one day I’ll sing them a different song. One that’s not so sad. I’m more of a cheerful person. ‘Alert and lively,’ they wrote in my school report. They always had these assessments by the teachers. And Magda always used to say: ‘Don’t get so hyper, girl, you’re as fluttery as a bird.’ She’d say so many funny things, and sometimes they were fitting and sometimes they weren’t at all, and I miss that. She’s in Hannover now. She sends me cards sometimes and she always remembers my birthday. She always used to say letters and cards are more personal than text messages. She sends me these really cheesy postcards, puppies, giant hearts, roses with glitter on, and sometimes cards with music. I still write her emails and texts though. My mother’s the only one I send postcards to. The last one on New Year’s Eve. That was for Christmas too. We don’t see much of each other any more but my New Year’s resolution is to go and visit her more often. Because she doesn’t like coming here to me, to the city.

The winter’s cold this year, colder than it’s been for ages. And I could hardly get to work in December, I had to leave the car at home. The whole city was buried in snow and the snowploughs could hardly keep up. I dread to think of my gas bill because I usually leave the heating on all day at home so it’s nice and warm when I get back from work. I often slept here in December, and I even stay the odd night now. Because I don’t want to go out in the snow. I used to go sledging every day when it snowed, when I was little. And sometimes my mother put me on the sledge and pulled me along when we went shopping. That was back in Jena. We have big hills there for sledging and skiing. I’ve never been into skiing though. I was really crap at it. My friends used to laugh at me, all the girls, and the boys even more. But I was good at sledging. I used to go hurtling down the steepest slopes, and even the boys had respect. It’s actually a good thing that the winters are getting so cold again. It’s the climate. But it could all be different next year. When I have a child I want to put it on a sledge and pull it along when we go shopping. I don’t really mind if it’s a boy or a girl. Mind you, maybe I’d like a girl better. I think you’ll be able to choose, in the future. Decide for yourself if you have a boy or a girl. Maybe there’ll be a pill you can take. But that’s probably a long way off. Mind you, some things suddenly go really quickly, what with technology and progress. And it’s rubbish, actually. It’d probably all turn out the same, compared to now. I know I wanted to have a boy, before I left Jena. That was back with Bert. I can’t understand why I left him now. I thought, I have to get out of here, God knows why they call the place Jena Paradise, but he wanted to stay there, he had it all planned out. Because his father had this chemist’s and he studied pharmacy especially. There’s a lot of money in pharmacies. People are always getting sick. At every time of year. Especially now. And when they’ve invented those boy-or-girl pills they’ll make even more money. They can even cure AIDS now, pretty much. I still don’t like to think about it though. I’ve never met anyone with AIDS. People talk a lot of crap about it sometimes. We all go for our check-ups regularly. Even though we don’t have to any more, not by law. It used to be different. But people think and talk a whole load of crap when it comes to that and when it comes to us. And I stand by the window and push the slats of the blind apart with my fingers and look out at the buildings on the other side of the road, with the sky turning red behind them now and the night coming up. Four thirty and the phone’s only rung four times, and the door only twice. For me, I mean.

Because Jenny’s been here since twelve and she stays till twelve. Twelve hours, that’d be too much for me. Ten hours is the longest I do. After that things start getting too hard on me. That makes me laugh, it could be one of Magda’s. Although it’s a bit of a stupid joke, not funny at all when I think about it. But now I’m getting feelings, thinking about her. Yeah, yeah, getting too hard on me. Don’t go getting sentimental now. Because we were pretty close really, and everything came easier, work and everything. It’s OK with Jenny. She only comes four times a week but she works Saturdays and Sundays and that’s when I’m off. My weekend’s really sacred to me. Like my arse. (That again!) Now I can light one up at last. I make sure I don’t smoke too much, you know. One cigarette an hour. Or I try, at least. The most I get through is fifteen a day, and that’s alright, I reckon. Jenny smokes like a chimney and she’s constantly spraying her air freshener around. Spring Lavender fragrance. I can’t stand it. We don’t do a lot of talking. Sometimes we sit together in the lounge when we’re waiting. I’d say we get along as colleagues. She’s a totally different type to me. Three stone more than me, I bet, heading for motherly territory, but there’s enough men into that, believe it or not. And I wouldn’t say she isn’t pretty. No, Jenny’s pretty alright. In the face, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. She’s just womanly, and I mean that as a compliment. And we get on well enough, each to his own, that’s what I say. Clients only have a good time if they feel like a guest. I haven’t seen Magda for a long time, and I often wonder how things are going for her in Hannover. It’s calm there, the Godfather and the Angels have everything under control. And the girls have plenty of trade, I’ve heard. You hear all sorts of things, since the Angels have been here too. I don’t have anything to do with them though. I just hear a lot of things. I’ve been with the boss’s firm for eight years now. I always say ‘boss’ and ‘firm’. Or sometimes I say ‘the Old Man’, because that’s what some people call him. Out of respect. I think he gets on fine with them, with the Angels, I mean, because the guy who’s top Angel here used to be a friend of his, they say, or at least they used to get on OK, divided the city up between them, but I don’t know exactly. There’s girls who know a hundred per cent what’s up, who get all the gossip, although it’s usually less then fifty, per cent I mean, of the truth, but when I get home from work and sit by the radiator I don’t want to hear any more about all that shit.