Lukas Bärfuss -Koala

 translated from Swedish
http://www.dixikon.se/utvalda-bocker/tyska/lukas-barfuss-koala/

After Lukas Bärfuss success novel about the war in Rwanda, "Hundred days" (2008) which also has been translated into Swedish ("Hundra dagar"), comes out now his second novel, "Koala". As before, it is a pleasure to read Bärfuss, rarely,I enjoy so of anyone's language - it almost does not matter what he writes about. He is personal without being private. Koala is about an ordinary man, an ordinary life. Yet it seems nothing in Lukas Bärfuss story was"normal". Central is the suicide, and it is Lukas Bärfuss own brother who commits it. It is poignant, shocking - but Bärfuss writes: suicide is a common death. Despite the heavy topic, there is lightness in the text when Bärfuss talks about his brother's life, he digs up what really happened. How do you mourn a man you were not missing while he was alive? The narrator become obsessed with wanting to understand, but faced silence wherever he turns. Why his brother's friends call him actually Koala? He was named so as a small scout, after an atrocious initiation at a scout camp - a name he never liked. Who wants to be a koala, when you can be a panther or grizzly bear? And does the name say something about why his brother died, he got a label he never liked? Was he in a box he could never free himself from?

Lukas Bärfuss makes a long digression on the animal koala and writes nearly 90 pages about the first convicts who were shipped to Australia in the 1700s. The koala - endangered in Australia - is a symbol of how we act towards our fellow human beings, to animals and nature. A victim. Was his brother's totem animal that indicated the direction of his whole - considered by many - failed life? The story about Australia seems at first to be a digression, a parenthesis, but is in fact central to the response Bärfuss seek. The provocative question is not why someone commits suicide, but it made us all: Why do we survive in this world? Why we get up every day, working the life out of us, fall asleep and get up again - just to be part of a really unworthy and inhuman world? He never finds an answer to his question about his brother, but somewhat on the question of why no one wants to talk about suicide.

 Suicide, which is one of the leading causes of death for people, aged 20-40. Almost everyone has someone close who had committed suicide, but talking about it is taboo. When the brother is to be buried, it is without a priest, his burial must take place outside the chapel in unhallowed made and his ashes sprinkled in the lake. Even within the church there is talk of suicide, without ever finding consolation. What is it that we disagree with the most? Well, someone has chosen not to participate in society, has waived the obligation to work. The author Lukas Bärfuss does the opposite - he goes home from the funeral and sits at his desk "and starts working", so he turns to life and tries to break the speechlessness. It is a thought-provoking book, a reminder of how much we forget in the speed, but this is not a roman in a general sense, rather a shard in the general understanding. Some critics have been disappointed when they compare this book with the "Hundred Days" - rather than to see that a writer must go different routes to reach new magnificent lyrics. This is one of the roads, it is a pleasure to read, and above all it is a pleasure to join Lukas Bärfuss literary journey.