It was simple, yet earth-shaking days when you could still be accommodated in the few lines of a song morale. 1970 Neil Young “Ohio” wrote that song about the Kent State shootings. A hail of bullets of the army in student protests against the invasion of US troops in Cambodia, and a line in it that deals with one of the four who died young: “. What if you knew her, found her dead on the ground”
A certain Sylvester Lee Fleming has these Allison Beth Krause have known, or so it claims Ulrich Peltzer tricky new novel “A better life”. Fleming has her even held his head as she lay by treacherous shots hit the ground. That was long ago, but sometimes he still frightens high at night as the hotel rooms in São Paulo, where the novel begins.
iron ore to Tianjin, phosphorus
has the better life Fleming not found to India, he does in insurance and international risk management. It involves large sums of money, and the man standing at his side, is a Brazilian Hellhound to listen just to name Ángel. Where are they now, the ideals of the past, as one such Fleming still knew where to go and where the enemy is? That Ulrich Peltzer, who has become with novels like “Bryant Park” and “part of the solution” to the genius accountant of the present, it is not really answer, is no harm for his new novel.
With three case studies global entrepreneurship waiting” A better life “and to stand with a bunch of characters who thought once in their previous lives on the safe side of morality. In addition to Fleming, it is still the Jochen Brockmann, who works very German as “Head of Sales South East Asia” at a Turin plant engineers, and Angelika Volkhart who sends for a Amsterdam Reederei Bulkcarrier to the whole world: iron ore to Tianjin, phosphorus to India, the Baltic Dry Index always firmly in mind.
black money in Zurich
increase the price of the cargo and fall every minute, while a like Brockmann recognize must that his best days may soon be over. Younger have overtaken him in the enterprise, the great Indonesia business has burst, and the old Italian patriarch is tired. Brockmann is one of the values of his art collection, his shares and investments together. For an afterlife. But it will not last. A small suitcase with dirty money is still at a Zurich bank, but that’s for the daughter.
Jochen Brockmann has been dismissed legally family, and he is not a cynic as the sinister Mr. Fleming, who hails from a small American town, and worked his way up, has to he in that gray area of conscience has arrived in which flow the millions and where he sometimes even do not know exactly what he’s doing there. Fleming is a player who can not lose, because it will change the rules if necessary.
The global economy is a world of uncertainties, the risk and the random, but as if in mockery makes Ulrich Peltzer from a reasonably calculated Roman world. If it already does not exist in reality, then there is the least literary teleology. The way his characters intersect not only, but it is, as if they were running up from the outset each other. Since the ’70s, at least. And they are all related somehow.
In the past they used Spontis
Between Angelika people hard and Fleming years ago an intensive look into the foyer a London insurance led to a violent affair. See you from time to time, but not this time. Fleming has verpeilt the appointment in Amsterdam restaurant, instead randomly strays Jochen Brockmann around the corner. That it is a love story between him and the people is hard, and Brockmann then also quite accidentally becomes acquainted in São Paulo Fleming – paid.
When Ulrich Peltzer seems the global situation to a family reunion of zusammenzuschnurren Ex-idealists, and the world spirit in which they all have heard in the seminars to their student days , there is only Pausenclown.
In the background there are former Communards who brought as a mathematician to fame as a film critic or reüssiert tolerably it. Peter Möhle sits in his Kreuzberger Altbauwohnung and meditates on Marco Bellocchio terrorism film “Buongiorno, notte”, because he wants to write a text about it. Gloomy recordings on the case of the murdered by the Red Brigades politician Aldo Moro, and nothing easier than to let it become a catalyst for memories of their own Sponti time. Everything is not really serious, just a bit dangerous.
Heroes in Cinemascope life
And today? The small revolutions of Brock’s daughter, a kind of mixed calculation from political engagement and small artistic activism, take over the ancient times harmless, and they grind into a world that is already much bigger than them.
The Cinemascope life that lead Ulrich Peltzer figures, portrayed in all colors socioeconomic reality, and the trick of the novel is to show the characters at the same time from outside and inside. Interspersed are found in the records fragments of inner monologues. When would run as a second soundtrack, as if there was now and then even a pause in what’s there. The routines in the hotels, the deals and the drug. Upper and Downer, and at night even with the half-full bottle of cognac from the precious restaurant through the streets of São Paulo, where the trash cans on fire.
In the cities is Ulrich Peltzer novel at home, surrounded by the architecture cataracts of the financial district of Shanghai, in Turin’s Piazza San Carlo or at Amsterdam’s Leidseplein. The microcosms of the model business traveler describes the book in tireless detail, it is literary smell-o-vision between adrenaline and fear.
And if the novel can do something, it’s that the path-time to show diagrams that make up the global economy. A fragmented between the airport check-ins and residual privacy existence, which competes with the pace of goods and money flows. It is a life in real time, which may also be represented in the time most authentic literature hardly even when Ulrich Peltzer trying some.
In hard cuts the stories of the characters are played blinded, there are jumps in the periods that date back from the Roman presence of 2006 to the thirties. There communism ranked just his partisans in a left deviationist and rightist, in between do not have much space, and you are everywhere the Nazis.
Literature in Time Real
“The better life” is a monumental painting of ideas and ideologies, and the Roman dare doing the trick, try to stay quite free of ideology. He has no argument with which he wanted to jazz up the time explainers. He has to present no educational mission, but he tries with the finest sensorium, that is.
This may be a too little, or you can take it with the same phlegm out that almost all fanned by Peltzer figures. Is it worth it? Basically, “The Better Life” a farewell to pretty much all certainties, and help there is not even from above. About the World chief ideologist says again: “God laughs at plans.”
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