222 pages
German language
Published 2011 by Suhrkamp.
Adaption is everything, something Frau Lohmark is well aware of as the biology teacher at the Charles Darwin High School in a country backwater of the former East Germany. A strict devotee of Darwin's evolution principle, Lohmark views education as survival of the fittest: classifying her pupils as biological specimens and scorning her colleagues for indulging in 'favourites'. However, as people move West in search of work and opportunities, the school's future is in jeopardy and the Lohmark is forced to face her most fundamental lesson: she must adapt or she cannot survive. Longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2015.
Ik heb het boek uitgelezen, omdat het niet zo dik was. En omdat ik hoopte dat er tegen het einde toch nog iets interessants in zou gebeuren. Maar het viel gewoon tegen. Veel biologie-vaktermen die ik niet begreep. Geen symphatieke hoofdpersoon. Ik heb geen goed gevoel overgehouden aan dit boek. Wel mooie tekeningen trouwens.
.... and Klaus, her previous partner, had wanted to talk all the time. Politics. About the government and the future. He got more and more furious as he talked, and she got more and more tired. And eventually she had a headache and Klaus was as red in the face as the men in the polyester suits with carnations in their buttonholes, when they stood on some stage or other beneath the banners proclaiming the future, talking about a world they’d dreamed up: one with efficient workers, fulfilled plans and improved means of production. As we work today, so shall we live tomorrow. You never knew if that was supposed to be a threat or a promise. Perhaps both.
..... Even before birth, even in our mothers’ bodies, we had to live through it all, three point seven million years, the whole exhausting evolution of man in nine months. All …
.... and Klaus, her previous partner, had wanted to talk all the time. Politics. About the government and the future. He got more and more furious as he talked, and she got more and more tired. And eventually she had a headache and Klaus was as red in the face as the men in the polyester suits with carnations in their buttonholes, when they stood on some stage or other beneath the banners proclaiming the future, talking about a world they’d dreamed up: one with efficient workers, fulfilled plans and improved means of production. As we work today, so shall we live tomorrow. You never knew if that was supposed to be a threat or a promise. Perhaps both.
..... Even before birth, even in our mothers’ bodies, we had to live through it all, three point seven million years, the whole exhausting evolution of man in nine months. All the ballast stowed in our bones. We were a patchwork, the sum of all previous parts, a stopgap that worked more or less, full of superfluous characteristics. We dragged the past around us. It made us what we were, and we had to deal with it. Life wasn’t a struggle, it was a burden. You had to bear it. A best you could. A task to perform from the first drawn birth. As a human being you were always at work. You never died of illness, only ever of the past. A past that had not prepared us for this present.
