[ book tip by Incentives ] Don Juan is over the hill. All that he can now manage to do is look back at his life. Nathan has no desire anymore. And for the always groaning Viennese newspaper editor that is anything but a groan. But rather is to be understood in a thoroughly ambivalent way, that is: literally. Nathan is in his early fifties and is trapped in a professional and – for him even worse – sexual, i.e. existential, crisis. For him, life, just like his professional work for the ‘Life’ column of the high-society desk, is simply ridiculous.
On the couch of the psychotherapist Hannah Singer, the melancholy Don Juan goes back over his history and his stories: the affectionless childhood, the absent father, relationships that began full of hope and often ended early, in which desire rapidly ebbed away on both sides. A first marriage, which was only a short intermezzo. A second marriage, in which careers developed in opposite directions: Nathan’s wife climbed ever higher. Nathan began to drop out and was finally fired.
In the end, everything culminates in a ghostly erotic game with a lover, an exercise comprising desire and pain and an exchange of roles, as if it had been thought up by a James Ensor. Upon which, everything probably ends in an orderly fashion and can take a new, calmer direction. Candide has discovered his garden of life, Nathan has put the confusions of his life behind him.
On the second page there is a photograph, dating from the end of the 1970s. It shows a young, casual, fully bearded Robert Menasse, sitting surrounded by young women. Are we to equate Robert with Nathan? Of course not. Not a word of it is true, all of it has been made up. It is all fiction. Just a novel.
Translated by Peter Waugh


Original version: Alexander Kluy, Oktober 2008

[ book info ] Menasse, Robert: Don Juan de la Mancha oder Die Erziehung der Lust. (Don Juan de la Mancha or The Education of Desire). (original language: Deutsch) Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, 2007 . ISBN: 978-3-518-41910-6 .