Jörg Fauser, Raw Material, translated by Jamie Bulloch, The Clerkenwell Press, 2014.
The best book I've read since I came out of prison -- Howard Marks
Bukowski meets Withnail on schnapps. As beautiful a mess as the characters he wrote, Jorg Fauser's trawl through the anarchist squats of the 70s lays bare the seeds of Germany's new cool. While we were still making war films, Fauser ran with a generation intent on destroying the state and itself; through the voice of Harry Gelb his savage wit leaves no truth unturned in describing its most foibled and hopeless endeavour - decadent revolution. This book makes me wish I was there -- DBC Pierre
Sad, funny, cynical and deeply authentic, it's the best novel of the period I've ever read -- Barry Miles
Cracking - nothing more needs to be said -- Nik Cohn
One of the best German novels of all time -- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
What do we know about Jörg Fauser? Outside Germany, not a great deal:
he was born in 1944 and became a drifter at a young age through
Britain, Ireland, Spain and Turkey, where he also became a junkie. He
wrote poetry, novels, edited a small-press magazine, wrote a biography
of Marlon Brando, kicked heroin and turned to booze.
He wrote lyrics for, and performed in, various bands. His reputation as an important figure in the German counter-culture survived even his commercial success as a detective novelist. His nomination for the Ingeborg Bachmann prize aroused the ire of some leading literary notables, who publicly denounced him, not long before he was run over and killed by a truck in 1987 on the autobahn outside Munich, at the age of 43 (there is an online rumour that this was an assassination: Fauser was, at the time of his death, researching the links between the drug trade and high-ranking politicians). He is frequently mentioned in the same breath as the Beats and, especially, compared to Charles Bukowski.
But his novel Raw Material is like nothing else you will have read before. To foist a genre on it, it’s a picaresque, but what a crazed, leaping, unmoored and hilarious voyage it is. It opens in the spring of 1968, a time of socio-political upheaval and an atmosphere drenched in revolutionary fervour, in Paris, Prague, Vietnam and Northern Ireland … The Baader-Meinhof gang is active. Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Last Exit to Brooklyn are under scrutiny, as is Oz. Our hero, Harry Gelb, is 24 and living on a rooftop in Istanbul with his partner in crime, Ede. Gelb is a struggling writer and a struggling junkie (is there any other kind?), a swindler, a scammer, a thief. This is the 60s, yes, but there’s no peace-and-love; Gelb is “rapidly approaching the season of hell”.
No sooner are we settled on that rooftop with Harry, than we’re whisked away, scooting across Europe, to a commune in Berlin, to Frankfurt, Vienna, back to Berlin, squat to squat, dead-end job to dead-end job, all in the company of an intensely observant and cuttingly incisive commentator, achingly aware of the terribly transitory nature of existence, the flux and the chaos of it, a breathless whirl of drugs and drink and women and doomed enterprises. The one point of solidity in Gelb’s life is his heavy old typewriter, and the masterpieces he will write on it, one of which, Stamboul Blues, accompanies him wherever he goes, as he hawks it to various hopeless publishers.
He gets a job on the editorial board of Zero magazine, where staff members levitate to attract funding, and where a table tennis table is an essential item of office furniture because ping-pong “represented the defeat of capitalist heteronomy, social democratic lethargy and Russian hegemonic self- importance”. Gelb is sent to London to interview William S Burroughs, specifically about his cut-up technique, an encounter related in a perfect pen portrait of the man: “Burroughs was tall, gaunt and slightly stooped when he walked. He’d turned white at the temples and his mouth was a narrow, bloodless line … Through his glasses he fixed me with his gaze. His eyes were blue and radiated the unshakeable authority of a high court judge who’s seen all manner of corruption, and even when every bribe is added together still doesn’t amount to enough for him.” Burroughs witters on for a bit about cut-ups and the apomorphine cure for heroin addiction, but that’s about all we get of him; a couple of brilliantly withering sentences.
Characters appear without introduction in this book, and then vanish without fanfare or explanation. The world just happens to Harry Gelb. Plot is a bourgeois construction, since to the materially disadvantaged, daily life is dramatic enough; there is ample conflict in renting a room from “widowed houseowners with dyed-blonde perms and eyes the colour of old family safes”. There is very little on the physiological effects of junk, and even less on the attendant bliss; the concern is more with the act of scoring and the acquisition of money and the neglect that goes with addiction. Alcohol, however, is given close study; booze puts the fun in oblivion. Junkies require nothing and talk about nothing but “the Nirvana of the needle”, but drink is an immersive, highly social drug that can often lead to new friendships and interesting sexual adventures. It also leads to weight gain and bloat, which is not a good look for a revolutionary.
And it is in a drinking den that Gelb unearths a sense of belonging, even meaning, and also realises that the cards are stacked in this world, the game is rigged, and romantic revolutionary idealism is, really, nothing more than a passing phase: “the lies of the revolutionaries sounded different from those of the reactionaries, but they were lies too. Revolutions were a hoax. One ruling class was replaced by another and the cultural apparatus spat out the pertinent editorials, the witty observations … If you saw through the lies, you could live in spite of them.”
Raw Material is a book of dashed dreams, then, at the last. More, it’s a book about how the doomed nature of political idealism can undermine any calmness in settled compromise. The idea of a comfortable life is both yearned for and reviled. At the urging of his friend Fritz, Gelb is enticed away from playing with cut-ups, which “ignored the hurly burly”, and towards the more linear and inexorable horror of Lowry’s Under the Volcano, wherein the protagonist’s collapse is all the more terrifying for its traceability. As we are told, “writing is different. You can’t give it up like alcohol or the needle. The most that can happen is that writing gives you up. And it hasn’t properly started with me yet.” This is the only safe anchorage in the mad world of this book, this crazed cut-up collage of wanderings and wishes and the inevitable destruction of dreams. - Niall Griffiths
In Berlin, by the wall
you were five foot ten inches tall
It was very nice
candlelight and Dubonnet on ice
We were in a small cafe
you could hear the guitars play
It was very nice
it was paradise
You’re right and I’m wrong
hey babe, I’m gonna miss you now that you’re gone
One sweet day
Lou reeds Berlin maybe one best sound track songs to this book source
Jörg Fauser was a huge name in the underground literature culture of Germany when he was writing , Grew up in Frankfurt , but then he lived in squats around Europe Istanbul , Berlin and even North Africa as he tried to live life ,like the Beat writers that he so admired .He was greatly drawn to the Beat writers of America admiring the cut up style of Willam Burroughs and also the hard-boiled crime of the likes of Hammett and Chandler , he wrote a number of crime novels that were well received at time and a have been published in English .He also tried his hand as a song writer .But this book isn’t a crime novel , no it’s the full on vision of a man as a writer at the time Fauser was a writer .His lead character is indeed an alter ego of him .
As they didn’t rake enough with their five storeys , the hotel owners had put another structure on the roof ,The view was overwhelming , as were the heat in the summer and cold in the winter .But for two marks a day we could enjoy the same panorama for which tourists would have shell out twenty or fifty times as much .And we could get ours on credit
Living cheap seeing the blue mosque from a makeshft home on a roof in a hotel in Istanbul .
As I said Raw material is the story of a writer Harry Gelb , he happens to follow the same path as fauser did in his life , living in Istanbul and then Berlin .what we see is a man who loves the beat writers and the lifestyle in the books trying to live out this lifestyle in europe living on rooftops in Istanbul writing in oilskin notebooks about his life their , then a return to Germany to the bohemian Berlin and trying to get noticed publishing Magazines .All the time , meeting girls drinking taking drugs .All the time writing and trying to find someone to publish his masterpiece Stamboul blues .Harry tries to get noticed but is thwarted at every turn it seems , his book is great every one says so but it is maybe to modern for the time .He also falls for many women along the way .Bur does get to meet one of his hero’s Burroughs as he tries to make it .
I was on my way – and how! I tried to explain to Burroughs that I’d been a junkie myself for four years , and in my report I also wanted to write about how one could get off the gear .Burroughs had managed it with apomorphine .Apomorphine was unknown in Germany .That’s why i was here .He lit another cigarette .He smoked filterless senior service chain-smoked them,
“What sort of stuff did you take ?”
“Oh , opium mainly .”
“What raw opium ? You didn’t take it intravenously did you ?”
“Yes I did .”
“Young man ,” Burroughs said, with the hint of a smile, “you must have been out of your mind.”
Harry gets to interview both his and Fauser’s own hero William Burroughs .
What we see in this book is a side of German life that isn’t always been shown in LIterature in translation , I was luckily enough to catch on to the very tail end of this life when I lived in Germany twenty years ago , a life of small pubs , people meeting and doing arty thing seeing small bands going to make shift clubs .This is the same world that gave us the great film directors like Wim Wender and Rainer Fassbinder ,we see the Berlin that also had the likes of Nick Cave and David Bowie making some of their greatest records at the time .In Harry Gelb , we see what life was like for Fauser the ups and the downs the dreams and disappointments of the world he lived in .Fauser story is sad he died under strange circumstances aged only 43 having a life similar to Harry his character doing meaningless jobs and writing underground magazines and trying to break through to be a big writer like his Hero’s .Fauser also wrote songs I found this on you tube by Achim Reichel who he wrote songs for . - winstonsdad.wordpress.com/2014/11/11/raw-material-by-jorg-fauser/
Jörg Fauser, The Snowman. Trans. by Anthea Bell. Bitter Lemon Press, 2005.
“Prose that penetrates the reader’s mind like speed, fast paced, without an ounce of fat.”—Weltwoche
He’s found five pounds of top--quality Peruvian cocaine in a suit-case. Pur-sued by the police and drug traffickers the luckless Blum falls prey to the frenzied paranoia of the cocaine addict and dealer. This is a fast-paced thriller written with acerbic humour, a hardboiled evocation of drug-fuelled existence and a penetrating observation of those at the edge of German society.
Having broken his addiction to on heroin at the age of thirty, Jörg Fauser spent much of the rest of his life dependent on alcohol. He died aged forty-three in 1987, run over by a truck at four am on a German highway.
Fauser, a heroin addict until he kicked the habit at 30, pulls no punches in his lean, darkly comic debut crime thriller, first published in 1981 in his native Germany, where it sold more than 200,000 copies and was made into a film. German porn merchant Blum is having a tough time pushing his dated Danish skin magazines in Malta. ("Afghanis might get some satisfaction from these products, but in my view they have no artistic merit," a Pakistani porn dealer tells him.) With the Maltese police breathing down his neck, Blum seizes the chance to transport five pounds of Peruvian flake to Ostend, but he soon discovers the job is more trouble—and indeed far more dangerous—than it's worth. Part of the pleasure of following Blum's low-life adventures is the sense that they're closely based on the author's own. Bitter Lemon deserves kudos for introducing this fine German noir to an American audience. - Publishers Weekly
He wrote lyrics for, and performed in, various bands. His reputation as an important figure in the German counter-culture survived even his commercial success as a detective novelist. His nomination for the Ingeborg Bachmann prize aroused the ire of some leading literary notables, who publicly denounced him, not long before he was run over and killed by a truck in 1987 on the autobahn outside Munich, at the age of 43 (there is an online rumour that this was an assassination: Fauser was, at the time of his death, researching the links between the drug trade and high-ranking politicians). He is frequently mentioned in the same breath as the Beats and, especially, compared to Charles Bukowski.
But his novel Raw Material is like nothing else you will have read before. To foist a genre on it, it’s a picaresque, but what a crazed, leaping, unmoored and hilarious voyage it is. It opens in the spring of 1968, a time of socio-political upheaval and an atmosphere drenched in revolutionary fervour, in Paris, Prague, Vietnam and Northern Ireland … The Baader-Meinhof gang is active. Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Last Exit to Brooklyn are under scrutiny, as is Oz. Our hero, Harry Gelb, is 24 and living on a rooftop in Istanbul with his partner in crime, Ede. Gelb is a struggling writer and a struggling junkie (is there any other kind?), a swindler, a scammer, a thief. This is the 60s, yes, but there’s no peace-and-love; Gelb is “rapidly approaching the season of hell”.
No sooner are we settled on that rooftop with Harry, than we’re whisked away, scooting across Europe, to a commune in Berlin, to Frankfurt, Vienna, back to Berlin, squat to squat, dead-end job to dead-end job, all in the company of an intensely observant and cuttingly incisive commentator, achingly aware of the terribly transitory nature of existence, the flux and the chaos of it, a breathless whirl of drugs and drink and women and doomed enterprises. The one point of solidity in Gelb’s life is his heavy old typewriter, and the masterpieces he will write on it, one of which, Stamboul Blues, accompanies him wherever he goes, as he hawks it to various hopeless publishers.
He gets a job on the editorial board of Zero magazine, where staff members levitate to attract funding, and where a table tennis table is an essential item of office furniture because ping-pong “represented the defeat of capitalist heteronomy, social democratic lethargy and Russian hegemonic self- importance”. Gelb is sent to London to interview William S Burroughs, specifically about his cut-up technique, an encounter related in a perfect pen portrait of the man: “Burroughs was tall, gaunt and slightly stooped when he walked. He’d turned white at the temples and his mouth was a narrow, bloodless line … Through his glasses he fixed me with his gaze. His eyes were blue and radiated the unshakeable authority of a high court judge who’s seen all manner of corruption, and even when every bribe is added together still doesn’t amount to enough for him.” Burroughs witters on for a bit about cut-ups and the apomorphine cure for heroin addiction, but that’s about all we get of him; a couple of brilliantly withering sentences.
Characters appear without introduction in this book, and then vanish without fanfare or explanation. The world just happens to Harry Gelb. Plot is a bourgeois construction, since to the materially disadvantaged, daily life is dramatic enough; there is ample conflict in renting a room from “widowed houseowners with dyed-blonde perms and eyes the colour of old family safes”. There is very little on the physiological effects of junk, and even less on the attendant bliss; the concern is more with the act of scoring and the acquisition of money and the neglect that goes with addiction. Alcohol, however, is given close study; booze puts the fun in oblivion. Junkies require nothing and talk about nothing but “the Nirvana of the needle”, but drink is an immersive, highly social drug that can often lead to new friendships and interesting sexual adventures. It also leads to weight gain and bloat, which is not a good look for a revolutionary.
And it is in a drinking den that Gelb unearths a sense of belonging, even meaning, and also realises that the cards are stacked in this world, the game is rigged, and romantic revolutionary idealism is, really, nothing more than a passing phase: “the lies of the revolutionaries sounded different from those of the reactionaries, but they were lies too. Revolutions were a hoax. One ruling class was replaced by another and the cultural apparatus spat out the pertinent editorials, the witty observations … If you saw through the lies, you could live in spite of them.”
Raw Material is a book of dashed dreams, then, at the last. More, it’s a book about how the doomed nature of political idealism can undermine any calmness in settled compromise. The idea of a comfortable life is both yearned for and reviled. At the urging of his friend Fritz, Gelb is enticed away from playing with cut-ups, which “ignored the hurly burly”, and towards the more linear and inexorable horror of Lowry’s Under the Volcano, wherein the protagonist’s collapse is all the more terrifying for its traceability. As we are told, “writing is different. You can’t give it up like alcohol or the needle. The most that can happen is that writing gives you up. And it hasn’t properly started with me yet.” This is the only safe anchorage in the mad world of this book, this crazed cut-up collage of wanderings and wishes and the inevitable destruction of dreams. - Niall Griffiths
In Berlin, by the wall
you were five foot ten inches tall
It was very nice
candlelight and Dubonnet on ice
We were in a small cafe
you could hear the guitars play
It was very nice
it was paradise
You’re right and I’m wrong
hey babe, I’m gonna miss you now that you’re gone
One sweet day
Lou reeds Berlin maybe one best sound track songs to this book source
Jörg Fauser was a huge name in the underground literature culture of Germany when he was writing , Grew up in Frankfurt , but then he lived in squats around Europe Istanbul , Berlin and even North Africa as he tried to live life ,like the Beat writers that he so admired .He was greatly drawn to the Beat writers of America admiring the cut up style of Willam Burroughs and also the hard-boiled crime of the likes of Hammett and Chandler , he wrote a number of crime novels that were well received at time and a have been published in English .He also tried his hand as a song writer .But this book isn’t a crime novel , no it’s the full on vision of a man as a writer at the time Fauser was a writer .His lead character is indeed an alter ego of him .
As they didn’t rake enough with their five storeys , the hotel owners had put another structure on the roof ,The view was overwhelming , as were the heat in the summer and cold in the winter .But for two marks a day we could enjoy the same panorama for which tourists would have shell out twenty or fifty times as much .And we could get ours on credit
Living cheap seeing the blue mosque from a makeshft home on a roof in a hotel in Istanbul .
As I said Raw material is the story of a writer Harry Gelb , he happens to follow the same path as fauser did in his life , living in Istanbul and then Berlin .what we see is a man who loves the beat writers and the lifestyle in the books trying to live out this lifestyle in europe living on rooftops in Istanbul writing in oilskin notebooks about his life their , then a return to Germany to the bohemian Berlin and trying to get noticed publishing Magazines .All the time , meeting girls drinking taking drugs .All the time writing and trying to find someone to publish his masterpiece Stamboul blues .Harry tries to get noticed but is thwarted at every turn it seems , his book is great every one says so but it is maybe to modern for the time .He also falls for many women along the way .Bur does get to meet one of his hero’s Burroughs as he tries to make it .
I was on my way – and how! I tried to explain to Burroughs that I’d been a junkie myself for four years , and in my report I also wanted to write about how one could get off the gear .Burroughs had managed it with apomorphine .Apomorphine was unknown in Germany .That’s why i was here .He lit another cigarette .He smoked filterless senior service chain-smoked them,
“What sort of stuff did you take ?”
“Oh , opium mainly .”
“What raw opium ? You didn’t take it intravenously did you ?”
“Yes I did .”
“Young man ,” Burroughs said, with the hint of a smile, “you must have been out of your mind.”
Harry gets to interview both his and Fauser’s own hero William Burroughs .
What we see in this book is a side of German life that isn’t always been shown in LIterature in translation , I was luckily enough to catch on to the very tail end of this life when I lived in Germany twenty years ago , a life of small pubs , people meeting and doing arty thing seeing small bands going to make shift clubs .This is the same world that gave us the great film directors like Wim Wender and Rainer Fassbinder ,we see the Berlin that also had the likes of Nick Cave and David Bowie making some of their greatest records at the time .In Harry Gelb , we see what life was like for Fauser the ups and the downs the dreams and disappointments of the world he lived in .Fauser story is sad he died under strange circumstances aged only 43 having a life similar to Harry his character doing meaningless jobs and writing underground magazines and trying to break through to be a big writer like his Hero’s .Fauser also wrote songs I found this on you tube by Achim Reichel who he wrote songs for . - winstonsdad.wordpress.com/2014/11/11/raw-material-by-jorg-fauser/
Jörg Fauser, The Snowman. Trans. by Anthea Bell. Bitter Lemon Press, 2005.
“Prose that penetrates the reader’s mind like speed, fast paced, without an ounce of fat.”—Weltwoche
He’s found five pounds of top--quality Peruvian cocaine in a suit-case. Pur-sued by the police and drug traffickers the luckless Blum falls prey to the frenzied paranoia of the cocaine addict and dealer. This is a fast-paced thriller written with acerbic humour, a hardboiled evocation of drug-fuelled existence and a penetrating observation of those at the edge of German society.
Having broken his addiction to on heroin at the age of thirty, Jörg Fauser spent much of the rest of his life dependent on alcohol. He died aged forty-three in 1987, run over by a truck at four am on a German highway.
Fauser, a heroin addict until he kicked the habit at 30, pulls no punches in his lean, darkly comic debut crime thriller, first published in 1981 in his native Germany, where it sold more than 200,000 copies and was made into a film. German porn merchant Blum is having a tough time pushing his dated Danish skin magazines in Malta. ("Afghanis might get some satisfaction from these products, but in my view they have no artistic merit," a Pakistani porn dealer tells him.) With the Maltese police breathing down his neck, Blum seizes the chance to transport five pounds of Peruvian flake to Ostend, but he soon discovers the job is more trouble—and indeed far more dangerous—than it's worth. Part of the pleasure of following Blum's low-life adventures is the sense that they're closely based on the author's own. Bitter Lemon deserves kudos for introducing this fine German noir to an American audience. - Publishers Weekly
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