History of a book. Back on the GDR and its end. An obsessing theme overseas overseas – and, above all, autobiographical for its author.
Le Monde Books
Do not despise novel ideas, sometimes passing in tight rows and vanish as if they had never existed. Some of them must be noted: we never know, it can be used. As proof, at the end of the 1990s, a German playwright of about forty years, whose moment of the moment does not hold in one piece, thinks of a novel. But Eugen Ruge is not novelist. Mathematician, he came to the theater on the late – the novel, he still just reflects. More than a decade will flow before the German exit in 2011 when the light declines. Bookstore phenomenon, criticized and rewarded by several awards, including the very prestigious Deutscher Buchpreis, his text just falls, at least as much as he just sounds. Whether it is crossed in Berlin or Paris, in 2011 or in 2012, Eugen Ruge still look a little surprised. Or dreamer. As if he did not want to believe too much. As if he wanted to stay discreet. The 350,000 copies sold from his book are difficult to hide.
Family novel, when the light declines is also a novel of his time, everywhere. On three generations, the Umnitzer family says a certain German history, which even passes through Mexico and Siberia, and of which the year 1989 constitutes the culmination and the overthrow. Communist intellectuals and activists (with more or less fervor), Umnitzer live the decline of the Democratic Republic of Germany. The light of utopia weakens and disappears. “From one generation to another, develops Eugen Ruge, it is as if they believed them less and less, without anticipating the collapse of the communist ideals.” While Grandfather Metallo is an emeritus member. From the party, his grandson goes to the west in 1989, a few days before the fall of the wall. Born in Russia in 1954, pushed by a historian father to the mathematics (“it’s something on which the ideology does not take”), Eugen Ruge looks very much in Sacha, the grandson umnitzer. Until this cancer be diagnosed with the character in the first pages, and which pushes him from Mexico alone, in 2001, in the footsteps of his paternal grandparents.
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