Videotime

• Shortlisted for the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize 2024
  

Fathers, Mothers and Demons – Roman Ehrlich describes a youth in the nineties

"Videotime" was the name of the video store where Roman Ehrlich's narrator and his father borrowed countless films to transfer them onto blank cassettes at home. It is the 1990s in a small Bavarian town whose seemingly peaceful order is bathed in a different, strange light by the eeriness of the films. What, for example, was going on back then with the fathers and mothers who worked in prisons or car dealerships and in their free time trained their own children on the tennis court with hard drills or were hopelessly addicted to sugar? What role did you play when you were young and your world seemed to be teeming with aliens and possessed people?

"Videotime" is a story in strikingly beautiful language about the faces and voids that hide behind our masks and self-images. An impressive novel, told with great confidence, which raises the question of what time and world we actually live in - and in what skin.

"a brilliant, surprising and [...] highly uncanny novel" - SWR Kultur - lesenswert Magazin, Christoph Schröder

"highly entertaining" - Tagesspiegel, Michael Wolf

"The precise language, which contrasts the film images with a literary register, is magnificent." - SWR Kultur, Dirk Knipphals

"The skilful montage and elegant language give the text a character all of its own, combining content and form in an innovative and convincing way." - SR 2 - KulturRadio, Meike Stein

"a remarkably profound, expansive portrait of a boy and his environment" - Deutschlandfunk Büchermarkt, Samuel Hamen

"Normality noir, artfully told." - taz.de, Dirk Knipphals