A Sentimental Lifestyle | Leif Randt: Born to be an Uncle

Marian's mother, Carolina, once a very famous model, is dead. The 41-year-old owner of the Kenting Beach Store in Berlin-Schöneberg, a proactively run fashion boutique, currently voting for the Left Party (a pointed aside to Michel Houellebecq), feels a profound rupture in his hitherto carefree life. He has had a few relationships that always fizzled out as if by magic whenever things got tense (children or no, marriage or no, pet or no). He also partially enjoys occasionally entertaining his younger half-brother in the latter's FDP-affiliated family oasis, whenever this pressed-front-of-his-haired boy gets the itch and secretly teaches a female party colleague the finer points of brown-nosing.

No sooner had Marian Flanders illegally scattered his mother's ashes in Lake Wannsee during a stylish funeral ceremony than he no longer expected much from the world. His relationship with his sarcastic mother, with whom he celebrated Christmas no fewer than 40 times, was simply too close, as puppet master Leif Randt calculates for us. Shortly before her death, Carolina gave her son a beautiful parting thought: "You were born to be an uncle, I suspected it early on, and your new shirt confirms my suspicion." Eclecticism in its purest form, as true as the aphorism that you can make fish soup from the fish in an aquarium, but you can never make aquarium fish from the fish soup again.

But Marian's last name is Flanders, isn't it? For all readers with a pop-literary bent, Ned Flanders from the American cartoon series "The Simpsons" will immediately spring to mind. The main character, Marian, resembles this devoutly naive Christian from Springfield in her sentimental lifestyle. Likeable and seemingly profound. He's interested in the myriad little things, the fashion faux pas and crimes involving fabric. And know this: even a roll of kitchen paper can inevitably bring a smile to his face.

Randt's great art lies in his perfect timing, putting well-tempered sentences into the mouths of his characters that unfold with exceptionally prophetic force: "Marian's aim was to be self-ironic and approachable, ideally to elicit a few laughs, and always to remain honest." Three cheers! Only the holy spirit Leif, our most accomplished outsider and rediscoverer of lovable layabouts, can pull that off. No one captures the banality of human existence better than L.R. He is the seismograph of contemporary Germany; no one sums up our powdered present better than he does.

Randt is not random, but born to be alive!

It's these stunning details that make us believe in the good in the book. Randt isn't random, he's born to be alive! Before the grand finale in the Gardens of the World in Berlin-Marzahn, we accompany Randt's people without qualities to Japan and India, among other places. The trip to India is because Flanders falls in love with a film director…

No, not everything will be revealed. Read it yourself, or have the AI ​​read it to you if reading it yourself is too confusing, because: "If guests frequently tell you, 'Clean the windows,' it doesn't mean that the windows will soon clean themselves," as Leif Randt revealed in "Zeitmagazin" – in the section "What I wish I had known earlier."

He couldn't care less about his cool life's work and regularly writes for the "Red Bull Bulletin." If that isn't true critique of capitalism, what is? Randt is more rebellious and resilient than Christian Kracht , which also explains the final verdict on "Let's Talk About Feelings." And very soon, a German feature film will unexpectedly explain the Randt universe to us in detail.

Randt's bestseller "Allegro Pastell" has been made into a film and is waiting for us! The master himself wrote the screenplay. "The things you're looking for are, 95 percent of the time, exactly where you first suspect they are. You just have to look longer," he wrote in "Zeit-Magazin," hitting the nail on the head – 95 percent of the time.

Leif Randt: Let's Talk About Feelings. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 320 pp., hardcover, €24.