Two sandmen of different size

The following example of Bodo Kirchhoff’s novel “Der Sandmann” which was published in 1992 shows how 19^th century literature serves as a template to create something contemporary and how a desired effect can be failed or eased if an author is highly engaged in adopting a certain literary standard.

Kirchhoff tells the story of Quint, a fifty-years-old man, who’s travelling together with his little son to Tunis to search for his beloved Helen, who has fled there for unknown reasons one year ago. But instead of finding the love he was hoping for, he loses everything what’s near and dear to him – finally he ends up losing his son and mind. He makes acquaintance with the evil, in the end he’s killing a man and is nearly committing suicide.

Not only the title of Kirchhoff’s work adverts to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s paradigm of fantastic literature, but also the used topics and motives are arranged in such a dense way that the reader should feel trapped in the storyline which resembles a spiral of fear. Feelings of insecurity and self-loss are going along with the protagonist who's losing any kind of footing in the course of narration.

Perhaps it’s the exotic setting why I couldn’t retrace the horror which is supposed to arise while reading. But in my opinion something’s prohibiting reader identification despite the use of well-tried narrative forms and literary plus philosophical motives à la Hoffmann and Freud. It seems that the author of “the new sandman” is losing sight of the proper aim in trying to do everything in a correct way. The attempt to fill too big shoes ends up in sticking to the tried and tested which is finally bedded in a pretentious style. This novel sets out literary experiences of the author, but nothing new is created, at least nothing terrifying. It’s quite obvious that I’m not a professional literary critic why I’ll finish now delivering one judgement after another. Needless to say, it’s up to you to form a personal opinion on the present reading and probably nobody will consider it as critical as I do.

But apart from that it’s just a matter of fact that we won’t achieve future enhancements if we’ll still just imitate something elapsed. Thereby I don't mean that this book doesn’t contain any new ideas, it’s just the way how the author refers to literary sources: References aren’t quite hints, they’re almost yelling.