Recommendations of the Editorial team
Lies, greed for power, vanity, illoyality, betrayal – not political business is the field of the new novel by Peter Huth, but the media industry. And there he knows his way around: after all, he himself was editor -in -chief at various newspapers for many years and today works as a company spokesman. So Huth is an insider who tells the history of the failed promoted Felix Licht as if he were biting into a schnitzel with shark teeth (of course in the “Borchardt”, where they are all sitting, the powerful and noticeable in the industry).
It starts rapidly, at the pace of a thriller: the eloquent, intelligent and of course power -hungry vice of a large magazine senses the chance to be called up to be editor -in -chief. He has subordinate everything to this goal before, family, family, pleasure. Boss his instead of the boss, his goal of life and sense of life. But he won’t, the middle -aged white man. But a young woman.
A latently disgusting tension builds up over 67 pages before light career implodes. Disgust because the intriguing game for power and influence, the actual fainting of the ramming and the indifference of the powerful unappealing antagonists are. The mighty, who destroys the dreams of the ambitious, is the publisher Christian Berg, a multi -million dollar entrepreneur who has gained the magazine to pass the time. And his wife, Charlotte, in turn connects his own ambitions.
If you want, you can recognize the couple Silke and Holger Friedrich in the two, who, both new in the media business, bought the “Berliner Zeitung” almost six years ago and were completely around. If you want, you can also find a few other protagonists of the capital stage in the novel. But Huths figures work detached from their possible role models. The promoted promoted promoted Felix Licht is the tragic figure of a passionate workaholic, which could also be located in a screw factory or advertising agency. Its failure and the emptiness the day after are universal.
People thrown out of the track
The disappointment, the bottomless case of his hero describes Huth as intensely and almost physically as the heart attack in his first novel “Infarkt”. This case the promoted triggers a chain of developments, a rally through the media world, featuring right -wing radical influencers and hardened lawyers, barns and scenic trends, wife and adultery, alcohol rush and self -pity, bourgeois feminists and meaningful strategies. And, hey, also a little romance.
“Promoted” (Droemer Verlag) is therefore close to the Berlin media milieu, as precise as exaggerated, but as oppressive close to the private suburb of his main character and in turn Huth’s last novel “The Honigmann”, in which he describes the decay of a bourgeois idyll. It is the ones thrown out of the track, the burglaries in disconnected worlds and shot life paths that Peter Huth interest. And in the end the realization that life offers more than a card that a person can put on: “Felix was in bed and suddenly knew who he was: a man without fear.”
(Transparency note: I am friends with the author of the novel. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to miss it to recommend his new book.)