RaveThe NationThis mid-rave feeling of being utterly present, devoid of any sense of time, place, or ego, is exceedingly difficult to capture in any sort of strictly representational art form, but German writer Rainald Goetz’s 1998 novel Rave manages to convey the black hole of a dissociative dance floor experience with clarity ... Instead of trying to forcibly carve a narrative of the madness and hedonism of techno’s early days, Goetz embraces the transience of a night out. What unites the disparate locales is a combination of chatter and somatic response ... in a nod to the collectivism inherent in the act of raving, Goetz doesn’t even center his ostensible protagonist ... he tells the story of those days by loosely following each stray glance and overheard phrase from those around him, piecing together a mosaic of this scene that avoids idealization ... In Rave, Goetz lays out the polar contradictions of a lifestyle dedicated to nightlife, cycling through flashes of enlightenment and tenderness to despair and cynicism ... Goetz’s novel succeeds in translating into black and white an embodied and ineffable experience, something prose isn’t especially equipped to accomplish.
