Towering, antagonizing ... Weary readers, somewhere adrift in this 1,000-page surrealist auto-exegesis, may feel inclined to accuse Lentz of adopting the bloated, paranoiac excess of postmodern fiction. They would not be entirely wrong ... But the book’s fidelity to ordeal and vexation marks it above all as a quest narrative ... It is experimental fiction that stores its pleasures in the way-stations of form, rich deposits of beauty and terror ... The novel’s formal pyrotechnics sometimes obscure the familiarity of its central trope ... Entire sections left me baffled ... It is part of the exquisite paradox of reading Schattenfroh, one of the great, and greatly demanding, literary pleasures of the year: that its annihilating fantasy should somehow reach us as so much light streaming through darkness.
Bleak, confounding, and finally brilliant ... At once tragic and comic, painfully human and stupidly bureaucratic ... Might try the patience of even the most erudite reader ... All the more impressive, then, is Max Lawton’s translation, which renders Lentz’s flinty though extravagant German into English sentences that are clear, nimble, and frankly full of beans, capturing the propulsive energy of the original text without sacrificing its difficulty.
Comes with plenty of what even an advanced and adventurous reader might consider obstacles. It’s 1,000 pages long. It’s translated from its original German, brilliantly, by Max Lawton. Its title is a complex pun that can’t be translated accurately ... But Schattenfroh is not nearly as head-spinning or brow-furrowing as it all implies. Somehow, Lentz (via Lawton’s translation) renders this impossible-sounding project legible and organized ... I implore you: If you’ve lately felt too occupied with social media, if you’ve worried over the products of AI, or if you just want to deepen the mysteries of existence with an open and patient mind — pick up Schattenfroh and dedicate some time and effort to it. It couldn’t be any further from our current typical modes, but it functions as a refreshing immersion rather than escapism.
Monumental ... A novel of titanic ambition, Schattenfroh draws on the esoteric, overlooked corners of human history to trace the thoughts of one man wrestling with existence.
Lentz gives an emphatic rebuttal ... I could not shake the eerie sense...that Lentz himself was repeating a familiar mistake ... The scant engagement with the genocidal crimes of the Nazis is a shocking elision ... This seems to me evidence of a refusal to engage with the urgent ethical and artistic questions posed by atrocity ... At its best, Schattenfroh is an offering of astonishing subtly, breadth, and dexterity ... So it is a shame that Lentz cheapens the offering by forgetting...the most important thing to know about the last hundred years of German history.
...like so many genre-pushers before it, Schattenfroh tests the boundaries of our readerly masochism with a predatory relentlessness, creating a reading experience that, for long stretches, can feel purely theoretical. At the same time, once we’ve gotten over our initial frustration with Lentz’s narrative, the sensation of wandering through its crumbling architecture begins to make a certain amount of sense ... One of the strange and wonderful things about Schattenfroh is the way that it occasionally seems to move us even beyond our usual novel-reader’s need for consistency, whether narrative or symbolic, and into a mode of reading that feels more granular and expansive ... The interesting thing, however, is that the further we read in the book, the more it begins to seem that figuring out its plot—or, for that matter, the constellation of characters surrounding Nobody, from the Kafkaesque Father to the menacing Frightbearing Society—isn’t really the point ... it moves relentlessly forward, telling and retelling with such uncompromising vitality that it leaves us feeling not necessarily terrified, but uncomfortable with our solutions, which we now cannot help but see are not really solutions at all but only stopgaps, scaffolding, sketches for some other work in progress.
Enveloped in a mind-bending fractal of Renaissance art, eschatology, and Germanic history, Lentz’s Schattenfroh teeters between brilliance and inscrutability. In his introduction to an English audience, German author and musician Michael Lentz showcases his erudition and presents readers with an intoxicating riddle to solve. Translated by Max Lawton, this surrealist work draws readers into a journey of metaphysical proportions, pushing the boundaries of linguistics and narrative ... Despite its panoptical narrative and clever constructs, its complexity comes at a cost. The narrative becomes constipated at times due to its endlessly referential and self-reflexive theatrics, including scrambled names, anagrams, and frequent interruptions that substitute mental gymnastics for clarity ... It’s a novel that demands patience, multidisciplinary comprehension, and an openness to grappling with Lentz’s experimental devices. Just as the end of the novel returns to its beginning, readers seeking to grasp its depths must reread it, peeling back each layer with every pass. It could very well be a century-defining novel or remain cherished solely by a targeted niche willing to lose themselves in its shadows—only time will tell.
Arcane and delirious ... The teeming narrative compiles Boschean visions of damnation, Nobody’s family history, biblical apocrypha, folk tales, and much more, including an extended description of printing technologies both real and imagined. Along the way, Lentz takes readers on a deep exploration of the relationship between art, language, suffering, and redemption. For those willing to go the distance, this monumental and taxing work offers rich rewards.
