»An essential chapter in the history of the Federal Republic, a swan song to the lost generation of the seventies that oscillates between melancholy and furore,« wrote Matthias Bischoff in his review of Ralf Rothmann’s 1991 debut novel in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Bull tells the story of Kai Carlsen, which takes from Berlin to Ruhr area, where the damage caused by mining is etched into the houses facades and where fathers work in the pits. This is where the quiet rebel and dashing »red light casanova« trains to be a bricklayer – and discovers a life behind life. When Kai Carlsen finds work and board with Eckhart Eberwein, a former civil engineer and operator of the Blow up, a meeting place for the subculture, the dreamer makes audacious new friends in his search for inner freedom. But the shadow of a woman and her beautiful daughter settles over their carefree parties ... Eventually, Kai Carlsen becomes a nursing assistant. At the clinic where he works, he meets an art-loving Colombian and the mysterious nurse Marleen. And he learns to live with the ordinariness of death.

Bull is a tribute to youth. Restlessly and intensely, it shares the attitude to life of a generation through the coming-of-age story of a young man who becomes a narrator because he has understood an essential aspect of life: »Time, however lifetimes it would last, was too short. It is the longing of the deceased that tugs at us, their love is what makes us and things evanescent.«

Young Light