The Following Pages

The narrator worries that he is not being kept busy enough. The television presenter decides to become a travel writer without leaving his home. A flat is cleared out, but it never seems to become truly empty. Names that everyone seemed to have forgotten reappear. Hanna, for example, but is that certain? The guests seem to have been invited by the zeitgeist, at least that’s what their conversation sounds like. Minimal stories: forever just a page in a journal that remained empty for a long time, empty like all the other copies in the library of books not yet written. Because the two hundred pages of the journal are already printed, its pages already numbered, and according to the author, it already has a concept – a concept that is, admittedly, meant ironically, in that it is part of the game that the author plays with his characters and fictions. The traces that Jürgen Becker uncovers in his writing lead to past decades that seem to have lapsed, decades that still seem as close as the moment that has just passed. Memory, however, encounters what has disappeared; it brings to mind experiences that speak of ladder wagons, home-rolled cigarettes, domestic shoemaking, an old barn and the last coal delivery, casually, as if it everything was just everyday life. This is what The Following Pages talks about as well: ordinary and unreal daily routines in which we are involved throughout our lives.

»Each fragment contains the whole concept, never has Jürgen Becker minimised the material so much and created enigmatic-poetic force fields almost solely from the movement of language.« DIE ZEIT

»What Jürgen Becker has created out of the many subjunctive discussions and indicative descriptions is a small masterpiece.« Heinz Ludwig Arnold, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung