Denis Scheck, probably Germany’s most outspoken and snarkiest literary critic now Marcel Reich-Ranicki has left us, is even less happy about the German Book Prize than me. At any rate, he called awarding the Prize to Terézia Mora an “incredibly mistaken decision”, since Mora’s novel Das Ungeheuer (The Monster) was “torturous and whiny” and “the real monster in the book was the author”. Yes, German literary critics are what various angry young men and reviewer mean girls want to be when they grow up.
However, I not just like Denis Scheck, cause he can be hilariously snarky, but also because he is pretty much the only big name German literary critic who is genre-friendly. For example, he interviewed George R.R. Martin in his TV show and talked about James Tiptree Jr./Alice B. Sheldon on TV. And today, he discusses the state of the science fiction genre in Germany and elsewhere in the TV program Kulturzeit. The whole thing is well worth watching.
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I like Dennis Scheck, too, and I agree that he is probably the most genre-friendly of all German literary critics. I’m skeptical about his assessment of Mora’s new novel, but then I neither expect to agree with him all the time nor do I know what I think of Mora’s novel after I finished it (who knows, maybe I will even agree with).
I vehemently disagreed with Scheck about last year’s German Book Prize winner Ursula Krechel, which Scheck liked to the point of interviewing her in his show (in the same episode as George R.R. Martin), whereas I felt her novel was just more of the same old, same old, while Ms. Krechel came across as incredibly unlikable in that interview.