A young student attends a Viennese grammar school. The school has a great tradition. The others in his class are children of influential families. The teaching staff is careful not to mess with the parents. So a lot is possible at this school, as long as you only have the name and the money.
Tobias Rüther
Editor in the arts section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.
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But the young student, his name is Till, is rather quiet. His father, also not a man without influence, has died recently, he lives with his mother and has a great talent, but his class teacher does not like it. This class teacher is feared. Anyone who ever sat with him in class, was admonished and punished for years, fears and loves him even after school. In the parallel class there are two students that Till is interested in, especially one of the two, who seems unreachable at first. But then they become friends. And more than that. And put the order of things to the test.
A school history that plays with many classic elements of school story world literature. But the Austrian author Tonio Schachinger has turned it into an outstanding contemporary novel, "Real-Time Age". Schachinger tells it in the knowledge of the tradition in which he places himself, but at the same time he sets himself apart from it. He invents such a coherent story of today, in which Sebastian Kurz, the Ibiza video and the corona lockdown appear as well as the whole magnificent Prater Vienna, that one simply admires Schachinger for his artistry.
For his quiet, unobtrusively psychologizing tone. For the liveliness of his figures. Young Till, who is incredibly good at playing computers. His strict German teacher Dolinar, who is a victim of his own traditions and strictness, a terrible, sentimental man. Till's friend Feli, who is looking for her very own freedom, against the ambitions of her dominant, celebrity mother. Till's mother, on the other hand, who is waiting for access to her son to open somewhere, and who is so overjoyed that Feli appears in Till's life that she immediately starts smoking with the girl again.
An accurate dose of confusion
One admires Schachinger's novel for the effortlessness with which it narrates, but also for the exact dose of confusion it triggers. If you read about all the names and places that you recognize, but in some places prefer to google whether everything fits together: Favoritenstraße. Stefanie Sargnagel. Daniel Kehlmann. Schwarzenbergplatz. Schachinger has placed his own in the middle of the world of Vienna: There is a school called Marianum in Vienna, but not where it is supposed to be in the novel.
"Real-Time Age" tells four years of Till's life and runs towards the last days of the populist Kurz-Strache government – and the first lockdown of the corona pandemic. But the theme of the novel is much, much older than these contemporary phenomena. A topic that Schachinger tells anew, because it can be told again and again, as he proves, because under the ever new conditions of advancing time it must always be brought up to date with the latest state of consciousness regarding culture, technology, gender relations: how it works, growing up.