Jakob Arjouni - One Man One Murder
No Exit Press Pbk £4.99
Arjouni's novel, based in Frankfurt, is related in a chatty first person narrative style which nails you to the page.
Turkish PI Kemal Kayankaya is hired to look for Manual Weidenbusch's girlfriend. She's Thai, an illegal immigrant, who danced naked on stage in a club called the Lady Bump in the Eros Centre, and now she's been kidnapped.
Kayankaya starts with the owners of the club and the German Immigration officials, and soon discovers that other asylum seekers are going missing.
The character of Kemal Kayankaya is a stroke of genius, as it allows Arjouni to explore the problems of racism as experienced on a day to day basis by ethnic minorities. Kayankaya himself is not an immigrant, but a card carrying German whose parentage happened to be Turkish. The result is a character who attracts flak, and who is quite capable of returning it. If you make a racist allusion Kayankaya will at the very least ruffle your feathers. If you persist after that the odds are that Kayankaya will become violent and you will learn to watch your mouth.
Not being a German speaker, it is difficult to comment on the translation. But this edition, translated by Anselm Hollo, reads like it was written in the English language.
Racism is used throughout the book as a metaphor to explore and describe the problems of contemporary Germany. This is undoubtedly the book of the month for me, if not the book of the year. I can't think of anyone writing in England at the present time who could produce anything as exciting, modern, or politically astute as this. Gimme more.
John Baker
