Kahn, Knaben, Schnelle Fahrt

After the spectacular excursions of the previous novels into the visual worlds of Caravaggio and de Sade, Christoph Geiser returns to his autobiographical material in 1995 and writes "Kahn, Knaben schnelle Fahrt," his coming-of-age novel, his very personal "éducation sentimentale." In his mother's new apartment, a home that is no longer his, the narrator encounters himself as a child: in a photograph of a 14-year-old with large, protruding ears and a stubbornly disturbed gaze. He no longer remembers how this portrait came to be. But he recalls the boy he was back then: a helpless outsider with philosophical inclinations and sexual anxieties, a child with the fixed idea of entering a monastery to escape his family. This journey to the monastery, which his father ultimately drove him to, albeit reluctantly, becomes the focal point and turning point of the story. From the distance of thirty years, the narrator retraces that journey, accompanies his alter ego once more to the monastery, and invents a new biography for the child he was. With tender irony, he attempts to break through the boy's reticence, to be both mentor and Mephisto, leading him away from mothers and playfully introducing him to sexuality and eroticism.