Zeer onderhoudende crimi. Ik heb deze - zoals alle Duitstalige romans- gelezen in het duits om ook te kunnen genieten van deze mooie taal. Er zit een pak humor en sarcasme in dit verhaal. De meerwaarde zit hem voor mij steeds in de geloofwaardigheid van de personages, de gebeurtenissen en karakterschetsing. Ik denk dat ik houd van de nuchterheid waarmee dit boek geschreven is. Dat is iets wat ik terugvind in alle duitse romans uit mijn lijst. Of het nu chicklit of detective betreft.....niet te ver gezochte, realistische verzinsels. ( )

This is a very clever murder mystery, written from an unusual and witty authorial viewpoint. The semi-omniscient narrator never identifies or explains himself, yet seems to know some things, and not know other things, and becomes a character in himself. He informs us early in the book that specific terrible things will happen, and when, and they do. This in no way detracts from the pleasures of walking through the poses and plans of the evil Senator, the rich developer and the scheming thugs. The setting is Vienna. The context is city politics, an abortion clinic, and a former police detective who has fallen in life to the status of a mere chauffeur to a rich family's four year old child. When bad things happen to his young charge he takes it upon himself to descend into the muck, figuratively and literally, and sort it all out. The plot is not unusual, although suitably gruesome and nauseating, but the contemporary Austrian cultural context and the narrative voice make this very much worth a read. ( )

What fun, what style, made me laugh out loud.
And I liked how the narrator takes the reader by the hand (leading/misleading). Will try to read the series from the beginning in German since the translation indicates a few Austrian jokes/insights worth savouring. ( )

Mein erster Brenner.
Also den Schreibstil fand ich schon sehr gewöhnungsbedürftig, ich habe mich reingelesen und auch einige schöne Stellen gefunden. Die Geschichte ist ganz nett, also nett nett :-)Ehemaliger Polizist als Chauffeur, der Mädchen verliert und als Kettenreaktion fallen Beteiligte und Unbeteiligte tot um. Aber etwas nervig fand ich es schon. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

I'm never a good person to listen to when it comes to crime novels, because I'm not really much of a fan of the genre; and then when it comes to Wolf Haas' Brenner and God, the English debut of what is apparently a hugely popular series in Europe, there's an additional problem, which is that the translation by Annie Janusch sounds very, very strange, and I couldn't tell whether this was being done on purpose or not. I mean, the story is serviceable enough, the tale of a stressed-out former detective who takes a job as a chauffeur for the rich and famous, and who gets reluctantly pulled back into crime-fighting when a little girl he was in charge of gets kidnapped right under his nose; but I'm not sure if it's that Haas' original version was written in some hyper-stylized, Denis-Johnson-style German version of noir prose, but the English version calls undue attention to its own sentence structure in nearly every paragraph, and not in the good way either, coming across at many times as if you were at DisneyWorld and listening to a foreign visitor comically attempt to ask directions to Space Mountain. When added to my natural disinterest in crime novels to begin with, the whole thing feels like I can't really do much service to this novel as a critic, so I'm just giving it a middle-of-the-road score today and moving on.

Out of 10: 7.5 ( )