Rave by Rainald Goetz
Review by Elodie Barnes
Goetz’s landmark 1998 novel set in the Berlin club scene comes alive in a new translation by Adrian Nathan West
Early on in Rave, the narrator poses a question — ‘How would a text about our lives have to sound?’ It’s a question that author Rainald Goetz sets out to answer in this, the first volume of Heute Morgen, a sweeping, ambitious five-part work on 1990s pop culture in novel form. First published in Germany in 1998, it is the result of Goetz’s intense collaboration with major figures from the early techno scene, such as Sven Väth and DJ Westbam. The tagline of ‘Meet girls. Take drugs. Listen to music’ simply scratches the surface of this complex, layered narrative that is now superbly translated by Adrian Nathan West.
Rave is split into three sections, the cohesiveness supplied by the theme and the narrator. The narrative itself, though, is fragmentary: each segment reads like a flash of the strobe lights, a scratch on the turntables. The whole thing is a sensory experience akin to a club soundtrack — Goetz’s attempt to recreate, in book form, the intense, pulsing, all-encompassing experience of a night (or several) on a techno scene that shifts from Berlin to Ibiza and back again. There is no distance here, between the writer and his subject. Goetz was there. It’s no coincidence that the narrator is also called Rainald. This immediacy means that there is also very little between the subject and the reader, and the novel is at time as exhausting and disorientating as the non-stop club scene it depicts.
There is no real storyline. The wide cast of characters, even Rainald himself, are never pinned down or really developed. There are fleeting moments of intimacy between them, caught in the dark corner of a club or in the tired lull of five a.m., but even these are secondary to the music and the night, and the rhythms that syncopate between them.
Unlike some, Goetz does not portray techno as “counter-culture”. Nor does he try and make it “mass culture”; instead, it’s a way of being that delves right down to the heartbeat. The narrative, along with West’s translation, perfectly captures the almost religious-like fervour that permeated the clubs. Enjoyment is not part of it, but there is a strong sense of being driven. Some revealing moments hint at the personal toll of living this way: when there was no stopping even when the body was in spasm, throwing up at dawn on a grass verge; when the realisation hits that ‘you’ve survived the big adventure of the night’, and ‘[you] sense the beating of the heart-lung machine pumping softly…gratitude…’. The body keeps going like the music.
While there is a tacit acknowledgement that it cannot always be this way, there is also an acknowledgement that the narrator ‘simply cannot get tired of this’. An undercurrent of uncertainty runs through the splintered text, reflecting not only this personal ambiguity but mirroring Berlin itself at the time; the city was desperately seeking a new normal after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a normal driven by the desire for unity and the reality of still-deep divisions.
There are objectionable moments in the text, too, moments of casual misogyny and cruelty that somehow rankle and seem out of place even within a novel designed to be raw. A short, sarcastic tirade against women in politics is later followed by the narrator’s plans for a ‘confessional child-sex project…child sex for all’. Given the lack of characterisation throughout the novel, it hardly seems necessary for our understanding of the narrator, and comes across as gratuitous at worst, the product of a weird acid trip at best. These instances unsettle the reader still further, leaving us wondering who Rainald really is. In the slippery world of drugs and clubs, there is not much to hold on to.
A kind of desperate determination ends the book. The invoice for living so wildly has finally come in: ‘We’ve let ourselves go to shit. We didn’t expect we’d ever get the bill for all that’, but there is a determination to carry on regardless. Goetz is clear that this is a way of life, not just for the weekends. Likewise, Rave is an all-consuming experience. It’s a challenging read. For anyone who was there, though, it will most likely be worth it.
Rave by Rainald Goetz is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions on 1st July 2020