Author(s): Rainald Goetz; Adrian Nathan West (Translator)

Novel | Translated fiction | Western Europe | Fitzcarraldo Editions | Music

Following on his monumental examination of `the most contrary and most political, the most radical and rich, the most unstruggling decade of decades,' the 1980s in his ruthless debut novel, Insane, his analysis of RAF terrorism in Kontrolliert, and his monumental forerunner of `uncreative writing', the trilogy 1989, Buchner Prize-winner Rainald Goetz turned his critical sensibilities on 1990s pop culture in a series of five books gathered under the collective title This Morning, his great history of the present.

Rave opens the series, and is the fruit of Goetz's intense collaboration with major figures from the early electronic music scene, among them Sven Vath and DJ Westbam.  An unapologetic embrace of the nightlife under the motto `Meet girls. Take drugs.  Listen to music', this fragmentary novel attempts to capture the feel of debauchery from within while at the same time critiquing the media structures that contribute to the 'epochality' of pop culture phenomena.

Throughout the four decades of his career, Goetz has sought to dissolve the critical distance between writer and object which, in the quest for distance, actually distorts its object; in Rave he dives fully into dissolution, celebrating what is neither counter-culture nor `mass culture' in Adorno's disparaging sense, but a new way of experiencing mental processes and intimacy.

'Rainald Goetz is the most important trendsetter in German literature.' - Suddeutsche Zeitung

 'Goetz's writing is a kind of dancing. Each sentence, fragment, captures the essence of what it's like to live inside the spaces of techno music. Thoughts come and go, and return louder, later in the text, with an urgent rhythm that makes the cumulative case for the transformative power of the dance floor. This is writing of and from the body, hot, sweaty, dazed, decadent, and ultimately life-affirming.' - Julia Bell, author of The Dark Light

'Rave matches [Bernhard] with its pitch-black humour and philosophical intensity. Questions of interiority, the external world, language and meaning are opened up within its circuit of pills and beats and clubs, like a genuinely meaningful drug trip.' - Financial Times

'In Rave, Goetz makes an electrifying portrait of what happens when you dedicate your life to the night, to the bass and the rhythm, when you party nonstop and rave like there is no tomorrow. [...] What makes Rave so effective is that Goetz chronicles the tenor of rave culture's endless cycle. The reader becomes part of the weekends of excessive indulgence, the "cracked" out week after, and the intrigues that linger. [...] I often felt a contact high reading Rave' - Shane Anderson, Los Angeles Review of Books

Author Biography: Rainald Goetz, born in 1954 in Munich, studied History and Medicine in Munich and obtained a doctoral degree in both subjects. He briefly worked as a doctor, but quit this profession for the sake of literature in his early thirties. His first novel, Insane, was published in 1983. In 1998, Goetz wrote the internet diary 'Rubbish for Everyone', probably the first literary blog in Germany, with entries on the world of media and consumerism. It was published in book form in 1999 and together with Rave, Jeff Koons, Celebration and Deconspiration belongs to This Morning, his great history of the present. Goetz has been awarded numerous prizes, most notably the Georg Buchner Prize in 2015. He lives in Berlin.