“Why We Took the Car” by Wolfgang Herrndorf
This is one of the funniest books that I’ve ever read. It’s about two idiot teenagers, one is a loser another one is a foreign student from Russia, spending a summer holiday together doing some misadventure.
The book starts at around the 3/4 mark of the story, where it gets so messed up and it only provides few clues to what has actually happened: An accident, presumably a car accident in the autobahn, with the narrator and protagonist – Mike Klingenberg (the loser) – then lost consciousness in a police station and wakes up in the hospital.
But then, before the story continues any further, the book takes us back to school in their hometown Berlin where it all started before the summer holiday. The first few chapters are filled with all the eccentric characters in the everyday German life, from the teachers, to his nut job schoolmates, to Mike’s crush Tatiana (who is obsessed with Beyonce), to this particular weird new student from Russia nicknamed Tschick, who looked more like a Mongolian, has an anti-social tendencies, and almost always come to school already drunk.
It was with Tschick that Mike eventually breaks out from his boring personality and boring life, and do some stupid adventures together. One particular act is stealing, nay, borrowing, a f***ed up Lada car, drive it to a supposedly made up place that Tschick swore it exist (it was in Romania), and to go there without a map nor a compass but only with a random sense of direction, where they don’t know where they are most of the time. What could possibly go wrong? The Richard Clayderman cassette in particular is a very nice, psychotic, touch throughout the narrative.
The book has a good flow of writing, quick and witty, broken down into 49 short chapters that makes it easy to read. It is narrated in a laid back style of talking, by Mike that sees almost everything from a sarcastic teenager point of view, and might just have a little sociopathic tendencies or mild autism or whatever, judging from the way he doesn’t really understand people’s reactions towards his antics.
The book is also filled with bizarre conversations during the trip, between the 2 clueless teenagers that still have a whole life ahead of them, who are afraid of the future but simultaneously not bothered about what will come, who have a vivid imagination about the world but not a single clue about their place in it. And they also have many weird encounters with people along the road, like the creepy happy family, the communist sharpshooter, the hippo with the fire extinguisher, and of course a chatty girl named Isa who has loads of crazy stories.
It’s fresh, it’s hilarious, and have an air of innocence about it, due to the fact that all this time the boys are only 14 year-old. I absolutely love it.
EDWIN SETIADI 