Lucy Fricke’s novel “The Festival”: Waste your later years

A 50th birthday is not the easiest day in many people’s lives, although there are certainly worse things. Having turned thirty, for example, or having your 60th or 70th birthday soon ahead of you. In any case, Jakob, the protagonist of Lucy Fricke’s novel “The Festival”, is certain that he will not celebrate his 50th.

Ellen, one of his best, long-standing friends, knows that this day is a single “abyss” for him, but who nevertheless shows up at his door with a bottle of champagne: “The thought of having led a completely mediocre life, having achieved nothing , leaving nothing behind, a life without traces. (…) He believed that at the age of fifty the course had finally been set, that nothing could change, that everything was doomed.”

Berlin economy

It’s all bad, thoughts that you can have at times, especially as a fifty-year-old in Berlin without children and living according to the rules of the Berlin economy, which is no longer what it used to be. When you start reading “The Festival” you quickly ask yourself whether you really want to read and endure the story about such a dump of grief – and yet you are quickly proven wrong.

Because Ellen, Fricke’s first-person narrator, who only appears in the novel at the beginning and end, not only does not allow herself to be deterred by Jacob’s birthday grief, but persuades him to visit the outdoor pool – and disappears. Jakob moves his tired limbs into the pool, and suddenly he discovers Inken, the woman who was his great love, next to him at the edge of the pool, but after a relationship that lasted ten years, this turned out to be a mistake.

And Jakob has barely finished a visit to the dentist, of all people, Inken’s husband, after an unsuccessful jump from the ten-count board, when she pushes him into a taxi, over which there is a dispute with another customer: Georg, Jakob’s former roommate and best friend with whom he wanted to conquer the film world together.

There are no coincidences

What a coincidence, which of course is no more a coincidence than the encounter with Inken and the subsequent ones with two other women from Jakob’s life, a motherly friend twenty years older than him and a sandbox friend. Ellen had thought of something, knowing that her friend would be defensive, and her plan worked: encounter after encounter, Jacob’s attitude towards his mediocre life changed without leaving a trace. There was something, there’s still something going on.

At first you feel a bit like you’re in one of those always decidedly cheerful German films from the nineties and noughties, and yet Fricke’s script for Jakob is an original one: a special kind of retrospective review, told quickly and simply, sometimes funny, sometimes with due seriousness.

Of course, sometimes you cringe when Jakob, Georg, Inken and the others offer somewhat clichéd, everyday insights (the fantastic nineties that ended with 9/11, the “big, wild, world-embracing life” of the twenties). – up to thirty-year-olds, the second youth with “stock package, belly fat, early arthrosis”), or “gray fathers with” in the gentrified Lausitzer Platz “Children with behavioral problems” frolic in front of the ice cream parlors and coffee roasters instead of the video stores and Internet clubs.

And yet Fricke’s novel about the hardships of aging is largely unembarrassing; it never slips into the tone of magazine-like self-awareness, self-care or advice texts. The eponymous festival ultimately has a happy ending. If you still have your 50th birthday ahead of you, you can hope after reading this: it could be one of the best days of your life.