tschick

tschick
By Wolfgang Herrndorf
Published 2010
English title: Why We Took the Car

Why I chose this book:
My husband picked this up when we were in Berlin this past summer, and urged me to read it after he finished it. His recommendations have not failed me yet (Elena Ferrante and Jonathan Franzen among them), and this is no exception.

Review

An emotional, thought-provoking road-trip novel that kept me up until the wee hours of the morning.

When I finished tschick at one in the morning, I was sorely tempted to wake up my husband so we could talk about it - my mind kept turning it over and over. On the surface, it's a story about a road trip in a stolen car. Tschick has "borrowed" a car (he fully intends to return it), and urges Maik (the narrator) to drive with him to visit a relative in "the boonies." Without really knowing why, Maik agrees. Neither of them knows what to do with themselves after school ends; their parents are absent and they are excluded by their classmates. Although they are not friends at first, the road trip forms an unbreakable bond between them. At it's core, tschick is an honest account of the uncertainty of the teenage years and the impact that another person can have on one.

I think what makes this book so easy to lose oneself in is that raw admission of uncertainty, uncertainty about what one's future holds, who one is, and the purpose of anything. His time with Tschick causes Maik to reevaluate how he presents himself to the world; he gains a confidence in himself that was never fostered at home or in school before.  The original title, tschick, puts the reader's focus on the character of that name, encouraging you to trace the effect that Tschick has on Maik. If you are looking for this book in English, it goes by the title Why We Took the Car, which I think is a mistake. That leads the reader to focus on the act of stealing the car for an epic joyride, and the book is so much richer than that.