RAINALD GOETZ:
RAVE

Author: Rainald Goetz
Published by
Fitzcarraldo Editions
English
264 pages
13 × 19.5 cm
Softcover
ISBN 9781913097196

Price: 78 lei


‘Meet girls. Take drugs. Listen to music.’ In Rave, cult German novelist Rainald Goetz takes a headlong dive into nineties techno culture. From the cathartic release on the dance floor to the intense conversations in corners of nightclubs and the after-parties in the light of dawn, this exhilarating, fragmentary novel captures the feeling of debauchery from within. Dazzling and intimate, Rave is an unapologetic embrace of nightlife from an author unafraid to lose himself in the subject of his work.

‘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

‘Goetz employs a digressive quantity of scenes, within which his insights about dance music culture remain extraordinarily sharp [...] Rave distills a specific time in the mid-90s when the subculture had become an industry. Goetz’s respect for dance music lies not in how his characters occupy or regard it, but in the flux of the novel’s mercurial structure...Beyond his admiration for craft, he is touching as a witness to our helpless need to connect [...] In an extraordinary year, [...] the experience of reading Rave is a cruel suspension between agony and ecstasy.’
— WIRE

‘To sample an old saying: if you can remember the nineties, you weren’t there. Rainald Goetz was there, and found a form in which to summon the sensations and sounds, the highs and the bass, of techno culture. This is a classic cut from a fabled era that will enrich the mix of today’s rave culture – and fills in the memory hole for some of us old-timers’
— McKenzie Wark, author of The Beach Beneath the Street