Why We Took the Car

by Wolfgang Herrndorf

Other authorsTim Mohr (Translator)
Ebook, 2014

Description

Mike Klingenberg is a troubled fourteen-year-old from a disfunctional family in Berlin who thinks of himself as boring, so when a Russian juvenile delinquent called Tschick begins to pay attention to him and include Mike in his criminal activities, he is excited--until those activities lead to disaster on the autobahn.

Publication

Arthur A. Levine Books (2014), 261 pages

Media reviews

I was eating breakfast in a hotel, reading a book, when the German illustrator Axel Scheffler (of Gruffalo fame) sat down opposite me. "Do you know about Herrndorf?" he asked. I shook my head. "He got cancer," he said. "Wrote a blog about it. Died." "How sad," I said. "Killed himself," said
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Scheffler. He had my full attention now. "Shot himself." Pause. "In the head."

He'd asked about Herrndorf because he'd seen I was reading the American-English translation of Herrndorf's Tschick, with the English title Why We Took the Car. I'd assumed "Tschick" to be the equivalent of our "Twoc" (Taking Without Owner's Consent), but it turned out it was short for Tschichatschow, the name of one of the two teenage-boy protagonists.

I have been irregularly reviewing children's books for the Guardian for more than 10 years and, if memory serves – with the exception of Tove Jansson's Moomin books – this is the first book I've read in translation for review. The lack of translated children's (in this case Young Adult) fiction is our loss. Fellow German Cornelia Funke aside, I am hard-pressed to think of other contemporary foreign children's authors available in English (though I know the Pushkin imprint is trying to redress this). Tim Mohr has done an excellent job with Why We Took the Car. Its American stoops and faucets and pants for trousers mixed with euros and kilometres-an-hour make for an interesting hybrid.

The story seems a simple one – two 14-year-olds sort of borrow a car – but the execution is beautiful. From the outset, it is clear that Mike is a square peg in a round hole. At school he is aloof and seemingly disconnected. At home, he has to deal with an alcoholic mother and a father who appears to be having a rather obvious affair.

Mike's crazy about Tatiana, a girl in his class, but is one of the few classmates who doesn't get invited to her party. He has done an amazing pencil drawing of Beyoncé for her but ends up tearing it to pieces. Tschick – the new Russian kid at school, who sometimes turns up reeking of booze – insists that they drive to Tatiana's house and give her the reconstituted gift. They arrive in a beaten-up old Lada that Tschick sometimes uses, borrowing it without permission from the street but always bringing it back. Until now. Until the road trip.

For much of the time, little happens. There are no big police chases (except for one involving a bicycle) and none of the more obvious rites of passage. But they do meet some interesting people in interesting places and, because it's seen through Mike's eyes, not too much is explained. Are they at some sort of religious community now? Is this scene set in a disused quarry? How and why did this girl get here?

This adds a very real, yet, at the same time, surreal edge to proceedings. In the same way that Frank McCourt's memoir Angela's Ashes related events as they were experienced at the time, with little, if any, adult reflection, we watch events unfold as Mike perceives them. The result is insightful and funny.

After finishing Why We Took the Car, I investigated Scheffler's breakfast revelations. Sadly, they were true. Diagnosed in 2010 (the year this book was originally published), Herrndorf shot himself in August 2013. Apparently, one of the first things he did after being told he had cancer was get himself a gun. He said it was his link to reality and his exit strategy. His was an extraordinary mind.
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3 more
Deze hilarische roman, over twee Berlijnse tieners die met een gestolen auto door Oost-Duitsland crossen, is om twee redenen opmerkelijk. Herrndorf, dertig jaar ouder dan zijn jeugdige hoofdpersonen, heeft zich opvallend goed verplaatst in hun denkwereld en taal.
Herrndorf zet uitermate geloofwaardig de gedachtenwereld van veertienjarigen neer, zonder te vervallen in het overmatig gebruik van jeugdtaal of grofheid. Zijn stijl is fris en mede door de korte hoofdstukken heeft het boek veel vaart. Tsjik heeft een hoog in-één-ruk-uitgelezen-gehalte. Ouders,
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tv en leraren hameren erop dat het een verrotte wereld is. Belangrijkste conclusie die de jongens na de dollemansrit trekken: misschien is 99 procent van de mensheid wel slecht, maar zij kwamen alleen die ene procent tegen die deugde. Na 255 pagina’s is het gedaan. Aan de ene kant jammer dat het boek uit is, aan de andere kant is het natuurlijk een geweldig compliment als men langer met Maik en Tsjik op reis had gewild.
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User reviews

LibraryThing member Larou
Until not all that long ago, there were basically only two kinds of German-language fiction being published – prettty much every released book fell either into the category of very cerebral, highly modernistic literary fiction, or that of trashy, iredeemably bad pulp, with all the huge middle
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ground between the two extremes being covered by translated books, mostly (and rather unsurprisingly) from the United States. This has somewhat changed over recent years, and these days you can find German genre authors who write for readers with more than the minimum intelligence required to decipher a text, and litfic authors to whom the concept of reading for enjoyment is not utterly alien. And sometimes you get a novel like Tschick (which would have been impossible thirty years ago) that is undoubtedly literary fiction but also is insanely fun to read, enjoyable on all kinds of levels, whether it’s analysis of structure and imagery or or whether it’s being swept away by a ripping good yarn.

The main reason for Tschick’s success (artistically as well as commercially – the novel was a bestseller in Germany) lies, I think, in its narrative voice, that of fourteen year old Maik who relates events from a first person view. Maik is your average awkward teenager, thinks of himself as boring and is in love with a girl from his class who barely knows that he exists. But then a new guy is introduced, Tschick, the son of Russian immigrants and very much a social outsider. Rather without intending to, Maik slides into a friendship with Tschick who one day stands at his door with a stolen car, and before Maik quite knows what is happening, the two of them are on their towards Wallachia where supposedly Tschick’s grandfather lives.

What then follows is a riff on simultaneously road movie, Bildungsroman and quest romance, a wild and hugely entertaining ride through Eastern Germany in the course of which encounter all sorts of bizarre characters while discovering both themselves and each other. It is a very hard thing to do, but Wolfgang Herrndorf manages to exactly hit the note of a fourteen-year old’s voice, giving his narrator just enough jargon and attitude to make him sound his age, but never so much as to make it come across as obtrusive and unconvincing. The novel is funny without being forced, touching without being sentimental, and while the story unfolds in what is quite recognisably present-day Germany it is never simply realistic (at least not in the sense of depicting things “just as they are” as realism is still most commonly understood). The narrative often has a dreamlike feel about it, sometimes peaking into the outright surreal, but it is always somewhat larger than life, as if common reality was not quite sufficient to hold Maik, Tschick and the people they encounter on their trip.

And while Wolfgang Herrndorf does not gloss over the bleakness of the East German Maik and Tschick travers in their stolen car, and does not serve the reader a facile happy ending, when all is said done, Tschick is not only a very funy and highly entertaining novel, but also a rather hopeful one; summarised neatly by the narrator at the end when he reflects that he has always been told how people are bad, and even though this might be true of 99% of everyone, he and Tschick on their journey enountered almost exclusively the one percent that was not bad. There is some melancholy in this, but also no small amount of optimism and I’d wager most readers will close this novel with a smile on their face and think back on it fondly.
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LibraryThing member Coffeehag
This book is great fun! The fourteen-year-old protagonist, Maik, has the time of his life with "Tschick," the new Russian kid from school, when the latter convinces him to take a real summer vacation with him in a stolen car while Maik's parents are away. At first, Tschick is just a silent
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individual, who brings an unconventional element to the classroom, and no one manages to get to know him. Maik is more concerned with his utter disappointment that the girl he has a crush on didn’t invite him to her birthday party after he’d spent weeks drawing a picture of Beyoncé to give her. He believes he wasn’t invited because he’s just too boring. But, on the day summer vacation begins, Tschick seeks out Maik, and then keeps turning up, first on a dilapidated women’s bike and then in a stolen Lada. Tschick and Maik embark on an adventure that is anything but boring. This coming-of-age novel has lots of twists and turns, and lot lots of hilarity. I highly recommend it.
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LibraryThing member thorold
Fourteen-year-old Berlin schoolboy Maik and his Russian-born classmate Tschick find themselves left at a loose end in the summer holidays. Maik's middle-class parents are too busy with their own concerns to worry about their son, whilst Tschick only seems to have his dodgy elder brother as family
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support. In a "borrowed" Lada, they set off to drive to Wallachia to find Tschick's grandfather. Unfortunately, they omitted to take a map, and they haven't "done" Germany yet in their school geography lessons, and finding Wallachia doesn't prove to be all that easy.

This is a very funny book, but the joke is exactly the same one as in Catcher in the rye, Adrian Mole, and (nearer to home) Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. -- we are looking at the world of adults from the peculiar perspective of an alienated teenage boy, who is (of course) really just an adult novelist using his disguise as a first-person narrator to poke fun at his contemporaries. Herrndorf does it very well, and adds some 21st century Berlin detail to the usual mix, with references among much else to asylum-seekers, racism, open-cast mining, industrial agriculture, computer games, Beyoncé, a left-over old Nazi (or possibly Communist) and a very discreetly smuggled-in LGBT plotline. Although it is a kind of coming-of-age novel, it always feels more irresponsible and subversive than didactic. I'm not really a fan of "YA" books, but I can see that if I were, this would have a good chance of becoming a favourite.
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Language

Original publication date

2010-09-17

Other editions

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