As a teenager, Luke Wilkins was a TV star, but today he is looking for the unvarnished self behind his roles in films

Luke Wilkins was once widely known as Christian Toppe in the ARD soap opera "Forbidden Love", adored by whole angelic hordes of young girls. He must now free himself from this self as an author in order to find his true self behind the mask of the actor. The book thus becomes a drama of unleashing, whose forefather is Arthur Rimbaud: "The poet turns himself into a seer through a long, immense and well-considered unregulation of all the senses." Not everything in this novel is well-considered, but the unregulation and violation of rules is methodical and offers an open flank to criticism.

First, the author radically stages his toxic masculinity. As the "devil's violinist" in Biel, where he is attending the literature institute, he welcomes his first student, Ruth. In her, as in all women, he sees not only flesh. But a lot of flesh. Like a brutal "tiger," he wants to "attack her from behind," only to reveal his softie side in the next sentence: "What a glittering relationship lies before us like a freshly fallen blanket of snow."

In order to free her botched violin technique, he thinks he would first have to "unleash her sexuality" and become a violin case of pure lust himself: "The snake around the Asclepius staff of her musicality is wrongly wound."

Of course, his male view of her is also wrong. Language is on a rollercoaster with his hormones, and in the shadow of the young girl's blossoms he is already picking stylistic flourishes in unrestrained self-enthusiasm: "Look how I, who have been burning up in deepest desire for you for thousands of years, am crumbling into snow-white ash, falling into lily spray, into milk, into creamy emptiness from the inside of the cosmic lily."

The author knows, of course, that this exuberance is not acceptable, just as the erotic fury of a young white man is not. Nevertheless, he not only breaks the rules of decency but also all the prevailing rules of style, and the language becomes more and more exuberant.

In what is probably the most virtuosic passage, Luke Wilkins superimposes three scenes in page-long sentences: While in front of him in a second-hand shop the beautiful Leila bares her breasts and robs him of his innocence, the father in the cinema - with counter cuts to an accident of the little brother in his father's car - watches a collision that ultimately means the end of his son's acting career and thus his exit from the role of the TV starlet.

Until then, he was admired not least because his feelings for his partner in the series were not fake, but real - as far as the author's literary self-portrayal is to be believed. And he did indeed have an affair with Cosma Shiva Hagen, which was again covered in all the colors of the tabloid press, since she is Nina Hagen's daughter.

No wonder the portrait of the young TV star Wilkins adorns the book cover. And inside the book you can also find a sentimental photo from the "Bravo" magazine with low-slung jeans and a belly like a Bircher-Benner grater. Perhaps the more honest and ideal cover photo would have been: trash and text in a huge discrepancy. Because the text is highly complex.

After the toxic and medial ego, the next mask appears: the theoretical ego. It quotes all the key words to refer to Georges Bataille's sacred eroticism of transgression. Then it briefly lets Michel Foucault flicker before placing itself entirely in the shadow of Klaus Theweleit, whose book "Male Fantasies" is also evoked by suggestive images: the hard-armored masculinity that once led to fascism.

Wilkins takes this into the time of #MeToo and, above all, into the frequency of the "mother radio": As such, he receives waves from the depths of the matriarchy and allows himself to be permeated by old premonitions and new technologies; he wants to become soft. But then, as a theory tank, he suddenly inserts old essays between the chapters of the novel. Among them is an essay that appeared in the NZZ in 2020 under the title "My Life as a Son and Ghost" and which, with the new title, names the thesis of the book: "The Mother Radio Frequency".

Since the violin student Ruth is ultimately the dead mother who visits or haunts her son, one can see an Oedipal entanglement in this, which refers to Freud and his theory of libido. The streams of libido are lived out with pleasure and at the same time transferred to the media, as if the author were short-circuiting the number of Freud's telephone on Berggasse in Vienna with Theweleit's cell phone in Freiburg im Breisgau. This is how sex, free jazz and frequencies meet - it is sometimes funny, sometimes complicated. But the author is repeatedly helped by the fact that he is himself a musician and performer and an expert in sound poetry, to which he dedicated a festival in Freiburg im Breisgau and Basel last autumn. Then language wins in the free flow.

But even this theoretical self, proudly parading in five interpolated essays, would have to be overcome in order to find the self that Marcel Proust had long been searching for: it is the "little boy who plays among me in the ruins" and is the only one capable of writing "my books". The boy behind the masks of the self - that is, behind the toxic man, behind the TV star and behind the theoretical self - does indeed sometimes come to light when Luke Wilkins switches to mother frequency and overdriven fragments of theory are accompanied by free jazz. Then the book takes off into intoxicating transitions where poetry and philosophy merge like watercolors.

As in Proust's "Recherche", the central mother kiss occurs. "Then she read me fairy tales and at the end she sang the old Swiss folk songs that her mother had sung to her as a child, songs in which the dark, wild heart of our people beats. The anarchic, uncivilizable heart of the Swiss. On the wings of these songs, sung by my mother's sweet voice, a kind of acoustic stream of mother's milk, I was drawn towards sleep. Just before I flew over the border to the realm of Morpheus, I felt my mother get up and give me a kiss on the lips, sealing my body in a sexual way, closing the finely spun maternal protective garment with a final knot."

In these passages, one can sense what the author's next work could be. A book that not only overcomes the pillars of TV celebrity, but throws them off completely and ventures out into the open, almost defenseless and unprotected, beyond theory and Theweleit. Unfortunately, this is "locked away" here by an afterword by the author and a very short foreword.

The editors and the author would have done well to place more trust in the actual text of the novel. But perhaps Luke Wilkins himself must first free himself from the fear that he senses as the erotic-Helvetic primal frequency in the alpine glow between the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau: "This is the most fundamental characteristic of the Swiss: being afraid of their own immeasurable revolutionary energy of love."

Luke Wilkins: On the Wings. Novel. Telegramme-Verlag 2024, Zurich. 340 pp., Fr. 36.90.