Leif Randt was once the voice of a generation, now he delivers tension at zero point

The French writer Michel Leiris once said that he fears "that literature is something like a comedy of danger." If one takes this definition, then Leif Randt's novels are something like counter-literature.

There's no danger here. The crumple zones of economic security carry the characters through life. Even in the "love interest" zones, emotions are toned down to the point of risklessness.

Five years ago, Randt published "Allegro Pastell" (Pastel) as his groundbreaking novel about a millennial attitude to life, which is already evident in the title: a bit lively, but also pastel. Nothing too daring, no excitement.

In Leif Randt's new novel, "Let's Talk About Feelings," things are even less exciting. Literature certainly hasn't produced a more boring main character in a long time. The hero's name says it all: Marian. He's officially 41 years old, but feels considerably younger.

On a boat on Berlin's Wannsee, the son must bid farewell to his deceased mother. Her ashes are scattered into the waves. Marian reads his eulogy from a tablet he bought especially for the occasion. His mother was a model and fashion icon, his father a former anchor for ARD's "Tagesthemen." In his retirement, he now dabbles in amazingly successful TikTok. He has a vacation home in Tenerife and has fathered two more children with his second wife: Teda is a DJ who travels the world for her sets, and her brother Colin is active in the Charlottenburg chapter of the governing party Progress '16, a kind of SPD.

When it comes to politics, Leif Randt's novel features gentle shifts in reality. It's almost as if he needs to protect himself against the intrusion of real life into the self-created cosmos of illusory worlds. Marian is, so to speak, the caretaker of these illusory worlds. Although the novel is not told from a first-person perspective, the reader is forced into a world of thought affected by surfaces.

As a boutique owner, Marian suffers from a perhaps not dangerous, but nevertheless irritating "millennial" distinction syndrome that glorifies itself as style. He judges the people around him by what they wear. And so, over the three hundred pages of the novel, one witnesses a stream of thoughts that strings together label names and indulges in excessive fashion descriptions.

From the "Heat-Tech winter set by Alberta," the collection ranges from "astonishingly tight pants by Monica Spicer" and "Silent Mustache T-shirts with rather successful back prints" to "shiny Abeltoyago fleece." High school student Marian's precocious fashion sense is described as follows: "He wore wooden chains around his neck and key chains on low-slung nylon pants. The fact that he didn't wear baggy jeans, but exclusively baggy pants made of other materials, was a small twist with a big impact."

With Leif Randt, you struggle through wardrobes that supposedly contain the essence of humanity, but in truth, you search in vain for that, too. Randt is the master of an artificiality in which, with a bit of will, you can recognize satire. Or, unfortunately, not. And then, despite its masterfully composed images, "Let's Talk About Feelings" is rather banal.

Things aren't exactly going well at the "Kenting Beach" boutique, and because they also have counterfeit brands in the store via the pirate label Pandabuy, they're a bit worried about being sued. It's no big deal for Marian; he's fairly financially secure. He leads a life at a normal level of excitement. The ended relationship with Franca, who is already having a child with another man, who will be named Carmen Caribu Schmitt, is still haunting him a bit.

There's potential for a relationship with doctor Selin ("lead-gray jacket with extra-long sleeves"), but things fizzle out. Copywriter Piet ("loose shorts made of sturdy jersey, a white baseball cap, and a green silk shirt") and accountant Sergej from Kenting Beach are Marian's friends. When they ask him how he's doing after his mother's death, he replies: "Normal."

In this cybernetic state of bliss, which requires no immediate movement, a hero feels most at home, whose midlife crisis culminates in the purchase of a colorful designer kitchen. "An elegant clown is cooking in these rooms," Marian's mother just managed to say.

Throughout the novel, one misses the distanced view of the misery of a safe contentment, which then even takes on a political dimension. Leif Randt's main character takes the side of the apolitical and thinks adventurous things like this: "Such attention to detail as that of the expressive fashion kids in China was perhaps only possible when one was not even allowed to comment on social issues, and thus these paralyzed less capacity."

What Leif Randt is really good at is shifting his novelistic scenarios into an airtight void. His way of exaggerating reality has something affirming about it, yet can also be seen as a critique of the situation. This tipping point is perhaps the most entertaining aspect of "Let's Talk About Feelings" for long stretches, but it's also tiring.

Towards the end of the novel, there's actually something resembling romance , which can be read as a meta-commentary on what's happened so far. Marian falls in love with a young filmmaker named Kuba. She's just finished shooting a film called "Foxtown," in which two friends travel across Europe in a camper van, traveling from outlet center to outlet center.

"In a way, it's also a fashion film. I think you might like it," says Kuba. Unfortunately, the film about the two fashion fetishists didn't fare so well in the hip city magazine "BerlinHasBeen." "Hollow in the middle," was the headline of the review. "Where Marian had felt a beautiful, universal melancholy and had felt very close to the sympathetic characters, antipathy and a leaden powerlessness had apparently spread within the critic, and that, Marian thought, was, of course, the critic's problem, not the film's." Film and book: That's how it is.

Leif Randt: Let's Talk About Feelings. Novel. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2025. 320 pp., CHF 35.90.