Die Benennung der Tiere

In “Die Benennung der Tiere (The Naming of Animals)”, Leon Engler takes a narrative risk: An overweight food-tester slips on a slice of pork liverwurst and ends up helpless on the subway tracks. He is taken for a holy whale who must be saved so that he can spew the EU out of the sea of sadness and into a happy life. In this constellation, Engler achieves an exuberantly imaginative grotesque of happiness so funny, so peculiar, so precise in its rhythm, so consistent and so entertaining in its content that he can unload a whole wagon-load of terrible puns into the whale’s track-bed without his spectators ever losing the feeling that they are dealing with an astonishingly developed, genre-aware and assertive author’s voice.
Dimitrij Schaad