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language: German
country: Germany
year: 2013
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy, erotica
dates read: 14.11.25-15.11.25
Tilman Janus’s Lustvoller Liebeszauber (Lustful Love-magic) is a train wreck, as I expected it would be. it follows Mateo, a Chilean-German guy whose boyfriend has just died tragically in a car accident, as he goes to Scotland for a bus tour of the Highlands in an effort to escape his memories of Simon so he can figure out how to go on with his life.
I expected this would be a train wreck because the blurb speaks of “[Celtic magicians]” guiding Mateo to the Otherworld. the first thing Mateo does when he arrives in Scotland is watch some bagpipers walking through Edinburgh and imagine (at least he doesn’t “wonder” — it is acknowledged on some level as a fantasy) “dass die schottischen Männer unter ihren Kilts wirklich nichts weiter anhätten. So jedenfalls sollte die Originalkleidung seit Jahrhunderten sein” [that Scottish men really wore nothing else under their kilts. That was how the original outfit had been hundreds of years ago, anyway]. it is mildly refreshing that this is described as a “grausige Vorstellung” (grim imagining), but this is only because Mateo is still grieving, not because there is any interrogation of colonial stereotypes of Gaelic culture. (the bus tour guide is of course named “Bruce MacRyan”; the titular sorcerers (there are actually two) are named “Beathan” — the only indication of Scottish Gaels’ presence in the novel — and “Tamlane”.) when they leave Edinburgh they’re apparently immediately in the Highlands. lol.
a closely related problem is that Mateo’s information about the Otherworld comes directly and explicitly from Wikipedia — and this, indeed, appears to be the extent of Janus’s knowledge of “Celtic mythology”. while wading naked into Loch Ness (where, btw, we learn that the Loch Ness monster is, like, a Real Celtic Mythological Creature) Mateo falls into a hole and, lo and behold, enters the Otherworld. here he learns that his beloved Simon has actually been claimed by the fairy king “Ahearn”; guided by Tamlane — whose lover is also in the sexual service of the fairy king — he sets out to rescue Simon, which turns out to be a “Tam Lin” deal but instead of wrapping him in a cloak he’s supposed to hold Simon so close that their dicks touch.
the biggest problem, though, is the novel’s uncritical reproduction of the relegation of the Gaelic world — extended here to encompass Scotland as a whole — to the realm of fantasy:
Ich zum Beispiel kann zwischen den Welten wechseln, wenn es einen Grund dafür gibt. In Schottland wirst du vielen Wesen begegnen, die aus unserer Welt kommen, aber du wirst es nicht bemerken.
[I for example can switch between worlds, when there’s a reason for it. In Scotland you will find many beings who come from our world, but you won’t notice it.]
just straight-up “anyone you meet in Scotland (which is made up of Edinburgh, maybe Glasgow, and the Highlands) could be a fairy”. no real people here in this magical land where all the men are muscle-bound Manly men who wear nothing under their kilts. the only indication of Gaelic culture as a living part of the contemporary, real world is an old man (of course) on the bus tour named “Beathan”; even the fairy king is described as speaking Old Gaelic (Altgälisch), rather than the modern language, during the “Lughnasadh” ceremony that Mateo interrupts to try to retrieve Simon.
aside from these ideological problems, there is a core issue with the narrative: if King Ahearn lives at Loch Ness, how did he arrange for Simon to be hit by a car (so he would die in the human world) and then transported (bodily? spiritually?) to Scotland? how the fuck did he even find out Simon existed?
setting this aside, however, the book does make an interesting narrative move, which is that Mateo does not, in fact, literally rescue Simon: he retrieves Simon’s soul, which then is placed into the body of Bruce the tour guide. we are assured that this is not a problem, because Bruce also was mourning his boyfriend who died in Ireland and his soul has happily gone off to the Otherworld there to be with his own lost love. there is no mention of the possibility that Bruce might have had friends and family, or of the fact that Simon also has living family members who had previously been close to both Simon and Mateo and who might be a little nonplussed to find Mateo with a man who — by magic — looks extremely similar if not identical to Simon, whose funeral they attended. frankly, when Bruce-Simon tells Mateo “Jedenfalls müssen wir uns um ihn keine Sorgen machen” [Anyway we musn’t worry ourselves about him] it felt less like reassurance and more like a warning — to the reader if not to Mateo. don’t think too hard about this.
the result is a strange, short novel, oddly light on actual sex — Mateo jacks off a bunch, and there are some memories of past sex, but it was definitely, I would say, a change of pace from the previous Bruno Gmünder books I’ve read.
moods: adventurous, horny, reflective