The writer and journalist Peter von Becker is writing an all-ages children’s book. With the biblical story, the refugees of the present also come into view.
“I can do that too,” Nikita Khrushchev is said to have exclaimed in the face of an exhibition of abstract art, and this statement was as presumptuous as the belief that writing children’s books was child’s play. This applies all the more to books in the eight to eighty category, which only reach their readers if the intention to write for children and adults does not stand out in the way: Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” or “The Little Prince” by Saint-Exupéry are famous examples of this.
The writer and journalist Peter von Becker is now also trying his hand at this genre, and the fact that “Jonas Reise” as an audio book, read by Ulrich Matthes, is more convincing than the opulently illustrated print edition of the text published by Penguin only apparently speaks against von Becker’s project : to tell the biblical story of the fall of Nineveh, of Jonah and the whale in such a way that it can be related to the wars in Syria and Iraq and the misery of the refugees that was caused by it.
Book cover of «Jonas Reise».
German tongue twisters
The fact that the author succeeds in this ambitious project is due to his writing skills as well as his journalistic dexterity, which is shown, among other things, by what von Becker does not describe because it exceeds the horizon of the main character, a nine-year-old boy. He deliberately ignores the causes and course of the wars and instead describes Jonas surviving in the belly of the whale, which devours him in the Mediterranean and spits him out again on the Sicilian coast, as well as the arduous onward journey and the culture shock upon arrival in Heidelberg.
«Many German words seem like tongue twisters to Jona. But he loves them: residence permit, status recognition, insurance approval, suspension of deportation or, that was important right from the start, registering for a language course.» That’s not just funny, it’s true: Mark Twain already complained that some German words are so long that they have a perspective.
Peter von Becker is more convincing in such passages than with tried allusions to teenage jargon such as “gothic” and “megacool”. He brilliantly succeeds in what at first glance seems difficult, even impossible: the description of Jonah’s stay in the belly of the whale, which lasts three thousand years. An octopus saves his life by scaring away a shark lurking in the whale’s stomach and protectively enclosing the boy in eight arms.
Waving tentacles
The arrival in Sicily thus becomes a rebirth, and the octopus turns out to be a deus ex machina: it symbolizes literature, because Peter von Becker’s novel is a homage to three classics of world literature, which he charges with current meaning: Montesquieu’s “Persian Letters” from Paris in the 18th century, Mark Twain’s reports from Wilhelmine Germany and George Orwell’s essay “Inside the Whale”.
Viewed in this way, Peter von Becker’s book is more than a retelling of an Old Testament legend with a focus on the tragedies of the Middle East in the 21st century. It is an instructive and enjoyable walk through the history of literature, which the author leads the pen almost without his doing: “The gray finger or thin arm of a strange sea creature, covered with thick warts, pointed out of a clay jug and with its writhing feeler seemed to to wave to people pushing by.”
Peter von Becker: Jonas journey. An adventure through space and time. Illustrated by Stella Dreis. Penguin-Verlag, Munich 2022. 192 pages, CHF 25.90 (also available as an audio book, read by Ulrich Matthes).