Looking back to today: Even if “Nullpunkt” takes place in the past, it is still relevant today.
Image: AP
Ukrainian writer Artem Chech is now a soldier. He was called up for the first time in 2015 and again in 2022. He wrote a brilliant book about the old war. His “zero point” is as literary as it is topical.
WWhy should you read books about wars? Wars are boring and the same: gunshots, shelling and bombs, destruction, rape and torture, imprisonment, prisoner exchanges and death.
Yes, “War is uninteresting” is what the Ukrainian writer Artem Tschech also lets his hero Artem Tschech say in “Zero Point”. The book Czech is drafted, he arrives as a Kiev hipster and writer in his “New Balance” sneakers in a world he does not understand. It’s populated by brutes and villagers, drunkards, the decent and the naughty – “where did I end up, who are these people, and where are the brave young heroes from the billboards?” he thinks at the beginning.