An impressively topical novel about a post-Soviet society sinking into a swamp of corruption and terror. Through the lens of his hero Anton, von Schirach tells how the global conflicts between Russia, China and the West over mineral resources, power and influence are fought out with the hardest of sticks – and how the individual is ground down in the process, should he not follow the commercial codes of the new era.
BEUTEZEIT
(Prey Time)
by Norris Von Schirach
Penguin Verlag, September 2022
When Vladimir Putin becomes president in January 2000, Anton, a rich commodities trader, flees Moscow. Behind him lie eight breathtaking years in post-Soviet predatory capitalism, ahead of him yawning boredom in the well-off milieu of New York. But even at forty, Anton is still an incorrigible romantic in search of the next thrill. Then a headhunter makes him an enticing offer. Anton is to build up a steel company in Kazakhstan, which is so rich in mineral resources, with money from anonymous sources. The German embarks on the adventure and learns painfully how local clans and insatiable elites ruthlessly defend the loot they have amassed after the fall of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Anton finds allies and makes a momentous pact.
Norris von Schirach, born in Munich in 1963, worked in London and New York after graduating from high school and completing a commercial apprenticeship. After his studies, he lived in Moscow from 1993 to 2003. There he experienced the euphoria and frustration of the Yeltsin years, when the border between organized crime and state institutions dissolved while large parts of the population became impoverished. Norris von Schirach has a son and now lives in Romania after extended stays in Kazakhstan and Australia.
When they meet as children, Nina and Jess form a strong bond, one that quickly intensifies when they discover they share an extraordinary power: they can swap bodies. As they grow older, they use this ability to steal into each other’s lives, unearthing secrets and betraying confidences. Nina, introspective and self-conscious, is seduced by the turbulence of Jess’ life, but also possessive of her bolder friend. Jess, meanwhile, envies the stability of Nina’s world, and wishes to seize it for herself. Now, Jess has re-entered Nina’s life after a long separation. She is in crisis after her father’s death, and says she needs Nina’s help, but Nina fears she may try to take far more than that. Over the course of this novel, they reckon with the truth, the beauty, and the horror of walking in another person’s shoes.
In 1946, Günther Quandt—patriarch of Germany’s most iconic industrial empire, a dynasty that today controls BMW—was arrested for suspected Nazi collaboration. Quandt claimed that he had been forced to join the party by his archrival, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and the courts acquitted him. But Quandt lied. And his heirs, and those of other Nazi billionaires, have only grown wealthier in the generations since, while their reckoning with this dark past remains incomplete at best. Many of them continue to control swaths of the world economy, owning iconic brands whose products blanket the globe. The brutal legacy of the dynasties that dominated Daimler-Benz, cofounded Allianz, and still control Porsche, Volkswagen, and BMW has remained hidden in plain sight—until now.
Jonathan Abernathy is screwed. Jobless, behind on his student loan payments, and a self-declared failure, the only thing Abernathy has in abundance is debt. When a government loan forgiveness program offers him a job he can do literally in his sleep, he thinks he’s found his big break. That is, until he finds himself auditing the dreams of white collar workers, flagging their anxieties and preoccupations for removal.
Sixteen-year-old Odile Ozanne is an awkward, quiet girl, vying for a coveted seat on the Conseil. If she earns the position, she’ll decree who among the town’s residents may be escorted deep into the woods, who may cross the border’s barbed wire fence, who may make the arduous trek to descend into the next valley over. It’s the same valley, the same town. But to the east, the town is twenty years ahead in time. To the west, it’s twenty years behind. The only border crossings permitted by the Conseil are mourning tours: furtive viewings of the dead in towns where the dead are still alive.