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Why a backpack is no longer a backpack today

Drowned in a flood of information: Walter Gronds novel "Old Danube House

By Bettina Steiner

Translation: Janice Schützenhöfer

Book of hte Week- an action of the ORF (Austrian Public Radio), CA and the "Presse"

Maybe Walter Grond wants to make fools of us with "Old Danube House". Maybe he has never been to a "house party", only knows post war Sarajevo from ORF (Austrian Public Television) news programs, Moscow from picture books- what happens at a hacker get- together he got partly from the Spiegel magazine and partly just made up.

So maybe the many scenes that Grond wants to acquaint us with in the new novel are the result of fantasy and even more from media consumption. Which can mean that we shouldn´t give too much weight to these descriptions. But more likely considering the depth of the details: Grond really went to Sarajevo and Moscow, conducted many discussions there, took notes, did research and also grabbed his pen whenever he heard a "cool" or the "ultimate".

So- we will just have to let ourselves be taught, and learn something in the process: what the Linux community like and what they are capable of; what the difference between a hacker and a cracker is, why a backpack is no longer a backpack and how one translates "vogueing" best. Secondly: how to best imagine the trading center for black market cigarette vendors in Moscow or what a researcher in post socialist Russia is up to. Thirdly: what Bosnians think of their Serbian neighbors when they want to borrow a fuse; what is hiding between the lines of the phrase "the rose of Sarajevo"; where to go in Sarajevo when you want to buy cheap CD´s. Grond takes his hero from Vienna to Moscow and back again and then to Sarajevo in the search for new perspectives. As if these places were not exotic enough, a shaman is also involved- complete with 12 candles and a dead pidgeon, there is a meeting of a fraternity where prosperous men are addressed as "Obelix" and "Hurcules", an esoteric supermarket and the ultimate flipped out house party at the Viennese industrial harbor.

Everything is very eccentric, sometimes so picturesque that one could almost forget the story that Grond wants to tell us. It is the story of a Viennese physics professor named Johan Nichol who conducts research on a quantum computer. That is until he learns of the suicide of an esoteric physicist named Nicola Sahli, who came from Sarajevo and tapped energy from outer space, from his Linux enthused students. From then on professor Nichol begins to root about the internet, which causes another colleague to make a plan because he assumes that our hero has become a member of a sect. Why Nichol goes to Sarajevo searching for traces of the eso- physicist is not entirely clear. In general, one could answer this question with the catch phrase "mid life crisis" or with the notation that it is difficult for a physicist who has been around to do without the belief in a life after death.

In any case, the novel reads like a crime mystery with its many references and cross references and strange connections: the detailed plot about hackers and ravers has similarities to an old bosnian folksong. The eso- physicist shows up again in an internet game: the wife of our hero turns to sufism at Sharm el- Sheik while a link in the internet from the eso- physicist leads to the rubrick "New Sufism. Besides all this one can speculate the meaning behind the fact that the heros´last name is Nichol and the first name of the dead colleague is Nicola.

Yet all of these references lead to nowhere, unfortunately not even consistantly into surrealism so that there is a principle to be seen. Lastly, the criminal plot also runs aground. We stumble from show place to showplace, are taught and lectured, but what one does not get from this flood of information is the feeling of having read a novel.