Literature Truth and lies in Karl Rühmann's "Matija Katun and his sons"
In "Matija Katun und seine Söhne", Karl Rühmann superficially tells the success story of a novel - and in doing so exposes the publishing industry with a wink. The novel is also worth reading because it gives a father-son story a special twist.
14.03.2025, 06:30
SDA
"Matija Katun and his sons" is an old story that a farmer in Croatian Istria tells Ingmar Saidl, a French and German teacher from Zurich. Saidl would like to be a successful writer. He has already written a novel and a collection of short stories, but has not been well received by any publishers. He has already had almost forty rejections thrown into his wastepaper basket.
Saidl suspects that the recipe for success on the book market is not so much literary quality as "packaging". That's why he opts for a "harmless hoax", as he puts it himself.
A dying language
The native language of the Istrian farmer is the so-called Istrorumanian, a language that is dying out. Saidl expands the archaic story that the farmer told him into a novel of his own entitled "Matija Katun and his sons". He poses as a translator who was lucky enough to come across an old Istrian-Romanian manuscript. And - you guessed it - the packaging was right.
The novel is extremely successful. However, without its author, as the supposed translator is not on the cover. "I once wanted to write a successful book. And now I've done it and yet somehow I haven't," muses Saidl.
Saidl refers this "somehow not" primarily to his father. Because it is his father's recognition that his son is fighting for. He is an emeritus professor of astrophysics and has nothing to gain from his son's work as a teacher. He dreams of his son gaining a doctorate.
The wrong reasons
The irony is that the father is delighted with his son's translation work and the successful book. He is proud of him, remarks Saidl's girlfriend, "Okay, for the wrong reasons. But fatherly pride is fatherly pride." But that is exactly what makes the son's success stale. He wants to be the great author in front of his father, which he actually is. But if he were to tell his father the truth, he would stand before him as a great liar.
Author Karl Rühmann has already focused on questions of truth in his previous novels. "The Truth, Perhaps" (2022) even has it in its title; the novel is about an interpreter who struggles to find the truth between languages. Or in "The Hero", with which Rühmann was nominated for the Swiss Book Prize in 2020: against the backdrop of a war in south-eastern Europe, he poses the question of guilt and truth.
And in "Matija Katun and His Sons", the lie - the "harmless hoax", as the son initially thinks - has developed a life of its own, behind which the truth disappears.
