23-04-2025
Stop satirising millennials – it isn't compelling fiction
About halfway through Allegro Pastel, the fourth novel by the prize-winning German writer Leif Randt, Jerome, a website designer, is on his sofa kissing Marlene, whom he went to school with, while Tanja, a young novelist who lives in Berlin, is going through a frosty patch with Janis, the tattooed guy she dumped Jerome for. A few months earlier, Jerome and Tanja were having 'slightly melodramatic' sex on the same couch. Soon, they'll exchange some tortured emails about missing each other, drop a pill at a wedding, kiss, and ultimately fail to get back together.
The first of Randt's novels to be translated into English, Allegro Pastel follows the length of Jerome and Tanja's relationship, from early romantic stirrings – they meet at the premier of the webseries adaptation of Tanya's first novel – through to Tanja's sudden, inexplicable aversion to Jerome when he reveals the website he's designed for her on her 30th birthday. This curdling of their desire into awkwardness and regret is a potentially fruitful story. But the question that emerges is: who cares?
For one, Randt doesn't hide how unlikeable his main characters are. Jerome's prejudices are never far from the surface and even Tanja admits her own caprice and vanity. As a narrative gambit, such characters could be interesting if the two weren't so shallowly observed. Tanja's character appears to be based principally on her love of badminton and Decathlon; Jerome's 'inner personality' becomes meaningful when it 'no longer reminded him of the text-to-speech function on his laptop, but sounded more like himself reading an iMessage'.
The writing is also astonishingly poor. Randt frequently squashes his characters' thoughts into clunky logical structures: 'On the one hand… on the other'. Perhaps it's simply an awkward translation – or perhaps it's an attempt to scathingly criticise the ennui of a certain kind of European millennial (an endeavour also made by Vincenzo Latronico with his recently published novel, Perfection.) But such impoverished interiority hardly makes for a compelling read. You wonder why Randt bothered with fiction when a flow chart would do.
And bafflingly, where there are opportunities for emotional texture, Randt instead delivers extraneous information. That includes the width of Jerome's mattress (1.4m-wide, if you're curious), various emojis, and a litany of brand names. Should we care, for instance, that Jerome serves Skyy vodka to Tanja, that Marlene uses an iPhone 8, that Tanja prefers EasyJet to Ryanair, and that they listen to Spotify in a rented Tesla? Brands can work as a shorthand for a type of person: but that's marketing or cultural semiotics, not fiction.
I gave Allegro Pastel the benefit of the doubt for longer than usual, mostly because I wondered whether it could really be so bad. Was it actually a sly pastiche or a smart self-parody? Was there a deadpan humour I wasn't quite getting? Unfortunately, Allegro Pastel simply is an empty book about vapid people. Sentences such as: 'Jerome could link most of his personal characteristics to his upbringing,' show that novels can be pitched as 'ironic' and yet still become parodies of themselves.
