Nataliya's Reviews > Why We Took the Car

“And I was insanely happy. Because you can’t hold your breath forever, but you can hold it for a pretty long time.”

An angsty, snarky teenage misfit road trip across Germany, a bit of a coming-of-age story of an unlikely friendship and people being better than you’d think. That should have not garnered my attention, but my friend Justin’s review promised a stunning final chapter — and he was right about that; the final chapter is good. Maybe not stunning as far as I’m concerned, but good. (And what do I know, having never been a 14-year-old boy?)

“So this was the situation: We’d driven hundreds of miles around Germany, ridden over an abyss on a scaffold, been shot at by Horst Fricke, had gone off the end of an embankment and rolled the car a half-dozen times, and come through it all basically unscathed — and then a hippo charged out of the bushes and destroyed Tschick’s foot with a fire extinguisher.”

Mike (apparently an anglicized “Maik”) and Tschick (a nickname given to a German kid of Russian origins because his full name even to me in German looked almost unpronounceable) are not popular 14-year-old boys. Mike is supposedly boring; Tschick is a budding alcoholic and juvenile delinquent. Together they take an unexpected cross-country trip to nowhere in a stolen car (a wreck on wheels) while getting themselves in more trouble than you’d think. Mike is our narrator, and he’s lonely and snarky and a bit lost in life with no good friends, arguing middle-class parents who harbor no love for each other (dad is sleeping with his young secretary, mom is an alcoholic), and a hopeless crush on a girl who is hot and likes Beyoncé (and besides that Mike is not sure, but he can’t argue with his teenage hormones.)

“Clayderman tinkled the ivories, and between him tinkling, the partially collapsed roof of the car, Tschick’s messed-up foot, and the fact that we were doing a hundred in a rolling Dumpster, I was overcome with a strange feeling. It was a feeling of bliss, a feeling of invincibility. No accident, no authority, no law of nature could stop us. We were on the road and we would always be on the road. And we sang along to the music, at least as best as you can sing along to tinkling instrumental music.”

I haven’t been a 14-year-old boy, but I vaguely recall being a teenager not always satisfied with life, and things rang true here. The lack of wise-beyond-the-years voice that actually sounds like a barely teen kid, the harsh judgments that can be cruel (but age-appropriately so), the mix of depths and shallows, the hormones (the crush valued for hotness and even the Manic Dream Pixie girl later on), and more than anything that instant development of strong intense friendship over the matter of mere days — all that rang true and familiar and way less irritating than I expected.

“Ever since I was a little boy my father had told me that the world was a bad place. The world is bad and people are bad. Don’t trust anyone, don’t talk to strangers, all of that. My parents drilled that into me, my teachers drilled that into me, even TV drilled that into me. When you watched the local news — people were bad. When you saw primetime investigative shows — people were bad. And maybe it was true, maybe ninety-nine percent of people were bad. But the strange thing was that on this trip, Tschick and I had run into almost only people from the one percent who weren’t bad.”

And after I finished what jumped to the forefront of my brain was the difference in the title between the English translation and the original. In English it’s Why We Took the Car - an adventure, a road trip, promised fun. In German it’s Tschick — and the focus therefore seems to be on Mike’s unlikely friend who turns his life upside down and inside out over a few summer days in a stolen car in the countryside. The focus is important here, and I wish it was kept in translation.

And no, in the end it didn’t end up profound — there’s a certain shallowness to it which may go with the whole 14-year-old often clueless protagonist, and made me eyeroll at regular intervals — but it was not actually bad, and a bit of a different experience than what I usually look for in my books. And that’s what we all need sometimes.

3 stars.

——————

Also posted on my blog.