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the complete review - fiction

Kein Platz mehr

by
Margit Schreiner

general information | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : entertaining riffs, but strays rather far and wide

See our review for fuller assessment.

The complete review's Review:

[Kein Platz mehr has not been published in English yet; this review is based on the German original. All translations are mine.]

       Margit Schreiner opens Kein Platz mehr ('No more room') with the astonished/baffled/defeated acknowledgement of: "Allein die Dinge, die sich im Laufe eines Lebens ansammeln !" ("Just the things that accumulate over the course of a lifetime !'). When she first moved back to Austria from Italy, years earlier, she only took what fit in her car with her -- which, for the first year then was actually problematic, as she found herself constantly missing essentials, without the means to even sew a button back on. But within three years her apartment was filled, with all the necessities -- and also all the excess -- that inevitably piles up. She recognizes part of the problem -- acquisition comes easily, disposal proves challenging ("Wer nicht sofort ausmistet oder nicht mehr Gebrauchtes bei eBay weiterverkauft, bleibt auf allem sitzen" ('Whoever doesn't immediately sort out or re-sell what's no longer needed on eBay is stuck with all of it')) -- but that doesn't get her very far either.
       The narrator -- basically Schreiner; as is true here and as she admits also of her earlier works: "Ich habe bis jetzt autobiographisch geschrieben" ('Until now, I've written autobiographically') -- observes that she's far from alone with the problem, chronicling the situations friends and others also find themselves in.
       Aside from Bruno, whom she lives with, there is also Rudi, to whom she was married for a while (when they lived in Japan, the marriage one largely of convenience, so that she could legally remain in the country), and his wife, Franca, as well as other friends and acquaintances -- mostly writers --, whose lives and experiences serve as examples. Aside from the problem of accumulation, there's also the struggle to earn enough money to get by in reasonable comfort -- especially when one is stuck with too much, not least properties whose upkeep is challenging --, as well as creeping old age, among other things.
       Schreiner rambles and riffs entertainingly along, from returning to the apartment she owns in southern Italy and the nightmare of trying to clean that up ("Es ist ja immer so: Kaum rührt man etwas an, hat das gleich unüberschauliche Folgen" ('That's always the way it is: as soon as you touch something there are unanticipated consequences')) to the pull of adventure (climbing Everest), writing retreats and seminars, computer issues (and with technology in general), and finding one's own space and place to work.
       At one point, as Schreiner is spinning her narrative, she admits: "Ich weiß jetzt auch beim besten Willen nicht mehr, wie ich vom japanischen Sexualverhalten dann auch noch auf Fukushima zu sprechen gekommen bin" ('For the life of me, I don't know how I now got from the subject of Japanese sexual behavior all the way to that of Fukushima') and, for better and worse, that's more or less the case throughout Kein Platz mehr. The free-wheeling narrative is a lot of fun -- Schreiner is easy and fun to follow -- but it makes for a very loose whole.
       To some extent Kein Platz mehr boils down to a rumination on confronting mortality, in its various guises -- what one has accumulated and done in life, and what's left over -- and it is very entertainingly done, but it also has the feel of every- and any-thing being stuffed in and much of that as random as what happens to accumulate in a household.

- M.A.Orthofer, 20 June 2026

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Links:

• Schöffling & Co. publicity page
• Profile at Der Standard

• Deutschlandfunk Kultur (German)
• LiteraturZeit (German)

• Official site

• See Index of German literature

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About the Author:

       Austrian author Margit Schreiner was born in 1953.

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© 2026 the complete review

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