154 books
—
122 voters
Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.
Start by marking “Axolotl Roadkill” as Want to Read:
Axolotl Roadkill
by
'Schreckliche Leben sind der größte Glücksfall', schreibt die 16jährige Mifti in ihr Tagebuch. Seit dem Tod ihrer Mutter lebt sie in Berlin, und als 'pseudo-belastungsgestörtes' Problemkind durchläuft sie nach 'Jahren der Duldungsstarre' gerade eine extrem negative Entwicklung.
Obwohl intelligent und gut situiert, nimmt sie Drogen, verweigert die Schule und hat sogar Argume ...more
Obwohl intelligent und gut situiert, nimmt sie Drogen, verweigert die Schule und hat sogar Argume ...more
Friend Reviews
To see what your friends thought of this book,
please sign up.
Reader Q&A
To ask other readers questions about
Axolotl Roadkill,
please sign up.
Be the first to ask a question about Axolotl Roadkill
Community Reviews
Showing 1-30
Start your review of Axolotl Roadkill
Total rubbish.
This reads like a wanna-be "experimental" novel,but in reality it's just "oh I'm so cool,I do drugs and waste my life",with a good measure of "I was abused...oh no,just kidding cause all the cool kids were".
Pseudo intellectual waste of my time - there's nothing more to say about this. ...more
This reads like a wanna-be "experimental" novel,but in reality it's just "oh I'm so cool,I do drugs and waste my life",with a good measure of "I was abused...oh no,just kidding cause all the cool kids were".
Pseudo intellectual waste of my time - there's nothing more to say about this. ...more
Mar 21, 2010
Anna-Lisa
rated it
did not like it
Recommended to Anna-Lisa by:
lovelylilain@yahoo.de
Shelves:
others
I can't give more than one star and I would like to give -5 stars...
This book is a book the world doesn't need. There was this whole hype about it so I borrowed it from a friend and read it in about 2 hours because there isn't much to read.
Maybe I'm just to old for a book about the life of a 16 year old who fucks around, doesn't go to school and take drugs.
This book is totally overrated, the author made a scandal with plagiarism and even won book prizes. *shakes head*
...more
This book is a book the world doesn't need. There was this whole hype about it so I borrowed it from a friend and read it in about 2 hours because there isn't much to read.
Maybe I'm just to old for a book about the life of a 16 year old who fucks around, doesn't go to school and take drugs.
This book is totally overrated, the author made a scandal with plagiarism and even won book prizes. *shakes head*
...more
Couple of interesting neologisms (potentially interesting from a translator's perspective), otherwise just another (albeit brutally hyped) angry-young-teen-contemplating-her-navel novel and a rather monotonous exercise in stream of consciousness. Perhaps her self-parodying "Axel hole den Rotkohl" will be better...
...more
I really think that I loved that book, but I also need to read it again.
It's strange, sophisticated and extremely raw.
...more
It's strange, sophisticated and extremely raw.
...more
http://www.mytwostotinki.com/?p=187
The Making of a Bestseller
16-year old Mifti, the hero of the novel “Axolotl Roadkill” by Helene Hegemann, is a kind of female Holden Caulfield transferred in time and space to the early 21st century techno clubs of Berlin.
The book was a minor sensation when it came out in Germany in 2010, and the 17-old wunderkind author became the darling of a certain part of the literary feuilleton and media.
I read the book soon after it was published in Germany and was taken ...more
The Making of a Bestseller
16-year old Mifti, the hero of the novel “Axolotl Roadkill” by Helene Hegemann, is a kind of female Holden Caulfield transferred in time and space to the early 21st century techno clubs of Berlin.
The book was a minor sensation when it came out in Germany in 2010, and the 17-old wunderkind author became the darling of a certain part of the literary feuilleton and media.
I read the book soon after it was published in Germany and was taken ...more
It's impossible to look at this without leaping to the (normally extraneous and irrelevant) fact of the writer's age (Helene Hegemann is calendar-flippingly precocious and I came to it, like many, on the back of 'Generation Zero' / Literary Sensation coverage).
Look, it's a forceful debut. She's obviously got potential and - at moments - she can write (the sound of a leg injury 'like someone biting into an apple through a loudspeaker' and suchlike).
But otherwise, it's shapeless, meaningless, na ...more
Look, it's a forceful debut. She's obviously got potential and - at moments - she can write (the sound of a leg injury 'like someone biting into an apple through a loudspeaker' and suchlike).
But otherwise, it's shapeless, meaningless, na ...more
If you enjoyed The Dead Beat you will love this. It's been at the centre of a maelstrom of controversy owing to the plagiarism allegations. I won't comment on that much here other than to say this is the kind of book that publishers will see more and more as alt lit overgrounds itself, its authors thoroughly immersed in and drawing from the culture that surrounds them in order to express themselves. There is, as some reviewers have noted, a self-consciousness here that will be by no means to eve
...more
My problem with this book isn’t that it touches upon sex, drugs, ugliness and whatever heavy topic, it is that it makes literally zero sense. I get that it is supposed to be about her delusions and that most of her life is a blur, but as a reading experience it was just a trainwreck. I felt as if I could’ve read the book upside down and still understand as much. Sometimes making a "cool" statement with weird writing just doesn’t work.
I thought about DNF:ing cause it was so bad, but at the same ...more
I thought about DNF:ing cause it was so bad, but at the same ...more
It's difficult to rate this. There seems to be a lot of focus on the plagiarism discussion which is obviously of interest. Sometimes it angered me, other
times I swam along with the madness. There were moments of genius in it but I'm not quite convinced. ...more
times I swam along with the madness. There were moments of genius in it but I'm not quite convinced. ...more
3.75 Stars.
I felt like I was going insane while reading this novel, but in a good way, which doesn’t make any sense, similarly to this book, really. It was such a rollercoaster to read — half the time I didn’t understand what was going on. I disliked all the characters with a passion. And still, still, this book impressed me — not least of all because Hegemann was only a teenager when it was published. It’s teenage angst and drugs and neglect and wrong on so many levels, but it made me feel stuf ...more
I felt like I was going insane while reading this novel, but in a good way, which doesn’t make any sense, similarly to this book, really. It was such a rollercoaster to read — half the time I didn’t understand what was going on. I disliked all the characters with a passion. And still, still, this book impressed me — not least of all because Hegemann was only a teenager when it was published. It’s teenage angst and drugs and neglect and wrong on so many levels, but it made me feel stuf ...more
Uh, nope. Whenever the narrator comes close to being honest, it's quickly covered with cheap wit, song lyrics, and attempts at philosophy. And the axolotl metaphor couldn't be more ham-fisted, it's literally spelled out for the reader. I hoped for something as moving and raw as "Wir Kinder von Bahnhof Zoo", perhaps even more touching and more on time - but I got a book which I tried to read really fast, just to escape the pretentious narrative.
...more
Feb 16, 2020
Rebekka
added it
Life's too short to read terrible books so I put this down after 60 pages. There's definitely a need for a "stopped reading shelf"...
...more
I'm not sure what I am to say about this book. I've been putting off reading it for a long time now and I'm not really sure if I regret that or not.
Axolotl Roadkill is, ultimately, not much of a novel at all. Our protagonist, Mifti (btw, I googlechecked and that is not a name so take that as you will) is little more than an instrument for Hegemann to express her own frustration (infatuation?) with our world. At 17 (I think that's how old she was idk), her writing and points are utterly pretentio ...more
Axolotl Roadkill is, ultimately, not much of a novel at all. Our protagonist, Mifti (btw, I googlechecked and that is not a name so take that as you will) is little more than an instrument for Hegemann to express her own frustration (infatuation?) with our world. At 17 (I think that's how old she was idk), her writing and points are utterly pretentio ...more
This was one of the worst books I have ever read. By far... it’s almost as if the author had read Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo and Rave then mixed them together. The bad writing style of Rave mixed with the child story of Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo. It surprises me that there was a fight over plagiarism. I wouldn’t have thought that anyone would have wanted this book to be in their name.
Yep got to say I haven't finished it. I read more than half of the book when I realised I didn't care at all and didn't see the point to continue. I don't do this very often but i have apparenlty no patience left today...
...more
Surreal, well written, interesting storyline. I really enjoyed this, and finished reading it in Berlin and on my way back in the train.
I give up. This is overly annoying, pretentious and pretty much stolen from a blog anyway.
sick book. I never read something like this. I am so lost in it and also the storyline is just nasty. I dont know how they make to print it...
This is what happens when tumblr becomes sentient and writes a novel.
Even allowing for some of the nuance to be lost in translation, the pinball machinations of Hegemann's narrative voice are erratic, unlikable, and downright impenetrable most of the time. It's as if all of Hegemann's neurons misfired simultaneously, and the result was a cacophony of noise that samples every pop-cultural reference that has every wafted across the writer's brainpan. As one of the characters tells Mifti, the prota ...more
Even allowing for some of the nuance to be lost in translation, the pinball machinations of Hegemann's narrative voice are erratic, unlikable, and downright impenetrable most of the time. It's as if all of Hegemann's neurons misfired simultaneously, and the result was a cacophony of noise that samples every pop-cultural reference that has every wafted across the writer's brainpan. As one of the characters tells Mifti, the prota ...more
The protagonist slightly reminded me of me and some people I used to know when we were 16. So I feel safe to say that in this book, the reactions of the adults surrounding her are fake, they’re constructs of that 16 year old wanna-be nonconforming “thinker’s” desires about how people should react to her. Nobody would act this way toward a crazy teen but it is exactly everything the teen wants to feel – adults seeing how wise they are, how they are thinking about things, how equal they are to the
...more
I did not finish this book.
There are books I don’t finish and I feel bad after I put them away, like I missed out on something, or I didn’t get the deeper meaning and my not finishing the book reflects on my inability to see the message. If this book had a message it should be ‘do not buy’ printed on its cover.
There is no plot, besides party and drugs. And this is done badly. Every line screams ‘I never had fun, but I enjoy fantasizing about it’.
Everything in this book has been done before, an ...more
There are books I don’t finish and I feel bad after I put them away, like I missed out on something, or I didn’t get the deeper meaning and my not finishing the book reflects on my inability to see the message. If this book had a message it should be ‘do not buy’ printed on its cover.
There is no plot, besides party and drugs. And this is done badly. Every line screams ‘I never had fun, but I enjoy fantasizing about it’.
Everything in this book has been done before, an ...more
I read this for my course on the contemporary canon. Our main discussion around this German translation was about the reception of the book and its plagiarism scandal. Hegemann lifted whole passages of the novel from a blogger's less successful book. But she claimed that her 'mixing' of sources wasn't plagiarism, but her generation's response to an online culture of borrowing and mixing of creativity. Hegemman's age (she was 17 when the book was published) and gender also featured heavily in new
...more
This book is not nice. it is no pleasant read. it is to be seen as a whole, as the protrait of a teenager AS THE ADULTS SEE THEM!!
everything bad that happens is done by Mifti herself. the adults are not to blame. so they gave her drugs and had sex with a 16 year old, so what she wanted it! the reception of the book illustrates this perfectly. you don't need to read it but if you do, heed my words and don't expect an authentic experience! ...more
everything bad that happens is done by Mifti herself. the adults are not to blame. so they gave her drugs and had sex with a 16 year old, so what she wanted it! the reception of the book illustrates this perfectly. you don't need to read it but if you do, heed my words and don't expect an authentic experience! ...more
The scandal surrounding this book is what originally drew me to it. I cannot describe reading this book as a particularly enjoyable experience, but that doesn’t mean it was not worth the read. Doing some research on the intertextual references may help readers better understand the book’s purpose. It is certainly a unique, postmodern read!
At first few pages I was saying to myself, why do I read such a rubbish. The book looked like some nonsense pieces of stories of a stupid teenage girl who is just a poser. However, over some time, the story started to get under my skin and I was actually curious, what the end will look like.
Couldn't finish it. So hard to read.
...more
One of muy favourite books of all time. I would recommend it especially to teenagers.
This book is bullshit!
Wouldn’t recommend it to my worst enemy
i remember reading this in class when i was 11 and there was a sex scene and my freind was like can i read the sex scene
There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
Be the first to start one »
Readers also enjoyed
News & Interviews
The idea for The Gilded Ones came to author Namina Forna in a dream. The recurring image was one of a young girl in armor walking up a...
70 likes · 6 comments
No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »
“Berlin is here to mix everything with everything, man… I steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels my imagination… because my work and my theft are authentic as long as something speaks directly to my soul. It's not where I take things from – it's where I take them to.”
—
2 likes
More quotes…
