Original title Spieltrieb Publisher Schöffling & Co. Pages 565 Originally published 30 September 2004 Page count 565 | Language German Publication date 30 September 2004 ISBN 3-89561-056-9 Country Germany | |
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Gaming Instinct (German: Spieltrieb) is a 2004 novel by the German writer Juli Zeh. The story is set in a private high school in Bonn, where an intellectual precocious girl and a classmate play a sexual prank on a teacher.
Reception
Die Zeit's reviewer placed the novel in a tradition of "German student tragedies" such as Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening and Hermann Hesse's Beneath the Wheel. The critic compared the language to Robert Musil, and wrote: "It is astonishing, it is admirable, how the only 30-year-old writer, with a well-trained language for all horses and a highly educated ingenuity, races her story through more than 500 pages across the finish line, a story, which couldn't have been more uneasy. Uwe Wittstock of Die Welt found the novel tiresome and unoriginal. He compared its ideas to "commercial reports about the 'youth of today'", and wrote that "at the same time the novel's motif of 'blackmail with compromising photos' strikes me as about as corny as that of the forged letters in novels and plays from the 18th century." The novel received the Per Olov Enquist Award and the Prix Cévennes for Best European Novel.