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Katharina Volckmer
Calls May Be Recorded for Training and Monitoring Purposes
Scatological and mischievously grotesque, Katharina Volckmer’s second novel revels in the messy misdeeds and unruly desires of the flesh. Jimmie, at the tail end of his 20s and self-consciously fat, has a penchant for lipstick and a complex load of body shame. He is most comfortable pretending to be someone else. He once worked as a mourner-for-hire, playing tragedy for farce, and has also been a children’s party clown. Now he labours in a travel agency call centre in London whose filthy, stained surfaces remind him of his own “lost dreams and intentions”.
There he deals with complaints from travellers who have found a hair on their luxury hotel pillow, haven’t been able to get the infinity pool to themselves for a killer selfie or are outraged that the resort pool boys aren’t forthcoming with sex. This work is performance too. He frequently veers off script, sometimes outrageously, always yearning for connection. Volckmer is clearly compassionate towards the Jimmies of this world – those who think themselves too fat, too queer, too whatever to be wanted and not just left wanting.
The novel works hard at being shocking in timeworn épater les bourgeois fashion. Transgressive sex! Misbehaving bowels! Gross mouths eating grossly! I have no problem with any of that, at least in novels. What gives me the ick is dialogue so stiff it could have come from one of the corpses at Jimmie’s previous job and the novel’s logorrhoeic dump of head-scratching metaphors and confounding similes. What do children look like when they “look like a hot-water bottle had given birth to them”? Or take this comment on Jimmie’s surgically enhanced colleague Helena: “This woman didn’t obey those ancient laws of fertility and shame that would’ve forbidden her from finding pleasure beyond the good years of reproductive purpose, like a smelly old priest in a dirty robe, hiding skin they feared would tempt the gods.” Half the time I have no idea what Volckmer is trying to say; the other half I think I get it but wish she’d worked harder on the spit and polish. Volckmer is German-born writing in English, no small accomplishment, but she’s no Joseph Conrad or Yiyun Li.
Threaded through this mind-fogging prose are genuine moments of literary flair. “A flock,” Jimmie reflects, “was only a flock when seen from below, otherwise it was just your life.” Work for him “had become another fluid in his body” and his mother “the only country I’ve ever lived in”. Promise, unfulfilled.
Indigo Press, 176pp, $29.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 26, 2025 as "Calls May Be Recorded for Training and Monitoring Purposes".
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