Lilos letzte Rolle is a novel by Ludwig Kapeller.

Plot:
Franz and Theda are best friends who live and work together in Bavaria. He’s a doctor, she his nurse. While they get visited by their friend Lilo, an actress from Munich, Franz gets a call that somebody got lost in the mountains. He sets out to find and help the guy together with a few other people and they do find a young man in pretty bad shape with a wad of cash in his pocket and a severe case of amnesia. While Franz tries to figure out who that guy is, both Lilo and Theda fall in love with him.

[So I just wrote a pretty long version of this blog post and wordpress lost it. It’s 1am now, so I’ll just keep this a little shorter.]

Lilos letzte Rolle is not a particularly good book – its prose is so purple, it’s practically a new hue, it’s sexist and the plot doesn’t make much sense. But that makes it kind of entertaining.

I’m usually not in the habit of reading 1930s romance novels but my friend has this curiosities section in her bookshelf and I stumbled upon this book (among others) and the sheer what-the-fuckery of it made me want to read it. Plus, I wanted to not forget how to read Gothic type.

Anyway. When Kapeller isn’t waxing on about the incredible beauty of the Bavarian mountains, he’s condescendingly mansplaining his pet theories (like how weather changes affect the psyche of the people). [Ok, honestly, it’s not that much mansplaining as just plain condescension, but I felt mansplained to.]

And then, for good measure, he throws in extremely harebrained statements about women. Like:

[Lilo] “I want the whole person of nothing of him. And since I haven’t found that person so far and probably never will… I live entirely in my art, as you say!”
[Theda] “But you are so successful, Lilo, have a great career in front of you! Doesn’t that make you happy and content?”
“Sometimes I imagine that it does, Theda. But mostly… I am unhappy about the sham I’m living. I have to be somebody else time and time again, have to live strangers’ destinies and I much rather would live my own life, be just myself for once, without make-up, without strange words on my lips, without a stranger’s luck or sorrow in my heart.”

Because no woman can ever have a happy professional and personal life. And work is generally only something women do until the right guy comes along. Bleargh.

Summarising: I can’t really recommend it, though I found it entertaining.